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Riding the rift

There is an ever-pregnant crack that runs down the Atlantic Ocean called the “rift.” The word focuses attention on the separation of the continents in exactly the way the fear mongers try to focus us on what drives us apart. Look closer at an actual rift and you’ll see nothing but molten possibilities welling up. New earth forces through the thin part of the crust millimeter by inch by yard by mile as new rock grows between the Americas and Europe and Africa. A rift connects by rearranging power and place.

*Most of the way to and from Cape Town we ride the rift.*

We flew one way down the rift from Washington to Cape Town as a human politician looked invincible, forcing proud law firms and universities to the knee. Two weeks later we flew back the other way just as four million citizens from around the world rose up like new lava. One man dividing with emergencies and fears. But as lava does, people rose up in the thin places with new land to stand on. where he pushed us apart.

All human fields of thought is connected by the upwelling of change: academic disciplines, political theory and movements, racial identities, nations, peoples, skills and techniques that seem stable enough to imagine even a few decades of time called “career.” It is easy to gin up fear of the new lava, people and relationships. But fear has so little to work with, really.

We were in South Africa where the Leading Causes of Life learned to walk over the past three decades. We met at Goedgedacht Farm and retreat center whose name means “well thought.” This is difficult land getting harder; Mediterranean climate until twenty years ago; now moving rapidly toward dry and hot, semi-desert. The Karoo is just over a few ridges and coming closer.

*Honeybees and olive trees adapt to the challenging and changing environment.*

The farm has deep Christian roots, but now it has an interfaith chapel and a vision increasingly tuned to life logic. It is a laboratory of mercy, justice and, well, life. And it is a real farm growing olives for market just like Koinania Farms grows pecans. In COVID-19 they had no money for pesticides and fertilizer. Peter, their Afrikaner farmer, had to look with new eyes at the dirt, bugs, trees, bees and all that rots. He liked what he saw and learned how to live in the rift between old ways and new regenerative ways. He is now the happiest farmer of olive trees I’ve ever met.

*Pieter describes falling in love with the regenerative dirt.*

Leading Causes of Life grows well here, too. LCL-I is about more than Faith and Health, or as we learned in Lesotho, FaithHealth. Peters says that when you see something that troubles you, look closer; pay attention and do not look away. Good advice for growing olive trees near the Karoo or democracy in times of rift. Whenever we gather it feels like Iceland; molten, connectional, expectant, unfazed by the structural uncertainties.

Some time ago The Carter Center built an Interfaith Health Program built on the upwelling of Faith and Health. We didn’t have to pull them laboriously toward each other one footnote at a time. They were already linked by new energy the way Iceland works, riding lightly on the lively connectional rift. That can be hard to navigate as the field look broken with fractures and gaps. I don’t know Icelandic, but in the Appalachians a gap is the way through the otherwise impenetrable barrier. A gap is a geological fracture that allows one to walk through; not unlike walking on lava once it cools. The gap is the place to head to what comes next in your life. Gaps connect.

This is practical way to navigate in a time of radical rifting. Personally, I’m happy with as big a gap as possible between me and Proud Boys. But even there, it is hard to miss all sorts of new molten organizations, networks, and such emerging. My favorite new upwelling is the organization “Indivisible” which helped liberate the global energy on April 5^th movement. Hold.Health, We in the World and Rethink Health the also rise up out of space in between.

The five gaps helped us to look more closely at the rifts so we can head toward those people, ideas, places, values and perspective we could build with.

The Gap between people we know and those we do not yet know, or could know if we wanted to.
The Gap between knowledge we already have and the new knowledge that might extend or complete what that knowledge might make possible.
The gap between places we think of as separate from places that we now see are actually quite intimately connected.
The gap between values we have and new implications and possibilities to fulfill those values.
The gap between what we think we need now and what our childrens’ childrens’ children’ childrens’ childrens’ children will need. That’s a seven generational span, counting us and our parents, long enough to expect radical difference, but short enough to imagine caring.

Each of the five gaps is a fluid emergent connection on which we can live like Icelanders or sub-Karoo farmers. Each gap is a way through something that feels like a dangerous barrier. Each gap is a kind of opportunistic connection that might shape our curiosity and active search. We can ask and follow the answer through each kind of gap.

On the harsh South African land our thoughts turned toward the cause of life we call generativity, intergenerativity or simply blessing. This focuses on how we find our life by the flow of life among the flow of people. This speaks to finding our way when we know we are poised appropriately on the rift between what has been and that which is still potential.

*Sunset in Hout Bay is sun rise in Brazil on the other side of the rift. (photo by Jim Cochrane)*

We can navigate the unknowable time between stabilities by looking for the new relationships, new relevancies of existing values, new knowledge, long term needs of those who will live on the other side of the rift.

Humble power

Here in the People’s City, the one where our government tries to function as best it can. We went to the the National Museum of the American Indian which tells the long history that is a useful lense through which to view the radicalism of white greed in the place called the United States. Here we see the long trajectory of shameless bullDOGEing any idea, perspective or fact that stands in the way of taking. Here we see the highly inconvenient truth of a people who decided democratically to “remove” another civilized people who were in the way. White people are charmingly surprised. Even liberal like me are embarrassed. People of color, not.

Eisenhower monument in front of the Department of Education. He second inaurgural: “We look. upon this shaken earth, and we declare our firm and fixed purpose the building of peace with justice in a world where moral law prevails.”

