Boundary Leaders – Page 2 – garygunderson Blog

Team Sport

Even an electric vehicle depends on the kindness of strangers now and then. Good thing there are always kind strangers. In this case it was Mike Carnett, a car salesman in Wytheville, Virginia, 90 miles from home when we only had 78 miles of battery life.

Nifty charger at Pipestem State Park. VERY handy.

TC and I had enjoyed the glories of Pipestem State Park in West Virginia, which overlooks the ancient Bluestone Gorge. And it has a modern little free charger for both Tesla and our union-made Chevy Bolt. (I love to park next to Tesla’s who paid three times what I did for our 250 miles of range.)

We decided to take the long way home down the New River as my EV app told us about a charger in Blacksburg. From there we would have plenty of electrons to get home to Winston. We travel these days guided by clever iPhone Apps and the scattering of charging stations in in Walmarts, shopping malls, gas stations and the occasional city hall parking lot.

Even the cheapest EV (mine) has more than 200 miles of range, which is a lot more than I can go without stopping to pee. I’ve put just under 20,000 miles on my Bolt ranging from Atlanta to Cincinnati to DC with only flutters of anxiety.

But you still have to get the electricity into the battery. Our Bolt would not accept the charge at the EVGo charger in Blacksburg even after 45 minutes with a very helpful young man on the help line. No problem as we had plenty of juice to get down to Wytheville as a gas station where we had charged the day before. But, it wouldn’t charge there either, even after an hour on the phone with another delightful lady. We were now 12 miles short of the 90 to get home.

The Nissan Leaf was one of the first legit EV’s so every dealer has a free, but really slow, charger. We drifted slightly nervously across town to Dutch Miller Nissan. It almost worked. Out walked Michael Carnett, who poked and joked as salesman do. He noticed that the charge nozzle didn’t seem to be quite seating correctly. So I stuck my naked finger into the gizmo and dislodged a little chunk of plastic that was wedged in, probably broken off from an earlier session. A teeny-weeny trickle of electrons began to move. It was like watching a bucket of water heated by a match. So we went back to the fast Electrify America and ate ice cream as the big wire poured in 100 miles in 25 minutes. Home by dinner.

Piece of plastic in the wrong spot prevented the charger from seating correctly. Who knew? Note I still have all my fingers even after fishing it out from amid the electronics.

Electric vehicles are still vehicles with thousands of moving parts. There is no oil to change or engines to pour gas in. But EV’s are still complicated machinery built to ride up and down mountains at high speed. Stuff happens in the real world.

I can’t wait for the deluge of charging stations after Senator Coal Mine (a compliment in West Virginia) changed his mind and permitted the future to edge into our lives last week. I don’t know how our Nissan friend votes or what he thinks of global warming. I know I was grateful for his practical curiosity and kind spirit. It’s gonna take all us strangers showing a little kindness to get to the future.

Sunset at Pipestem was still worth all the adventure.

Plant

The morning after Ruth Bader Ginsburg completed her journey and handed on her legacy, I picked up six Linden trees from a nursery south of town. The county bee association had arranged a bulk purchase of the trees, known by their “small, pale yellow, fragrant flowers in clusters.” Bees and their human friends like the honey which is “white with a slightly aromatic flavor [and] when fully ripened in the hive it is considered one of the best table honeys,” according to John H. Lovell’s Honey Plants of North America. He states that “hot, clear weather and a humid atmosphere are most favorable for the secretion of nectar. Small drops may then be seen sparkling in the bloom; and the bee may obtain a load from a single blossom.” Worker bees, every one of which are female, would have liked RBG a great deal.

Our local county bee association arranged for us to buy Linden trees as a group. Bees and beekeepers will appreciate this in 10 or 15 years. I bought six to help somebody who will probably never know me.

It is cool here in the Carolinas, which is bad news for drones. Every morning below the hives I find drones that have been escorted from the hive, some with force, as they are no help in the rigors of winter. The girls don’t tolerate big and useless creatures. I think I know how they would vote, especially following the loss of RBG. Maybe I’m wrong. I didn’t ask anyone in my bee Association how they were voting. My closest bee friend is also the man I’d call in the middle of the night, if I needed something. He’s a thoughtful and kind man, whose vote will cancel mine.

The Linden trees will not help my bees today or in their eight-week lifespan. They may not be much help to me either for the similar reason. You don’t plant a tree for today; you plant for the blossoms it will provide to others who may not even know your name. A few weeks ago, we harvested honey from nectar from trees Moravians planted without knowing that me and my bees would thank them someday.

Democracy–fragile, tender and organic–is like that. A group can clear-cut it to make sticks to match their stones and beat those they consider enemies to pulp. Win! Every democracy that has ever been experiences its own failure, sometimes death. But we try to construct agreements to weather the unpredictable fire and storms of human social life. We try to anticipate how our best selves might survive our occasional worst. The young experiment called the United States has done pretty well as these things tend to go considering the potentially fatal compromise at our root—slavery and later toleration of decade after decade of gross disparity.

