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Bolt

Compared to Ukraine, Gaza or the wobbly democracy in the US, reading about my Chevy Bolt may not seem urgent. But stick with me; it might relieve some of your despair.

TC and I bought a basic 2020 Chevy Bolt the dealer was so eager to get it off the lot, they let us strip it of everything including the silly floor-mats. I mean basic; the cheapest EV one can buy. And still a terrific car comparable driving and space to my beloved Mini Cooper. It’s a small hatchback with the same 250-mile range as the base Tesla. I usually charge it at home with the stock cord and a $20 adapter from Amazon to plug it into the same 220v plug which powers my big wood turning lathe. It’s not elegant, but it works overnight. I plug it in a couple times a week as most of my life takes place within a couple dozen miles of home.

An electric car is only as clean as the electricity, which in Winston means coal from Duke Power. We once looked into installing solar panels but avoided the mud wrestle with the home-owners’ association by buying our power through Sol Systems (formerly Arcadia). They negotiate with Duke Power to buy wholesale electrons from solar and wind producers. It costs us a few dollars for the moral fig leaf, of claiming to be 100% solar. It’s a nice tingle.

We also have TC’s Prius for when we don’t have the patience on long trips or if we would have to cross West Virginia or Mississippi. The guzzle bunny, as I call it, gets 52 miles to the gallon which is a good tingle, too. I prefer the Bolt on the road as it is more quiet and comfortable.

Long distance driving in an EV in the Deep South requires patience and planning, neither of which I am known for. And a lot of apps, which I am known for. I am 70-ish, so I need to pee and stretch more often than I need to charge. The 240 miles range means a couple of added hours on a 400 mile day but the breaks mean we arrive a lot less frazzled. It’s a feature, not a flaw. That’s really true of nearly everything the climate crisis is forcing us to do from eating closer to the land, to E-bikes, to recycling to slowing everything down. Every single thing is quieter, calmer and better for us. Don’t the screamers make you miss the real plot–it’s better, if sometimes, like my Bolt, a bit awkward.

The complication is that a handful of Bolt batteries caught fire a few years ago, which forced GM to recall everyone’s car. GM came up with what they called a “final solution” (they need a new PR firm). They offered $1,400 to allow an electronic monitor on the car for 6,200 miles to detect the rare fatal signs. I took the money. The catch is that the process reduces range by 20% while monitoring which means in the Winter I have more like 180 than 240 miles. That’s a big difference.

That set up my 1,400 mile Deep South drive to Atlanta and Orlando and back as an adventure. I’ve driven to Atlanta innumerable times over the decades including 4 trips in the EV recently so I know where the good chargers are in Charlotte, Greenville and over the Georgia line. These are by Electrify America, which VW had to set up as penance for their environmental fraud. Good comes from bad sometimes, as there are now fast inexpensive chargers in Walmart parking lots along many highways. They barely need even 45 minutes to get from 20% to full and there’s always something to buy in a Walmart. The one in Greenville even has a Chick Filet across the parking lot. The destination Marriott in Decatur had a free charger in the basement, so I sleep well.

South of Atlanta was new EV territory. First stop was Buc-ee’s just south of Macon. The nice Mercedes charger outside almost made up for the bizarreness inside. As usual chargers are off on the edges of the lot as if we should be ashamed of ourselves, like smokers. This is especially ironic at Buc-ee’s with everyone smothered and covered by plastic crap and deadly food. So we left without a full charge, stopping in Tipton where a pokey charger at a hotel bumped us back up enough to get to the Walmart in Valdosta. TC needed some contact solution.

I don’t really know what to say about Buc-ee’s. Nice Charger. Great driving companion.

We were aiming for Palatka for the night which is about 200 miles from Valdosta—just out of range. The first time I’ve ever had to wait for a charger in three years was at a Shell station in Lake City: all three stations were occupied and the 4^th one broken, kinda off in the dark side of the lot. I had promised dinner, but there were only sad hot dogs on greasy steel metal rollers, so TC settled for a bag of pistachios. She graciously pointed out the gorgeous full moon rising over the vacant scrub behind the gas station. It is important to marry someone with a sense of humor, if one drives an EV.

An EV journey makes one think about places along the way such as Palatka. We had watched a great PBS story about William Bartrum, who visited here in 1774 writing his amazing “Travels.” A Quaker botanist, ethnographer and poet, his book about the St. John’s river, plants, animals and people mesmerized all of Europe—and justified our slight detour. We stayed in the Great Gables Inn, which, once the finest house in all of Florida, run by Tate and Jennifer, who were even better than their house.

