Bee

Radical non-conformists built this first Friends meeting house in Skipton in 1689 when slavery was utterly normal.

TC and I got back from England some weeks ago but writing is harder here. Especially as I agreed to teach an online asynchronous Divinity School class next semester. I didn’t quite grasp that  this requires all 14 weeks of the teaching in advance by video. Yikes. It’s on the Leading Causes of Life, and I’ve got lots of help. But rather pushed my blog writing to the side.

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This is surely the worst Christmas since the slaughter of the innocents. So many slaughtered in Gaza, Ukraine and Sudan by despots worse than Herod. Uncountable innocents bleeding out from the callous withdrawal of USAID across Africa. More ripped away by thugs at Home Depot in the land of the formerly free and brave. Blood on all our hands.

Against this ugly tide we celebrated Christmas for the City in Winston-Salem Saturday evening organized by the preposterously brilliant Love Out Loud. This is a quirky local extravaganza that for 14 years has filled our Convention Center with food, gifts, music from dozens of churches and vaccinations from the health department. This year included our one local Jewish Temple, so Jesus’ parents could have come, too.

Rev Dr David Docusen reminds us that Jesus knew all about the dark and was not afraid.

This event has lots of Hispanic energy, including those hunted by ICE. The organizers work closely with Siembra to monitor the surrounding streets for ICE. This the David that famously hounded Goliath ICE into the light and out of North Carolina and then out of New Orleans, too, which adapted Siembra’s technique, technology and Spirit. Still, as we moved toward the closing candle light vigil out in the street, all eyes were pealed for black SUV’s and big guys in boots. I volunteered to be the Nordic guy to obstruct and get arrested first, which turned out to be untested. David Docusen noted that Jesus knew all about darkness and only promised that we could walk home together as neighbors.

I’m sure Mary sang in an early version of Spanish:

“God’s mercy is for those who fear God

from generation to generation.

God has shown strength with God’s arm;

God has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts.

God has brought down the powerful from their thrones,

and lifted up the lowly;

God has filled the hungry with good things,

and sent the rich away empty.” (Luke 1:46f)

This year has been about the art and craft of avoiding the total eclipse of the heart. TC and I lived half time on a narrowboat in England on the canal dug in 1770’s to link Yorkshire to the slave cotton and tobacco fields of North Carolina. Dug by what were effectively Irish slaves and the local landless just as desperate. Dark. But this is also where the non-conformists hid out from both King and Parliament which finally let them build meeting houses including the one where I worship in silence, listening for the way ahead. That seems—and has always seemed–so little and weak!

I’ve been kept by honeybees for some years as they gerenously to teach, tend my Spirit and feed me with honey and mead. But you can’t do that across an ocean, so I gave them and all the equipment to a local cooperative. 

Bees beeing

Then I become a honeybee myself. Quakers are as close to honeybees as humans can get. Both are generous, diligent, peaceful and so democratic they don’t even vote. Quakers seek in silence, bees vibrating in the dark. Neither kill to defend themselves, but are fierce for the babies. Both sting. Not like aggressive wasps (or the Christian Nationalists). Quakers sting just as Mary singing the magnificat; refusing to be complicit with the slaveholders, royalty and rich.

The most famous American Quaker prophet was a weaver from Philadelphia known as John Woolman famous for walking and talking across the South meeting with Friends about slavery. And then he followed the cotton thread of complicity to Skipton where he giving his inconvenient witness about their entanglement in slavery the canal made possible. He actually died nearby in Yorkshire after falling ill. Many Quakers were unexpectedly wealthy because their famous honesty made them trusted business partners. They were early investors in cotton mills, shoes (Clarkes) and chocolate (Cadbury and KitKat) and finance (Barclay’s Bank) and canals. They did not want to listen to Woolman; half of all slave ships had been built in Liverpool where the canal meets the sea. But in their silent seeking, his words percolated, turned to conviction and witness that ended the slave trade.

Our modern struggle is so much easier. Even amid the Trumpian blitzkrieg American democracy isfar more vibrant and robust than anything imagined by British Quakers, who were lucky to even have their tiny meeting house in Skipton. Less than 6% of white men could vote; no women at all. They had Thomas Paine pamplets (he, a Quaker). Imagine him with our websites! We citizens have liberties, technologies and revolutionary techniques honed in the long walk fromo the Magna Carta. Give the trumpians credit seeing and acting on all the weaknesses. But they are melting as they are dragged into the light, backbones withering like salted slugs.

Quakers are famous for what they won’t do–take off their hats in the presence of royalty and, of course, refusing arms. But their silence ferments endless creativity for justice and mercy. I’m guessing the Portland frog is one. But once creative courage is in the water, it spreads like a positive virus. King, Lewis, Barber, Indivisible—thousands whose names we will never know.

The Friends’ promise seems whimsical. Simple, radical, spiritual. Be quiet. Listen. Then act on what you hear and never stop.

Prayer After the Shut-down Vote

Prayer After the Shutdown Vote
For Those Living Between Relief and Uncertainty

Shared on the Moral Monday. Repairers of the Breach Clergy Call

November 11, 2025.
By Rev. Dr. Hanna R. Broome

Eternal God, who is called by so many names,
Known in every tongue, worshiped in every land—
we stand today between almost and not yet.
The Senate has spoken, the votes are counted,
but the hungry still wait on confirmation—
mothers still count cans and calories,
fathers still stretch prescriptions,
elders still pray that tomorrow the lights stay on.

Creator, we thank You for the flicker of relief,
for the doors that may soon reopen,
for the workers who will be called back,
and for the food that will again find its way to tables.
But we do not confuse delay with deliverance,
nor cloture with closure.
This was a procedural mercy, not yet a moral reckoning.

You, O Holy One, are not impressed by votes without vision,
nor cloture without compassion.
We name the violence still lingering—
the SNAP cuts that slice through family budgets,
the healthcare premiums rising like tombstones
over a system that buries the poor while billing the sick.
We refuse to call this “normal.”
We will not celebrate crumbs while the loaf is withheld.

So breathe on us, O Spirit of the Living One that connects us in humanity
breathe courage into every organizer,
breathe endurance into every faith leader,
breathe wisdom into every policymaker who still dares to listen.
Make us restless in comfort,
and relentless in hope.
Until justice rolls down like water,
until every child eats without shame,
until healthcare is treated as holy,
and until this nation learns that budgets are moral documents,
not weapons of war against its own people.