Some consider those issues to be in our past, exaggerated to make the current administration look bad. Not Black moms with young men for whom they are afraid to jog down the street, drive across town or bird watch. And it is not in the past for any public health department watching the COVID data replicate the pattern of almost every other viral phenomenon from cancer to gun-shots, metabolic syndrome to environmental pathologies. Case and Deaton, in their landmark work around diseases of despair shocked the world by tracing the decline in American longevity rates to working-class white men experiencing structural vulnerability that denied them a way to make an honorable living. Humiliated and trapped, they are experiencing something not entirely unlike the phenomenon common to Black men for four hundred years. As usual, the mostly White elites channel that outrage in ways that seem illogical against the Black and Brown men, not those driving the structural causes. The humiliation is so painful that it cries out for immediate release, logical or not.

Some empathy and respect would help, although likely to be lost in the cacophony of internet-speed clang and gotcha. Empathy develops slow, as slow as the speed of trust.

Another friend, Mike Heisler, sent me a book this week by Timothy Snyder, “On Tyranny.” It is “20 lessons from the 20^th century” about how to live in these times of liquid anger and fragile polity that RBG hoped to outlive. Snyder fears the people Linwood trusts, just as Linwood fears the people I trust. Lesson 12 is “make eye contact and small talk.” Synder says that “In the most dangerous of times, those who escape and survive generally know people whom they can trust. Having old friends is the politics of last resort. And making new ones is the first step toward change.”

Justices Ginsburg and Scallia were friends who enjoyed each other’s company enough laugh. My daughter Lauren had dinner with Rex Tillerson at the opening of one of her plays (he, a great patron of theater!). Linwood and I will plant Linden together 44 days before the election. I’ll cheer for his daughter’s basketball team, even if I don’t for his candidate. In a sense, that makes no sense. But democracy is not about logical sense—certainly not about winning. It does help messy humans live in between clarities when the best we can hope for is non-violent compromise. It good for muddling our way when nothing can make complete sense. Good for these times.

I feel exposed by the loss of a tiny 87-year old justice in the same way I did with the loss of John Lewis two months and two days ago. They deserve to rest in peace, honored by grateful generations. We haven’t earned that peace or honor, but there is still time. Can anyone be confused about how to honor them? Respect the structures of legal process, support social institutions, the dignity of professional ethics, the essential decency of labor serving the good of all people. Have faith. Vote.

And embrace the process of planting for others to harvest. I gently free the Linden from its plastic container, tenderly loosening the roots. I put my hands into the soil of the hole I’ve dug so it can welcome the roots home. I am not the Linden, or the soil, much less the rainfall or sun. Just one human grateful to have a chance to give life a chance.

Four trees in a trunk, two more in the passenger seat. Planting for the future sometimes requires looking a bit silly today. I’m okay with that.

Thanks for the fish

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mainsail

Charlie Wolfe, among my very favorite humans. His future is not determined, especially by any of the other 7 billion.

Perhaps you’ve met a human. You have noticed that we can be hard to help. Perhaps you’ve been to a planet like Earth and noticed the same thing, except 7 billion different ways. How do you help something with 7 billion moving parts be healthier?

Advancing population health depends on understanding not just the medical problems, but the drivers of health ….at community scale …over time. Those drivers are largely social and they are not determinants because none of the 7 billion of us humans are determined. Words guide our imagination, shape our ability to talk about what to fear and what to hope for. So it is a big deal to see the 100 Million Lives Campaign “determinants” for “drivers.”

It important for every grown up in any position to influence a single life to talk about life as changeable and chooseable—but shaped by power drivers that have to be confronted. This is especially true for the grown-ups in positions to influence the big social structures like hospitals or faith networks. Monday in Washington DC the Association of Academic Health Centers met to explore how their huge organizations can align themselves wit the leading edge understanding of the social drivers of health. This is a huge shift for them (us, as I am a VP of one….). They brought in the big voices including none other than Dr. Michael Marmot the author of the stunningly powerful studies of social position over time (The Health Gap.). And our friend Dr. Denise Koo one of the principle forces behind the new array of useful tools emerging from the CDC such as the Community Health Improvement Navigator. (http://stakeholderhealth.org/cdc-community-health-improvement-navigator/).

salamis The closing panel of the whole conference was our “ground game” in Winston-Salem. This was explained AND embodied by Jeremy Moseley our Director of Community Engagement and Annika Archie the lead Supporter of Health, with Dr. TC laying down the data beat like a bass player in a jazz ensemble. I had two minutes at the end to set a metaphor like a sail to catch the wind of the spirit moving where you wouldn’t expect it.

