deeply woven roots – Page 2 – garygunderson Blog

Wild

Humans are a very young species so it is hard to tell if the idea of humanity will stabilize or not. It’s not looking good. Jane Goodall writes in the forward to Regeneration: Ending the Climate Crisis in One Generation that “what separates us from our closest living relatives, the Chimpanzees—and all other animals—is the explosive development of our intellect. … How bizarre that we, the most intellectual of all species, should be destroying our only home.

No honeybee would do something that dumb. I wonder if we can learn from them?

We do not deserve to stand in the presence of such wondrously complex creatures. But they don’t mind as long as we are quiet and let them work. When I do, I can’t help but reflect on our own way and Spirit. It gives me both hope and instruction.

That’s what the workshop is about August 17 and 24th (online). I’m leading it at Threshold Retreat and Farm (here). You might want to join with people who will gather in humble, hopeful curiosity to ask how can we humans might find our way illuminated by the honeybees.

It is worth pausing to study bees carefully because many of the things we think we know about them are exactly wrong. For instance, they are not rigidly organized around a totalitarian leader. They are democrats with no one bee deciding anything, certainly not the queen who is busy laying eggs. When they vote on a new home, they do so in the open, transparently and while dancing. No mean spirited puffery. Good decisions happen.

The honeybees are not invulnerable. Three of my hives died within two weeks when gardeners nearby sprayed poison ivy, which have little flowers the bees like. Nothing bad for bees is good for humans. We breath in the same crap that kills them. Dumb us.

Honeybees remain wild, even after millennia of being managed and robbed by humans. We think of bees as orderly, hierarchical and well-behaved because we steal their precious honey. About four thousand books have been written purporting to teach silly humans how to manage them. And yet honeybees are still untamable for thirty million years and counting,

Honeybees survive because they are wild. They mate high in the wind with six or ten boys not from the neighborhood. It reminds me of my Norwegians who were often led by women as fierce as honeybees, finding mates and raising children across the waves to Newfoundland and down long rivers all the way to Turkey.

Human cultures also find life through shared–not shed–blood. Our story includes violence, often organized and sustained over long period of time. But the species as a whole thrives because of what flows across the boundaries where we find new blended life. Zero immigration adds up to….zero.

Wild works. I’d rather live in the wild USA than teeny weeny Hungary which used to have a diverse empire. Now it is afraid of the world, encouraging us to be afraid with them. Look rather to the honeybees.

Honeybees don’t teach us; they probably think we’re unteachable. They do pose a damn good question: how do we humans remain wild and expansive? How do we remain curious about where love might be found, Spirit unleashed, new songs and vibrations pointing to new possibilities?

We are so young that we are still stupidly proud. Surely it is obvious that every human structure, hierarchy, creed and scientific certainty has passed like the dew in the dawn. Wild, adaptive, ever beginning, ever new–that’s what works. The honeybees have been a stable success for at least 300 times longer than we’ve been painting on cave walls. Generously, they invite us along for the flight.

Register here for the workshop, August 17th and 24th. Zoom, of course. $75 tuition goes to Threshold Retreat and Farm. Participants will receive a PDF draft of a book I’m writing about this. And a real copy when it is published. I’m glad to scholarship a bit, if you’ll give me some feedback. Email me at gary@honeybeespirit.org. Please join us!

Note: The honey from the bees who live with TC and I is called Warthog From Hell honoring the wild untamed nature of southern women. We also bottle honey blended from five other sites to make Honeybee Spirit. Both are available at the Threshold Retreat and Farm booth at the Cobblestone Market in Winston-Salem.

Adults, flunking

“We will live together, or not at all. We will build hope and wholeness, or watch our children grow small, surrounded by ineffective barriers against their fears. We know that acts of compassion, nobility, faithful caring for the earth and her people are all we can do. It was once thought that acts of virtue, conservation and care were only of personal consequence. But surely it is the most fundamental adult responsibility to build and nurture systems that carry our hopes forward. (Faith&Health, The Carter Center 2001).

On national bee day (May 20) twenty leaders from Atrium Health met at The Carter Center to see how we might align our efforts to “To improve health, elevate hope and advance healing – for all.” This is a very large organization—some 70,000 people—serving 400 miles of rough Southern country. If the FTC allows, the circle of care will grow to include even rougher neighborhoods in Chicago and Milwaukee as we combine with Advocate-Aurora. Most of the people work inside traditional hospitals and clinics, but increasingly both science and mission draw us over the sidewalk and into the neighborhoods where elevating hope is like pushing a glacier uphill. Despite superabundant healing science and technology to see disease at the molecular level, the fundamental drivers of ill health remain mired in ugly patterns of race and poverty, often in the very same census tracts for many decades.

Adults are flunking adulthood; our children are growing smaller.

Many of my best thoughts were born at The Carter when the oak trees were smaller. The very first major project of The Carter Center was called “Closing the Gap” which asked, “how much of the current burden of premature mortality could be prevented based on what we already know.” Turns out the answer is about two-thirds. Who can act on what we know? Formal healthcare and public health are only a small part of the answer. The knowledge must come alive in the hundreds of thousands of non-profits, businesses and….faith networks. My Atrium Health collegues and I have made reducing live expectancy gap by 2030 our top level goal, so I am back face to face with the same great and still unsolved opportunity that started me in FaithHealth, still difficult for much the same reasons. The ideas that grew out of The Carter Center soil, with major help from our partners at Advocate 30 years ago, included the basic ones we are still working with today: strengths of congregations, boundary leadership, leading causes of life, religious health assets and now the prayers of the people. These ideas were like bridges across troubled water.