We seal this prayer with the faith of those who refused to be silent,
and the ancestors who built freedom out of scarcity.

Ashe, Ameen, Amen, and It Is So.

Consequences

I have a friend whose life has led him to be one of the most powerful Republicans in the North Carolina state legislature, marked by his tenacious commitment to expand Medicaid. He is a grandfather, a religious man with a diligent spirit. I reached out to him a few days ago, knowing he would be voting in a razor-thin decision to gerrymander one more Congressional district to support the desperate effort to protect MAGA. North Carolina is 50/50 Democrat to Republican voters, but our state legislature is ridiculously gerrymandered into a Republican “supermajority”, dependent on his vote to make it 11-3 guaranteed GOP districts. I urged him to have a John McCain moment and do the right thing.

He graciously replied almost immediately to say he had no choice. His district voted 2-1 for that fellow and, after all, “elections have consequences.” In reality, he helped design his district so created his own captivity. Made me sad. For him.

This isn’t about the GOP. The most egregiously ugly and racist actions in North Carolina history were done by Democrats (google Wilmington race riots, 1898). Powerful Democrats did the same things he did at one point.

Surely grown-ups can do better.

MAGA is circling the drain, maybe already down the pipe entirely out of sight of the light. When you bulldoze the White House, kill all the reindeer and prepare the first family landing spot in Argentina, it is clear this will be over soon.

Farmers, minders andd traders have walked this path above Hebden since neolithic times trying to give the next generation a chance.

The seven million citizens in the street on Oct. 18th were so cross-cuttingly normal that David Brooks is thinking of joining them next time. There will be ten million next time and fifteen before the mid-terms.

People like my friend will claim they were friends of democracy all along.

We need to move now from just stopping the thieves to working on Project 2029 so that we create a new possibility, not just another swing of the political pendulum.

We need role models not just ideas. Even better would be a role model with ideas. This is what I found in the London Quaker bookstore, where I stumbled across 87-year-old George Lakey, the author of Viking Economics. Bill McKibben says of Lakey, “almost no one I can think of has made better use of their time on earth.”He also wrote a guide to nonviolent direction action campaigns, called “How We Win” that McKibben compares to West Point for change-makers. But I think we’re already winning; my question is what we do with the victory.

Lakey was like electricity in my wires as he describes how the “Nordic model” was born out of similar polarization as we’re experiencing now in the States. He notes that the greatest changes of the past century become possible in the heat of social/cultural and political pressures. He describes how the poorest country in Europe—Norway—became the happiest, healthiest, best educated, most entrepreneurial and equitable, before it discovered the oil off-shore.

This was totally unexpected–preposterous. The Norway we now know came out of the deep conflicts of the early 1920’s that culminated with an elected retrogressive government that became complicit with the Nazis in World War Two. The name of that president–“Quisling”–is now synonymous with betrayal, but he was elected president before he tried to destroy the electoral process itself. Same deep hole we’re in.

Just below Skipton Castle where royalty shat down “the long drop.” Times change. People change.

Lakey knew the inside story as he married into the movement—his new father-in-law was one of the key Christian socialists who began organizing as a college student. He lays out the detailed analysis how the Nordic model (Norway, Sweden, Denmark and Iceland), which offers a practical path for what I call project 2029. Refusing to accept the polarities, the practical politics focus on what is good for everyone, not the poor, minorities, identities, urbanites, soccer moms, or any other specific group. Everybody rises. Or everyone sinks.

”Arguably, what motivates Nordics to pay high taxes for services is that the services are universal rather than targeted  to a subgroup of ‘the needy’.” Everyone benefits from quality health care, schools, transportation and pensions, but those who benefit most of all are the political majority composed of the working and middle classes. When someone proposes chipping away at the quality of universal systems, a political defense is mounted by the majority almost regardless of the party they belong to.” Page 174 

In a time of radical economic changes, this model makes it safe for innovation. The Nordic countries are pro-business with more start-up companies than the US because nobody has to risk their retirement, healthcare or education for their kids. Basic shared security makes it much safer to take entrepreneurial job-creating risks. Companies pay a lot of tax, but they get an extraordinarily rich environment in which to do business with a highly educated mobile workforce, free to innovate. Everyone is expected to work and hardest of all, speak Norwegian.

This avoids the easy stigmatization and what-about-me poison in American politics. And we would not have to learn Norwegian.

This is very practical good news; the way to channel the solidarity in the streets into clear vision of a better way for everyone. Lakey argues that the severity of the crisis is exactly what makes possible that new thing, a more perfect union built on the unfulfilled promise signaled in the stumbling efforts of those white slave-holding men who risked everything to make the United States happen a quarter millennium ago.

Consequences can be good.

His most difficult counsel is to reject the story of radical polarization itself. Take health care policy: “The reason the United States has failed to adopt universal health insurance is not because it violates our culture, but because special interests prevented the majority from getting what they were ready for.”  Page 224

“The mainstream media continues to report the discourse of the political class as if it accurately reflects what Americans think. I find that many people in my audiences who think that Nordic style policies are sensible have no idea that they are, in fact, members of the American majority.” Page 233

Lakey says that “At any time we choose, Americans could decide to learn from our own abundant experience of people-power triumphing despite harsh opposition. In the 1960s, the civil rights movement faced down the largest terrorist movement in US history, the Ku Klux Klan, as well as lawless police. Brave African Americans with white allies won gains and took casualties, while a largely indifferent federal government looked on. Finally, the federal government was forced to act—by that same civil rights movement.” Page 238.

He urges us not to splinter the 5 to 12 million Americans in the streets which are succeeding to break the back of the current ugly cabal. We must not drive away many of the partners we will need for Project 2029. And likewise, we must not personalize this about you-know-who.

Again, Lakey is right on target in noting that the Norwegian left “understood that Quisling was a symptom, not the cause of the mess Norway was in, just as Donald Trump is a symptom, not the cause of the mess the United States is in. Rather than obsess about the symptom, progressive Norwegians focused on the cause, which was primarily the dominance of the economic elite…..by targeting the elite in nonviolent campaigns for specific widely shared demands. So many people joined the growing non-violent direct-action campaigns that Norway became ungovernable by the economic elite.“ Page 256.