The social drivers engage the role of an hospital not just as a provider of therapies, but as a social presence—usually the very largest social/political/economic structure in a community and region. This requires us to see ourselves from a community perspective: inside out and upside down. In Memphis we found ourselves in a covenant relationship with more than 600 congregations that pulled us inside out. In Winston-Salem we have followed the deeply grounded intelligence found in some of our lowest wage workers into relationships that are not just inside-out, but upside down or, better, right side up. We were steering toward life, not just away from death.

Proactive mercy is way cheaper than reactive charity. That’s the whole and complete logic of “population health management.” But if you don’t understand the humans, you can’t expect to be proactive. Being proactive depends on the intelligence about– and trust with– the neighborhoods where the costs of reactivity are concentrated. This requires not just the preeminent brilliance of our surgeons, but of all 14,000 humans on the team. Dr. McConnell and Annika Archie embodied this new deep discovery in the video interview he did with her (and me) last week (click here).

That’s what works.

It is new for big organizations to hold ourselves accountable for social factors. That has always been on the side, a by-product, an unintended consequence. Now it is central. Some say we should think of ourselves as “anchor institutions,” but that image reinforces our worst habits of domination. What could be worse than focusing on anchors of determinants? I’m depressed just typing it!

krusenstern_mainsails — The mainsails are the ones low and large. You leave them up so the ship can keep moving even in heavy seas.

We should be mainsail organizations.

The mainsail is the large sail on a clipper ship low and strong that you leave up even amid the heaviest weather and hardest storm. This includes the storm-tattered neighborhoods you can see outside the windows of urban medical center. You leave the mainsail up because in deep and heavy water you have to keep going or the waves will overwhelm you. The last thing you need is to drop an anchor. That’s what you see in Annika, Jeremy and TC and their hundreds of colleagues setting themselves to catch the same wind of Spirit– surgeons, nurses, social workers and revenue cycle VP’s– that share a hope and mission.

You can even hear it now from some our community partners, glad that we have finally joined them in their journey toward health. They don’t want an anchor; they want to go somewhere new.

Last Saturday our own Rev. Dr. Francis Rivers received the major award from the Hispanic League of Winston-Salem honoring him (and the FaithHealth team) for leaning way into the heavy seas of anti-immigrant venom surging currently in North Carolina in creating the ID Drive. Francis’ award honored him, but also his mainsail organization–and not just the tiny part of it called FaithHealth. The medical center put up a big sail amid very heavy seas that helped other key institutions do their critical work. The Sheriff, police, DA, a network of churches called Love Out Loud, many Hispanic organizations and Que Pasa media). And don’t forget the most important FaithAction—the small faith-based organization that does the actual work of validating identity so that an ID card can be issued and trusted.

ship A fully rigged sailing ship is a very complicated thing with many sails and miles of rigging. So, too, is any network of partners committed to helping their community move away from the rocks and into a safe harbor. But none of the partners could have stepped into the heavy wind themselves, much less alone. That role was for the mainsail and a ship built for deep water.

You might be so embarrassed by all the mean hateful things religious people are doing these days that you want to stop the metaphor right there. But you’d be leaving out the most interesting part of sailing—the wind. The sail doesn’t have any power; it only catches the wind. Greek traces the same word for wind to breath and… Spirit.

We know in North Carolina that the Spirit can blow toward or away from the rocks; it depends on the skill of the sailors and the courage of those who climb up the rigging and set the sails. These are days filled with stupid religious venom, so I don’t blame anyone who wants to move culture and institutions and society without faith. But nothing at cultural scale ever happens without Spirit blowing really hard. You can stay below decks and hope for the best. Or you can find someone who know how to set a mainsail and head to deep water. Francis, Annika, Enrique and the others on the edge, live way up in the rigging where the wind blows with raw power. They teach us to its respect power, but not to fear.

Dr. King spoke realistically when he said “the arc of history bends toward justice.” It is a slow bending curve, more tectonic than sharp. We don’t choose this way or that, but lend our days to the slow bend, helping each other keep courage for the long turning. We set our sails for heavy seas and a long arc toward a horizon worth the journey.

Faith with

Across the street from The Garfield Conservatory, a block away from the L, a gaggle of geese find their away amid the urban mysteries. — Across the street from The Garfield Conservatory, a block away from the L, a gaggle of geese find their way amid the urban mysteries.

There were years when I was across the ocean that I would tell people I was from Canada to avoid explaining US politics. People in more normal countries dumbfounded my people would be found dumb enough to vote for a California actor obviously reading someone else’s lines to fill the most intellectually demanding job in history. Some Americans still talk of him with reverence, which is hard to explain. But since we elected our Harvard lawyer, it’s been a lot easier to travel.