Do facts matter in this raw play of power, taking, suppressing, denying? Do facts matter? Does theory matter; ones that allow us to see and act on patterns of fact? Does thought matter; the capacity to move close enough to see and far enough for perspective? That’s what academic institutions are for and why a radical minority must distract and instill fear into them.

For such a time as this to be with the Association of Schools and Programs of Public Health (ASPPH) talking about the Leading Causes of Life with the one who basically invented Obamacare, Dr. Howard Koh and Soma Saha of We In the World (WIN)

We had shared in the writing of the Handbook of Religion and Health, edited by Jim Cochrane, TC and me, who also wrote a recent article in the American Journal of Public Health. That’s a lot of typing in the midst of a catastrophic meltdown of democracy. Shouldn’t we be in the streets?

Power rests on facts, which is why any usurper of authority must suppress the facts, the story, the rhyme and reason they find unpleasant. They usually think that power rests on money so they round up some billions and billionaires and expect their way. But watch how the usurper spend that money to gain power. They spend first on suppression of reality to comply with the way they wish it was.

Facts are so inconveniently sticky. Just when one thin they are safely squashed them, they pop up again. Congress actually forbade disclosure for a half century the treaties with the Native Tribes. Now there is a museum on the National Mall about them.

Smithsonian museum pictures of Native children forced to pray to the christian nationalist god in the government boarding schools.

Fact: there really is too much carbon in the atmosphere to sustain human civilization. There really is way too much sexual diversity, which is why we have so many shades beyond pale pink in the human array. There really is more to life than buying stuff on Amazon—spiritual, family, neighborhood—so can’t be bought or sold. Life is too complex for rich people in a hurry to be richer.

Sorry.

How do we live in such a time? Focus on discerning the truth and then living in its light. TC, me and Jim Cochrane wrote in the American Journal of Public Health about crating deeper partnerships between faith-driven and public health networks. We hoped to move beyond simple project-oriented collaborations of convenience (parking the medical van in the church lot) to a deeper sense of shared mission for the people God so loves—the messy public. Deep partnership is slow. It grows from intellectual humility about facts, not unlike that underneath the museums on our national Mall.

Our book grew mostly in the brilliance and energy of Africa. “Carrying out this work on the ground in Lesotho confronted researchers with a problem: Similar to other Nguni languages, there is only one Sesotho word, bophelo, to cover both health and religion. It refers to a total ecology of the household, encompassing the person, family, clan, nation, those who have gone before (ancestors), the land on which one lives, its animals, and its crops, all honored in the hearth of the household. Hurt or harm one element, and you harm the whole.

“This respectful, curious engagement in Lesotho is important, not just for the uncovering of the word and concept of bophelo,…but because that process modeled three key factors in successfully navigating the relationship of faith and health. First, the learning came from an intentional approach in which we assumed we (the experts) might not know something important. Secondly, we moved in humility born of respect for the people, partly because two of our research team had grown up in the region. Thirdly, we took their language seriously and did not try to translate for the people into our language, which could not express the most important insight: English encourages the separation; the Sesotho language makes it impossible. These three principles are relevant even—maybe especially—when the cultural divide is less obvious, as when a public health practitioner looks the same, but is not the same, as the local public.”*

We are told change happens when power “moves fast and breaks things.” Not a fact. Instead, we get broken things, people, ideas and emptiness. Actual power moves slow and builds things…..on facts, properly understood in a theoretical framework that accords to reality. Took a while to make it through that sentence, didn’t it? Doesn’t quite fit on a bumper sticker?

Sorry.

Facts matter. Theory matters, or you won’t know what to do with the facts. And vision—seeing clearly– matters, or the people will die.

Dr. Stacy Smallwood of Wake Forest School of Divnity speaks about religion and health at the Association of Schools and Programs of Public Health. @WakeDiv

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.

—–

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

Don’t Protect Me

Celeste Wray a spirit warrior who belonged to St. John’s United Methodist church in Memphis, Tennessee which has seen its share of evil and evil overcome. She fought every good fight with grace.

Mr. Trump used the National Prayer Breakfast to announce he was going to lend the power of his office to protect Christians. This venue has always been religion-for-show with the theological standards in the subbasement. But anytime he goes anywhere near the Bible, it ends up upside down all over again.

This is a good time to clarify the relationship between his policies and Jesus. For the most part there is none. I’m an ordained Baptist minister and I’d be hard pressed to find a proof text for or against tariffs. Lots of texts about mercy and care for the poor and immigrants (of which Jesus was one). Lots about God warning the rich and those that suck up to them. Lots more texts about obeying the law and telling the truth.

Jesus never voted or ran for office. When tempted he turned away from political power. He was killed by his government at the insistence of a subservient spiritual cabal. Actual Christians find spiritual cabals repellent.

Religion has little to do with Project 2025, except as cover. It’s about the money and power. Most gods don’t care about money and they don’t mind royalty. But one particular God does, the One we see in the peculiar life of Jesus. That One flipped over the temple tables speaking of mercy and justice. That One mocked the self-congratulatory cabal that took money from the poor, weak and vulnerable. You can do that in the name of Tesla, but not YHWH.

This brings us to Christian Nationalism, the explicit theology behind the Trump claim to royal privilege. Not that Mr. Trump thinks he needs help from theo—he thinks he is theo.