One idea we had at The Carter Center was “not even one,” the name from Dr. Fred Smith. Simple public health logic matched with fierce faith that refused to look past even one gun death of a child. We thought adults could be organized at the level of their town to investigate where they—the adults—had missed a chance to prevent each young persons’ gun death. It would take a lot of adults talking to each other.

The oak trees are now much larger and I find myself less hopeful than at any point in my life, sobered by war and melting planet and, most of all disabling political vitriol. So it was good to be at The Carter Center where preposterous things are made practical through tenacious and smart work: eliminating polio and guinea worm. Elections in places they are obviously impossible: Zambia, Liberia, Ghana (where I helped once). Again, diligent and non-naïve preparation, training of thousands of volunteer poll-watchers. Work in the service of noble values. Tenacious. Qualities that national Bee Day brings to view.

Yascha Mounk writes in The Atlantic about the doom spiral of “pernicious polarization”—when a society becomes fearful of its fellow-citizens, expecting ill-will and hurtful actions unprotected by law or norms that can interrupt the most ordinary days, say shopping in a neighborhood grocery story. The research indicates that the spiral is only broken by a cataclysm. You’d think losing one million people to a pandemic would do it, but it seems to have only accelerated the polarization.

Who is crazier, the shooter of children or millions of adults who allow themselves to be radically polarized?

Nobody at The Carter Center has ever been naïve about religion as both an asset and profound barrier to boundary-crossing labor. There was a time when religion itself was the agent of polarization, but that seems quaint now, replaced by raw political anger untethered by any traditional norms or rules. Our children grow small. Some are shot.

On National Bee Day, I wondered, “how do the bees avoid our kind of doom spiral?

Thomas Seeley is an impeccable researcher and professor at Cornell who has written graceful books about how bees make decisions. He has focused on the most profound risky decision of all, which is when a hive splits, sends out the current mother/queen with about half of all the workers to form a new hive. In “Honeybee Democracy” he describes in mesmerizing detail how the oldest members of the hive switch from seeking flowers to scouting for a new homesites and weigh the options. If they choose one too small, they won’t have enough honey to make it through the winter; too big and will be too cold to survive. There are six life-death criteria. The bees get it right more than 90% of the time. They have for 30 million years.

We face no less perilous a passage in finding our way toward a new political, healthcare system, economic and, yes, faith systems even as the natural systems writhe, shudder and buck. We can’t get it wrong. Seeley says there are five clues from the honeybees. The scout bees tell the truth about the many alternatives over 40 square miles. The process takes whatever it takes, maybe an hour, maybe three days. No leader warps the process. No bee lies to another.

Bees use their pin-sized brains collaboratively to scout for the alternatives and compare them to make a choice. (p100) It helps that the idea about “good enough cavity” is hardwired into those little brains. And, as in many things bee, there seems to be no detectible pride at the individual bee level. They share, then release, their individual perspective so the truth comes clear. Not shooting grandmothers and children is hardwired into even human brains. So we at least what not to do. Bill Foege, who led The Carter Center and led the field of public health to embrace gun violence as a disease once said that it is easy to have a brilliant idea; think of the dumbest thing possible and do the opposite. How do we choose the opposite?

There is no future when leaders warp our ability to talk to each other. Nothing works, choices become random and disconnected from reality. We cannot see each other or our children. We are absolutely certain to perish.

Humans do have Spirit to work with, which seems like a slim reed on which to lean. Since we have little hardwiring to move us toward common purpose, we can only hope Spirit is stronger than venal stupidity. We do have a few mature humans, so we know it is possible. But it seems like a slim hope amid the manipulated deluge of divisiveness.

The oaks at The Carter Center grow a little each year. About 15 years ago the Carters planted a small grove of American Chestnut hybrids selected from among the tiny handful that have not succumbed to the blight that wiped out millions. Real science. Tough hope. Carter—then 80 years old–knew he would not see if the experiment “worked” to again blanket the Appalachians. None of us can know any more about the seeds we are planting with our lives.

He is 95 and the trees are still growing. Listen to the man: “I have one life and one chance to make it count for something… My faith demands that I do whatever I can, wherever I am, whenever I can, for as long as I can with whatever I have to try to make a difference.”

Strong

I rocked back in my chair as Becky brought the prayer to life in her voice. I actually heard my own prayer as if for the first time. We had gathered on a gorgeous Connecticut afternoon at Round Hill UCC using my book God and the People as a magnet. A dozen of us had convened to talk about “prayer as if for the first time.” Although mostly life-long church folks, everyone was more than a bit curious and wary of this talking to God thing. Becky read my prayer, “between clarities,” which in her voice was like opening a Springtime window: “Ever unfolding one, We live between clarities about the most important things. It makes it hard to pray. We are not clear if You invented us to have some to talk to or if we invented you for the same reason.”

That’s not something that would happen with a bowling team. Probably not many of the ten million “nonprofit organizations” in the world, either. Congregations are different social beasts. Their DNA holds distinctive strengths to find, form and express Spirit. Staggering out of COVID amid a European war, with dozens of other countries including our own simmering at the civil boiling point… we need prayer. Not religious chatter. No abstractions. Certainly not just about certainties. Prayer as honest dialogue, listening more than talking. Together.

Congregations have eight strengths which have long held my interest and kept hope alive in my life. I wrote about this nearly a quarter century ago at The Carter Center in Deeply Woven Roots, still in print and used in multiple seminaries. I name the eras of my life by the names of the congregations that held me: Milford Mill, Knollwood, Oakhurst, St John’s and Green Street. I usually sat near the door with friends outside wondering what I was doing within; and those inside wondering why I was not further in. My best thoughts grew here as doubts matured into commitments that have endured woven like threads into fabric.