Its not any easier being a Christian than an American. I work in fields with lots of science going on so am occasionally held to account for my faith. Nobody cares enough enough to hurt me for it, as in olden days. But for those who otherwise like me (sometimes including my children), it bears explaining how an apparently intelligent person would identify as a member of Jesus’ or any tradition of faith. Like claiming Canada next door, it is easier to say something vaguely ethical rather than saying I go to that most odd of all human assemblies, a church.

Francis has helped. But even in a week in which it would really hard to screw up being a Christian, we have had nutters from Arkansas chattering away near microphones embarrassing generations of Christians. If Francis watched any TV while he was here last week, he probably thought about taking his robe off to just blend in with the homeless.

We think of programs as independent and accountable, but actually they weave, influencing each other and shaping the whole. — We think of our traditions and learning groups as independent and accountable, but actually they weave, influencing each other and shaping the whole.

I think of our traditions—mine being Christian—as learning groups more than knowing groups. My most powerful relationships are like that, such as the Africa Religious Health Assets Program (ARHAP) led by Jim Cochrane, Steve DeGruchy, Paul Germond and now Jill Olivier. A whole literature has emerged from its thoughtful journey, now thousands of pages. Groups don’t learn in a straight line and sometimes wander into dead ends (especially when they put on conferences with papers). But if we keep our learning grounded, we can find our way back out. AHRAP accumulated epic stories of finding, naming and mapping. But its most useful tools are those for optimistic searching (such as the assets mapping now about to be trusted by hospitals, public health and community partners in Tacoma).

That curious community spun off another one pursuing just one of its questions, about the Leading Causes of Life. Those Fellows cross the strangest boundaries of intellect and miles, as great questions always have and will draw us.

Stakeholder Health was originally the “Health Systems Learning Group” and remains useful when in learning mode. We’ve are drawn to the questions that lie in between hospitals and their neighborhoods, borrowing and bending the language of clinical, public and population health. The questions look technical, but draw us into deeper waters.

Technical kinds of answers are not the most interesting or obvious thing being learned. Along the way we have been learning about the defining characteristic of our group—most of us as both individuals and institutions were of faith. But not all of us are officially faith-ish, which is what makes the whole group so interesting. We’ve talked and sometimes argued about whether Stakeholder Health is “based” on has “faith.” What we mean by those words? Is it important? Does Henry Ford Health System have enough to count just because it has among the very largest network of faith community nurses in the nation? It reflects the man named Henry Ford, not Jesus, but sustains an often sacrificial mission finding innovations where a mere corporation would flee. What’s the name of that driving spirit? Most hospitals with religious names on their buildings don’t think or act any differently toward their patients, neighbors or employees—and many much worse—than massively profitable Cancer Centers of America. But some do find the wells of compassion to give their life away decade after decade. Iconic little Bon Secours in West Baltimore sure does and, yes, those are nuns all over that history, just as surely as the Pope is Catholic.

Many of our organizations are now merged and morphed—Brooklyn Lutheran part of staunchly secular academic NYU. The blended hospital and medical school called Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center will discover the cure for cancer before we figure out what to do with that middle word in our name. These complicated relationships are being carried by what we are learning, not by what we are based on; faith more like a sail to catch the spirit than anchor to hold us back.

We are who we walk with along our learning way. (Kevin, TC and me. Jim Cochrane holding the camera.)

People from outside hospitals notice that interesting things are happening inside. Peter Berger edited a special edition of “Society” looking at the complicated dynamics of faith in modern hospitals. Some of the pieces are not brilliant, even borderline snarky. But Berger’s introduction is tantalizing as he speaks of those of working inside the places: “They cope with reality in both secular and religious terms and they find ways (not necessarily coherent theoretically) of applying the two discourses in different parts of their lives. Is that feasible? We already know it is. The interesting question is how it is done! The question suggests a fascinating research agenda.” (Society, October 2015, Volume 52, Issue 5, pp 410-412)

Last week the learners of Stakeholder Health convened in the Garfield Conservatory in West Chicago, which for more than a century has protected space for the flowering of learning about plants. Its human story is as exotic as the plants, especially how they won’t quit when surrounded, literally, by gangs or rapacious politicos. Or when only a year after the massive dome was built, thousands of panes of glass protecting the tender palms had to be replaced because the wood frames were rotting (cheap wood). You’d think God would protect arboretums along with fools, but it turns out not.

It often takes a learning community decades to flower, especially when the questions outlast the curious. Jerry Paul, who led Deaconess Hospital in St. Louis and then its equally faithful foundation, formed when the hospital was no longer needed and lent his intellect to the founding of ARHAP, died suddenly in May of fast-moving cancer. Steve DeGruchy died in fast moving water before he even wrote his real book. Larry Pray has lived through another and then another and another stroke stealing his memory even as his spirit is defined by poetic appreciation for life. I’m not so young myself.

Faith is a fellowship, not just a bundle of ideas; marked more by with, than what.

We find life in the questions that outlive our answers.

We are defined by those with whom we seek.

We are what we find in each other.

