garygunderson Blog

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.

That Jesus

We pause on a day almost certainly not his birthday to consider a strange carpenter-teacher who lived two millennia ago. He was always inconveniently good news. Long before germ theory, telescopes or electricity, Jesus lived a short life before dying as a political criminal. We know about his life through scraps of stories and vignettes no longer alive to us except through translations of translations. The stories of the birth that “magnify my soul” are all radical signals of protest and defiance against the oppressive cabal of religion and empire.

Said to be the oldest baptismal pool. Naples, Italy.

Jesus was not a member of any Christian group and would probably not recognize most of the religion that claims him. Paul, whose writings shaped much of that religion, villainized and persecuted Jesus’ earliest followers before converting, never met him. Although a student of the Jewish texts, Jesus was not a writer. No home, much less an office. No wife, apparently, or kids. We don’t know his sexuality. He apparently had a brother.

He healed people seven days a week with no business model. The only times he showed up at worship, he got thrown out. He never voted or sought political power. But he was regarded by Empire and its religious toadies as a threat to order. He had no school, but did accumulate disciples. Before his movement backslid into bishops, those following him were said to follow his “Way.”

That’s the clue. I want to move through life in that “Way” and with those on that Way.

He prayed some, mostly by himself, apparently to strengthen his capacity to stay on the Way.

He said that Way was narrow and difficult, which some think means we should go single file through life. I think it means we are to walk like the Reindeer we associate with Santa, but who are also symbols of radical resilience. The early Mediterranean Christians thought of Jesus as the Lamb of God, stressing the sacrificial metaphor. They didn’t know anything about Caribou and how the herd saves each other.

Caribou–they who move through impossibly difficult circumstances following many paths that weave together and then apart and together again. I have walked their narrow, braided paths on the tundra shelves flanking the frozen Alaska rivers beneath the Brooks Range. They are called Caribou in Alaska but have the same Way that they have followed for thousands of years, moving as a company of thousands, trusting each other to find the paths across and through to where the Spirit of life draws them.

The mesh of trails suggests a social complexity beyond our simplistic theory of networks.4 This helps me imagine the adaptive possibilities as Spirit sets us free while remaining social, safe while remaining kind.

I, too, pay attention to my trusted ones on the Way: Chris and Bobby, Enrique and Maria, TC, Jim, Tom, Fred, Jeremy, Jerry, Dora, Ron and a cloud of witnesses on the move. We trust each other to stay on the journey and in sight, sometimes protecting, sometimes finding safety. The world is a dangerous place. Safety only in motion, together, on the Way.

I wonder what Jesus would say about all this. I suspect he’d wonder about all the churches from which I was not thrown out. And all the clutter I’ve accumulated beyond his one cloak and borrowed mule. My offices. All the stuff I did not give away. All the healing kindnesses left for other obligations.

I hope for grace.

And pray for a Spirit to move me onto one of those narrow paths closer to the edge of the herd as we move together over tough land for another season of life.

//// adapted from my book, “For God and the People: Prayers for a Newer New Awakening.”

*Sunset from Monkey Valley, South Africa*

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.

Potbound

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

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

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

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

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

Pot bound.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lost bee, found bee

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Soul sick

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

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

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

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

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

I am sick to my soul.

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

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

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

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

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

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