Great Gables Inn, Palatka, Florida. The town was nearly chosen as the Capital and the house looks like it.

Alas, Palatka has only one ancient charger on the side of the Nissan dealer a bit out of town. Every Nissan dealer in America has a free charger dating from when they introduced the first Leaf. They also have a nice bathroom and impressive array of drink and candy machines including more pistachios. But we found seafood later at Corky Bell’s across the river, damn near worth the whole drive down.

We could easily have made it to Orlando with 250 mile range, but with 180 we swung by the Walmart on I-95 at Daytona where we found a surprising selection of wines and tennis balls. Then a short bounce down I-4 for a delightful couple of hours with Bill Davenhall (formerly of ESRI) and finally to the hotel in plenty of time. As in Decatur, they have a free charger with plugs for both Tesla and normal people.

EV driving clarifies that moving a noisy machine really fast down the road is no big accomplishment. Nothing like seeing a Manatee which drew us to Blue Springs State Park a few miles out of our way heading back north. Hundreds of Manatee spend their winters in the warm pristine gushing spring. The Springs once became so dirty that the winter count got down to 20 of the magical creatures. Government and citizens made a million right decisions over a couple of decades so; there were 124 the day we visited. We talked for hundreds of miles of their wonder.

Manatee were created by a kind-hearted God on a good day. And the water would occupy Monet for years.

Up through Jacksonville and across the Georgia line. Zapped up again near Charleston and over to Columbia with 80 miles still in the battery. We slept in a hotel near….an Electrify America (TC sleeping while I charged up). A final bounce up to Charlotte for our last 20 minute charge got us home for lunch.

I mentioned the apps, which is how one navigates the chargers. Electrify America guides you to theirs, my first choice. Chargeaway and PlugShare show details about nearly every socket in the nation. Tesla has a great onboard app, which everyone is copying. Google shows charger details on their web-based maps, but weirdly, not on the phone. In short, finding the chargers is the emerging art. There aren’t enough and they aren’t all compatible, yet. But it’s all coming along.

What could be more complex than changing the whole energy system in the largest economy on the planet? It demands a million right things big and small done right over a couple of decades. Some of the choices are not great and will need to be improved. But it is is happening, even in the Deep South which weirdly treats sunlight as if it a liberal conspiracy.

Elon made his expensive cars fart (as he did the internet). Nameless GM engineers simply made them go. He did make 10,000 good chargers, which will soon be open to everyone, making it even easier to drive in the quiet elegance of an EV, albeit a Chevy which normal people can afford.

I’m almost done with the 6,200 battery monitoring. I can hardly wait to drive to St. Louis in April with all our mileage back. We’ll drive past Buc-ee’s this time. Maybe we’ll see another full moon, if nothing as astonishing as a Manatee.

Have you ever really looked up to the sky through Spanish Moss moving in the wind? *Palatkak Florida.*

How Long?

Dr King has been dead longer than he was alive. And his dream seems as wobbly as the 94 years old he would have been this year. This is what happens to dreams too tethered to specific humans as we tend to age quicker than grand hopes can be fulfilled. King got the idea of “beloved community” from Josiah Royce, who would have been 169 this year. Amos, the prophet who imagined the waters of justice rolling down would be 2,788. Born 11 miles south of Jerusalem, I doubt he’d be feeling fulfilled if he’s watching from wherever.

Closer to home in little Winston Salem there is energy stirring to come together in a different way, one organized around the “vital conditions” linked to the Leading Causes of Life. Deeply informed and illuminated by the strategic fervor for equity, the vital conditions look at the community of people and organizations who hope with the tenacity of King and Amos for justice to roll at least a bit. Monte Roulier, the bard of Community Initiatives, was here just a month ago to talk about how we might do the plumbing for those rolling waters and not just chase whatever bothers us the most at the moment (homelessness, no–addiction, no-reading levels, no-toxic waste, no-poverty, no-whatever). Precisely because we have so many non-profits within 10 miles of city hall, each of which is organized around solving something ugly, it is very hard to work together long enough to see any change. Most of the organizations have some staff and a Board and donors whose attention span competes with all the other organizations’ needs.

Our fears compete while our common hopes are starved. While tribes can be built on fear, community is built on hope and possibility.

It is odd to look at civic body experiencing the Iowa caucuses next to the day honoring Dr. King, while the journalists run out of adjectives for the suffering in Gaza, Ukraine and among those struggling north to the US border. All this while a man who once held our highest office does all he can to shred the social and legal threads that hold us together. He has a tribe built on the fear of of community. It’s not the only such tribe around the world.

