boundary leaders – garygunderson Blog

King Year

A person holding a bouquet of colorful flowers, wearing a brown beanie and traditional clothing with rich textures and earth tones. — https://dhammacetiya.com/walk-for-peace-the-venerables/

Buddhists walk for peace in my Carolina Winter while I, a Baptist/Quaker, walk their Monks’ Trail in Chiang Mai. Here in Thailand it is hard to see the mountains through the blizzard of campaign signs for their election February 8^th. The campaign is skewed by live fire border conflict with Cambodia that makes this Buddhist nation think more about their military than their monks, but nothing remotely as brazen and raw as my own country. The people here will vote and the government will be who they choose.

I am not sure that will happen for my people as the increasingly brazen, desperate man coming apart in real time on world screens simply can’t afford one. After losing 43 out of 43 smaller elections since the presidential squeaker a year ago, every poll signals that the light at the end of our authoritarian tunnel is a very fast moving train that will take the House and Senate like hitting a bug on the tracks.

They have no other man and no other plan than to stop the elections from happening. Like a bizarre version of Thelma and Louise they accelerate maybe taking another mother on the way off the cliff. They will try to claim insurrection, posting goons at every polling station. Black People have seen that before and stood in lines winding down the streets. I doubt that Brown people will have any less courage. White people are too dim to understand the threat, so will show up with breezy optimism as the People take the House and Senate. But then we have a true knife fight in the mud for two years more.

A tranquil view of a still water pool surrounded by lush greenery and trees, reflecting the clear blue sky. — *Wat Pha Lat, over Chiang Mai (tourists cropped out)*

With troops in Caracas, untrained goons in Minneapolis, soon Charlotte and Winston-Salem, we have to ask what faith has to do with raw power.

We know that any faith can be frivolous and silly. Yesterday on the Monk’s Trail was like Buddha-rama, a tourist conga line up the hill and through the sacred spaces. Christians have singing Christmas trees and incredibly stupid museums of the Bible down the street from where the Department of Education is vacant.

But….every now and then the Spirit stirs with power.

For faith doesn’t have opinions about power; it is power. Faith has no fear of what simplistic violence can take away. Death? Pain? Jail? Our best theology from Paul, Bonhoeffer to King was written there shaming the timid Bishops outside counselling patience. Bull Connor raged against the children raised in Sunday School for courage who marched—beat them, jailed them and bombed them in their church. And still they walked, shaming the by-standing adults until even the reluctant Feds had to cave.

King Day is over; King year just lifting off.

Said he: “The past is strewn with the ruins of the empires of tyranny, and each is a monument not merely to man’s blunders but to his capacity to overcome them. While it is a bitter fact that in America in 1968, I am denied equality solely because I am black, yet I am not a chattel slave. Millions of people have fought thousands of battles to enlarge my freedom; restricted as it still is, progress has been made.

“This is why I remain an optimist, though I am also a realist, about the barriers before us. Why is the issue of equality still so far from solution in America, a nation that professes itself to be democratic, inventive, hospitable to new ideas, rich, productive and awesomely powerful?

“The problem is so tenacious because, despite its virtues and attributes, America is deeply racist and its democracy is flawed both economically and socially.”

That was with Bobby Kennedy sitting where Stephen Miller now poses while his boss watches TV shows that making him think Greenland is bigger than Africa.

The little people surrounding him know it’s over. The only question is how many more dead mothers it will take. How many children?

Haven’t had any dead preachers, yet, but there are plenty on the front lines, running for office, building the protest and electoral machinery already running like a train in the tunnel. William Barber marching in NC Feb 11^th. Talarico, a seminary student running for senate drawing thousands in the dust of Plano. Vote Common Good aimed like a laser at the 40 house seats most likely to flip Blue. Bishop Budde as clear as a newly forged bell sounding with grace and clarity in the morning. And, if you need a soundtrack, Jesse Welles.

No wonder the goons are hiring more goons.

Faith does not blink when God turns on the lights. Granted, faith can snooze through an approaching storm piddling and fiddling, doing not much until it hears the voices of its prophets, the young ones rising up on wings, the old ones giving voice to dreams long held waiting, waiting, waiting.

Says William Barber, our modern King, “Only when we refuse to accept the mythology around King and the Movement can we comprehend the legacy they entrusted to us. They did not leave us a perfect union. They inherited from those before them and passed down to us a way to challenge injustice and become what we’ve never yet been through moral force. They showed us the way up and out of the mess we are in.”

A group of monks in orange robes and brown hats walking along a road, some carrying flowers and displaying peace signs. — https://dhammacetiya.com/walk-for-peace-the-venerables/

Not one day. This is King year.

We are seeing what we’ve been waiting for. Indeed, we are the ones we’ve been waiting for.

Now.

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 could go wrong?

Exterior view of a Quaker Meeting House with a garden, featuring a sign that reads 'Think it possible that you may be mistaken!' — *These radical non-conformist Quakers built this very first meeting house where we met this morning in 1689. That’s a lot of stupid wars ago.* Two hundred Quakers are buried in these stunning gardens, their lives continuing to nurture the lives and hopes of us now.