Lakey closes his autobiography with a story from the improbably successful struggle against apartheid and the “joy that comes from going beyond awareness of injustice and toward acting for justice.” He remembers, “we turned a large protest in front of City Hall on frigid evening into an all-night dance, fueled by the heat of South African movement songs…..hour after hour of dancing did more than keep us warm physically. It reminded us that if we tune into what’s happening and act with others, we get to dance with history.”

Project 2029, anyone? Want to dance?

This is where Fiddlesticks will spend the winter across from the Boathouse Pub and Pennine Cruisers. The Leeds and Liverpool Canal was dug in 1770’s by shovel by Irish and Yorkshire workers to move livestone, coal and cotton.

Torrent

Videos and photo from the River Wharfe.

I was supposed to be in India two weeks ago to participate in the Christian Medical College of Vellore’s strategic conclave and to attend the astonishing Sikh Sathya Sai Grama in Bangalore. Instead my visa got caught in the US government’s sabotage of international relations. You can imagine how badly I felt to not be in these sacred places at this time so pregnant with possibility and, yes, danger.

The Sikh One World One Family Foundation supports the Sri Madhusudan Sai Global Humanitarian Mission that provides essential services in 5 world regions, to over 100 countries, and maintains 12 Centers for Human Development (one is coming up in Los Gatos, CA). One of our Leading Causes of Life Fellows, Dr. Sunny Anand is deeply involved.

CMC asked me to speak about the theological clues from the Leading Causes of Life relevant to strategic planning. They take theology more seriously than any Christian hospital in the world—at least that I know about. So I leaned in and spoke frankly. (find the full text here)

CMC expected my remarks to be framed by the new book that came from the Leading Causes of Initiative, Taking Responsibility for the Life of Complex Human Ecosystems—Deep Accountability. And also in the context of my 18 years in hospital leadership roles. That title sounds preposterous but that’s exactly what CMC is trying to do in India in the most complex human ecosystem imaginable. The challenge is especially, dangerously, vexingly hard for a massive academic medical center trying to be Christian in a wildly interfaith context. Especially at a time in India when the god of the medical market is rising in power every week. CMC is among the most eminent medical schools and clinical systems in a nation with more middle class and wealthy people than in the United States.

I based my theological comments on the passage from Ezekiel 47 that Larry Pray told me about one day. “Gary, grab the Bible on your desk and turn to Ezekiel 47! I asked my secretary to go find one, then quickly read about the trickle of living water escaping the temple, running down the street, growing into a torrent downstream over his head. “Man do you not see it?”   “See what?” I asked with the man in the water. “That you are being carried by a torrent of life, surrounded by even more life on the banks.” That is what we must build strategy on–that torrent.

Our new book addresses this in the chapter called “Storm” which is inspired by Ivan Illich’s 1970 book, Medical Nemesis. It was audacious to jam Illich in a chapter, even worse in a blog but even a teaspoon makes for hot and uncomfortable reading. Every faith-based hospital and academic medical center I know about long ago became comfortable with the ugly complicities and intellectual capitulations he predicted a half century ago.

In the USA Mr Kennedy may finish off the last remaining scraps of thoughtful mission as the trillion-dollar array of organizations betray their founders, patients, staff and communities by joining in the whitewashing of their complex human ecology. Illich is sadly prescient, but not just sad. Nemesis is the Greek God who brings justice to those enjoying privileges they do not deserve because they betrayed their gifts. Illich focused on the medical science—obvious even a half century ago—as these institutions tuned their financial logic to the most profitable sciences, mostly cardiology, cancer and, as the public aged, orthopedics. That’s what drives the financial engine, builds the massive buildings and pays the ridiculous salaries. And that’s part of what calls forth the certain storm Illich predicted.

These organizations also betray the moral intentions of the thousands of people who give their lives to these organizations. Illich didn’t address that, but I was one of them and I know many more hugely decent people involved. So our book not only grieves for the waste of moral intention but asks us all to focus on being deeply accountable – from wherever we are in the span of our lives.

It is never a convenient time to face the complexity of the human ecology, especially when one is making vast sums patching up the damage that comes from ignoring it. Hospital executives and Board members have nearly unanimously decided to take giant steps backward as quietly as they can terrified that the MAGA or MAHA people will notice the estimated trillion dollars in financial reserves held by non-profit healthcare organizations. So the earlier chest thumping commitments to a diverse community—what we call complex human ecosystems—evaporated as quietly and totally as morning dew in a southern summer day. Shameless; but what attracts Nemesis is their pride in these business decisions that betray both faith and science.

Promotional poster for a double book launch at the University of Cambridge, featuring two books: 'Taking Responsibility for the Life of Complex Human Ecosystems' and 'Handbook on Religion and Health'. The event includes details such as date, time, location, and speakers.
Follow the link to register for the event by Zoom.

The most obvious action of Nemesis is likely be the taking away these organizations’ non-profit tax benefits. MAHA cares as little about their mission as do their Boards, viewing them realistically as just part of the corporate healthcare industry which they believe should be in the hands of the most efficient capitalists—Google, Microsoft, Amazon, whoever. Without well-funded Medicaid, Medicare and public health these organizations are forced toward the high-margin services and they  will supplicate before these deep wells of capital. Of course, the health-tech firms know that Artificial Intelligence will decimate physician-driven hospitals and allow for precision cherry-picking of paying patients. They will let somebody else feed medical scraps to the poorly insured middle class and the poor. Faith-based hospitals could have invested this past half century arguing for policies building deep accountability to the science of prevention, chronic condition management and truly effective care. Instead they invested in self-serving revenue-oriented policies. This eroded any possibility that the public they were supposed to serve would now protect them when Nemesis comes to call with all its profoundly bad news.

The good news is clarity that it didn’t have to be this way; and it doesn’t need to be this way in the future.