Anyone who is not depressed and anxious is simply not paying attention.

TC urged me to read Johann Hari’s book, Lost Connections, an exploration of the roots of our pandemic of depression and anxiety. He unpacks how our therapists and physicians are treating our depression and anxiety with a staggering amount of pharmaceuticals rolling down like a mighty river in our veins. His simple point is that the epidemic of depression can’t be fixed by pharma because the problem is not in our heads; it’s in the space between us, the one now filled with vitriol driving us farther apart at the very moment we need each other most.

“You aren’t a machine with broken parts. You are an animal whose needs are not being met. You need to have a community. You need to have meaningful values, not the junk values you’ve been pumped full of all your life, telling you happiness comes through money and buying objects. You need to have meaningful work. You need the natural world. You need to feel you are respected. You need a secure future. You need connections to all these things.” (p318)

And of course, when he says “you,” he means me, you, himself and every single one of those we think we should fear or want to hurt. When depressed and anxious we lose the capacity to trust ourselves or anyone around us. The pills only dull the pain; they can’t resolve the disconnection.

We are deeply ill as a body politic, circling in our fears from the very people we need the most. Who do we need most? People who are annoyingly different, inconveniently complex, who don’t echo what we want to hear. Sort of like you’d find sitting down the row from you in church or standing next to you in line to vote.

Johann Hari is clear that this circling inward is serves the interests of the professionals plundering our souls by misdiagnosing our suffering . The pills for depression and anxiety are not medically effective except in rare circumstances. They create collateral damage at the individual level in such predictable things as weight gain. The pills and pill hucksters gain from our loss of energy, clarity and self efficacy. Every syllable is an accurate description of the venal way politicians exploit our fears.

No wonder people would vote for a transparent fraud. No wonder so few weep over Gaza and Nova Rave. No wonder people find the institutions of faith so hollow.

Hari suggests 7 anti-depressants—reconnections. None of these are in our heads or even our Spirit. Rather, the solutions are near at hand. He means literally at the fingertips where we touch other humans and focus on their joy or possibilities instead doing another lap inside ourselves.

Ask ourselves who is trying to make me and you more afraid. Walk away from them. Certainly, do not vote or give money to anyone who would gain from your fear.

Ask instead who might need some hope. Go toward them and show up in a real way. You should not go alone. Our culture, even hollowed out and brittle, still has an almost bizarre range of voluntary associations that will be happy to see you and give you a task that fits your hand.

Many such organizations were created in the aftermath of Dr King’s murder those many decades ago. They are what Jimmy Carter once called the mundane revolution, as practical as a bag of food, as basic electricity not being turned off, as modern as vaccine.

Hari’s hope is realistic and well-founded because it is not normal for humans to be so disconnected, medicated and fearful. Rather, we should expect to see a great turning toward the life of the whole people. It would be normal to experience an epidemic of connections of meaning, trust and respect.

A 94-year old King would remind us that he never promised that he would get there with us, and we might not either. Walking in hand is the way.

Iris Dement sings it:

Power, greed, and profit
Will never feed the soul
These three shovels have dug us
A deep dark hole
Compassion, understanding
And living one for all
And all for one is what it’s gonna take
To break this fall

How long? How long?

He said “Till justice rolls down like water
‘Till justice rolls down like water
‘Till justice rolls down like water
And righteousness flows like a mighty stream”

(You can listen to How Long: https://irisdementofficial.bandcamp.com/track/how-long)

Yes

Friday night Shabatt in the middle of a burned out, now recovering, forest. Yes.

Nobody has a right to hope these days. Anyone with basic arithmetic can read the data trends to see the fire coming for everyone and all we love. I’m not arguing that our losses are any more precious than those of the times of the Black Death, just to pick one horror. But ours is a a distinctively precarious time because of the multiple overlapping and accelerating crises.

In this context I’d like to offer up Camp Towanga, which is 160 acres of hope with a Jewish accent surrounded by hundreds of thousands of burned forest left black and ruined by the Rim Fire of 2013. This is the dark side of John Muir territory, bordering the cathedrals of Yosemite and also the place that broke his heart. This was his great lost cause, the Hetch Hetchy valley, now a flooded cathedral filled with the water that provides the pure water our daughters and grandsons enjoy in the Bay Area. Hope in these mountains is always within site of something lost. A good place for religious camps.

Fresh lunch, served with a generous helping of words crafted across the millennia. Yum.