So, what could go wrong? A 79 year old man surrounded by people who cannot possibly stop him just busted a bunker of an 86 year old man surrounded by advisors with the identical intellectual and spiritual bandwidth.

Of course the world is better if Iran doesn’t have nuclear weapons. It would be better if the US, Russia and Israel didn’t, either. It would be better if those with constitutional responsibilities obeyed their oath, didn’t steal and put the people first.

And Jesus, Mohammed and every Hebrew prophet are screaming in one voice that It would be better if religious leaders led out of the peaceful side of their particular faith. Among the tragedies is how all three of these old men have tethered themselves to the radical tribal versions of their faith in the US, Israel and Iran.

There really was nothing to say, so I walked over to be silent with the champions of sacred silence, the Quakers. These radical non-conformists built this very first meeting house where we met this morning in 1689. That’s a lot of stupid wars ago. Though known for silence, they can turn a phrase: To King Charles II in 1660 they said, “We do utterly deny, with all outward wars, and strife, and fightings with outward weapons, for any end, or under any pretense whatsoever…The Spirit of Christ…will never move us to fight and war against any man with outward weapons.”

Don’t skip past the nuance that predicts Gandhi, King and Lewis: no outward weapons. So how do you get the inward weapon? Ah, that is what Islam and Quakers agree is the great Jihad, the truly lifetime struggle.

Over the entrance of the meeting is a simple sign, “Think it possible that you may be mistaken.” Quakers once held slaves and participated in the cotton, sugar and chocolate industry which to this day is built on exploitation. But they don’t bluster, pose and “Whatabout….” They consider and try again to be more deeply accountable.

The 19 quiet people this morning did not look radical; sort of grey and drab, actually. I lowered the average age when I walked in. But there are young ones asking for the heart of radical faith to beat again. With such a remarkable past it is easy to miss the fact it is already beating in scientists, activists, politicians, actors and doers of good of many kinds. It lives and hopes, not just remembers.

Only last year the “school for moral ambition” kicked off in Amsterdam offering the age old promise of giving your life to something that matters most. Not religious but full of the radical spirit of practical hope that makes God happy. The young have not given up on the planet and are radicalized by the obvious weakness of 30,000 pound bombs.

There is another way.

Inward power is tectonic. Spirit, truth, humility gather slowly but irresistibly.

Will it be enough or in time? No. In the short term a handful of quiet people is not going to stop a runaway man-child who can send billions of dollars of deadly tech around the world when he needs a political distraction. Five million noisy witnesses did not seem to have much affect last week. But 10 might. Fifteen, more likely. Twenty?

In the back of the church where saints have sought the other way for 335 years is a copy of a book written by Jim Cochrane, me and the Leading Causes of Life Fellows, illustrated by Cagn Cochrane, “Mobilizing Religious Health Assets for Transformation.” I have no idea how that book, written in South Africa found its way to Skipton, but it speaks to the way living systems work. It was drawn from an academic book* by the Barefoot Collective because leaders need good theory to work with. This same ensemble is honing the same body of logic for Interfaith America’s Faculty Summit in Chicago in 5 weeks hoping to provoke another wave of deeply grounded imagination

This is, oddly, a time for humble silence in the light of generations that have sought mercy, justice and peace. Silent, but not alone; conscious of all who seek the way of peace, undistracted by those who want us disoriented and afraid.

Sign for the Society of Friends (Quakers) indicating a meeting for worship, set against a stone wall and greenery. — *Down a side alley, easy to miss. But George Fox and the founders of the Quaker Movement knew it well.*

We should focus exactly where the authoritarians want us to look away. Rule of law, free civil voice, no stealing or lying. Legislation for the good of all. Science. Almost all of the citizens of Iran, America, Russia and every other people on the planet want that. You don’t even have to sit in silence for an hour to realize that.

But you might consider spending some time quietly being clear with yourself about how you can be part of the healing and lend not the weight of your one and only life to the forces of outward power.

* Religion and the Health of the Public, Palgrave, 2012

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Live, the People

Historical industrial building at dusk, flanked by greenery and a pathway. — Belle Vue Cotton Mill used to dominate for miles with thread wove of slave-raised cotton. All gone, but the building is good for techies now. Our boat way down in the lower left corner on the canal that used to bring the cotton.

We live only if we are connected.

The FaithHealth networks in Winston Salem were so woven into the neighborhoods that somebody on the team knew every single homeless person by name. And where the Mayor ate lunch (West End Cafe). Thin filaments of trust, subtle as the forest mycelia, threaded every neighborhood including even into the Sherriff’s Office and, yes, ICE. Every now and then we’d host a lunch with ICE agents and Hispanic clergy so that the humans knew each other, not as cartoon characters.

The very first of the Leading Causes of Life is connection because all life flows across relationships, as real as the grittiest street in the toughest neighborhood.