There are similar theological betrayals in Turkey, Russia, India, Hungary. But the American one is by Christians, of whom I am one, a Baptist whose heirs bled to put the separation clause in the Constitution now being shredded.

I believe these people are wrong about more than theology. That’s not my argument right now.

They are certainly wrong about who is theo and who is not.

Jesus must not be tethered to any nationalism, especially one so calloused toward the poor and the vulnerable. Use some other god, if you must have a god for your movement; I think the Aztecs had one closer to their policies.

It’s up to the Christians to sort that out. There is a different betrayal peculiar to people of faith who are also citizens of the United States of America. Because we were founded by numerous strands of faith, we have hard-won practical intelligence about how faith works well in democracy. We know that we are at our very best when none of us has the power of the state to enforce our own views. We know that it is better—spiritually—for the state and the structures of faith to partner in the love of the people, for instance by helping everyone get vaccinated, but not share in the exercise of power. You protect Christians by protecting everyone in the rule of law under the Constitution. That’ll do it.

No country is exactly the same, but we can learn from others such South Africa’s long walk from Apartheid. They gave us Mandela, Tutu and ….Musk. South African Christians challenged the theological and moral foundations of the Apartheid Government who had wrapped all their worst policies with the trappings of Christian Nationalism. The South African Council of Churches in 1968 called Apartheid “heresy” which was bold but not quite accurate. ‘Heresy’ is a ‘wrong belief,’ which is bad but not fatal. Christian nationalism was fatal; a betrayal of the Gospel. They came back and wrote the extraordinary Kairos Document which named it apostacy—betrayal. Apartheid cracked at the base.

The Christian Nationalist movement in the USA is the same betrayal.

It is one thing to punk the Democrats; quite another to punk YHWH.

It will not stand.

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Consider joining Christians Against Christian Nationalism.

Praying for trouble

I’m really missing John Lewis today. Fearless, tenacious and non-violent, he’d know what to do and how to do it, . He went to jail dozens of times–usually getting beaten in the process—so that people could vote. And clear-eyed, he would not be surprised that 49.2% would fall for an ugly offer to reduce the price of eggs a bit and beaat up on somebody weaker. But he would also know that many of them are truly traumatized and don’t know who to trust. But he would not whine like my Democrats are. But he would not pout. He knew it was a long, long walk. Since it is King Day, I’m quite sure he’d be in a church praying for good trouble.

Good Trouble

God of anger, fire, trouble and cry,

Kindle us, your willing embers of the world that needs a cleansing fire. We are yours to risk, eager for fresh air beyond the safe spaces. We love your street, and concrete grit. We love the stride and the heft of things worth doing, unafraid of conflict.

Let us not hold your energy lightly, unexamined and unwashed of pride. Let us not waste your hope by tethering it to our short-ranging vision. Let us not waste voice and language by limiting it to our cleverness.

Tune our ears to those hardest to hear, the ones we find annoying and inconvenient. Especially help us hear the ones that embarrass our proper friends, just as You bothered them with tax collectors, working women and the rich. You were rejected by family, nearly thrown off a cliff by neighbors. Complicate our sense of connection and draw us into the tangled humanity You have made so wonderfully and inconveniently complex.

And then, after we sense the breadth of your impossibly wide family, let us speak with simplicity of mercy and justice in kindhearted firmness.

Protect us last. Put our bodies in the way of those who would harm the poor and despised; let the bruises intended for the weak fall on us; let the venom aimed at the despised be ours. Spend us as You have spent yourself.

We know in resistance we find release; in giving, all gain. For life finds a way where we let it flow through us into lives parched for mercy, aching for justice, despairing of peace. May our young be brave. Our families raising up new prophets as our old ones take the risks reserved for those who have lived enough to give it all away.

Make our lives a protest against the lie that You have not created enough food, space and freedom to go around for all your children. We deny with generous lives the lie that You failed to design a world that might work for us all. May our kind lives protest the lie that we must narrow our hope to only those who pray like us, look like us and talk like us. May our lack of anxiety protest the bitter penury that shrinks your mercy into a fist.

Surely it is your voice that speaks of a time when your promises will be realized, the weapons laid down, the rich with the poor eating together, lamb and honeybee, Baptist and Buddhist, Anglican and Atheist quiet in wonder at how great Thou art, how blessed we are.

May it be.

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The prayer is from God and the People: Prayers for a Newer New Awakening, published by Stakeholder Press. Available on Amazon here.

Pitchfork 1

A pitchfork is perfect for moving hay, compost, and the messy ensemble of cow poo that accumulates in barns. And the five sharp tines get attention by someone angry when the banker and landlord are insufferably arrogant. The wealthy are usually surprised. I know I was surprised last month as my party and candidates were so rudely put aside in favor of….well, you know.

*“Reasons You Need a Pitchfork” from the Minnesota Horticultural Society (not the book Frankenstein)*

Once anger flames, rationality has nothing to do with what happens next. Righteous anger can open the way for cynics with very ugly intentions to do things nobody voted for. Who voted for polio, measles, coat-hanger abortions and run-amok preachers? This is why Project 2025 was buried during the election and whipped out immediately after. This is why North Carolina losers used anger’s shadow to change the job descriptions of those that won. Ugly. And predictable.

Even when it is obvious that anger is being used by opportunistic frauds; it does not mean the anger will subside. Or that it will suddently become smart and be redirected toward the billionaire blowhards that actually do deserve a pitchfork.