I was attending a Jewish camp a couple days after Christmas to fill in for our daughter whose broken leg kept her away. So it was her husband Nathan, me and the grandsons, all experiencing the camp in very different ways that stirred up deep and very different feelings

At this camp you don’t have to precede every hopeful song by the sort of apology that is common among religious social justice environmentalists like me who feel obliged to list all the reasons we should not be hopeful (note the first paragraph!). Nope, they go right to the bold brave joy. Nothing is more important than to sing the songs, ancient ones, and those by the Indigo Girls, Bill Withers, John Prine, then grab the kids and dance as have hundreds of generations in the dark times.

Hope is one flavor of faith, as basic and urgent as breath itself. In most religions, breath and Spirit are the same word and claimed the same way—by breathing in and out, in rhythm, song and trusted language that others have taught us for times just as these. Tawango has the DNA of an American religious camp, so it has the dumb songs and silly counsellor inside jokes. Many of the same songs I led at Camp Manidokan a half century ago, albeit with much less skill than Devon and Aaron.

And to sharpen the main point, they hold up hope in an eternal loving Presence of justice, mercy, peace and kindness that was not left to the side, just because of all the California scientists in the room. No. Out rolled the exuberant Shabbat songs. Saturday morning we stood as the Torah stood and those of us new to the experience were invited to stand near, in my case, with grandsons, as the exquisite words were spoken.

We sang, most with more practiced nuance than the Baptist mumbling along with the children: “It is up to us to hallow creation, to respond to Life with the fullness of our lives. It is up to us to meet the world, to embrace the whole even as we wrestle with its parts. Therefore we bow in awe and thanksgiving before the One who is holy.

This is not how most of us normally go about our days in the city, which is why places like Tawonga are as essential as the lungs in our social body. Anyone who hopes against all the grim fires burning our social watersheds to dust must find the places where you can remember what lasts, what is worthy of trust.

This camp borders Yosemite National Park, where I have hiked and savored. Cathedral rock is well named. But it is not enough to go to alone. It is crucial to go and be among others who share the doubt, as well as the hopeful practice that can seem so merely symbolic to hear, taste, and touch, with unalloyed joy, the flow of Spirit. I’m pretty sure this grandfather was the oldest present, but I felt as did the youngest kid as I tasted the challah. It tasted good and new and real. It was.

Those who delight in our fear want us to to argue, as if the opposite of fear is built of rationally vetted facts. These days they prefer we argue over the existence of facts and never even get to the construction.

The opposite of fear is joy, resonating among a group of people built and tuned like a good guitar amplifies a single string. Because hope is a social quality, it often finds voice and thus draws much on the arts and artists who are not drawing so much on the well of their own solitary muse, as consciously weaving from the choir that crosses generations—including the very youngest and most novel. This is, of course, not just for camp. Nearly every one of the gatherings of We In the World, led by Dr. Somava Saha does this. She knows to do this because she experienced it in her Bahá’í experience.

And back we go to work of healing the world. How? By grabbing the near edge of some great problem and acting at some cost to ourselves (Colin Morris). Or, better, grab the near edge of some tendril of life trying to find its way. Listen carefully to the scientists when you turn to the labor, so it will not be in vain. “Measure your steps,” says the great spiritual, which I always took as a nod to good data and careful logic. Don’t squander precious joy on ill-considered and inadequate action. Do the right thing…..right.

We must put out the fires we can, preserving the lives we can while not assuming it is all up to us alone. The Rim Fire burned thousands of acres of habitat of highly endangered owls which many assumed would be lost. Somewhat surprised, the Spring that followed the great burning witnessed nearly 100% of the nesting sites occupied across the range. Apparently the owls had seen it before and knew what to do. The species we think fragile are built for travail and fire. Maybe even us.

*Cathedral Rock, Yosemite National Park.*

Consider a gift of hope for those who give us hope by sending home money to the camp of your tradition which has helped make you who you are today.

Honeybee Collaboration

I once got up in a frigid December night to put a blanket on the honeybee hive on our deck. I do not know how to “keep” them or assure their thriving. But I sit with the bees and notice they find their way improvising amid circumstances no one bee or any one hive has encountered. I wonder what we could learn.

Worst bee picture ever. But they are alive where I thought them all dead after the frost! A great picture!

Late in the summer a hive that I thought robust was overcome by wax worms. You may have read about them because of their recently discovered capacity to digest plastic. They prefer eating wax and also spin a sticky web of yucky gloop inside the hive that the bees can’t overcome. The bees in this hive gave up, took their queen and fled about 100 feet across the circle underneath an empty hive box—a desperate tactic. I jiggered a way to get them inside a box but thought they were too few with too little time to build up for winter. I was not surprised that after the first frosty night, I saw no activity. And then I was surprised again when they mocked my despair this week coming and going with elan. I wrapped them in insulating foil to celebrate.