Once, local ICE agents rescued a woman being trafficked and didn’t know where to put her safely. FaithHealth paid for a hotel (I didn’t ask the hospital CFO!). And when we convened the undocumented, we had enough trust to tell the ICE folks which church to stay away from. I am sad for these friends’ as they are debased by venal “superiors.”

Every human structure—church, hospital, university, Marines and ICE exists like honeycomb for the bee to help us attain our God-given capacity to thrive. This behavioral structure is hard-wired in the bees; no queen ever goes rogue to subvert her hive. Humans go rogue all the time debasing themselves and those with less power they coerce. Jonas Salk wrote, The Survival of the Wisest, about how our lack of hard wiring made us capable of adaptive choice. And, of course, it makes possible the corruption of power you can now see at your neighborhood Home Depot. Bees don’t have to think about being true to their purpose; we do.

Walter Wink observed that a) all human structure is designed with a Spirit for good that b) always tends to be corrupted and twisted against good so that c) the work of every human is to redeem and restore the structure to make mercy and justice possible.

When a damaged person obtains power, they can debase structure built for good and twist it to serve perverse ends. Social Security—one of the moral icons of the last two centuries—can be twisted into a weapon against vulnerable working people whose payroll deductions leave a trail. This is what Musk was doing. In the same way, our highest principle of free speech makes it possible for Journalists trained to articulate the truth debase language to confuse, distort and inflame. Marines trained to risk their lives to defend democracy become like Halloween clowns, threatening citizens who are protesting the violation of the Constitution they swore to defend.

This happens. Most of us just didn’t think it could happen in the constitutional democracy of the United States. At least most of us who are white. I don’t know anyone Black or Hispanic who is even surprised by the amoral vacuity of Musk/Bannon/Miller/Marco, serving a guy who hasn’t even read the constitution, much less a whole book about it. They have seen this for centuries.

This happens. But it never sticks.

TC and I live for now, for a season, in northern England on a canal dug by shovel 250 years ago by poor people who were valued little more than the sheep shorn for wool. The workers were guided by exquisite engineers working for rich families. They were digging for the same reason the container ships come to LA and deliver all the Chinese tools and Canadian lumber to the Home Depot that is put on shelves by people who mostly speak Spanish. I doubt if anyone in the White House has ever shopped in one personally. But they might wonder where their golf balls come from. Same ship.

It was—always has been—one world. But in the last two hundred and fifty years, the pace and scale has escalated profoundly. Even in those simpler times the relationships were woven in cotton and tobacco. Slave grown cotton from the Carolinas traveled to Liverpool on the same ships that had brought them from Africa to work the clay soil. Just west of Winston was the largest plantation in the state developed by British bankers from Liverpool. Our canal is known as Leeds to Liverpool, but it really runs to the hot fields of the Carolinas, across the South to Mississippi. A Manchester cotton company still owns thousands of acres of cotton land surrounding where TC was born, including the barn where Emmett Till was killed by some thugs way down the debased food chain of power.

A Venn diagram illustrating the concept of 'LIFE' at the center, surrounded by five overlapping circles labeled 'connection,' 'conference,' 'agency,' 'blessing,' and 'hope' in varying shades of orange and yellow. — *Leading Causes of Life leads with connection. If you want to kill something–say, a democracy–disconnect it.*

We grow ever closer to each other, which makes some afraid and thus easy for those who twist power to inflate those fears. LA shows us one structure of power in a last desperate ill-considered rush to hold on to its privileges, debasing all and everyone to the very last Marine.

Webs of power never last because the soil wears out or some technical gizmo changes everything again. The Belle Vue Cotton Mill behind our boat dominated everyone for miles around, spinning slave cotton into thread that was shipped around the world, even unto India where they conspired to make it illegal to spin cotton themselves. The rich built big houses thinking they would be lords of industry forever but did not imagine Gandhi who taught the people to spin for themselves and be free. Today the mill is full of flats and offices with people wearing shirts made in Vietnam spinning little bytes around screens built in China.

Human structure dissolves when it ceases its proper work and is bent to evil. The Marines pointing guns against citizens violate their own oath and become something else, sadly. Many in my family took that same oath, some buried at Mt. Vernon. They swore to serve only the People. So did all the people in Our White House, but you expect more from a Marine.

Why such a rush to scour the Home Depots anyway? There is more violence at an average English soccer league game. The desperation is so obvious as to be sad. They have already lost when they have to pretend that Home Depot needs the Marines.

Statue of Liberty illuminated at dusk, holding a torch and a tablet, with a sunset background. — *Stand strong lady in the harbor. We will not debase you.*

They have to finish their debasement quickly before the People can vote again. Once we get within a year of voting, even the most emasculated Republicans will hesitate to risk everything for a 79-year old lame golfer. So they are right to hurry. It is said that if you go at the King, you must kill him. And what if the wanna-be king goes after democracy? He must kill it, too; and so completely that we will not remember it. Our job is to follow the Constitution and make it clear that the only insurrection is the one behind the Resolute Desk in the People’s House.

Things that cannot continue don’t.