Ed, Shannon, TC and Gary in the sanctuary of Round Hill Community Church

The idea that congregations have strengths is surprising to some (especially clergy!). On this side of COVID we are remembering that we have more than Zoom and social media to work with. We have things that bring humans together, woven like roots too hold us up and find nurture. We—together—have strengths. And those strengths are adequate to the vast challenges of our melting contentious planet.

These eight strengths have been tested for nearly a quarter century in many communities and congregations of many varieties and traditions. They are there for hard work, built for heavy lifting of entire neighborhoods. The National Academies of Sciences Roundtable on Population Health used this model to help grasp the role of faith-based health assets in communities. The logic of strengths is the taproot of the Memphis Model, which is about congregations, not the hospital. The strengths are the foundation of the large scale faithhealth ground game growing in the Carolinas. They are the positive power of the social determinants.

The strengths of congregations mainly function on the other side of the sidewalk from the hospital. This is why the FaithHealth Division of Atrium Wake Forest Baptist Health is part of the population health group, not solely in the clinical hospital group. We have superb chaplains who are there in the radical crises of the hospital and the poignant times of transition. But most of the time, Spirit and the congregations that nurture and express Spirit flex their social strengths in the neighborhoods where life is happening. This is why the videos based on those strengths are on the FaithHealth.org website that drives our broad “ground game” improving health.

A quarter century after discovering the framework of the eight strengths and writing Deeply Woven Roots, we’ve put up a short set of videos to help you discover your strengths and your roots. The videos are edited so you can take in the logic, or focus on each strength that seems most relevant. Prayers strengthen Spirit; the strengths give the Spirit form, sinew, muscle.

Round Hill Community Church on strong Greenwich Connecticut rock

My experience has mostly been among those trying to follow the Way of Jesus, but it turns out that the strengths are present in any temple, mosque or ashram. They are, I think, the way God has made us strong when we are humble enough to gather as we understand ourselves in the presence of the Ultimate.

We—together—are strong enough. Let me know how your strengths are expressing in the neighborhoods you love. Drop me a note at gary.gunderson@gmail.com

Tender

Things are seen in in the terrible intimacy of the ED every day that should not happen once in a thousand years. Except they happen in entire zip codes, too; the same damn ones for decades. This morning I presided over our hospital “safety huddle” where we report to each other about events, concerns and needs, often using abreviations and acronynms for highly technical and fraught things that happened; “peds abuse procotol” instead of whatever the true story would be in the life of a child hurt by whoever was supposed to protect her. Those break this grandfather’s heart (Charlie turned 3 yesterday).

Last week I was in Atlanta at the advocacy leadership table of the American Public Health Association—the health colleagues at the exact opposite end of the professional continuum from the two child abuse cases reported out in our hospital safety check-in today. Last week John Lewis opened the APHA with words both fierce and tender about justice and kindness as the zillionaires try to walk off with another trillion or two.

Big numbers and repetition can make us hard and dull; but they don’t have to. We live in such a hard-hearted time. Today the sharp edge of medicine was felt by a nurse who is also a mom with a high school son taking chemo. Later at Green Street church, we lifted Aaron up even as we were still wordlessly aching for Cole, our six-year-old who died only last Sunday. How can we can we keep our heart from closing down?

Cole Weaver’s friends decorated the church in his honor.

In my Christian tradition, we have Paul’s words on love, written to the contentious gaggle in Corinth. These are mostly wasted on romance when we need them in the bitter struggles to give hope a chance one patient and a neighborhood at a time.

“If I speak in the voice of powerful people or spirits but do not have loving kindness, I am only a distracting noise. If I have predictive data and interdisciplinary analytics that give me confidence to move mountains of poverty, but am not kind, I am nothing. If I proudly commit to radical levels of community benefit and take on huge obligations for the health of the public, but am not humbled by love, I do nothing.”

“The love that life needs is patient and kind. It does not envy others’ projects, it does not boast of our own skills, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of who got more. Loving kindness does not delight in anyone’s failure but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always finds a way.”

“Love never quits. Where we have predictions and projections, they will cease; where there are speeches, they will be stilled; where there is knowledge, it will pass away.”

“For we know in part and we predict in part, but when living complexity becomes visible, what is partial disappears. When we were young in our work we talked like beginners, and thought like beginners, reasoned like a students. When we became a grown-ups, we put the ways of childhood behind.”

For now we see only dimly as if looking through a smoky haze; then we shall see it all directly. Now we know a bit; then we may know fully, even as our own lives will be fully known.”

“For only these three remain in life: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.”

God, our simple prayer; keep us tender.

Kathryn (my kid) shows Charlie (Lauren’s kid) his cake that she crafted .

Thanks for the fish

Sunday morning I found myself, an incurable optimist, preaching perched on the chasm of doom, 46 hours into a Trump presidency. Green Street United Methodist is the archetype of the raggedly dogged social action church. The kind that Newt things is dead, when, actually, it’s not even tired. But Sunday was still a tough sell for hope.

The first lectionary text for the day was better suited to the more triumphal congregations; it’s the one from Isaiah, about how the light is now shining out of deep darkness. I skipped that one, muttering. Here’s the thing; nothing in the scripture helps us much right now, if the subject is democratic process. We are way off the biblical map, since the canon closed 9 centuries before the Magna Carta, 13 before European convicts settled the Carolinas, 14 before the Moravians came down the Shenandoah to what is now precinct 601 in Forsyth County. It was 16 centuries before anyone but white men could vote in anything worthy of the name democracy. Jesus didn’t vote and nobody voted for him.