I wrapped the other six hives, too, after our state bee magazine reminded me that bees are supposed to be inside a tree surrounded by 3-5 inches of trunk, not our flimsy ¾” pine boxes. Anything we can do to keep the bees from expending energy is good the winter. I put a “sugar board” for nutrition and then added a “quilt box” on top filled with cedar shavings for warmth and to absorb moisture. I’ll do a final treatment for mites this week, blowing in oxalic acid to beat down the mites.

This hive is ready for the sugar board for winter nutrition and quilt of cedar shavings for insulation and to absorb moisture

The only thing I don’t try is to coordinate anything. Nobody has ever tamed honeybees, though we humans subject them to bizarre circumstances to which they adapt as best they can. No bee coordinates anything, either. How bees think is as much a mystery as the how a three pound squishy mass in our skull “thinks.” Thirty million years with no boss, much less royalty. No executive committee. No “table” around which important bees gather to decide the future. And they don’t get tripped up by “perfect;” taking what is real and finding the way.

Many important humans are currently making such abysmal choices that the whole species seems locked in a doom loop. Artificial fears blind us to our real peril. It was hard for the “last chance” climate conference in Qatar to remember to even pretend to try. The honeybees don’t care, except that the horrible decisions include releasing plumes of toxic chemicals that make it hard for them to fly straight. It’s a small planet.

As the global people were squandering their opportunity in Qatar, some key people in our little city met to think differently about how our civic hive might work better. We brought in Monte Roulier of Community Initiatives, one of our Stakeholder Health friends who, with ReThink Health and We In the World, have brought the Vital Conditions framework alive all across the nation, even into the dysfunctional thicket of Washington. Honeybees have the Vital Conditions in their DNA; every single bee and every single hive knows what to aim for, not just what to fear. Fears fragment our focus, while vitality integrates. If every human—like every bee—had roughly the same idea of vitality and life, we would need far less complicated coordination. We would count on everyone buzzing to a roughly similar tune.

Even a small town of 250,000 humans is an ensemble of many hives, neighborhoods and overlapping zones of power and ways of being. Nobody can possibly coordinate such a complexity even when so much depends on working together. We burn energy and time trying to create a table with clear agenda, shared data, distinct roles of authority. But the more power is concentrated, the more energy emerges to resist. We, like bees, work better knowing the other hives have a similar idea of what to hope for. Honeybee organization spends little friction on forced coordination; entirely focused on adapting to the actual circumstances. Multiple generative nodes are way smarter than any table of self-chosen geniuses trying for a singularity.

Better to gather with curiosity about each other’s hopes for vitality, hopes for life. Food helps with coffee in the morning and wine later in the evening. Like hearts learning to beat together, common life will emerge.

At The Carter Center’s Interfaith Health Program we traveled widely to help complex communities find their way to implement the gifts of science for health. We spoke of a “limited domain collaboration” as a way of creating multiple nodes of aspiration without leaders quarrelling. I was not yet informed by honeybees, so I didn’t realize they figured this out 30 million years ago. It’s Honeybee Collaboration; giving credit where it is due.

Humans have less baked into our DNA than honeybees. This makes us more adaptable but also easier to miss the point, chase our fears and waste time on needless friction. Every honeybee is imprinted with the ideal dimensions and qualities of the cavity in which to build a good hive. Maybe the Leading Causes of Life which underlay the Vital Conditions are like that. They see the interplay of five facets—Connection, Coherence, Agency, Intergenerativity and Hope as a pattern out of which life emerges over and over again. Jim Cochrane points out that the Causes of Life are actively dangerous if captured by any one tribe, nation or committee. If informed by the creative imagination for the whole and animated by the energy we call Spirit, they find the way toward life even when all seems lost. But that is a lot less exact than the bees, with their DNA imprint of the dimensions for the ideal hive cavity (22 quarts, dry, with a 1 ½” hole).

The wisdom tradition of Islam, the Jews and later, Christians, thought the honeybees were the species closest to the qualities of God with the sole exception of humans. We emerged millions of years later, so we may be an experiment by God to see if a species without the imprinted DNA can be agents of life for everybody on the little planet. It’s a perilous risk, working barely, if at all.

But that may be the Christmas miracle. Kate Hauk reminded me of the poem by John Roedel:

Me: Hey God

God: Hello there, my love.

Me: It’s over

God: That’s not true. You won.

Me: How can you tell?

God: Because you’re still here.

Me: Barely.