But they do until people look up from the screen, move into the physical world and behave differently. Find your local Interfaith Alliance witness and act like a citizen.

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If you or a family member are in the National Guard or active-duty military and you believe you are being ordered to violate the constitutional rights of U.S. citizens, call the GI Rights Hotline for advice and support, at 877-447-4487.

Boss power

An abstract painting featuring vibrant swirls of colors including blue, green, yellow, red, and purple on a white background. — *The many paths of the Mississippi North of Memphis. Drawn by Kathryn Gunderson for the Cover of Religion and the Health of the Public (Cohrane and me, Palgrave).*

How does power work in a time of no boundaries, rules, or words that mean anything?

Robert Reich, who is normally pretty smart, said the other day that power is a zero-sum struggle; that is, if someone has more, the other has less. There is a limited amount of power; the only issue is who has it. This is a mistake as it turns our attention to taking power instead of making power. Generals usually prepare to fight the last war, unprepared for the one they are in. So are social change-makers. It focuses us backward, thinking we need the kinds of power that created the mess instead of building the strength to subvert or bypass with new power. Even the Mississippi River, when confronted with a new barrier erected by some foolish human, goes around or under it, leaving it behind as a monument to folly.

There is no taking back the money Trump and his awful dependents have stolen. But how many gilded hotels can a family rent to how many bit-coin suckers? Who is going to stay in Trump Gaza for $1,000 night? The stuff stolen is mainly circulating among other thieves, so let them stay in each other’s hotels, fly on jets and swap wives, too.

The techno-poofs of Amazon, Apple and Meta didn’t become big by preying on whales. They want to be whales by consuming teeny krill like you and me one download at a time. They are mass market consumer companies just as vulnerable as Tesla has been in the face of global revulsion against its owner.

Tim Cook, Zuckerberg and Bezos have surely joined millions of their customers in downloading Springsteen’s meteoric hit recorded live just days ago in Manchester, England about 50 miles south of where TC and I are at the moment. I ran into a woman at a Skipton store yesterday. She was SO disappointed that I was an American but I assured her I was a Springsteen patriot not, well, you know. “Oh, she said, I heard about his Manchester concert…..”

Download his four-song set from pretty much anywhere and thrill to the “sound of freedom ringing.” You’ll be reminded “it’s going to be a long walk home.” He is as vivid as Dr. William Barber: “the world’s richest men are taking satisfaction in abandoning the poorest children to sickness and death.” You’ll find courage as he quotes James Baldwin “In this world there isn’t as much humanity as we would like.” And you’ll probably follow him as he urges us to pray as a bridge into “this train.”

It’s not his best music, but surely his best speech. (The speech is My City of Ruins (Introduction) [Live in Manchester, May 14, 2025])

I believe when the Boss says that we’ll survive this.

But how? The Don taunts the courts and those who hope law prevail, “whose army will enforce your judgements?” Good question. Can new power be created enough to turn over a lopsided accumulation of old power?

You’ll be watching the answer happen June 14^th, which is when we’ll see two kinds of power face off—62,000 soldiers embarrassed to be disgracing themselves in the Don’s silly parade dwarfed by 6 or 10 million disgusted citizens. First time we’ve ever seen president with such weak self-esteem that he needed such a ridiculous thing; soldiers are for fighting not fawning. So even the soldiers will be be humming Springsteen, not Kid Rock. The organizers are calling this “no kings day,” which is really not fair to actual kings, which have agreed to submit themselves to the Law and the People for a thousand years.

Many, many of the citizens will be signing songs forged in the long walk to freedom of the Black Church. If you are of the faithful persuasion, you can register here to find the Interfaith Alliance march closest to your church.

Aerial view of a winding river with vibrant blue hues, showcasing its curves and natural patterns. — Landstat image of the Mississippi’s wandering ways–never ceasing to power around, never through.

Last month I noted a new song by my friend Sally Morris whose new hymn makes the same point as Springsteen (and millennia of saints): “These simple lessons are the teachings of God. Diverse and Equal and Included by God, we rise to righteous calls

each time we topple walls.”

You can listen here. My earlier blog has the words. Here’s the link to the full sheet music so your choir can sing it Sunday, if they can’t do Springsteen.

Is there new power in the world or are we left to scrape and struggle for scraps of the old? Jesus laughed at those who thought that God had already spent all the creative energies there were in the world. God can raise up new children out of dry stones (Matthew 3:9). And if children, why not citizens?

Bees politics

TC and I arrived in Skipton, Yorkshire (UK) Tuesday to live for a while near her twin sister Lisa. On Thursday an urgent pounding on the door revealed an anxious Royal Mail man gingerly holding a box of 10,000 loud bees that we had ordered from Abelo in York. He did not stay for the congratulatory selfie.

A person wearing a beekeeping suit and veil smiles for the camera, with a beehive visible behind them, nestled in a lush hawthorn hedge. — *Buckfast Bees nestled into the hawthorn hedge by the Leeds and London Canal.*

We introduced the bees into their box nestled into the hawthorn hedge bordering the canal behind Lisa and David’s home. The honeybees were a nucleus 5 frame hive of Buckfast bees, a distinctive species developed at Buckfast Abbey by Brother Adam after many years of careful breeding.