We are what we think about and how we help each other learn.

We are what we ask of each of other.

We are what we notice in other groups also finding their way, by how we lend and borrow.

We are not the first or smartest humans to do all this.

We find nobility in humility before faith and its mysteries, complicities and community formed and still forming across the years.

It’s Sunday morning after the two big storms have passed; I think I’ll head up to church.

Improbable Lessons

This palm was planted at the Garfield Conservatory in 1926. It takes time and tending over generations to get something like this. — This palm was planted at the Garfield Park Conservatory in 1926. It takes time and tending over generations to get something like this.

Between Pope Francis and the nine Charleston “Saints” whose deadly witness held us just as rivited a few months ago it is obvious to all that faith is not synonymous with stupid, mean and irrelevant. They are helping us see through the stars, bars and blather to something real. If you need forgiveness, intelligence, mature compassion, it is a reasonable idea to look toward an institution where faith has been nurtured over a few centuries, or, in the Pope’s case, millennia. If something lasts longer than one lifetime, or even a season in one lifetime, it is likely that there is a tradition involved, ecology not just of one, but many institutions. The Pope, for all his evident virtues, did not invent or elect himself to the role of Pope. The very institution that has been so egregiously, yes, criminally, complicit with some of the worst imaginable abuses of power and privilege turned around, found its best possible self and—who could imagine it—found a guy to fill the role that has electrified the nuns, nones and nearly anyone with a heartbeat. The Saints of Charleston who died–and the hundreds more that lived to forgive–were not a random gaggle of what really good people, but a fellowship born and formed with those easy-to-dismiss rhythms of bible study, song and prayer that turned out to be—when tested on a horrible afternoon—to be stronger than speeding bullets.

The Zaban Room at The Carter Center has held hundreds of creative, improbablyy hopeful meetings. This one anchored by Ray Fabious, CareNet and Ron Mandershieim on integrating Spirit into Population Health. — The Zaban Room at The Carter Center has held hundreds of creative, improbablyy hopeful meetings. This one anchored by Ray Fabius, CareNet and Ron Manderscheid on integrating Spirit into Population Health.

On Wednesday a small group of experts in behavioral and population health gathered at The Carter Center (named for a Baptist deacon who knows about formation even unto the edge of death). The “we” included Ron Mandersheid and Ray Fabius, who has literally written the textbook on population health (second edition!) before most of us heard the term at all. He was with us after gaining specific permission from his mom so that he could travel on Yom Kippur, a day held sacred across not two, but four millennia and counting. Why? Because the subject was how to integrate the sacred, the Spirit, into the work of behavioral health as it is integrated into large-scale population scale programs. One of the questions alive in the room was how to accelerate and shift “health” from being all about disease and preventing toward the positive dynamic we hope for.

What does “faith” know about that, given that from the outside, the institutions of faith seem to be mostly about not doing things? What does faith know about life that could be integrated into—maybe even illuminate—population health? The answer isn’t in the tricks of faith-based behavior modification that drizzle a bit of ritual razzle-dazzle over the dreary goop that “wellness” programs use. It is about the practices, disciplines—traditions—that shape we humans over the complexities of life together on this spinning and wobbly planet. Those traditions help us adapt to unpredictability, with a huge toolbox relevant to failure, forgiveness, resilience and hope. And the traditions themselves adapt—as Pope Francis is modeling in real time brilliant humility.

Dr. Kimberly Dawn Wisdom of Henry Ford Health System is one of the springs of intelligence within Stakeholder Health.

While the Pope was doing his best to tend to America’s soul one Speaker at a time, the leadership of Stakeholder Health was working in Chicago, where the FaithHealth movement was born, reborn and reborn many times, with another FaithHealth infant in the birth canal as I type. Stakeholder Health is a learning group of those who are living institutional lives, trying to find the shared intelligence, courage and community needed to nurture another round of transformation. What we want to learn the most is how to find and release the deep practical nobility found in the birth story of these hundreds and hundreds of faith-inspired healthcare organizations. Stakeholder Health includes a number of institutions that are not faith governed. Some of those, like Henry Ford and Nemours, spring from the social conscious of a vastly wealthy industrialist; others like ProMedica, MultiCare or Kaiser, express another community of social imagination. But all of us know we are drawing on more than our own toolkit of techniques and clever people. And we know we are doing so for a greater purpose than ourselves. All of us have an ear for the inconvenient cries for mercy rising up from the streets and neighborhoods we were born to serve. We know—as does anyone who has ever attended a church committee—that our institutions are deeply complicit with the banal evil of every status quo. Yet, we also know they are capable of nobility and of giving the moral energy of thousands of employees and their partners a chance to express itself at a scale unimaginable by one, two or a group of individuals.