God: Barely is all it takes. Barely is amazing. Barely is a miracle.

The bees longest day is Friday. Six weeks later, still amid the frost, the queen will lay the eggs that will become the bees who will leap into the Spring sky to greet the early blooming maple and redbud. Miracle.

A bit ridiculous with foam insulation around perfectly dignified honeybees. It beats getting up in the the night with a blanket.

Relevant Science, Mature Faith

If we ask the wrong question, our answer won’t matter. Many ask the wrong question about how to resolve the conflict between religion and science. The useful question is more nuanced: how do we embody our most mature faith and the most relevant science to inform the health of whole people? Good question. But you have to see somebody do it to understand the answer.

*John Hatch, Jeremy Moseley and Teresa Cutts asking the right questions.*

Last week about 200 people asking that question gathered in Rocky Mount, North Carolina for the Eighth Annual John W. Hatch FaithHealth Lecture. And to celebrate Dr. Hatch’s 95^th birthday. Not many black men live to be 95, so we should have a party for every one that does and think about how they did so. John began by picking his parents and grandparents wisely. They were fierce for him, believed that he should be a professor (his grandmother even considered his goal of Governor). Just as important, was inculcating him from his earliest age that his life intelligence, energy, courage and heart belong to the people God so loves—all of them. Good pick, John.

Two weeks ago THE American Public Health Association Caucus on Faith and the Public Health honored Dr. John Hatch as the first recipient of the Flame Award, given for a lifetime of keeping the flame of justice, mercy and healing alive in a hard-hearted world. We did that in Atlanta by Zoom, but Barbara Baylor, the chair of the caucus and a student of Dr. Hatch, came to Rocky Mount to give him the award in person.

The interwoven fields of public health and faith have been embodied in many significant lives in the past several hundred years as public health science has emerged.

For example, in 1737, James McCune Smith became the first African American to earn a medical degree, awarded by the University of Glasgow in Scotland. The local schools didn’t admit him, so his church connections found the way. A gifted orator and writer and social entrepreneur, he was also a mathematician. He used his statical analysis to take down Senator John C. Calhoun who was citing the US census to show that poor health of slaves reflected their inferior stock and poor behavior. Dr. Smith’s widely published scientific article showed that comparative data on free slaves and poor whites to had identical outcomes.

A binary star as our North Star—mature faith, relevant science, John Hatch embodies the most relevant science of all, the one that sets people and communities free by undergirding their own power. I’m sure he learned this science from his family example. But as I thought of him, I picked up my precious copy of “Closing the Gap” published in 1987 by Oxford Press. This CDC Conference was the idea of Jimmy Carter and Bill Foege who convened the hundreds of scientists to figure out how many years of premature death could be prevented based on what we already know. There is a lot of confusion about what we already know. Said Carter in the introduction: “This is particularly true for an issue as complex as health. Too often, Americans are confronted by messages about health that leave us with little or no hope…. Frequently, there is no mention of what I as an individual, or what we as a society, can do to arrest this relentless onslaught on our health.” The answer is about what John’s grandmother would have said:
“Approximately two-thirds of all reported deaths can be delayed, which means that 1.2 million lives and 8.4 million years of life can be preserved each year.” That next three decades dramatically increased our preventive knowledge as well as some relatively minor increases in curative science.

But science without hands, feet and heart doesn’t move from the lab to the streets. That takes mature faith, the kind that lets the science flow through generous lives to where it is needed most. Like that of John Hatch.

Shortly after their landmark report on Closing the Gap, Bill and Jimmy convened another meeting of several hundred diverse faith leaders to see if they could grasp the urgent moral moment posed by the prevention science. They also created the Interfaith Health Program with major funding from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation as well as some from Templeton Foundation. And they hired me. I quickly learned about John Hatch, who knew every bit of this science and carried it with his body into the toughest places that needed it the very most. This included Mississippi, where he and Jack Geiger created the first (or arguably second) community health center that is still more radical than most of the 3,000 that followed. And he came to the University of North Carolina and continued his landmark work with the 1,600 churches of General Baptist State Convention.

When I say “embody” science and faith, what kind of body do I mean? Whose bodies are best suited—let us say designed by God—to be the ideal carriers of this science that could prevent two-thirds of all unnecessary and thus, scandalous, death. Who did God put in the world for that purpose, to save, dare I say, it? Well, your body and mine, of course, just as well as John’s. Why can’t you and I be as brave, smart and fierce?