I noticed some difference from my Italian-Americans in the Carolina’s. My home bees dispatch a line of sentinel bees to the opening, lift their rear ends high in the air and fan the scent of the hive to help its missing members find their way home. The Buckfasts maintain a very British dignity with no anal display at all. But within an hour all the bees that had been in the delivery box were enjoying their spiffy new hive with lots of room for new sisters and, eventually honey.

As if to welcome us and the bees, David Attenborough posted the very same morning about the ancient practice of “telling the bees.” He noted that “beekeepers in 18th and 19th century Europe and America believed that bees were not just insects—they were members of the family, messengers between this world and the next. And like any family member, they deserved to be told when something significant happened.

“When a loved one died, got married, or even when a child was born, the head of the household—or more often, the “goodwife”—would walk solemnly to the hive, knock gently, and whisper the news. They’d say the name of the person who had passed or wed, and even drape the hives in black cloth during mourning. Why?

“…it reflected a powerful belief that bees could feel joy and sorrow, that they needed to be included in the life of the household. The practice likely finds its roots in Celtic mythology, where bees were seen as spiritual couriers, able to travel between the worlds of the living and the dead. Seeing a bee after someone passed away was interpreted as the soul in flight.”

A close-up of a green box containing live bees, with a warning label stating 'Live Bees', 'Handle with Care', 'Do not expose to Direct Sunlight', 'Do Not Drop', and 'Do Not Shake'. — *How would YOU like to the mail man delivering 10,000 bees?*

I’m a Baptist-Druid, which rounds out to being Celtic, so this all makes perfect sense to me. It is why a friend suggested I should tell the bees that the young experiment with democracy in the Colonies was dying.

The bees already know. For what democracy could survive in a culture willing to poison itself? The bees are not the vulnerable species here. They’ve survived many, many times longer than humans and seem certain to last millennia beyond us.

They are an untamable species without rulers, which is why they are smart. Dr. Tom Seely, the epic honeybee scientist from Cornell wrote Honeybee Democracy that documented how all major honeybee decisions are made after transparent deliberation of comparative data. (Here’s his great lecture.) Seely says that there is no boss bee expected to know everything. Male humans back to Aristotle thought the biggest bee ruled the hive who they assumed to be King. She is not a King or, really a queen. Despite her size and crucial role (birthing babies) she makes no more decisions than anyone else in the hive. It is a pure democracy so sophisticated we lesser species can’t figure it out.

No bee would imagine a process as flawed as American “democracy” in which fear of one deeply flawed person disables the thinking of millions so that he would not just be obeyed, but enriched with more honey than 1,000 hives could ever consume. They bees don’t need to be told about the death of this dumpster fire; they have seen it coming.

Not many humans in this part of England need to be told, either. They have seen actual kings, not the trashy American knock-off. They, like the bees, know about the certain suffering that follows from elevating one human so far above the others, wrapping them in layers of stultifying privilege and then letting them decide anything. They become stupid and then dangerous. The one in the gilded bubble inevitably make horrible decisions that damage and impoverish everyone. And then they, of course, go down, too as the consequences of their folly roll out.

View of a canal lined with boats and greenery, including a hedge, in Skipton, Yorkshire. — *The Buckfast Bees love the gardens but love the corridor of canal wildflowers even more.*

The English Magna Carta and closely linked tradition of habeas corpus were evolutionarily necessary for the human species to survive. They first established that nobody—certainly not the king—was above the law. The second established that no human could be judged without a fair trial. No human society that violates these can survive. Trust dies first, then facts, marked by random decisions that fuel greed, fear and loss of every certainty. There is no way to navigate or talk: nothing but raw violence as the single ruler and the tiny group he depends on run us all off the cliff.

It would be so convenient if it was possible for one person or a tiny group to manage all the vast interwoven complexities of life on this wild earth. Democracy is messy, inefficient and slow. But letting one person, especially a man decide things is dumber than any insect could survive.

The English figured this out about a thousand years ago, so this can’t be considered a “secret sauce.”

We don’t have to tell the bees. We should ask them.

Inconvenient Jesus

As institutions and norms we thought solid melt, we all have to figure out what reality grounds our lives. It is ultimately money, power, violence and the grab? Does my family’s life depend on me wearing a red hat while being silent as park rangers, doctors and elected allied leaders are humiliated? Is that how it works? An unknown number of Americans think so; about half are silent.

The current administration have had an impressive 5 weeks ploughing through the American institutions like the Germans through Belgium. That Reich, expecting 1,000 years, disappeared in five. But it took a global war, Holocaust and vaporizing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to end it. The revulsions produced the United Nations, World Health Organization, Marshall Plan, NATO, the European Union, liberating colonies around the world and a hundred other laboriously wrought agreements.

But if all those agreements are just undergirded by overwhelming US military force, why bother pretending otherwise? If we want “rare earth minerals,” why not just kick Ukraine to the Russians and take them? Is reality just that way?