Every part of this book is about deep accountability, and only one chapter deals with healthcare. Those of us who do care about the health organizations – public, private and faith-based – will need the other chapters to think with, to break the deadly intellectual dead-end the health sciences have trapped themselves in. We need clarity about how much capacity we have to act, invent, choose and imagine. We need to join economist Mariana Mazzucato’s fundamental new thinking about what and who produces value in our current world, unmasking, like Illich, those who are satisfied with mere cost and acritical profit-taking. We need mycologist Merlin Sheldrake’s whole new way of seeing how we humans move toward each other to make new social and political possibilities real. And we need the dramatic insights about social meshworks that are so much smarter than the dumb computer networks we’ve long tried to emulate with such meager swill.

A serene landscape featuring a river reflecting trees with autumn foliage, surrounded by lush green hills and a blue sky.

We can reclaim the light we have to live by, the joy that is the natural fruit of taking responsibility for the full life of the complex human and natural ecology where we live. We are not leaves before the harsh winter wind.

It is Spring time. It is always Spring time. Even in the dark and cold of January life is finding its way all day and night, never resting, always emerging, never quitting. Joy! Life works.

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Ribblehead Lessons

The Ribblehead Rail Viaduct is a wonder, but like the US Constitution it did not anticipate all the challenges it would face.

The founding brothers of the United States of America crafted an exquisitely complex array of checks and balances, anticipating craven behavior by tyrants. Like the stone pillars of a high arch built to defy gravity, ice and wind by carefully balancing opposing forces, they expected an American King George rather like our current imitation. They worked fast as best they could in a hostile time, but could not think of everything; such as the weak behavior of Congress collapsing like bricks made of poor clay.

I thought of this standing at the foot of the Ribblehead Viaduct that curves across a high valley near the apex of the rail line in the barren mountains of Northern England on the way to Scotland. Graceful, audacious–arching in every sense—the span is on post cards, hats, t-shirts and coffee cups. Beautiful but dangerously flawed.

A coffee mug with an illustration of a viaduct and a postcard featuring a steam train crossing a viaduct against a scenic backdrop, placed on a wooden table.
The curving arches adorn all sorts of bling and merch. Engineers look more closely and admire the repairs.

My father would have noticed all the repairs. An engineer, he taught me to look under the bridge for leaking water and loose stone. The bridge, like our Constitution, was built in only six years across terrain considered impossible. Corners were cut sort of like our lazy 3/5th decision regarding Black people. Water driven by mountain wind found the weaknesses and did as water does. The huge stone pillars were left hollow, allowing water to erode from the inside out. The bricks at the top of the arch were made local, fast and cheap; some of the limestone was cracked. It lasted longer than my father would have expected, but its inevitable failure nearly caused the closure of the entire railroad only a hundred years after hundreds of workers died building it.

As everyone pointed fingers, one engineer figured out how to do what should have been done in the first place. Facing calls for drastic closure, he got permission to experiment. After carefully observing all the failure points, he filled the hollow pillars with concrete, inspected every stone and brick, replacing even those thought impossible to reach. New roadbeds rebuilt to drain correctly. Lots and lots of iron bracing, rivets and bracing my dad would love. Thoughtful engineering saves money. Only $3 million saved the route for all the dependent villages and those hurrying to Scotland, staring at their IPhones today.

Grown ups make things better for people they will never know. The are rewarded with a quiet pint to reflect on a life well lived.

Close-up view of a stone pillar of the Ribblehead Viaduct, showcasing its rough texture and repair features against a blue sky.
The repairs were more like surgery, carefully splicing, replacing and strengthening the high pillars.

American grownups could do that soon.

The fellow imitating a stumbling King George will pass as did all the failed tyrants like him. We will have a damaged and unsafe democracy, but we will be finally see the design flaws. Some call for a whole new bridge, which will just have a new array of flaws. This one just needs thoughtful repair.

Soon—perhaps two, maybe four, six or eight years from now we can fix the flawed structure so that it can carry the weight of free people. Those citizens can make the collective decisions necessary in a tiny world experiencing the wild winds of climate change. We don’t have to invent the rails, just make a bridge that can bear the weight in hard weather. We have plenty of science, engineering, social intelligence, political sense and faith to do that.

We can protect ourselves from predatory gangs. It may take longer than my lifetime to earn the trust of our world partners, but they have had hollow pillars, too, and will probably welcome a chastened, humbled people.

Even as the pillars sway, we can see the future to choose. It will be solar, now outrunning even the most wildly optimistic projects of Al Gore on maximum coffee. That kind of energy is safe for democracy unlike oil or coal. It thrives, decentralized. Even our tiny narrowboat has enough to get us off grid except for clean water. That’s true in your life, too; you just don’t have to know it (how many gallons a year do you use; where does it come from?). But almost all the problems are solvable once we can turn our attention toward actual threats instead of the ones whipped up to make us afraid of ourselves.

If anyone is anxious, it should be former FBI Director Jim Comey who was just indicted, blowing past all the norms of the criminal justice system to serve a tyrant’s vengeance. Comey asked people to vote. The only way out of the deep trouble our country is to ensure free and fair elections where people who believe in democracy turn out in record numbers. (Joyce Vance has straightforward counsel.)

Congress can fix what is broken, if we had a Congress. There are dangerous calls for a whole new Constitution. It just takes some new laws designed to fix some simple design flaws. Getting a functional Supreme Court will take longer, but once the tyrant passes, they are likely to be more inclined to obey laws themselves. A functional Congress only takes about 300 grown-ups between Senate and House, maybe 320.

Each legislator is elected in a small geography in which every door can be knocked, every voter known. Every district is likely to have a demonstration October 18th that you can attend with fellow citizens. Bring your kids so they see free people standing up for their future. You’ll be surprised by who comes along. In fact, invite them.

A view from underneath a large stone arch bridge with two massive pillars, set against a blue sky with scattered clouds and green grass in the foreground.

That march will be called “no kings,” which confused things a bit. The London protest I’ll be at is called, with more precision, no tyrants. That’s the problem that needs fixing. Well behaved Kings are harmless. The better ones seem to help people keep their collective eye on the future. The Brits figured that out centuries ago and we will, too.

All of us—helpful, craven, those not paying attention and the rabid, are just people. Another Quaker tip helps here. Because we are all just people, equal before God and the universe, all external titles are distraction. I would never get a letter from a Quaker, addressed to The Reverend Dr. I’m Gary Gunderson, the king is Charles Windsor, and the tyrant, Donald.