*Dr. Goldie Byrd of the Maya Angelou Center for Health Equity and Dr. Hatch of the UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health*

But I think there is an even better body designed for this mature faith and relevant science. That is the social body of the church, synagogue, masjid, temple or wherever people gather to be made whole and sent out again. That’s the body that formed John. And that is the body designed to carry the science the world needs. We were, of course meeting in just one such body, the Impact Center and Tabernacle, embodying the saving science and faith in a tough town in a tough part of a tough state.

The science that saves us—at least 2/3rds of us—is for the world God so loves. It is hard to monetize and turned into money by healthcare organizations, even those trying to use value-based contracts to do so. It won’t put hundreds of billions in the basement or pay big bucks to interventional physicians or those who organize the organizations who so successfully monetize other branches of science. The science that fits mature faith perfectly is that of mercy-making, justice-doing and love that teaches people and communities that God has made a world in which 2/3rds of their suffering is within their control. This science is considered the lowest in the academic hierarchy with a tiny fraction of NIH funding. But it is the highest of all sciences because it liberates, releases and sends out the whole body of faith.

That science is relevant once it finds the right body to carry it to the streets.

The John W. Hatch FaithHealth Lecture is coordinated by Anita Holmes with support from the FaithHealth Division of Atrium Health Wake Forest Baptist. Cosponsors include the Wake Forest University School of Divinity, the General Baptist State Convention of North Carolina, Maya Angelou Center for Health Equity, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Gillings School of Global Public Health, Caucus on Public Health and the Faith Community of the American Public Health Association, Community-Campus Partnerships for Health and the National Association of Community Health Associations.

More information at FaithHealth.org or StakeholderHealth.org

Rosalynn Carter

Now that’s how to spend 96 years.

Rosalynn Carter’s life is an extraordinary witness that demands that we pause in respect. But she would know we were not paying attention if we paused longer than that. She was fierce, urgent and tenacious in doing good, especially for those who suffered with any kind of mental or emotional burden. In the book, Everything to Gain, written just after they returned home to Plains from Washington, DC., Rosalynn said, “What I have learned over these years of work and study is that mental illnesses are less understood than almost any other major health problems, and that most people who experience difficulties suffer needlessly. The mystery, stigma, and misconceptions that surround mental illnesses prevent many people in need of psychiatric help from seeking treatment.” I once drafted notes for her to speak at a meeting in Pittsburgh at a Divinity School about the church and mental health. I thought the notes were somewhat aggressive, but she wanted them tougher: “the first word anyone in the church should say about mental health is an apology. The church has been the last bastion of the worst stigmas.” She never gave up on the church but had eyes wide open to the ugly complicity it has with the cruelty experienced by those it finds inconvenient to care about. That stigma is, was and will be the biggest challenge facing those individuals and their families.

If you want to honor Rosalynn Carter today, reach out to one of those you know (you do know more than one) and say you care.

Don’t pause.

Broken Glass

One of 128 stone is a collective sculpture The the young people from Graben who designed this stone wanted to warn and remember:“A raised index finger signals to the viewer that they have to pay attention. It demands attention and urges vigilance. The string on the finger is barbed wire.

I am writing this in one of the small towns in Germany that on October 22, 1940 was among the first to railroad its Jewish neighbors to the Gurs holding camp in southern France and then to their murder in Auschwitz. Today is the 85^th anniversary of Kristallnacht that preceded the deportations in a national attack to break all the glass on Jewish stores and synagogues throughout the country. The death camps, “the final solution,” then ramped up, operating for only a couple years, leaving a bitter stain that will last centuries.

There is never a final solution for incoherent hatred, not in Baden, Gaza, Tulsa or Cherokee land. Hatred replicates, simmers in the hearts of the children watching their parents humiliate or be humiliated. There are few unbroken windows in Gaza.

Germany is the only place I’ve ever seen I’ve ever seen where the people teach their children about their inherited complicity in an attempt to break the cycle. It begins with the churches that have the most reason to hide from that history, as they provided cover for the worst atrocities. I visited a a youth camp in Neckarzimmern where Lutherans and Catholics created an astonishing memorial right next to the basketball courts where the kids couldn’t miss it. Each of the 128 of the local villages from which Jews were expelled created its own unique memorial stone which were then placed in a large Star of David on the campground as a collective sculpture. Artful, honest and stunning.

The website is in German, but google translation works. Go deep enough into the specific village’s monuments (such as Graben-Neudorf, #31 in the opening photo).Each explains how their neighbors where deported on that one brutal night. The monuments were done by students, many by confirmation classes learning the profound truth in the Talmud: “The secret of redemption is memory/remembrance.” At least these kids might not go along with the next hateful frenzy.