Raw power isn’t just “over there.” I’ve never been mugged over my politics or faith. But the same thugs who attacked our Capitol are disrupting policy meetings in Washington now. Some time this Spring tens of thousands of normal Americans who miss democracy (or their Medicaid check) will be marching. They will vastly outnumber the thugs, but so was the Klan, and people got hurt.

It takes a vast outpouring of coordinated civil resistance to overwhelm the violent outliers. It works. As Tutu said, “anything war can do, peace can do better.” But this isn’t a video game. Some of the non-violent folks get injured; some die. So, you’d better be sure you want to bet your life on a loving God who guarantees mercy, justice and decency. Or go find a hat.

Most bands of thugs claim to have God on their side. The Klan burned…crosses. Putin has an obsequious Bishop. The Afrikaners had Christian Nationalism, as does MAGA.

This brings us to Jesus, the most inconvenient figure in all history; a vexation to every king, and pretender to royal privileges (I’m looking at you Bezos). Jesus has always tripped up bullies coopting the name “Christian.” The actual Jesus had a very inconvenient idea about power—don’t use it for yourself.

After an earlier blog, an actual Gideon told me that I needed a better Bible. They have warehouses full of them; I’ve only got a few dozen. But I have read mine, so let me be clear about three exegetical moves I am recommending in this radical moment:

First: Read Jesus before you skip to Christ. The latter is a nuanced theological construct that may or may not have anything to do with the Jewish Jesus who taught and was killed in Palestine. There is more than one “Christ” found in the New Testament, much of which was written a century or more after he walked. We’ve had hundreds of conclaves across millennia to sort this out. Most of those meetings ended up taming Jesus to be more useful to the Emperor Constantine or another one like him at the time. Every wannabe king has not only a chaplain, but a customized Christ.

Jesus life has cosmic implications which take a lot careful theology to figure out. Hence, seminary professors of different sorts.* That’s not blog work. And it doesn’t go fast.

My point is that, as important as it is, Christology and all the other -ologies can distract us from the basic call to follow Jesus’ Way of non-power, non-violence, pro-compassion healing.

Second, if your mental Jesus looks like you, you’re wrong (unless you’re a Palestinian Jew). He was from Nazareth, which was barely on the map of ancient Israel; rubble at the moment. Barn-born among the sheep, remarkable for all the privileges he did not have. Good news to the poor because he exposed the powerlessness of power. So, the King wanted him dead and slaughtered every boy under two to get him; his canny parents believing a dream about a different kind of power ran across the border.

Why bother with this old history? Jesus actually looked like the ones Christian Nationalism wants us to fear, despise, humiliate and, in the end, allow to be slaughtered in silence.

Third, the Jesus in the Bible wants it all. No to violence, but also to possession (one cloak for decency, but not two). Makes me a little nervous about my life. But it’s totally impossible to justify a violent kleptocracy on him. That’s why they talk vaguely about “Christian,” not Jesus.

This Jesus has implications for the movement now rising up to restore the damage to norms of modern constitutional democracy, checks and balances and law. Jesus didn’t enjoy any of those things. But he did pay taxes and ate with an IRS employee. So, he was ok with functional government as long as it wasn’t perverted to serve the rich. What make him angry were those who sold out the Temple to steal from anyone God so loves.

Find another god, if you must. But those who follow Jesus–even in a soft modern American kind of way—will stand against you without fear. Because love drives out all fear when you believe, as Jesus showed us with his life, that love of all is the ultimate power.

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*I am part of a Divinity School with some very smart colleagues, if you want one.

Potbound

Sometimes a houseplant will get too large for its clay pot. You don’t notice at first but it slows its growth as the roots circle sideways around and around in a futile strangle. Even in a new a new pot the roots will keep circling and hardly notice the new soil. Not really dead; a withered version of itself that lost the plot.

I’m talking about hospitals here, most of which were created a hundred years ago by faith and community groups who saw that the simple science of their time could benefit their communities by providing healing and justice at large scale. Hospitals were uncomplicated enough for church committees by the dozens to consider starting one with donations, led by pastors and nuns, linens sewn by congregations. Today, these roots circle inside massive brick pots, out-scaling every other local non-profit organization by a quantum; way beyond the capacities of pastors and nuns to keep them on task.

Non profit hospitals are supposed to be kept on mission by a legal tool called “community benefit,” which works about as well as a fig leaf in the Arctic. The idea of “benefit” dates from when “mission” meant giving away urgent care instead of the goal of community-scale well-being that health and social science now make possible. A recent report from the National Academies of Sciences makes the missed opportunity painfully clear (National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2023. Population Health Funding and Accountability to Community: Proceedings of a Workshop. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. https://doi.org/10.17226/27258).