What to do? Don’t argue with angry people, especially by telling them they are foolish to trust such obvious frauds. They don’t want instruction, especially from people like me they see as part of the “elite” that reminds them of their stolen dignity every time they go to the grocery store, bank, school or hospital.

Let’s talk about the hospital part of the conflagration. That’s the one I know best, having been inside the beast for nearly twenty years until recently. Why would anyone be angry at a hospital since everyone is going to need one? Normal people (the angry ones) understand that the shiny medical castles are only partly there for them. Hospitals are one visible knot in a complicated web of privileged guilds and professions including, executives, bankers, doctors, nurses, suppliers, technology companies, insurance companies, pharma, ambulance drivers, all seamlessly integrated into the government and universities. All that feels quite personal one is vulnerable and in pain with no possibility of negotiating anything.

All parts of the system—cruelly called “health”—seem to be more and more obviously about money—theirs—and less and less about those who need their “care” (the services people cannot not buy). This system costs roughly a trillion dollars a year and yet wants more. It drives every in the economy cost higher while whining all the time that it isn’t enough. Ironically, many of these hospitals (including my own) are not supposed to be “for profit,” so they do not pay taxes. All of this is painful at the family level only beginning with insurance and the huge indecipherable bills that result when you actually need the services. It makes the economy sick as every business thinks constantly about how to offload these costs onto vulnerable gig-workers or by shifting everything possible across the border or replacing humans with robots.

This interwoven system is the leading cause of bankruptcy in most states (for medical debt under $5,000). So who needs democracy when I can’t take my kid to the doctor without risking eviction or having my car towed away?

Pitchfork.

It is ironic that this web of privilege thinks it (we) are protected by our non-profit status and science. Who could quarrel with charitable scientists? Well, we don’t look charitable and we don’t look scientific. Offensive executive and physician pay levels pulls one fig leaf away. The other fig leaf—science—disappears as it is always used to justify another shinier and more expensive building. What about the low-cost and low-tech science of prevention that makes at least some of those buildings unnecessary? Silence. What about the science supporting investment in education, faith and good stable jobs? Maybe later. What about the science linking democracy and neighborhood stability to health? Sounds woke. Everybody in healthcare knows that science, but we build bigger buildings instead of following it. So the angry people give us a Secretary of Health who doesn’t believe in science either.

The whirlwind is partly our fault. Those of us who do believe in that science and do believe in the non-profit mission should have been far more aggressive in pushing the medical industrial complex to act appropriately. Instead, we prodded gently and waited for a better time.

It’s not too late. Dr. King said it is always the right time to do right. It is crucial that we not be pulled into defending the indefensible. Not everything is worth defending from president Musk who will be losing support pretty quickly on his own. And as you pull apart the data we should notice that some of those most angry are people friends. This might be a good time to lend some intelligence by helping aim the energy where it can do some good, instead of bad.

For instance. I offer two minor tweaks to non-profit health policy everyone should agree with:

First, hospitals’ non-profit tax status now rests on superficial “community benefit” rules. It should never have been allowed to be superficial. Those rules have little to do with the science of prevention and social determinants because implementation plans have no accountability to local public health (except in Ohio which is a story for another blog).

Give the local public health department authority to approve the hospital’s community benefit implementation plan so that it aligns with actual public health science and local government. This has been discussed quietly at the National Academies of Science for years. But religious hospital lobbyists fought it (!?!?!?!) It would have been better to make the hospitals uncomfortable, Than having the voters angry. Do it now.

Second, hospitals are huge financial enterprises which often make as much money from their investments as from selling expensive medical procedures. It is likely they have about a trillion in their basement, which nobody ever thought possible. But there it is; they are banks that also offer medical services. Legally, their investments are invisible to their non-profit status; they aren’t required to report how much investments they have. They are usually required by their bankers to have between 100-300 “days of cash on hand”. Take your local hospital’s annual revenue and do the arithmetic. Unlike hospitals, your local banks are required by the Federal Reserve to invest some of their corpus in places impacted by their historical racism. Why not hospitals, which have done the same in the past (usually to the identical neighborhoods)?

Add transparency to the legal “community benefit” form. And give the Federal Reserve responsibility to oversee non-profit investments instead of the IRS.

Dumb is going to happen. But the chaos breaks open some room to do some good things, too. This is a great time to speak very specifically about how our public goods can be available to everyone no matter how they voted, prayed, worked, worried or shouted. If we use the pitchfork to shovel out the barn, nobody needs it as a weapon.

“American Quarantine” an American Gothic parody created by me with Photoshop. In this together, separately…
byu/rvtherford ingraphic_design

Shovel, Steel and Spirit

The Kelpies (and TC) at Grangermouth on the Forth and Clyde Canal

Are we doing anything today that will be useful and beautiful three hundred years from now? The question was irresistible at 4MPH on the Leeds and Liverpool canal. This 2,700 mile network of amazements were crafted by shovel, designed by impossibly bold engineers to move coal, limestone and Wedgewood china to the factories and markets before railroads and later roads and later computers. They were built shovel by shovel, snaking up, down and across high hills using the locks imagined by Leonardo DaVinci (who could not have imagined 2,000 miles of interlocking canals). Tunnels hewed by pick centuries ago still work. Aqueducts built by nameless artisans still gracefully carry canals high over rivers.

*dry-stone walls snake up from the canal, over and around the hills.*

Up from the canal I am caught and taught by the many more thousands of miles of dry-stone fences that measure every hill (and dale, of course—it’s Yorkshire) into pastures. Hands chose and placed each stone so carefully that they are useful today without cement, plastic or wire.