It is good that we know what has almost fallen down. Be done with the anxiety and get to work.

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Absolute Perhaps

A view of a cliffside trail overlooking a beach with waves crashing against the shore, featuring wooden posts and barbed wire along the edge.
Before one trusts a fence, make sure it is attached to reality.

I am so weary of the certainties. Not all of them are cynical, but all easily bent to serve bullets, venom and snark. It is hard to take the whole category of certainty seriously and do not wish to contribute to the cacophony. I must admit that I have contributed more noise than most and, from time to time, been more certain.

These days I am learning from those who think differently about thinking. Less talking; silence best of all. Not to flee from the mean chatter, but to go deeper so that we can discern what must be done to give life a chance.

Quakers are a radical minority among those holding religious opinions—barely a statistical rounding error. Never more than a million people at their zenith, which was quite some time ago. Thousands were jailed by kings, others killed by Puritans and at least one by a Pope (after dressing him down for his self-serving pride of certainty). Dr. Pink Dandelion, explains in his Oxford Press “Very Short Introduction of The Quakers” how their annoying grit produces theological pearls for our time of raw argumentative certainties.

Even for their Christian cousins, their adamance about remaining uncontained by creed  is awkward. Likewise, their focus on Spirit is a bit embarrassing for their secular friends. But you really can’t run a modern anti-war, pro-peace or pro-environment campaign without them, so you’ll find them anywhere life breaks out. And they do make great business partners (they won’t steal or lie) and scientists, especially in the arena of cosmological physics, where uncertainty is the key. They heal (never punch) way above their weight.

Albert Einstein never formally joined the Quakers but held them in high regard, stating, “If I were not a Jew, I would be a Quaker,” and was associated with them through his pacifist beliefs and admiration for scientists like Arthur Eddington. And they admired him for the laser transparency of his politics. Great questions pursued honestly stay alive long after one quits breathing. I came across 2025 book about his profound 1949 article, “Why Socialism,” in the Friends London bookstore. I would have enjoyed listening to he and Mr. Kirk dialogue.

The urgent task of these ugly days is to think prepare for when we will build on the wreckage. Project 2029, perhaps. Focus on the perhaps of the project. What might be possible in the humble aftermath that was impossible in proud times and the present argumentative fog? Einstein and Bertrand Russel issued a joint statement a few days before he died, “There lies before us, if we choose, continual progress in happiness, knowledge and wisdom. Shall we, instead, choose death, because we cannot forget our quarrels? We appeal as human beings to human beings: Remember your humanity, and forget the rest. If you can do so, the way lies open to a new Paradise; if you cannot, there lies before you the risk of universal death.” (p. 81, above).

A scenic view of a rocky shoreline with remnants of a shipwreck partially submerged in shallow waters, surrounded by gentle waves.
The captain was probably confident right up until the sound of the waves on the rocks.

Every tyrant, petty or grandiose, has a chaplain squawking vapid theological nonsense to cover the evil. Thus, refusing to doff the hat, bend the knee or chatter along are political waves undermining the foundations of the sandcastles. Silence and laughter are political because they refuse to play along. The thuggish FCC is right to quake in its presence.

Clarity—not certainty—sometimes comes near the end. In the same bookstore a few shelves over I found Wildest Dream by David Gee. Another activist Quaker writer who lived on a narrowboat called Promise near Oxford. With a terminal cancer diagnosis he knew he had one book left. His publisher expected a final justice manifesto. Instead Gee wrote about how we are saved only when we are put in our place by untamable nature. Only in a humble posture beyond all vestiges of power can we finally be of use to those we love and the wider world. I thought of HoldHealth and the Leading Causes of Life Initiative as I read: “I’d sooner cast my lot with these motley movements of hope, shaken as they are, faltering on the way as they must, than with the kind of hope that expects to seize the future and save the world. Such total hope, trading in grand narratives of redemption, and hungering as it does just a little more power to realize them, forever slips from the fist that gropes for it.”

Honest, humble uncertainty serves the ultimate human hope—deep accountability. It is more likely to find the way through the “absolute perhaps” than strategy cobbled together of certainties that are only certain to be wrong.

I was reflecting on all this while walking the cliffside trail near Robinhood Bay on the Yorkshire coast. The smugglers loved the hidden coves and celebrated when the Spanish Armada blew onto the rocks here in the storm in 1588. The ones who didn’t die ended up marrying local, so you just don’t know what happens next here.

Scenic view of a rocky coastline under a cloudy sky, with gentle waves lapping at the shore.
Smugglers loved the ragged coast and fast tides as it gave them a home team advantage.

My phone pinged with a message—a smoke signal, he called it—from Jerry Winslow, the great mind and spirit at the root of both HoldHealth and Leading Causes of Life Initiative. He wanted me to see the dedication in William Stafford’s little collection titled A Glass Face in the Rain. As usual, Jerry accomplished in a message what takes me a book: “There are people on a parallel way. We do not seem them often, or even think of them often, but it is precious to us that they are sharing the world. Something about how they have accepted their lives or how the sunlight happens to them helps us hold the strange, enigmatic days in line for our own living.” He dedicates his book, just as we might dedicate our fellowship, “here is a smoke signal, unmistakable but unobtrusive, we are following what comes, going through the world, knowing each other, building our little fires.”

Absolutely. Perhaps.

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What to do?

Cagn Cochrane.

What to do? Amid a paralyzing deluge of dismal surprises we ask simply; what to do? I was surprised to learn there is a whole violent alt-right movement to the far right of the young Turning Point man killed in Utah. He died doing a very American thing—speaking freely–although I disagree with his viewpoints. I’ve known young men like Kirk, so I wonder how he would have evolved as many like him do. I’m so sorry he fell to cowardly violence.

We are well and truly off any map. It was already clear that our tools for answering that question were simply inadequate, unhelpful before the volcanic maga explosion and its continued deadly shards. Frankly, our old ways of thinking are in the way of a serious attempt to act in an accountable manner.

So the Fellows of the Leading Causes of Life Initiative wrote a book that turns to be more relevant that we knew it would be back in the old days (a year ago ago). Thin book, thick title: Taking Responsibility for the Life of Complex Human Systems: Deep Accountability. You may say, along with my sister in law, “I’m out; can’t do it!” If you have grandchildren, you can’t be out. They will ask you what you did in these days and you will want an answer.