This is what a man looks like, paralyzed as a teen-ager now giving his life twenty years later to interrupting the cycle of violence: "don't tell me you're too tired." — Levon Stone is what a man looks like: paralyzed as a teen-ager now giving his life twenty years later to interrupting the cycle of violence: “don’t tell me you’re too tired.”

We heard about the miracles born of wrenching change—the closing of Advocate Healthcare’s Bethany Hospital—with angry wounding community protests about broken trust. Out of which came the Advocate Bethany Community Health Fund, structured for transparency and partnership, to steward a million dollars a year into carefully defined West Chicago neighborhoods to strengthen the non-profit and faith organizations closest to those tough streets. We heard the radical simplicity of CeaseFire Chicago, which blends the power of ER chaplaincy (embodied by Richard James) with the brutally won integrity of one who has lived the life of violence and its paralyzing fruits (embodied by LeVon Stone). The “golden hour” is that which follows the bullet’s impact, doing all to break the cycle of retribution. If not forgiveness, maybe grace, at least resilience. It doesn’t always work; but it is almost the only thing that does work.

Dr. Carrie Nelson and Dr. Bonnie Condon unpack the complexities of aligning thousands of physicians for the health of the community.

And we learned from Dr. Carrie Nelson of the mammothly hopeful and excruciatingly complicated task of turning 4,500 Advocate Health physicians toward the work of health in exactly the same way that got Ray Fabius on the plane to The Carter Center. How exactly does that come to be, not just outside the walls of the hospital, but also outside the doctors’ exam rooms and maybe even on the streets in between?

We learn of each other’s best attempts, still caught and partial, filled with frustration and inertia. We become braver, not just smarter. We look at our little lives and decide to risk our reputations as professional grown-ups on things that have never yet worked before. So, all across the vast warren of Chicagoland streets, dozens of hospital are working together to coordinate their community health needs assessments, struggling with the insane arcana of cleaning and aligning data so it can be made coherent at large scale (sort of like making oil and watercolors blend in one painting!). It seems just impossible. But then it is possible, at least enough to encourage those in the heart of it to try a bit harder, to invite a few more partners (let’s paint with acrylics, too!). It isn’t smart enough, yet. But certainly wiser than anything ever before.

Even naming a collaborative learning document with seventy authors is hard! Stakeholder Health will find a way.

There are some thing that one can absorb by listening and others that only become known through the laborious process of writing. And some by the even harder process of collective writing. Stakeholder Health is working on a second “collaborative learning document” that can help us name and claim the land we are in now. We wrote the first before the Affordable Care Act had passed through the valley of shadows known as the Supreme Court. We are in a truly new place drawing hospitals over their institutional moat and public health into partnerships only dimly imagined (with hospitals????). Stakeholder Health knows that one of the greatest and most hopeful unknowns is whether and how the quiet innovations among congregations and faith networks can be woven into the fabric. Like weaving behavioral health and Spirit (surely, we can do this!), weaving congregational intelligence and energy looks obvious until one tries. Even in Memphis where it has been nearly institutionalized, it has failed to become adapted across the full spectrum of competing hospitals (or competing faith ministries!). We need to learn more and far more quickly about integrating the full spectrum the hopeful arts of faith and health. So we are writing a not-book quickly emerging from the field, ready for the field with ten (or is it 11) chapters marking our learning edges.

This is holy and profane work, the only kind we get to do on this planet. It is the only kind any humans have ever hoped to do. We think in these days of Dr. King’s hopeful counsel about the arc of history bending toward justice.

Martin Luther King as a potential student to Colgate Rochester Seminary, long before he came to know of arcs of history and mountaintops.

Gene Matthews, who was the General Counsel for the Centers for Disease Control ended the recent meeting of the NC Citizens for Public Health with the quote behind Dr. King’s quote. Among his genius was King’s eye for the shards of wisdom born of previous battles, this one given in 1853 by Theodore Parker to a Congress on Abolition, an earlier chapter of the work still calling us beyond disparities: “I do not pretend to understand the moral universe;

The arc is a long one, My eye reaches but a little ways; I can not calculate the curve and complete the figure by experience of sight; I can divine it by conscience.
And from what I see, I am sure it bends toward justice.

Trellis

The Surgeon General of the United States explains why his four biggest opportunities to advance health need relational infrastructure built on faith and community partners.

On Wednesday and Thursday this week, a wildly diverse group of leaders met in the White House to explore how to accelerate the growing alignment so necessary to advancing health and well-being of communities. Surgeon General Murthy laid the foundation with a sketch of a framework he will unwrap later this week in detail. But you could guess the outlines, which are pretty much the same priorities John Wesley laid out in his book, Primitive Physic, years ago, written before germs were invented. The reason this is new today is not because we have a new machine, but because have the possibility of new relationships of high capacity, capable of operating at scale. Keep saying that: building capacities for scale. They require what is now possible; rich interconnection between systems for food, mobility, the more complex systems of legal and illegal substances and the almost infinite array of systems relevant to emotional and mental balance. Oh my!