Kimberly DiGioia, a program officer at the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute, provided an overview of findings from her research on the effects of Medicaid expansion on community benefit (DiGioia, 2022). About two-thirds of hospitals in the U.S. are nonprofits, spending between 8 and 9 percent of their total operating expenses on community benefits, which seems impressive. But she explained that the vast majority of community benefit spending goes toward charity care, and unreimbursed Medicaid services while a small amount of this money goes to community health improvements. This includes educating its own health professionals, subsidized health services, medical research, and smallest portion, cash and in-kind contributions to community organizations.

The passage of the Affordable Care Act, DiGioia said, raised optimism that hospitals would report more revenue and less uncompensated care and thus spend more on community health. Indeed, the evidence has shown that the more Americans are covered, the more hospitals reported increased Medicaid discharges and decreased uninsured discharges. There was indeed a decline in uncompensated care, but this was offset by an increase in unreimbursed costs associated with caring for Medicaid patients. They charged more for less care and as a result, “community health improvement spending did not increase as expected.”

Pot bound.

Instead of growing into the rich soil of community health science, health system roots just circled the pot. This is a failure of hospital governance and timid government policy, not lack of science or administrative skill. Boards never fire a CEO for bad community health; the government settles for health fairs and a mobile van.

Thousands of highly skilled administrators and staff came to the profession expecting to grow like an oak in deep soil (they don’t mention the pot in school). These are honorable people trapped in doing small things. At a recent medical school reception honoring TC and I, Dough Easterling reminded us of when we traveled across the country in a Winnebago testing the idea that “everything we hope for is already happening.” He quoted us back to ourselves:

“We traveled with the sharp awareness that we are among the privileged class, linked to institutions among the most privileged of all—academic medical centers. It is striking how little is asked of these vast organizations. In most every community the healthcare organizations are pretty much busy with running the hospital. The staff might be kind in the ER and diligent on its wards, but not likely to cross the sidewalk in solidarity with the poor and suffering. There are exceptions in every hospital, but as institutions, the expectations remain low for a reason.” (Road Trip, Stakeholder Health, 2019)

Jim, TC and me in Wilmington NC —our 29th stop 2,600 miles after leaving San Diego. Everything we hope for is happening, but often trapped in small pots.

There are three ways to approach this withering, this tragic failure to fulfill our missional DNA.

One is to ramp up community benefit regulations. Not many hospitals have the internal capacity to know how to do that kind of work, so give local public health authorities power to get intimately involved in deploying hospital funds into serious programs of prevention, social determinants and chronic condition management. Don’t count “loss” on Medicaid and Medicare or training their own medical providers. The political screaming will be deafening as the ones that own the pots resist.

Two is to simply let non-profit hospitals remain inside their acute therapy pot, but give up the pretense that their efforts have much to do with community. Treat them like banks with some, but minimal, expectations of community good. Banks have to invest actual cash in the communities they previously damaged by redlining. Hospitals should do the same in the same communities as well as providing decent access for urgent services.

Third, create a special legal category for mission-driven hospitals. The 21^st century work of advancing health at community scale needs a whole new pot. These hospitals would be like Community Health Centers (FQHC’s) that get preferential reimbursement for services that make them sustainable once they are built. Hospitals would need what they once had—preferential and protected access to borrowed capital so they could have modern technology. Treat them like missional utilities with no advertising permitted and community people on their governance Boards. True accountability is needed for meaningful integration with public health and social services, both governmental, private and faith. Restricted pay disparity between highest and lowest staff. Built for mission.

The National Academies report notes that Community Health centers offer much of this logic, but built for primary care, not acute hospital services. But why not? Every one of the major hospital systems have some hospitals they don’t actually want, that won’t ever make much money. Why not flip them to this different model?

We could do so much more with what we have. But our communities have almost given up:

Contrasted with the high enthusiasm when the hospitals were created, “the low expectations of (of hospitals) were striking—maybe for more health fairs, slightly kinder financial assistance policies, or free parking for clergy. We didn’t hear any calls for transformation, hardly any for solidarity. Yet those of us inside the institutions know how much more might be possible.” (Road Trip: Soundings. USA: Stakeholder Press, 2019).

We’ve been circling the pot. We need to break it, point the roots to deep soil and get to work.

Lost bee, found bee

That’s me on the upper right trying figure out how to talk to the guard bee at the entrance.

Forty thousand honeybees live above my parked car, which is often cluttered with beekeeping accoutrement that smells of wax and honey. It is common for a few bees to tag along for the ride. Beyond two or three miles and they can’t find home so they will circle a bit, tasting the air for a waft of nectar, resin, honey from a hive nearby. They can sense a hive vibrating with life that might welcome a lost bee laden with honey or pollen from the back of my car. Honeybees are a practical lot, unlike wasps that tend to chew up visitors.

A honeybee shares a mother with thousands of sisters with a random assortment of absentee sperm accumulated on mom’s one big day on the town. A bee is so fully integrated into the superlife of the three-pound hive that a solitary bee can hardly be thought to be imagined unless they accidentally drive away in a car. The bee has a tiny brain devoted to life and death issues such as where the nectar is, what the hive box looks like and her immediate job at hand. No brain synapses to waste on lingering affections, so in about three days she will not remember her sisters. The new sister will learn to dance among thousands of new kin until her her wings wear out in a month.