The canals, like everything in Scotland and England, thrive today in a constantly negotiated creative tension between every level of government and a dense mesh of volunteer societies, organizations, trusts and determinedly eccentric people.

Americans take credit for the volunteerism that powers our grass roots democracy, but it’s actually the Scots and Brits who invented it (along with canals, steam engines and computers). Their civic life is vital, muscular and kind where the American version has grown coarse, proud and polarized. Democratic systems live on the complex social life in which people work together to do many collective things, not just those explicitly political. This is especially true today as the mechanics of modern interconnected systems are so easily tamed and gamed, abstracted from lived life; froth blown by artificial non-intelligence.

The canals did not survive the centuries on their own. Everything made by and among humans has to be tended, repaired and protected by and among us. The best of any one generation only lasts when the next considers it worth tending and passing on. The canals were eclipsed by rail and eventually the climate-melting petroleum vehicles we consider normal. One by one the canals were abandoned, their locks and mechanisms rusted and blocked by careless new highway bridges. Surprisingly, after the decimations of world war two a most preposterous British style citizen movement brought the canals back to life. Technically the right to navigate was as British as voting, but somebody had to make it possible again. As always it began with two eccentric couples who created the Inland Waterways Association in a converted bedroom. Using all the movement arts—including no small civil disobedience—it made the canals visible to governments and eventually thousands of people who volunteered. They waded into and cleaned industrial canals. And they voted. Today the canals are managed by a “trust” which blends philanthropy, government funding and countless volunteer hours.

*Imagined by Leonardo DaVinci, the lock is changeless today.*

Why bother? In our nano-age, a 4mph thrill ride is not obviously useful. But there is brilliance in the odd. The canals are an ecological life web linking hundreds of protected wetlands and sensitive natural areas. Hundreds of small towns without their founding factories have lively new industries focused on the 35,000 canal boats that putter back and forth and the many more hikers, bikers and gongoozlers of the combined natural spectacle that is now fiercely beloved. The gongoozlers (canal talk for idle spectators) tend to vote. Like the stacked stone walls, a billion things have to be done well for something to exist at all; and if done really well, earn enough love to be protected by another generation.

I don’t know anything in the United States built by my generation likely to here in three hundred years. We might borrow from Jimmy Carter a tiny bit of credit for the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve—as it has taken constant battles to protect it (not all won and done, yet).

I once would have said that American democracy had been built for another ten generations, But under my generation’s watch it has wobbled and withered to where I’m not entirely sure it will make it another 56 days. That depends on millions of gongoozlers suspending their idle onlooking long enough to vote.

And then after democracy has once more been voted back to life and away from the abyss; what then? In Scotland, Yorkshire or North Carolina there are rivers and forests to tend, neighbors to visit, plenty of beating back the dead hand of greed while extending the gentle one attached to our own arms. And finding the Spirit that moves every human toward each other and the inexpressible wonders we call “natural.”

A final note about the comprehensive genius of the Scots. Their Forth and Clyde Canal started in 1668, the last shovel in 1690. It was the super highway on which the Scottish revolutions rode, industrial, intellectual and religious. And then, as in England, the canal eventually became superfluous and left behind until retrieved by civic movement in the 1990s. This was marked for the ages by two astonishing feats blending engineering and practical art: the Falkirk Wheel, which this engineer’s son breathless at how it used Archimedes principle of displacement, insane steel work and graceful art to link two canals separated by an 80 feet drop. (A later blog….).

Even more astonishing is the Kelpies–largest equine sculpture in the world honoring the massive horses that pulled the barges which sits just a few miles down the canal where it meets the river (the Forth; the Clyde being at the other end in Glasgow). Although the bankers and barons claimed credit, the canal was built on the thousands of nameless men with shovels and these massive beasts. Those barons have their little statues, now with signs explaining their ugly complicity in the tobacco and slave trade. None of those bald men had anything like the Kelpies.

The Scots saw in the canal horses the mythic Kelpie horse spirits of the sea that protect those who travel by water. When TC and I were there in the (rare) Scottish sun the stainless-steel Kelpies were alive and vital, heads a hundred feet above us little humans. The artist left us to the imagine the rest of the horses that would reach another two hundred feet below where the muscle would have flexed. I love the part we can’t see as much as the stainless steel dazzling above.

My engineering father taught me to appreciate the underneath part of a bridge, so I think about what makes canals and, yes, civic life durable, beautiful and life-giving. Art helps us see, engineering to see how, shovel and steel to make it real, Spirit to give our own lives in common purpose for another generation.

*TC and Lisa like twin headlights on the canal.*

Good start

Five hundred and six pages. Thirty-three authors. A big book. So, a warning, this is sort of a big blog.

It’s about the Handbook on Religion and Health: Pathways toward a Turbulent Future (Edward Elgar, UK), which focuses on the complex way that faith at social scale, for better or worse, shapes health and well-being … so that we can make the choices that lead toward life for the people and places that are ours to love. That itself is a big sentence which hints at the need of a big book. The Handbook dares to mark a pivot toward a whole new phase in the intellectual understanding of faith and health. All of its authors, many well known in their fields, were asked to step away from what they already knew and look forward. They did that.

There have really only been three eras before now defining that relationship. The first lasted three billion years when the dimensions of what humans eventually called faith, which eventually evolved into religion and even more eventually science, were simply and utterly part of the whole.