So there is no relevant political guidance to found, although I will point out that there is a lot in the Bible that the absolute rulers found comforting. Every king since Constantine had their very own Christian chapel and Christian chaplain. John Wesley isn’t a lot of help either. He thought his American followers were way off the rails with the democracy thing. He opposed the revolution, supported the King and scolded all of our founding fathers for their childish overreaching.

It’s only quite recently that it occurred to any theologian that people of faith could create a democratic government with qualities of mercy and justice. And they never would have imagined that once we had it, we would let it float away on a froth of nonsense. How has the brief American experiment come to this? Especially now amid a vast tide of rootless suffering on a melting planet. This is simply beyond the imagination of any of the biblical authors except maybe whacked out Ezekiel and the inscrutable dude who wrote Revelations.

I don’t know about you, but I’m attending the Democratic party precinct 601 meeting next month. I’m ashamed to say it will be my first meeting. Perhaps you have many such missed citizen opportunities, too. Quit missing them. Programs and policies laboriously put in place over decades are about to evaporate at the clumsy hands of people who know not much of anything, much less what their actions will do those with the least capacity to absorb one more blow, one more insult, live with one more burden. Put your phone down and show up.

The Bible doesn’t help us know how to fix democracy; but it does have a lot to say about how to live without having power and even more about not needing it.

You don’t need Ezekiel or the Revelations dude at a moment like this. Head for Jesus. Look at what he did right after his mentor John was arrested by Homeland Security. Herod didn’t need to tweet his move; everybody knew his appetites and paranoia; it was just a matter of time till he went after John like someone we know went after John Lewis. Jesus was part of John’s movement, so wasn’t surprised by the arrest. When Herod made his move, Jesus headed for the hills. Then in utter vulnerability he came back down, started forming and collecting his confoundingly unexpected movement. His was not like John’s, except in its radicality. Jesus’ radicality went much farther and in a different direction than your normal righteous protest. It was marked from the first by a ridiculous amount of healing and radical generosity that made no sense. It was almost as if Jesus was declaring an end to religion, not just offering a new flavor. This was confusing from the start and unsatisfying to revolutionaries and rulers ever since.

What did Jesus find in the wilderness? In the second half of my life, I find myself going to the wild places more and more. Two weeks after the election I was in the wilderness end of the Grand Canyon down a mile from the rim near the river. On the way back up, I learned a lot as we were caught in a winter storm.

As we picked our way up the trail, we heard stone move high above us, then bounce once, twice, three times and, after a long silence a swinging sword, a sharp crack more like a cannon far below. Even through the sleet and wind, the sound cut hard with menace even though we knew the Canyon wasn’t thinking about anything but gravity.

Nature and the fundamental drivers of large scale change do not care what humans think, feel or tweet. The Colorado plateau tilted up over millions of years, draining an ocean that cut like a saw through a billion years of rock in what by geologic standards was a relative handful of years. It carved a cathedral. But, I don’t even think the Canyon knows or cares about its own beauty.

Don’t worry about the Canyon. The climate deniers will be long gone before another few rocks fall; we will all be entirely unremembered before the river cuts another quarter inch from the basalt floor. This is the natural fact Jesus would have learned in the wilds east of Jerusalem.

I think Jesus went to the wild places to remember another natural fact more preposterous than all the canyons on earth; that amid all the harshness, fragility and loss, loving kindness survives. Humans care and care for each other, even as blood, race, wealth, politics, religion and ethnicity fall like nameless stone from the cliffs. The rocks fall, the kindness survives.

What could be more obvious than the fact that everyone who has ever lived died, felt pain and knew sorrow. We know it for ourselves and we know it for all those we love, too. Bitter resignation makes sense. But generation after generation, we find lovingkindness.

Life is fragile, short and harsh, THEREFORE be radical in your love.

My Mom died a few days short of 18 years ago. She was a practical person not given to symbol. I’m more of a romantic, so when she was near death, I took her hand and asked her if she had last words for me. She looked at me and said, “no, I think you’ve got it. You’ll remember what you need when the time comes.”

Today is a time for us to remember what Jesus told us. We need it now. Wayne Merritt, a Baptist drinking buddy who taught me Greek, said that Jesus’ message was that you will know the truth and the truth will make you odd.

Jesus came out of the wilderness and gave himself to healing —and never stopped, even for the Sabbath. He said that he would stop healing when his Parent did. How preposterous; how human, how holy; we don’t know whether to laugh at him or cry for how strange that is to us.

And what did he do beside healing pretty much everyone in sight? What does he tell his movement to do? He doesn’t give them a box of tricks to win anything at all, but a way to live; And what a crazy way! How happy are the humble, those who know sorrow, who claim nothing, who are starving for goodness. Here it shifts: How happy are the merciful (not desiring to show mercy, but doing it); and so too those who are actually sincere and those who do the work of peacemaking. And, here it gets even worse: happy are those who suffer persecution for the cause of goodness, especially when people tweet about you and make things up entirely. If you suffer for living a true life of radical generosity, how lucky you are!

This, Jesus says, is what salt is for, what a light is for, what we are for.

He keeps the radical pedal down, which must have been a shock to those just looking for some free medical care or to get some demons released. Jesus said that anger is as bad as murder! Anyone who calls someone a fool commits a serious crime and that anyone who says someone is lost is himself heading straight to the fire. Recently, I happen to frequently call a particular group lost fools, which makes me guilty of both of those. I wish Jesus would be more reasonable and supportive of our movement.

But he didn’t get more reasonable; he just keeps getting worse. Don’t tell people that God will guarantee your promise, no eye for an eye, no hitting back and if the cop makes you do one mile, give them another. And give to anybody who asks anything (I can tell you that’s dumb; that’s why I ended up in the pulpit!).