The challenge is the opposite of what you’d think: too many partners, not too few.

A trellis fits the plant it is intended to help find the light. Plants just need old sticks.

Tom Peterson tells me there are at least five million non-profit organizations in the world today, most of them created in the last half century, and almost every single one formed to do something somebody thinks useful for improving their community. It’s worse than that! Many more millions of for-profit companies have been formed in this same time, hoping to make money, but also to do something good in the process. Just check out kickstarter.com to get an idea. The ecology of human forms of association is rich, complex, interconnected and adapting at the speed of electrons. This is terrific if you need lots and lots of relationships. It is daunting if you think someone should be in charge of organizing them.

The Surgeon General does not aspire to organize 5 million of anything. But he does hope they (we) can organize ourselves in ways that can make it more likely that 21^st century science (including, but far beyond everything Wesley knew about) can get into the lives of people and neighborhoods.

Many trellis builders think a lot more about their wooden art than they do about the plants.

One idea that has been popular, but rarely successful, is forming a backbone organization to achieve “collective impact.” I think it’s the wrong body part for the job, preferring something more like the intelligence of the liver or gut. But it is often useful for relatively small problems with simple answers, such as building a lot of homes in a particular city. When used for big and complex challenges, the backbone is often overwhelmed by all the partners and ends up simplifying things by leaving new ones out. The backbone’s limited number of vertebrae is the same list of privileged partners that always end up around the table. The idea of a table at which things are decided is part of the problem: you can’t fit 5 million people around any table.

On Thursday we tried on a different mental model better suited for organic complexity: the trellis. A trellis is not a miracle; it’s just useful to support the miracles of photosynthesis so that plants do what they want to do—bear fruit. The gardener (and the movement organizer) trusts the process, but doesn’t make the process do all the work. I like wine, and know that good wine needs just the right soil (developed over many thousands of years) and just the right rain (which depends on picking just the right valley and sun, not too hot and not too cold), so that magic happens. But it helps if the vines don’t just run every which way on the ground, so they have developed a near science of trellis design to fit different grapes.

Some trellis are built for the decades the vines mature through.

A movement is more complicated than grapes—and right now we have vines running every which way. It would help if we did the humble work of building some trellis on which could grow a rich array of relationships to bear the fruit the Surgeon General imagines possible. There are four main kinds of trellises:

Conceptual. Stakeholder Health emerged as a learning group, which collectively created a monograph to map the conceptual trellis on which healthcare systems could fulfill their missions. It is really good, but like other kinds of conceptual trellises, it needs to be rebuilt for a new season of work (stay tuned on stakeholderhealth.org). The learning community will need to be much larger and even more interdisciplinary than the intellectual gaggle that did the first one. It will need a relational trellis on which grow (and prune) those fruitful concepts.
Programmatic. The Surgeon General’s call for broad activity is not a call to do 10,000 different things, but to find alignment around four that could be transformational. Thousands of us can find a coherent role in food and we can understand our work as linked. Nobody is exactly in charge of it, but a well-built programmatic trellis helps us we can find power and meaning in contributing to a very large collective change.
Institutional. The YMCA is 3,000 local organizations, which have changed quite radically from the original shelters for young men to today’s iconic role as suburban fitness conglomerates. Now it is changing again, to embrace its extraordinary role very aligned with the Surgeon General’s vision. There are many other examples of old structures finding new relevance. But in every case, it is tough work. The 3,000 Y’s have 900 local Boards!

Some plants (like some types of congregations)(yours, Michael Minor!) are so smart they can grow up a string. But the string still needs some support.

Michael Minor is the midwife of the National Baptist Convention’s 60,000 congregations move toward health; but every one of them has its own Board of Deacons that will need to catch the same wind of the Spirit. So, too, the 33,000 United Methodist churches, hundreds of Jewish Community Centers and dozens of faith-based hospitals. “Can dry bones live?” asked Ezekiel. Can an old trellis bear new fruit?

Narrative. We humans live by story, far more than objective data. A movement with capacity and scale needs a narrative trellis, so that each of us, in our many roles as members, leaders, citizens and healers, can locate our personal story in the thread of a great story. We need the bards, writers and artists to help us tune ourselves to resonate to a greater tone.

Community Health Assets Mapping, here led by Teresa Cutts, makes visible the assets already alive in a place. This enables the community leaders to imagine a new kind of trellis of relationships. And then they can build it. — Community Health Assets Mapping, here led by Teresa Cutts, makes visible the assets already alive in a place–the stuff that wants to grow. This enables the community leaders to imagine a new kind of trellis of relationships. And then they can build it.