That first era was capped by a flurry of thinking once we humans accumulated enough frontal matter that we could name ourselves boldly homo sapiens sapiens (the human that knows it knows). For all this time religion, including faeries, YHWH, Jesus and all the saints and scientists were in one intellectual stewpot for better—and often for worse in the hands of the powerful.

The first phase lasted roughly up till the “Enlightenment” in the 1700s, during which pretty much everything thought to that point was unthought. It became obvious to every rational intellectual that we didn’t really need religion at all to map what was known and knowable. Religion was intellectual detritus that obstructed clear thinking or, at best, needed to be shown to be reasonable.

The Enlightenment glow went out in the middle of the last century, seared by murderous gas ovens, nuclear blasts and, now, 129-degree summers. We’ve been in an intellectual wilderness of post-modern, post-industrial, post-constitution, post-language, post, post, post, post everything. The boundaries have evaporated including, to the dismay of the left-over Enlightenment thinkers, the rise of religion entirely untethered to any social or political norms, logic or facts.

A friend sent me this picture from National Geographic that so vividly indicates there is way more going on then we ever thought.

The echo-chamber world of academic health research with its pristine peer-reviewing world of double-blind control trials ignored all the dismal wilderness outside (making it triple-blind). But late in the day, this era acknowledged minor claims that religion was a variable in human health. Each of these footnotes squeezed through a tortuous process that fundamentally considered any signs of religiosity to be a false signal, better explained by a bio-chemistry or abnormal psychiatric phenomena. In fact, the American Psychiatric Association had disease codes for religion until the 1970s.

It is important to remember that the simplifying secularists had a point; much of what is attributed to religion—by both believers and those who scoff—is a false signal, often harnessed for tribal, parochial interests that can be stupid and dangerous, especially at political scale. And it’s important to not trash the traditional research models that were superb at knowing what they considered knowable partly by rigorously excluding things not.

Still, the end of this era was marked by the article in Journal of the American Medical Association two years ago (Balboni, VanderWelle, Doan-Soares, et al., 2022). The Harvard team laboriously sorted through thousands of articles that claimed findings of spirituality in health for the few meeting the very highest standards of peer-reviewed studies. Only a thin gruel could pass through the thin intellectual mesh, but even those findings came as a shock to the field. It is also important to note that one of the problems in associating spirituality as a variable is that nobody agrees on what it is, which suggests that maybe it doesn’t exist at all.

That study would not have happened without the four pillars that begin with the earlier Handbook by Larson and Koenig, followed by the basic texts of Oman and Idler. This is why the JAMA article marks the end of the era, making possible a new beginning.

This brings us to the 506-page start of the fourth era, the Handbook on [Formerly Known as] Religion and [Formerly Known as] Health: Pathways for a Turbulent Future. I add ‘formerly known as’ deliberately. The new era lives in the science of complexity, and multi-variant phenomenological study of complex phenomena that begins with the assumption that humans are in our every facet biological, psychological, social and spirted. Most of the traditional gatekeepers do not think that way and remain especially uncomfortable with taking the phenomena “formerly known as religion” seriously. Dr. Paul Laurienti addresses this in his chapter in the Handbook, noting that those fields are busy “harmonizing” research methodology based on the old accepted processes that methodologically exclude any surprises. “Who needs a new era?” they would ask.

The Handbook is disruptive in another whole way because it grows from the Leading Causes of Life. Even the spiritual part of the last era was driven a great deal by the spirituality interested in death, dying and the closely linked clinical chaplaincy. The era has more to work with. The Handbook (Ch. 28, pp. 456-57) argues that

“Looking at humanity as a living system invites us toward an integrative generative practice that does not collapse in the simplicities of upstream-downstream instrumental intervention. To be deeply accountable for the whole of the social watershed invites the immediacy of picking up one’s own trash before it can contaminate the lives of those to whom it would otherwise flow. And it invites humility before all that we have received for good or ill. This posture of always being both recipients of blessings we did not create and stewards of the blessings that will flow through us is what the Leading Causes of Life call intergenerativity, or simply blessing. When we are conscious of being in this right relationship–recipient and steward—we feel something like awe, gratitude and being in the right place.”

This is not good news to all the traditional researchers who have based their careers and methodology on the previous models. Even those intellectuals talking about complexity do not quite honor the complex generativity of the psycho-social-spirited phenomena. We are not an interplay of calories or protein but consciousness of the whole becoming more vital and prosilient. This is part of how “what was known as religion” functions in synergy with the thing “formerly known as health”—the vital phenomena, not just biochemical or material, but consciously alive on all levels.

While the traditional researchers will perhaps not be happy to find that their academic cheese has moved, this Handbook is a three-pound thrill for the next generations of hard thinkers. And it is happy not to conclude anything:

“Perhaps we have only begun. Neither religion or the health sciences quite thinks this way about its work or way. This is not how we collect or analyse data and thus not the way we regard the possibilities of what we might learn from research (maybe we say, formerly known as research). But even asking whether we could learn more and thus be more accountable for possibilities and cannier about risks shifts us just a bit. As is evident in other chapters in this handbook, new methodologies, new norms of transdisciplinary dialogue and analysis will emerge, just as new shared language does in El Paso, Texas, and other borderlands—objective and subjective—around the world.” (Ch. 28, p. 457)

This may not be the last 506 pages needed. But it’s a good start ….