This book moves crisply through 83 pages unlocking and weaving new tools for thinking in the new ways we will all need in order to look each other in the eye (grandchildren can wait). It’s available now on Amazon but consider buying direct from Elgar. We will be officially releasing the book at Cambridge University the afternoon of October 3rd.

I am tempted to focus on the chapter that was the bravest (at least for me), “storm. This roots in the polymath radical, Ivan Illich, who five decades ago surgically eviscerated the self-serving intellectual corruption of the health science industry. He could see even then, it would its own ugly reckoning, now imminent. At this point we have seen the demolition of public health, but that is a small potato compared to the savagery about to ensue when the maga-mob goes after the serious money of non-profit healthcare. I’ll come back to that chapter in a few weeks.

The chapter we need most this week is the one on Joy.

“There is an intelligence, a deep knowing, we may call joy. Joy is not what we experience as an end. Joy is how we navigate, the evidence we are on the right track, doing the right work with the right people in the right way. When in doubt, move boldly toward joy.”

Nature just won’t quit trying. Here’s a happy dandelion emerging from our parking lot. Never quit trying….

Joy is how we navigate; it tells us what to do as it tells us why. I don’t mean stupid optimism or Facebook puppies. I mean joy informed by the science, experience, tradition and presence of how thing work in this amazing world by moving toward each other (chapter 6, Involution).

Joy and lament are sisters. I am also sorry for all the public health friends taunted and humiliated by the cowardly destruction of institutions such as the CDC, HRSA, WHO, USAID, AHCR. All flawed and compromised, of course. And they all worthy of respect for their moral and intellectual foundations. This is the time for every scientist, administrator, student, researcher and policy-maker to claim the joy of work well done, policy well-conceived, risks-well-taken, arguments well-made and discipline sustained. Although you have lost your badge, remember that joy as it will tell you what to do next.

Go clean up the vacant lot down the street, take some trash out of the stream. If you know the joy of pursuing equity, go do that with some actual humans down the block. If you thrilled with the joy of creating climate policy, go to a grove of trees. TC and I often go to the meadow above the canal and put our fingers into the living soil to feel the fierce emergent energy. Let the joy in.

There will be a time—soon—for us build again. We must prepare to do that work guided by science, ethics and spirit, tuned to the deep joy a free people experience doing the right things.

Fear can be a true signal. But most of the fear today is artificial, self-serving and disingenuous. The loud lies and willful obfuscation are designed to be entirely false signals.

These false fears all rest on the lie that there is not enough.

There is enough in the world for everyone of every difference that can be named in every language. There is enough. I would not have thought so even five years ago in the former times, but there is even enough energy. Read Bill McKibben’s new and shockingly hopeful book, Here Comes the Sun. Bill is a somewhat dower Methodist ecologist who once almost made me drive my car into an abutment while listening to his audiobook Eaarth. He now writes—surprised—that the sun has arrived in the very nick of time. The exponential growth in solar and collapse of prices is a true signal that we have enough energy. And that sun falls everywhere all the time. No cabal can own it as has been true of our short-lived coal and oil age. It really is a new day.

Sun above Gawflats meadow near the canal.

This is why the fear people want to destroy the true signals of abundance, the solar panels and turbines that even Texas loves.

Joy is curious, appreciative and thus creatively grounded in the nitty gritty world of what might be possible. In this sense, joy and love are synonyms as both drive out fear (1 John 4:18) How does it do that? Fear is nothing but an absence of hope; joy and love are stirred authentic hope. Fear evaporates—turns to vapor—in the presence of the real.

Fear sees nothing beyond its own exaggerated weaknesses. Fear is anxious with no fine motor skills and none of the patience or diligence that the work of discovery demands.

The possibilities out of which the future emerges are unlocked by the unlimited creative imagination of spirited humans. Every act of creation, innovation and way-finding I have ever seen is marked by joy, often laughter. And the joy is not postponed to the end of the process; it is the energy along the way. It is the sense of emergent discovery long before the way is found.

Fear can’t take a joke. Joy laughs all the way down the road to the future. Measure our steps, says the great hymn. Measure them in joy.

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Positive virus

You and I are made up of 30 trillion cells and about 38 trillion microbes. Most all of that colony works like a family. No small part of that is our immune system which recognizes the other viruses that like to eat us for lunch. Those might snack on your daughter if they notice her parents did not get her vaccinated. Public health and faith are like the social immune system. When disingenuous blather breaks it down the virus notice the opening for every kind of infectious disease.

A handmade sign in a rural area expressing gratitude to frontline workers and first responders, decorated with an American flag. The sign reads: 'THANK You THANK U to: All OUR Frontline Workers & 1st Responders. WE LUV U ALL! :)'
The Navajo Nation was severely affected by COVID19. So they thanked their public health workers ceaselessly.

Public health science is not entirely easy to understand and its experts often get in their own way. And there is some class divide at work. Their scientists are usually paid more than, say, a textile worker (but a hell of a lot less than a hospital executive or specialty physician). And sometimes they talk in more syllables than is entirely necessary. If those scientists imply this gives them certainty and that their pills will always work—it set up an epidemic of dumb.

Every type of discernment is a gift of God, which is why I have special disdain for anyone who splits faith from science, especially those who do it for cash or political gain. It weakens the primary defense against infectious disease—human trust in each other.

Nobody should presume trust any more than one should assume that all 38 trillion microbes are well-meaning. Trust is earned, not granted with the academic degree; earned on the streets eyeball-to-eyeball. A great public health director like Joshua Swift in Winston-Salem is hardly ever in his office; always out and about talking to as many of the 300,000 people in his county as physically possible. He lives Rule One: if the people don’t believe you care enough to know them, they won’t care what else you know.

The curbside public health is more important than the bedside manner of clinical medicine. Why? Because the window of opportunity for public health is before the disease is next door. And you have to experience yourself as being part of a “public.” If you love your daughter, you want everyone in her county vaccinated, too. It helps to have met your local public health officer and they seemed to care about you.