On and on, page after page, without a single tip about how to beat Herod, his deeply annoying glameroti and his horrible ever-grinning children. “Jesus…..is…..impossible,” every king and king-hater has said for two millennia.

“Comfort my people, for in the darkness we have a seen a great light.” But the light of Jesus is not the light we want. It is not a way out or a way over, but a way through; a way to live day by day, year by year, even generation after generation after generation, if we have to, waiting for the promises of god for mercy and justice to be realized. And what do we do while we wait for the big show? Go do mercy and some justice, that’s what. Jesus’ promise is that you and I can live this way, The Way, the only way which gives life a chance at all.

Come and be part of the end of all fear, especially the fear of all death and all that claims the power to kill. Come and give your body and mind to The Way that leads to life. Give yourself away, every bit and you will feel the life flow where once you held tight to your little fears and hopes. Give it away, every bit. Be part of the healing and don’t start big. Before you make a big holy show of it, think of your brother, sister, former spouse or left-behind friend; go make peace with them first. Come away from the anger and scheming. Quit bargaining and holding your minor gains as if they will last. Live this way now and you will find life flowing freely, abundant, overflowing beyond all measure at all.

You might point out that, technically, it didn’t work out so well for Jesus or those who bet their lives on his words. Herod won without a recount. Pilot, two clicks meaner; he won, too. Most kings do. But take a look at the end of Jesus story.

The story of the boats and fishers is so good that it show up in all four gospels in four different ways. John puts the story in the tender days after the assassination and scattering, when the fishermen went back to fishing for fish. Simon Peter, Thomas, Nathanael, Zebedee’s sons and two other disciples were hiding at the lake north of Mt. Airy. Peter announced that he was going fishing and since nobody wanted to be left behind, they all tumbled in. They stayed out all night, and caught nothing. They headed back in, even more discouraged than when they started, except now hungry, too. Jesus watched from the beach across the early still mist and then called, “children, have you caught anything to eat?” (No, of course.) “Cast on the right side where its deeper and you’ll find some.” They netted so many they couldn’t haul them in. John reports that it was 153, which is like counting the beer bottles left on the lawn after beating Carolina. Peter, sure didn’t count the fish. Naked, he jumped out of the boat, pushing his way a hundred yards through waste-deep water to get to his beloved friend.

Jesus had started a charcoal fire going on the beach, expecting the haul, toasting some bread. “Bring me some of the fish; y’all need some breakfast.”

Listen to the tenderness of the one who calls us into a preposterous Way of generous vulnerability. This is a savior who knows we need to eat as much as we need hope; and that we need hope as much as we need breakfast.

Be as careful with each others’ hearts and spirits in these tender days as Jesus was that morning.

Jesus does not give us a way to beat the mean and violent, but neither it is a counsel to give way to the liars and schemers. He gives us The Way to not be like them. So do not let your fear draw you toward them or their way. They have no power over you and they have no power to stop you from living The Way of Life. Their castles are as froth on the waves. You are drawing from a deeper place, carried by a deeper current, that can cut through stone like the Colorado.

The healer is here among as we fish, and type and give away our lives in healing, or teaching or raising up the voice of hope through art or kindness. Give yourself to life-giving now, not later; save nothing back for a safer or smarter time. The Reign of God is at hand, says Jesus. I think he meant your very fingertips.

“Hey,” says Jesus, “do you want some fish?”

Runaway heart

My daughter Lauren is about to give birth to my second grandson, which, with her sense of dramatic timing will probably happen on Mothers’ Day. This also kicks off Nurses’ Week in hospitals. My wife and my (now former) first wife are both clinical professionals and moms. Most of my staff in the FaithHealth Division are women and the men are in touch with their feminine side or they couldn’t do their work of care for the bio-psych-social-spiritual dynamics of the thousands about whom we care. For ninety years our largest partner–the NC Baptist State Convention–uses Mothers’ Day to collect an offering for our most vulnerable patients.

So I’ve been thinking about the expansive caring going on; and the unknowable, but real limits to our reach.

Last Saturday it was my turn to lead the Medical Center’s daily “safety huddle”—the mundane miracle in which every operating unit of the health system from chief medical officer to security to food services and everything in between gathers to report on whether each of us has an event, concern or need to report. Even if we don’t, we have to say so out loud to our colleagues. Usually it moves fast, but sometimes it just stops the heart. Someone reported a situation with a runaway kid who had been compelled to come to the ED by her mom, who promptly run away herself, leaving the kid in our care. Except then the kid ran away from us, too. Everyone hurt hurt. We all dealt with our sense of profound limitations even when the 14,000 hospital people were multiplied by the police and social services. I couldn’t get it out of mind, so the next morning slipped in a prayer amid all the operational chatter:

As Jerry Winslow has noted, it takes a lot of sawdust to find the second life of a tree.

“Mother God, we pray today with thanks for the big heart and strong muscles you have given us so that we might be healers amid so many lives. Every morning we see how big a family of colleagues we have that is constantly present to do what is possible for all who come. Today we pray for all events that raise our concerns for all the needs we cannot satisfy that we cannot get out of our minds, hearts and bones. The runaway kid from yesterday with the runaway mom who left her. All the husbands without words sitting next to their wives with cancer about to leave the whole world behind. All the people who have lost their way to any hope except for the medical miracles that lie beyond us, too. Keep our hearts tender like a mother for all that love lets in. But keep it beating and open for each other and your great spirit so that we might be smart, gentle and kind for this one more day.”

The first cut through the pith lays open the astonishing grain of the burl.

The British Medical Journal has been thinking about this, too, although in grim language of “multimorbidity:” “Across the world healthcare systems are struggling to cope with increasing demands and costs. Rising life expectancy has been accompanied by an explosion in the prevalence of long term conditions and multimorbidity.