Students from the Sandhausen Catholic Community designed a deep crack runs across the memorial stones from Sandhausen. If it weren’t for the Star of David that holds the stones together, they would break apart in half. Tears flow from the crack like blood from a wound. With the inscription “For I weep day and night for the dead” (Jer. 8, 23)

In Germany the memorials are created by the perpetrators, so their children will not repeat the cycle. Kids need grown ups to help them. In Germany, the grown up was the president Weizsaecker who in 1985 took the anniversary of the end of the war to declare the moment of liberation from their past, not capitulation to an enemy. His Historic speech is only comparable to Lincoln’s Gettysburg address, which by comparison was much easier to be a gracious winner. I wish that young Baptists in America were being taught their complicities instead of their parents worrying about hurting their feelings.

As you read this thousands of young Jews and their anxious parents pray the Iron Dome protects them from the rockets. And thousands of Palestinian parents parents pray the Jewish rage against Hamas will abate before it shatters every glass in the region. Every rocket and every shell is a seed watered by bitter tears that will bear the fruit of another horror.

The smartest president and First Lady we’ve ever had admitted they couldn’t figure it out. If it’s beyond the Obamas’, I’m not going to have any better idea. But I do know that the first obligation of every parent is to act out of wisdom, not another round of adolescent rage.

It’s about hope

Cast of Time Traveler’s Wife at the Apollo Theater, London.
“Love wins the day.”

It’s about hope, she said, explaining her new musical based on The Time Traveler’s Wife, in London. Almost any play worth staging is about hope; as is every book worth typing, every sermon worth the pulpit, every speech worth giving. But so much of our electronic space seems designed to exaggerate fear, distance, venal irrelevance and disconnection. Even in our highest arts of meaning-making such as the theater, we can forget why we are able to communicate at all, what words are for.

It’s about hope.

The worst of us say that hope is delusion that it’s really all about violence, money and domination. They cower behind a self-serving intellectual laziness accusing us of not knowing how life works.

Nobody knows more about unfair reality than artists, especially those in theater. They are blessed but also cursed by talent that wanted to flow like hot lava their whole life. But they were usually the wrong size, color, sex, pitch of voice, perspective in the wrong town, country and century in front of the wrong casting committee, much less audience, who had someone else in mind. True of the ones’ aiming for the stage and those behind the curtain, imagining the lines, music, set or trying to run the business of the arts. That’s before the professionally unhappy people called critics have their shot. It’s a rare artist with healthcare insurance, savings or rent in the bank or any hope their kids get straight teeth, much less private college.

Artists know all about unfair; always have. And because of that they know that nothing is more important than the words that bring hope to life again and again. You can’t do that alone; you need a congregation a company of friends.

*Cast of The Book of Will, Shakespeare North Playhouse, Prescot, England. Same kind of people who would have been on stage 400 years ago.*

The friends of Shakespeare improbably managed to salvage the scraps of his plays into the collection that are fundamental to English—one could argue human—culture. The Book of Will is the story of those friends, a love letter to all those who find hope in language, especially in really tough places. Prescott is one of those tough places, the second poorest borough in England a long way from the West End of London. The town improbably built the Shakespeare North Playhouse here during COVID. This was the site where some of Shakespeare original actors played those centuries ago long before immunization or modern sanitation. Death and suffering were common around the theater then as they are today in Afghanistan. One of the actual first folios was on display downstairs from where a new troupe of actors took to the stage yet once again giving themselves to raising up the words. Why did Will’s friends speak then? Why do these friends do so now?

It’s about hope.

*Lauren Gunderson, Lotte Wakeham, Laura Collier and Will Shakespeare.*

This is also true of those who use god-talk in a room built much like theaters, though usually with worse acoustics and less comfortable seats. The sister of the director of Book of Will is a vicar in a church in London. Both theater and theology depend on the rich for the bricks, so have had to put up with a lot of people dismissive of their most noble work. The god-places are more likely to have food pantries and clothes closets than bars, but both exist for others, not themselves. They point beyond, within and among those of us hoping for hope.

So when they say that hope is not a delusion, you have to pause.

“All I have is too little time on earth.”

“I should savor all I can.”

“I would stop right now on an ordinary day

And forget about tomorrow.

“I don’t need tomorrow.”

“Measure out these days till they slip away.”

“All I need is this little time on earth.”*

“Make it new.”**

(*On and On, ** Love wins the day. Songs from Time Traveler’s Wife, the musical, Apollo Theater, London. Playbook by Lauren Gunderson.

Lost bee, found bee

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Soul sick

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

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

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

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

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

I am sick to my soul.

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

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

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

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

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

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