The focus on humility at public scale is why religion has always insisted on accumulating human experience over time and turning the hard-won learning into rules to protect the social body. At one point, priests and epidemiologists were the same team. Leviticus was the first text of precision public health, but 3,500 years later we are still learning new lessons together as evidence accumulates such as the lesson from COVID19: Don’t close the churches if you leave Walmart open. And don’t blame God if your members die from bad leadership that leaves them unvaccinated.

A vintage US postage stamp depicting a woman in a robe holding a shield with a medical symbol, flanked by two children, honoring those who fought polio.
When I was a tiny child, my grateful nation thanked the literally millions of researchers and volunteers that figured it out.

Nearly everyone I have met in the practice of public health or its supporting researchers is deeply Spirited. They are no more or less likely to go to church or synagogue than any other Republican, Democrat, lawyer or janitor. You just don’t do this kind of work if you are not filled with wonder about how those 68 trillion cells work together multiplied by 7 billion bodies.

Anyone vile enough to intentionally split science from human community is, technically, shitting in the water we all drink from. Jesus said that contaminated speech was worse than contaminated water or unclean hands (Matthew 15:11)

Vaccination is a lot more subtle. It can seem an expensive annoyance to have somebody tell you that your kid can’t go to school without a proof of vaccination. Especially in Skipton in 1875 when the local pastor leading the national Anti-Vaccination League claimed, “that more people who were vaccinated caught the disease than unvaccinated.”

Further, “Every last one of them (vaccines) is wrong and drips with disdain and slavery. Who am I as a government or anyone else to tell you what you should put in your body? Your body is a gift from God. What you put into your body is between your relationship with you and your God.”

Actually, this last quote was last week by an ordained Florida bloviate named Ladapo. Nobody in Yorkshire would be that stupid now as the last real resistance to vaccination in Skipton died out in 1961 when 4 people died of smallpox, including three-year old Denise.

Two men painting a 'Thank You Dr. Salk' sign in a storefront window, expressing gratitude for medical contributions.
Jonas Salk believed the answers were in nature once we found the right questions. He did not patent the “Salk Vaccine.”

Once somebody makes money dumping their intellectual waste into the public stream, it is hard to make them stop. I’m talking about Fox news, not Ladapo. But it may be possible to drain the swamp of grievance that feeds their business model.

The Thanksgiving holiday may be the most important public vaccination of our public spirit. I will participate in the next worldwide protest October 18th against the political open sewer. But that will rally our tribe, probably not convert anyone. For that we need Thanksgiving. The only protection against the vulnerabilities of grievance is gratitude, appreciation and wonder at the bounty of God’s provision for us all. And why once a year? We need a Thanksgiving every quarter until the ugly poison is out of system and the children can grow freely in safe places as God intends.

There is a lazy story about the inevitable clash between religious people and public health that will always come to a conflicted head around vaccination. James Fallows, the veteran reporter, writes about how the New York Times has been framing the story of the Harvard resistance the Trumpian blitzkrieg as a slow inevitable collapse. No named sources and no collapse; the storyline itself is a moral collapse. “It affects how people in a movement feel about themselves, and whether they think they are entirely on their own or part of something larger. If 50 people protest in a small-town park, is it just those few people, at that one site? Or are other groups of 50 to 5,000 standing up in other places, for the same reason, at the same time?” The same lazy doom-casting frames public health. Both are nearly as dangerous as the sad little Lapado fellow.

Let’s flip the script. If you walk over to your public health office and ask anyone you meet where they go to church, they’ll have one (probably Baptist). If you’re a pastor, you know you have members who work in public health or the sister field, social work. Why not do it near Why not organize all the houses of worship in town to honor them on the same weekend; Thanksgiving is perfect. Buy an ad in your local paper? And a billboard. Take turkeys or cake to the public health office.

Gratitude for the people who vaccinate us against fear is the best public vaccination of all.

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Afloat

A year ago we had no idea that our life had changed.

A year ago today TC and I woke up on a narrowboat, not knowing that our lives had changed quite profoundly. We had rented it with her sister Lisa and David to putter up the Leeds and London canal toward Skipton. We noticed a Victorian house across the hedge. Last summer TC and I had flourished like graduate students in Glasgow and were committed to steer toward happy. They lived in a Glasgow flat and felt a houseplant needing a bigger pot so when David noticed the house was for sale I uttered, “you buy the house; we’ll buy the boat.” They did within weeks, we did in January then moved on board in May and here we are afloat.

Interior view of a narrowboat featuring a cozy living area with a blue sofa, wooden furnishings, a small table with a laptop, and large windows allowing natural light.
Small and narrow, not primitive.

A narrowboat is a British curiosity suited to the canals dug by shovel in the 1700’s that released the industrial revolution. Quaint now, they connected slave-grown Memphis cotton and Carolina tobacco with hand-dug coal to change the world, enabling Britain to rule the waves and subjugate people of many nations. They were built with short-sighted private capital, so they are too narrow for modern freight. In France, they were built by government wider and remain useful to this day, muttering about the daft Brits. Daft or not, more than 2,000 miles crisscross England today with thousands of people living on them full-time. In the cities many do so to escape high rent and impossible purchase prices. Our boat cost about $70,000 once we added solar and fiddled around. A new boat could easily be twice that but still a fraction of landlocked flat.

Called Fiddlesticks by the musicians who previously owned it, our floating tiny house narrowboat is about seven feet wide and 56 feet long; about 350 square feet. Small, not primitive: full kitchen, shower, radiators and wood-stove, double-glazed windows, skylights and internet. Solar runs everything but moving the boat. A British double bed is like a wide single, so I remodeled for a proper queen sized bed to run crosswise. With the slow nautical rock, we could sleep for 20 hours.

Canals are only 4 feet deep and don’t flow like rivers, but they do require water to operate the locks. This year has been the most severe drought in a century leaving the reservoirs dry. Our canal has been essentially locked down 5 miles to the west and 17 to the east. So, we have been forced to be utterly happy in the wonderful little town of Skipton filling up our water tank with a hose snaked through David and Lisa’s hedge.

Skipton has been a market town with a castle for 800 years that kept the Scots to the north. We personally love the Scots, but they do tend to carry off the livestock. The castle was home to generations of Cliffords who helped get King John to sign the Magna Carta and later start the British East India Company. The working people raised sheep and worked in the textile factories until quite recently when tourism arose. This is the gateway to the graceful green Dales which All Creatures Great and Small made.