A worker bee lives about eight weeks collecting a twelfth of a teaspoon of honey. You and I live 4,750 weeks often, without producing anything as helpful. Humans exaggerate what can be done in a season, while cynical about longer transformations. Impatient foundations often force recipients to promise transformation in three years while cynically avoiding commitment to the city-sized transformations that could be realized in a half generation. Ask any bee.

I found myself thinking about these issues when I noticed that a bee was riding with me on the four-mile drive from the hospital where I used to work to my new home on the Wake Forest University. This was my hive once—I can see my freshman door room out my office window. And while academic guard bees notice my hospital scent, I do carry the equivalent of pollen for the young ones (a new course on Leading Causes of Life). And friends from South Africa, Germany, Texas, California and even Finland with sweet nectar (ideas) that might help the hive. Here’s a link to the Baobab conference we just hosted. I’m already forgetting the old ways.

Bees don’t try to teach humans anything, given our short and unpromising evolution. But they allow us to observe and notice their practical balance between intense selflessness and short term memory. We humans exaggerate our individualism, thinking that the skin-bag holding our squishy parts and three-pound brain is a functional whole. And, opposite of bees, we nurture unhelpful affiliations long after they are are relevant to our future. A bee forgets in three days; about five years for humans. This may be a bit quick for our species.

Bees are a bit ruthless in their commitment to the future, but we should also focus on the neighborhood in which we now live and the people with whom we might thrive. I’m thinking of the tortured shore east of the Mediterranean. The sad futility of my dad’s old political party. The pathetic rending of old religious groups voting about other people’s sex. Hospital systems tethered to old therapeutic techniques instead of modern population health science. Seminaries teaching the same stuff they did 180 years ago. Universities organized the way they were when I was a freshman; for that matter, when my father was a freshman and his dad, too.

(Don’t mention these last two to my new guard bees; winter is coming and I need a hive.)

Soul sick

Lisa Lumb, artist. In dialogue with her twin sister.

I am not sick to my stomach. I am sick to my soul.

The first job of any religious person is to try to make their own religion safe for the world. Every religion has a dangerous side which has at various times in the evolution of the tradition provided cover, sometimes even encouragement, to the most obviously horrible facets we humans are capable of doing to each other. Every king, thug, despot, gang leader and e-gazillionaire has a chaplain willing to cheer them up when they are sad and encourage them when angry. Every castle had a chapel, even when it did not have flush toilets.

As a follower of a Jewish man named Jesus, I am sharply aware that people have done, in the name of my religion, some of the same repulsive things done in Israel this week. Hamas didn’t do anything that the Crusaders hadn’t wraught a millennia ago on the very same land.

My daughter is married to a Jewish man, with both my grandsons raised to respect and participate in the rituals of Jewish life. We just built a Sukkah shelter together that we bought on Amazon. They are San Francisco moderns, sophisticated and proud of lots of things no longer believed. They let a Baptist sit in the Seat of Elijah for the circumcision. And those kids are more likely to go to Burning Man or a trance music festival in Israel one day than church.

I am sick to my soul.

This weekend a couple dozen authors and scholars from Africa, Europe and the US will gather at Wake Forest University to blend our thinking toward a book published next year about religion and health. We meet in sharp awareness that many would wish for no religion at all.

I can’t blame anyone who looks at history and concludes that we should try a culture with no religion of any kind. I thought we were heading that way, as rational secular science-based logic was all the rage way back at the end of the 20^th century. It turns out that there is something in the human being that simply must tether beyond ourselves to ultimate meanings. Call it Spirit. Homo sapiens spiritus. We all have an ember that will flame for good or evil beyond all imagination.

Any of us brave enough to accept identity with one of the great traditions is responsible to see that the others of that tradition do not use that religious cover for heinous actions toward people of other religions; or those who are simply going about their life down the street in Hroza, Gaza or Winston-Salem. We say clearly that any religion—especially our own–that is comfortable with gross inequity in the distribution of things God intends for everbody should be rejected by the larger world as fraudulent. If one’s religion is not good for the whole world it obviously is not linked to the God who created the human species with nearly infinite variations of thought and imagination. Any religion that is not good for the whole world is dangerous to our small planet. Let us not leave that to secular people to say; it is our responsibility.

Practically, only a Christian can engage a dangerous Christian. Same for every other religion. This is not without risks, as some of the most virulent emotion is between people who share the same religious identity. But only an older white male Baptist can deal with the leadership of the minority group of older white male Baptists showing dangerous tendencies in public toward people within punching range. No Muslim, Jew or Sikh can sort out a crazed Baptist. That’s on us Baptists. And I’ll count on y’all to keep your extremists away from my grandsons.

The heinous savagery degrades all religion. Every faith favors humility, hospitality, kindness, generosity and peacefulness—especially toward strangers. And every religion violates every one of those time and again when it fails to hold itself accountable to its own teachings.

Today a kind of prayer beyond words lives in my soul, sick with sorrow.