// The Handbook on Religion and Health: Pathways for a Turbulent Future is available in hardback immediately (priced for academic libraries!), with an eBook coming in a week or two (~$48) and, we hope (not yet confirmed), a paperback to follow later. Most of my friends will wait for the paperback or eBook! I’ll let you know when they are available.

Bee sex in Texas

Humans get so many things wrong about honeybees. I’m sure they are a bit confused about us, too. But they must be especially mystified by the way we call the one who sows all the eggs in the hive a queen, which implies the off-putting and inefficient pomp of human royalty. Mother is closer, given her role in laying many thousands of eggs; but also wrong given her lack of maternal qualities. She lays eggs but has no role in raising them. And the first thing she does when she emerges with her impressive stinger is to kill her competitors. Not like my mother.

The one we call queen is more like a sower of seeds. She is not even a gardener that carefully plants a seedling, making sure the roots are nestled just right in the soil. Let’s call her Sower.

Honeybees have successfully flourished for 30 million years precisely because they have no royal qualities at all. We have no idea how 60,000 bees in the hive think collectively, but we know it’s not the queen. Every single worker bee—all girls—have the identical genetics of the Sower. The hive every egg “royal jelly” for three days before switching to the more mundane “bee bread.” But the hive feeds the Sower special food her whole life turning on the genes that make her much bigger and living 10 times as long and, of course, able to lay a thousand eggs a day. But she isn’t any smarter than the other bees. Her most consequential decision is which egg to lay in which cell and doesn’t really decide even that. She sticks her tentacles into the cell to see which one the architect bees intended (the 10% drone cells are slightly bigger).

Why is this important for humans? We have long fallen for the idea of the Elevated Decider who receives ridiculously disproportionate privileges in exchange for making big decisions. The honeybees make those decisions collectively without the process skewed by privilege. Flat democracy so perfect humans can’t even recognize it.

Now and then humans approach smart by accident, such as recently seen in Texas of all places.

Honeybees typically produce way more honey than they can possibly consume, leaving plenty for us. They can also produce more hives, which is why they are so adaptive, able to explode into almost any niche given the chance. The Texas department of agriculture triggered an explosion of bee hives by granting agricultural tax abatements to any “farm” over 5 acres with 5 or more hives. Texans are not known for environmentalism, but they known a lucrative write-off when they see it.

Honeybees are insects, as TC reminds me, with little emotional bandwidth. They don’t care about dubious Texan morality. Suddenly, there were bees everywhere! And the people dumping poisons suddenly were surrounded by tax-incented Texans. (Here’s the story.)

We are so used to complaining about environmental decline that we overlook the natural superpowers like the honeybees’. They can make a new Sower and thus entire new hive when they need or want to do so. Normally, this is when the old Sower starts to show signs of wearing out and getting erratic. The hive puts some promising eggs in larger cells and feeds those eggs nothing but special food. In about 16 days a Sower will emerge. (She isn’t nice: as I mentioned, her first act is to kill the other potential queens.) She’ll fly off to mate with six or ten drones and returns to lay eggs in the dark for a couple years.

Often in the Springtime the the hive will find itself thinking of reproduces itself. Honeybee sex involves the whole hive. The existing Sower is chased around the hive to lose weight so she can fly one last time. About half the bees in the hive pour into the air in a swirling ecstatic cloud bringing the old Sower with them. They pause in a tree branch to give the scouts a chance to find a new permanent location in the neighborhood. While they are pausing an opportunistic human can persuade them into a box they may find it acceptable.

Kelly Carpenter’s bait hive for Methodist bees. So far it has captured four swarms that have come from his church rafters.

Kelly Carpenter and I have captured three Methodist hives this way in the past couple weeks. Combined with some Texas-style splits, 5 hives are now 16. The process is risky and wild. They bet everything on expansive possibility which has worked for thousands of millennia.

Last year about half of all hives in the United States did not make it through the gauntlet of toxins, sprays, overcrowding and stupid human behavior that magnify the threats of mites and such. But it is important to note that most of the hives that failed were the ones kept by humans.

Many natural species are also capable of exuberant expansion once humans quit pumping poison into their neighborhood. Nature out-generates death every chance it finds. Humans can help the most by removing the financial incentives to poison. Just imagine if we gave tax rebates for planting butterfly and pollinator flowers. Do we really need Texans to show us?

Why five acres? Our townhouse community has one acre of sanitized fescue vacuumed in the fall. The city council could change the game for bees and bugs and songbirds with a 5% property tax rebate. Of course, we could just do it. We not legally bound to spray neurotoxins on ourselves.

Too small to matter? One of my favorite organizations is Homegrown National Parks. “Homegrown National Park® addresses the urgent biodiversity crisis with a simple, science-based solution to a global challenge. We are a grassroots call-to-action to regenerate biodiversity by planting and preserving native plants that support critical ecosystem services and removing invasive plants that do not. We are catalyzing action that will have meaningful, tangible, measurable, and immediate results. We can do this NOW, without waiting for legislation.”

We are not inherently smart as honeybees. We have to think hard and do things on purpose. Somebody had to notice that there is more private land currently planted in lawns than in all the national parks put together. And think about what that means.

We can just stop behind stupid. Start choosing abundance.