“Clinicians are working within legacy systems that were developed to deal with 19th century problems—they provide specialised responses to acute illness and infection. At the same time daily practice is strongly influenced by an ever expanding array of disease centred guidelines that don’t map neatly to the realities of clinical practice, in particular the ubiquity of multimorbidity. The result is fragmented, poorly coordinated health services for those most in need—vulnerable patients with multimorbidity. Today’s healthcare professionals are faced not only with rising disease-disease, drug-drug, and disease-drug interactions in multimorbid populations but with the increasingly evident consequences of socioeconomic disadvantage.

The rough and twisted bark hints at the pattern.

“Meanwhile, patients, their families, and their extended social networks experience not only the burden of symptoms but the burden of treatment. This is an emerging but underi-nvestigated phenomenon. It has received increasing attention recently, and interest has been growing in how to define and better understand the concept.” ( (BMJ Published 10 November 2014)

We could join the public chorus of complaint and rage about what the world is doing to us and demanding of us, as if expanded life span were a mean trick on all of us. Or we could work on what lies between us, the weak ties that could be strong, the empty spaces that could be filled with compassion and carefully tended connections. Even in our mean and stupid time, we are witnessing the dramatically hopeful emergence of webs of trust where you’d think they would be impossible—North Carolina, where you can’t even pee without the government telling you how or where. Good grief. But even here—maybe especially here, where powerful elites have told stigmatized and despised people where they could drink water and pee for generations—webs of compassion spring up on the bitter soil like desert blooms in random rain. Don’t ever be surprised by what a privileged but anxious elite will do badly. And don’t ever be surprised by the fruits of compassion, either. That’s what we are coming to call the North Carolina Way and it is big, strong and unafraid of tough neighborhoods and runaway everything.

When I hurt myself last June, I was drawn into being a partner in the healing of my own body. I have been learning in wonder how we – even me!—are made for healing. Of course we are, since we are also made to be bruised, wounded and broken. All of us, sometimes at others’ hands, but usually a mélange of our own mistakes along the random human way. (That dumb overreaching tennis decision wasn’t my only one!). I’ve been learning to turn wood on a lathe as I healed and found myself drawn to the wonder of hardwood burls, the growth that emerges where a tree has been broken or violated with some sort of trauma. The wood in the burl has a weirdly complex grain pattern, twisty, dense and wondrous. The mysteriously beautiful grain reduces me to respectful awe as the smooth cherry takes a beeswax polish. I think, of course, of Lauren’s pain and that of every woman in my life, of every nurse in every hospital, of every broken heart that manages to stay tender to the pain of the world.

No mom I know stops at the pain. They lend their life and every fiber to what remains possible for those they love. They never cease forgiving and hoping. They teach us not to stop at lament even though so much of what we see is deeply lamentable. They teach us that compassion is the heart of prophesy, of lovingly holding up what remains possible for each person, neighborhood and peoples alive.

The burl is what grows around the trauma experienced by the tree.

Carolina tears

Sprouts find their way through the bullet holes in an old refrigerator in North Georgia.

Hearts break today in North Carolina.

I think of atheists as slightly over-educated modernists who are harmless, almost quaint, in their ardent non-belief. It had not occurred to me that non-believers were inclined to shoot people over parking slots. But now the Associations of Non-Believers have to explain, just as we Baptists have had to do for centuries, how their style of belief in UnGod can make one mean enough to be kill.

Of course, Atheism doesn’t make you mean any more than Islam, Christianity, Bhuddism or Hinduism. But every one of those structures of meaning have given harbor at some time to dangerous people who kindled the energy of belief into the fire of violence. Belief—and unbelief—can warm or burn.

Someone who believes in nothing is indistinguishable from one who says they believe in God but who do not believe in what that God tells them to do toward others. Groups of people, whether Islamic or Christian, can claim to follow God, but actually believe in their guns, banks, drones or grinding, blinding anger.

No French cartoonist, or student trying to park their car can be entirely safe from delusional nutters. Mental illness often hides in the fog of ardent belief and unbelief. It deserves pity, prayer and, often 21^st century pharma. Turning this man’s delusions into a reason for religious or anti-religious rant only serves the demons.

The most dangerous nutters are the ones who gain control over the instruments of state power. The mentally ill man who shot three students in Chapel Hill is not as scary to me as the elected wackos 25 miles away in Raleigh where an unhinged legislature is considering a bill to prevent Muslims from imposing Sharia Law on the good Christians of Northern Carolina. These guys have a whole police force, not just some guns in a closet. They don’t want your parking place; they want the whole enchilada.

We Baptists remember times when we were strangers in this land, too, and know to fear any government that thinks it is holy enough to know who to punish on behalf of God. The first duty of any Christian—or believer of any other faith—is to work to make their own faith safe for the world and especially for anyone who does not share your faith. You or your children might be a refugee someday, too. This is why every religion that lasted longer than a few seasons raising high the priority to care for the stranger, the weak, the poor, the widow or motherless child.

The actual followers of Islam who pay taxes here are mostly students and a previous generation of students now serving as our doctors, nurses, dentists, computer programmers and anchors of our civilized way of life. There is no clinic or hospital in the entire state (or any of the other United States) that could operate an entire week without the medical professionals from many faiths well beyond my own Christian circle. Our community strategy of “proactive mercy” depends on the powerful faith of saalam-seeking healers of Islam. So our grief extends to the families and friends of the UNC students in a double portion because we share their commitment to the healing arts their entire family so obviously embraced.