There are few Americans. I ran into one in an electronics store who exclaimed, “Oh no! I am SO disappointed to meet you!” I wasn’t thrilled to see her, either. Let the colonists stay with JD Vance and his ilk down in the Cotswold.

Most everything I call “work” can be done better here. I usually type until people wake up 5 hours later on the East Coast and then often zoom. I bike 15 miles up the towpath, come back and do it again. This is probably the most productive writerly time of my life as the Leading Causes of Life Initiative grows ever more global. Our new book, Taking Responsibility for Complex Human Ecosystems: Deep Accountability, has a British publisher and will be released in a few weeks at Cambridge University. I’m on a direct flight to India in a couple weeks; South Africa is in the same zone.

Interior of a narrowboat featuring a wooden table with a laptop and a mug, next to an open window overlooking greenery.
Where I “work.”

The US political wildfire is making room for new thinking about how to achieve mercy and justice. Hold.Health drawning from global networks of colleagues is finding similar traction. TC and I keep our home base in North Carolina but in many ways Skipton is the center of our world of work because it is, well, more in the center of the world.

We hang with the Quakers here, where they have met in the same sandstone floored space for more than three centuries. I am quiet for a full hour for the first time in my life, amazing my friends and family. We stood quietly with them in front of city hall remembering the Hiroshima bombing. They now convene the broad faith community about Gaza noting that more Palestinians have been killed there than the in Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined. I don’t think I would have heard that in Winston-Salem.

We Americans have been proud of our civic culture, but it is now mostly withered with tribal whining. Here people do the peoples’ work with many key tasks done by volunteers. The canal infrastructure would collapse otherwise. Today on the way to dump my waste cassette, one stood in drenching rain hoping to engage potential volunteers and donors. Fierce.

The food is good and pubs abundant. They are not like American bars, expecting families, dogs and children. Our grandson won at Bingo last week. I’m a malbec guy, but frankly fresh hand-pulled Yorkshire lager is better. Easy to find live music. And audience at open mic nights knows the words to the union mining and waterway ballads along with Delta Blues.

Two women stand outside the 'Two Sisters' bar and kitchen, smiling and looking up. The venue features warm lighting and decorative signage.
Lisa and TC; why we are here.

Our move toward the Island happened the same time as American went off into the formless void of stupid. We expected Kamala and can’t explain any of it to our friends here. Sad demise but the world moves on without it. The Brits have found life after empire and so will we.

Intellectually, there can be no “American academy” anymore; entirely corrupted, intimidated and ashamed of itself as one institution after another lays low when we need them most. Any intellectual roots jettisoned within months were obviously not very rooted at all. Nothing worse than my former hospitals, so annoyingly proud of equity, now abandoned like gum on their fancy shoes.

The dynamics of faith, health, climate, governance, peace, justice all transcend any one little people. Where better to think about that than on a canal dug by poor people at the beginning of the globalized industrial economy? And so we do.

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Shame

Close-up view of a broken window with a significant crack pattern, surrounded by horizontal blinds and showing a glimpse of the landscape outside.

Public health holds many inconvenient truths. Some demand highly technical digging to find the evidence buried in the behavior of living microbes. The vaccines built on that train of evidence interrupt that behavior in ways that are near miraculous, but with variations that infuriate those who want certainty and someone to blame. Bullets lace the CDC encouraged by the lies of our tragic disgrace of a secretary of health, appointed and tolerated by a tragic disgrace of a president.

Most of what public health inconveniently knows is not as subtle as a vaccine, but self-evident. People die in predictable patterns marked by race, gender, language, zip code, religion and what nation they were born in. These patterns not in the genes and not of God, but created and sustained over time and across generations by human choice. Individual behavior makes a difference, of course. Don’t smoke, walk around the block and stop with the sugar. Leviticus had this figured out 3,500 years ago. But neither the Bible nor public health is about about the micro-ethics of individual choice. It is about the choices we make as a people toward patterns of mercy, justice and health for all as God intends.

Public health is the name of that disciplined thought that points out the way, like a honeybee finding its home hive. If you’ve ever actually watched a bee, you’ll notice they don’t actually fly in a straight line. A “bee line” is constant course correction accounting for the wind and drizzle and the fact they don’t see very well beyond 18 inches. Public health is constant course correction, too. That’s what the science is about; it figures things out along the way.

The people who give their lives to this work are poorly paid by the standards of hospital-based healthcare. Nobody in public health has ever earned in two years what many hospital CEO’s make in a month. They don’t have jets, three homes or minions to write their speeches and books. They do science for the same reasons poorly paid pastors do ministry; they love giving their lives to the lives of others beyond themselves.

I have worked among these sacred servants for many years, sometimes blessed to pray with and for them:

“What both faith and public health view as sacred, blessed, honorable, worthy of praise and sacrifice are the choices that lead to life, protect it, enhance it, extend it and spread its blessings widely across the people. We don’t think God is done; and we don’t think science is done. Thus we love to work together, even when some of us don’t care about God and others don’t care for science.

“Our beloved field of public health can never stop talking about facts, analytics, determinants, vectors, patterns and predictors. This is because of our crazy love for the people–the public.

Close-up of a weathered metal surface with small holes and a green fern growing amidst the rust.
Sprouts find their way through the bullet holes in an old refrigerator in North Georgia.

“We can not stop talking about why we continue to hope for better, hope for more and simply won’t quit hoping no matter what. You can take our money, put us in the dumpiest offices and cut our staff. You can treat us as pitiful, hardly even as honorable as a primary care doctor, which in hospital world is hardly on the map. We won’t quit. Why? Because we are in a lovers quarrel with the public we love.

“This is the time for those who just can’t stop loving the messy, disappointing, ever-muddling gaggle of humans called “the public.” We are in JUST the right work at just the right time. While others rant, we must speak out of that love. Bring our facts and laptops, as we know that science is a friend of humans and what we are possible of.”

God will never waste the life of an honest scientist who brings data to power without apology for its inconvenient demands for mercy and justice. Science is a gift of a loving God for all the people. May God bless and protect those sacrificing today for doing the right thing for the public. Shame on those who persecute them.

// photo credit CNN. And me.

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