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

Labyrinth

Lit by the light of the Milky Way, the four of us held hands to find our way through and around the labyrinth. The Ramadan moon has not yet risen, and the African air was dry enough for the light to mark the sandstones against the dark gravel. We moved in toward the center, then to the left, followed the long loop and around before heading back in and around again. The pilgrims included myself, Marcellino, a South African community activist and researcher, and TC, my Bride of many years, as well as Bastienne. She is a Greek scholar who said that we should have been dancing as the Greeks did. We did well enough. Once at the center, we paused to look up with wonder at the thousands of stars, knowing there are billions beyond our sight and depth far beyond our capacity to imagine, much less grasp. We moved back out, turning, turning, seeking, seeking. Finding our way.

Most find the labyrinth a place of personal spiritual way-finding. Who and where am I in life? Holding hands, if not quite dancing, this was not personal; it was a hint of a greater whole moving in a social labyrinth. For today it is the whole that is seems needing to find a way. More likely to see that way by starlight instead of the stultifying glow of our screens and their chattering distraction.

I have been coming to Africa for nearly forty years, always amazed by the gritty tenacious people who simply won’t give up despite ever new complexities layered on historical traumas. I’ve sat with Thomas Sankara, the iconic young leader of Burkina Faso still seen as a wayfinder by youth today because of his fierce integrity. He renamed his country “land of upright people” and then made it real. Through the blowing red dust, he told of their victorious “commando vaccination” in which they mobilized the whole society to vaccinate every child in the country (and the thousands that were brought across the border by their mothers). Killed cynically, probably by the French, his life still resonates decades later with youth desperate for heroes who might show a way in and out, back and round, maybe even forward.

This particular labyrinth was on the grounds of Goedgedacht, a bold experiment in rural development an hour and a half north of Cape Town. The name means “good thinking,” and it is a good place to see clearly how much good thinking we will all need to find our way. Here we see radically different lives in a spectrum of whites, blacks and browns speaking far more than the eleven official languages. The local poor were already poor enough without the arrival of immigrant workers from all over Africa now competing for the scarce and difficult jobs. And the local rich were rich enough without finding new ways too exaggerate their privileges. Goedgedacht grows olives from the tough dry soil to finance the rural development efforts in the villages. But it can’t qualify for the valuable “organic” label because of the pesticides that drift from the farm next door, which is literally covered in plastic to shelter their luxury crops from the blazing sun. Their neighbor’s private dam shining like a jewel out of place in that bright sun is filled from a pipe drawing water from a river 15 kilometers away. All this bizarreness is possible because of the specialty grapes and clementines grown to be shipped abroad. Nothing local about it. Maybe I’ve had one of those clementines in the US.

Only a four-dimensional labyrinth could map the difficulties of navigating such complexity. But that is what the South Africans are doing by light of the Southern Cross. Shock after shock (AIDS after Apartheid, ‘state capture’ after freedom, then COVID, then ….). Layers of ironic betrayals that would shatter the heart of any lesser people left Mandela, Tutu and millions that hoped with them in tears. But the people do not quit. They do not stop putting one foot in front of the next finding the way by not stopping.

We were at Goedgedacht to convene some of the Fellows of the Leading Causes of Life Initiative. I once thought those words were too happy and American to even speak here in such a mystifyingly difficult place. The Africans taught me that life is the only thing tough enough to work here. No simplistic professionalism, no shallow plans, brittle schemes or mere interventions. Only life can live here. Only it can find the way.

Marcellino, Sandy and Beulah helping each other find the way.

And how does it do so? By what light? We gathered around the hunch that it might be fueled by something more like joy, let us dare to say dance. The English word “joy” falls so short, but still comes closer to the way we move with just enough light to see to the next turn on the path. Never one by one; always in small groups who would be lost entirely if not held by slender and improbably threads of trust.

One of these improbabilities that lights up the sky is the Christian Institute of Southern Africa, which Goedgedacht has honored with a peace grove of 28 olive trees for the founding giants who suffered with some dying in the bitter decades of struggle against Apartheid. Built with what we now see as the sinews of life, it defied the massive structures of Apartheid. Nobody involved had any clear thought as to how it could be ended. They gathered and spoke such vivid truth that the government banned them all, preventing them from being together or even be quoted in public. Tiny, nimble and fragile looking, they nonetheless persisted, gathering support all across the globe, creating channels for funds to flow into the struggles for justice, dignity and integrity. They won their day in ways that inspire us to struggle with very different demons in ours.

We walk in their light today because they kept weaving thin webs across borders, time zones, political snares, theological lines and impossibilities of every kind. Like the Milky Way constellations, the dozens whose names we know reflect millions who we do not know who also risked everything for a future that drew them beyond the possible. Most in the movement did not get an olive tree memorial garden or even a footnote.

What do we do with this light? Their specific answer and ways of struggling are not ours. It is unlikely they were any smarter than us. Or that they would be any better than we at figuring out how to move through the current labyrinth of collapsing climate with political systems so easily gamed and tamed by the cynical powers.

We are here now, not them. And we are in our struggle, which is not exactly theirs. Their problem was nationalwith some hope to be found abroad. Ours is planetary with no help on the way at all except for the next generation. They are rising quickly, but time is short.

What can we learn except like them to act as best we can; to risk as wisely and boldly as they did with those they trusted with their lives and with the life of their hopes.

Neither they nor we could know if our very best would be enough or in time. Who can ever know that?

Hold hands with a few you trust and put one step in front. Turn, move, turn again and yet again, grateful for the light of billions of stars.