I’m a Christian, trying to follow Jesus. He said that God would sort out the right and wrong, sheep and goats later on. The twisting plot of the story made clear God’s decision would surprise everyone involved. Don’t guess God. In the meantime, love mercy, do justice and walk humbly.

Cry with us and lend us with your prayers of mercy.

City of Light

Carolos Latuff, one of hundreds of visual jounalists speaking into the horror of Paris.

Every religion is dangerous. Like fire, wind and water, religion is a fundamental element of human life that can drown, blast and burn. Religion guides our fear and frames our shame. And it can also strengthen our capacity for the courage shown in generosity, compassion, kindness and decency. It can be a wicked brew and also be like warm French cider on a bitter Winter day.

What are those of us who find our hopes in faith to do this week? What do we do when faith has been the language for nearly unspeakable acts? Do we just huddle behind the soldiers, or is there any place for our own actions to be as brave and relevant as the cartoonists like Carolos Latuff poking his pencil into the muzzle of terror?

Can mercy be brave as violence?

Although it filled up the CNN cash register this week, violence between religions is relatively rare and getting more unusual year by year. I’ve quoted the finding of Daniel Pink in earlier blogs, but worth remembering that all forms of violence continue to decline year over year over year. Most religious violence is between those who share a religion but find its variations deeply threatening.

While dozens died in Paris because of their secular differences from Islam, hundreds, probably thousands of moderate Muslims died last week because their 1,500-year-version of Islam embodied the radical hospitality, kindness and sacrificial generosity that fills up the pages of Islamic sacred writings. This is true of every religion. John Calvin burned–literally set fire and watched die–Christian theologians that it would take another theologian to figure out the minor differences in doctrine they were arguing about. He killed Christians not Muslims. I’m a liberal protestant writer who not have survived a week in Geneva. I thought about this when worshipping down the hill from Calvin’s towering grey church with an ecumenical gaggle of english-speaking Christians last July. He would have locked the doors of the World Council of Churches, torched the whole place and everyone in it….and than sung a hymn about it. And Presbyterians are relatively nice people. I’m a Baptist…….which I’m just guessing is more common among the Klan than their up-market Christian cousins.

It is always safer to have a radically different idea about god than a moderately different one using the same language. ISIS kills many more moderate Muslims more eagerly than Christians or those who believe in no god at all but humor. Every now and then they may travel to Paris for some especially flamboyant act of horror. But their every day killing is focused on the vast majority of fellow Muslims they find nearby who understand Islam as a faith of mercy and healing.

There is not much a Christian can do about radically violent Islam. But it would help to avoid accidentally strengthening the most despicable by implying they know anything about Islam. The “terrorists” aren’t radical about Islam, which is a religion of hospitality and charity; they are radical about their own projected fears, insecurities and delusions which are then wrapped in a weird and horrible way in the vocabulary of Islam. Christians know all about this process. Christian politicians are masters at wrapping their reptilian greed with Jesus’ words. But we don’t say of our nutters “those folks who blew up the Federal building in Oklahoma sure were radical about following Jesus!”

Do something to strengthen the moderate Muslims, for whom this is a special time of danger, not only from their traditional nut-cases on the far boundaries of Islam, but now from those of other faiths, including secularity, that will fear anyone they think is a Muslim no matter where they’re from (including Sikhs who stupid Americans confuse with Muslims all the time because of their turbans)(Oh, good grief…..).

TC and I took a check over to our friends at the Muslim Free Clinic on Waughtown Street that I’ve mentioned in my blog before. They were today, as they do twice every month, caring for whoever walked in from the neighborhood that needed healthcare, medical counsel or a clue about where to their pill prescription renewed. It is very mundane, as most mercy tends to be. The physicians and volunteers show up and do it because their faith has thought them to do so. They aren’t aiming for martyrdom; just happy to settle for basic grown-up integrity. They are, as a Christian philosopher once said, “grabbing the near edge of a great problem and acting at some cost to themselves.” It is all a Christian, Muslim, Jew, Sikh, Bhuddist, Zoasterian or cartoonist can hope to do with their lives.

Do this.

Soak in the TV, then turn it off and go find someone who isn’t of your tribe, class, color, faith or opinion and be kind to them in some practical way.

Do this.

And the God known by every name any human has ever uttered in hope will heal your fears and count you among the living.

Do this.

Rochester Warming

I just spent two remarkable days in Rochester, New York with the grown-ups in and around its institutions of healing and learning. It was cold; the wind off the lakes gave the first early snow of the season. At one time this part of the country had seen such intense revivals that it was referred to as “burned over.” But Colgate Rochester School of Divinity, University of Rochester School of Medicine and its affiliated hospitals, Strong and Rochester General were warming things up and it felt like home. This was the home of my great uncle, Jessie Hurlburt the last ordained family member and the author of Hurlburt’s Stories of the Bible which my mother remembered hearing in draft form sitting on his lap. But I am more influenced by Walter Rauschenbusch who gave voice to the Social Gospel who taught at the Divinity School here.

Martin’s application picture to seminary.

Rochester knows a lot about how faith can shape politics for good. But it also knows to be suspicious of it and its capacity to make people mean and foolish. Susan B Anthony and Fredrick Douglas are buried here after a life of battle with those who used the language of faith as weapons against the future. Dr. King went to school here and learned much. Dr. Marvin McMiclkle is the new president raising up another generation, hoping for another young Martin.

Rochester was the proud home of Xerox and Kodak and the Erie Canal and remains the home of mystifyingly enduring racial disparities despite the fact the largest employers are some of the finest healthcare organizations in the world. Rev. Wade Norwood led 27 faith and community leaders to ponder how such an array of assets could be mobilized to finish the job Rauschenbusch and his friends started a hundred years ago.

Rev Bobby Baker and I were invited to facilitate conversations about what how the array of health and faith assets could find new energy and vision for what is possible. This city has taught the rest of us so much about what faith can do when organized and aligned with the best of a generations’ science. It is always hardest to remember those lessons in one’s own place, so it was helpful for two visitors from other tough cities to remind them of we learned from them.

They had heard of the hundreds of congregations aligned with the Beloved Community in Memphis. And they had heard about the rising up of the Environmental Services Workers at Wake Forest. So Chaplain Bill Reynolds helped them boldly open up the lecture hall in the heart of medical learning for a panel drawn from the Environmental Workers, interpreters and unit secretaries– for them to serve as faculty. Physicians, executives, brilliant students and community clergy listened, then engaged, the men and women normally only free to be brilliant among themselves.

Mr. White of Environmental Services makes a point while Dr. Berk, CEO, listens.

We gathered in the name of Janice Lynn Cohen who died at 9, but lives through the fidelity of her parents to nurture her memory for 33-years through a lecture series named after her. We also heard the name of 15-year old TeJean Williams who died as he threw his body in the line of fire in front of his grandmother just a couple of days before Bobby and I landed. The room was thick with lament for the two too-short lives. And yet we could see the other grown-ups leaning in, daring to hear. The CEO, Dr. Berk, came briefed to talk, but quietly listened as we all did, letting it in.

Does faith offer up anything of use in such times as these? Does it help grown-ups do our job of creating the structures and systems that give hope a better chance?

The Reverend Bobby Baker speaks of Jesus and Lazarus in Colgate Chapel.

Bobby preached at the Colgate Chapel with a new social gospel illuminated by John 9 story of Jesus releasing Lazarus from the tomb. He told the story through the Leading Causes of Life, so we also used them as lens to focus the panel in the medical school. There was a lot of life to hear.

The most basic spiritual competency is the capacity to listen to the whole life of the patient, colleague, friend, community in front of our eyes. We did that together as we listened to each other in the presence of these two children.

We need another competency that is hard and indeed very hard for many of us: to appreciate the limitations of one’s own history. It is a painful path to appreciate one’s own personal path of complicity with the patterns and powers and privileges so woven into the suffering. One would think that over time we would move toward maturity as we learn. But often what we learn is what we have been part of the wrong and the damage along the way. We –I–need to know forgiveness is possible in order for lament to not be the last word. That is not the last thing we need, of course. But it rolls away the stone, so Bobby Baker said in the chapel. It is never too late. Not while the spirit moves.

DNA

I learned an extremely simple thing at the Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies: if there is a lot of something going on inside or between humans and you don’t understand it, you should pay attention until you do.

The biology committee of our Forum was pursuing the new knowledge “epigenetics.” The are curiousi about our 20,000 bits of DNA that are like toggles (or networks of toggles, technically). What turns them on and off? The answer is not found among those 20,000 codes but in the other 92% of biological stuff that science thought was filler, sort of like the bubble wrap that surrounds the CD from Amazon. That stuff is called the “non-coding” DNA and turns out to be the essence of adaptive humanness. It shapes the human dance at the molecular level. Before anyone even knows there is a dance, the embryo and mother begin to relate in ways that form one and transform the other. The big news is that the process is affected by emotions both positive and stressful. The science is so young, we are only dimmly aware of how this works even in the mother-child dyad. In this most intimate relationship, the dance is esquitely subtle.

What looks like a very precarious strategy works because it is radicaly social. The child that survives is the one with the best, which is to say loving, …..mom. And the mom that loves best is the one with the best, which is to say loving….mate and they with the most fiercely loving famly, friends and neighbors. That works. And what turns on the choices that make that all go?

Some talk of the “sychronous mind” that may function at the level of groups and even community. “Better than Conscious” is an MIT Press book that came from a 2008 Strungmann Forum. Since then many are exploring how synchrony and choice emerge in groups, often with music, rythm, shared meaning and something like ritual. Sounds like Black Church to me, although it will be several hundred years before one of them allows Yale scientists to hook them up to machines to map their popping peptides and whizzing electrons.

Most religion doesn’t look nearly as useful as non-coding DNA even before it turned out to be epigenetically active. Much is harmless piddle, which is still better than the flamingly stupid fear all religions are capable of fomenting at the most unhelpful times. Still, at the core of every faith that has lasted for more than a couple generations are rituals, songs, practices, norms and celebrations that enourage the wonder of love alive again. The survival of the species does not depend on preaching, thank god. But everywhere you look in humanity, you’ll find spirit. We should pay much closer attention to how it works for birth, growth and thriving of the Whole.

Quit staring at the the pulpit where it is mostly still men acting like boys. Look to the womens’ groups that replicate life and healing practices generation after generation. They do –and could do more– organizing themselves around the social structures of faith. (This is how I see Parish, or Faith Community, Nurses, not as a kind of extention of the hospital.) Think of the pulpits as the coding DNA and the women’s groups as the 92% around it –the epi-faith that governs the expression of the formal codes. And be thankful that the predictable gender patterns are changing–more women in the pulpits, more men giving care: better codes, more care. Maybe just in time, too.

This is from the back of the church Rev. Renate Cochrane pastors in Gottenfingen where I spent a couple days after the Frankfurt Forum. The church has gathered on exactly that spot since 1513, so they should know something. Four hundred and fifty people now live around the church and know its care. Like the mothers’ epigenetic affect it is not one thing, communion or the sermon, but the whole thing across the whole life and the generations.

What if those of us of faith and in positions to influence its expression and practice took our role as seriously as any pregnant woman does naturally? What if felt that our work was crucial to the expression of wisdom the cultural DNA makes possible?