We watched the video of the murmuration of the starlings, a mesmerizing image of complex beauty (here). Are we like starlings? They dance in the sky forming patterns beyond words. But they are all starlings and know how to act with each other. We are not alike (Kirsten Peachey said the group is more like a dozen starlings, and a hawk that eats starlings, and a horse, pig and potato). Not as pretty in motion. Or maybe it just takes time to find our common energy. The International Science Times, reflecting on the video, says that the way the birds dance is managed “by constantly avoiding collision. Generally, they were taking their lead from the bird directly in front of and below them, rather than the birds to the sides or above.” If you can’t understand how that metaphor applies to humans, you have never tried to lead a committee.

And we watched a YouTube video about how reintroducing the wolves in Yellowstone are changing not just the wildlife, but birds, berries, beavers and the flow of the rivers—the whole ecology (watch it here). Maybe we can change more than we think! So we howled (literally, we howled, which may be the first time that’s happened in White House since Andrew Jackson let in the rabble from the streets!).

Arvind Sindal used his many creative meeting structures to unleash a torrent of transparent brilliance. This is the "fishbowl" with healthcare providers in the middle. Pretty smart, but the questions from the outside were the real brilliance. — Arvind Singhal used his many creative meeting structures to unleash a torrent of transparent brilliance. This is the “fishbowl” with healthcare providers in the middle. Pretty smart, but the questions from the outside were the real brilliance.

Or maybe we are just human grown-ups influencing our own complex systems as we try to live our way into the new possibilities. Many of us this week find our story in the Great Story of faith; we think we are agents of a redemptive process that has never quit, despite entire centuries of bleak reversal. We think that God is not quite done with our tiny planet or even with us, flawed and tiny people.

As we were meeting, astronomers were reporting more evidence that the ingredients for life are astonishingly abundant in places beyond counting at distances beyond imagination. The vast reaches of reality are swirling with the ingredients of life. The places once imagined as impossibly cold and hostile are just waiting for the right relationships to emerge. “Life finds a way,” said Jonas Salk, who was one of the first who thought that life rode into Earth on the comets.

Life is still finding a way—even in the hostile barrenness of Washington DC. It turns out there is a richer array of the basic ingredients than we’d been led to expect. But don’t make the process do all the work, unless you have a few million years worth of patience to move at the speed of stars.

I turn 64 Monday and need to pick up the pace a bit. It is very good news that we don’t need to invent the life. But we do have to thoughtfully craft the trellis. Let’s get on with it.

Carolina tears

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

Hearts break today in North Carolina.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

City of Light

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

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

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

Can mercy be brave as violence?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Do this.

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

Do this.

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

Do this.

New blade

Six decades later I can still hear the screaming whine of this saw as my dad crafted cabinets with it.

I peered through a hole in our basement wall into a cloud of sawdust where my father fed a piece of wood into the spinning blade. The sound was painfully high loud and powerful, such that I can still hear it, now almost six decades later. I was two or so and learned later the wood was pine, as was all the rest of the cabinets in the home I grew up in, crafted with a mixture of love and parsimony by Dad. The saw, made by Rockwell, eventually became mine and used for most of my adult life as I, too, ripped, spliced, joined and paneled every place I’ve landed. The saw was a primal link to Dad, but over time whined, smoked and wobbled more and more. Once, back when I was earning my living with it doing remodeling, I was moving it from a job site when it bounced out of my nearly-as-old pickup truck, breaking on the pavement. Ken Sehested, knowing my despair, found a friend to weld the key cast iron gear back together, so it lived to wobble on in my life. But eventually the damn thing could no longer hold an angle, sometimes cutting a perfect 45, but more likely 50 or, the other day, 60 degrees. This makes very ugly joinery.

Now wobbling, smoking and whining, the saw prevents, not enables, good work. Dad would not be happy.

Dad would have hated the crappy quality the saw made inevitable and surely would have found any link with him something of an insult. I finally had to distinguish between clinging to nostalgia and actually honoring my Dad’s woodcraft. So I went to Lowe’s, channeled his spirit, and bought a solid Kobota table saw. I’m in the last stages of a new bathroom in TC and my condo near Old Salem and now have a chance at doing the finish work in a way that the Moravians and Dad would find acceptable.

Our lives are filled with the artifacts of those in whose shoes we walk, feeling our feet slightly too small for the journey. Just before Christmas I met with the ethics committee of the medical center, which had been established by the iconic surgeon, Eben Alexander, decades ago (he’s the dad of the recently famous one who wrote about “proof of heaven.”) The committee he started is still appointed by the chief medical officer, also a surgeon. Although medicine and the health sciences are less and less about what happens inside the medical hotel called “hospital,” the focus of the ethics committee continues to be almost entirely at the surgeon’s elbow. It thinks mostly about what the doctor should do or stop doing. Our current model of bioethics is not looking at the CFO’s spreadsheet, or COO’s deployment plans, or the Board’s capital decisions voting millions to build another office in the burbs, even those decisions shape the life and death for thousands of people over time. One can imagine Dr. Alexander shouting, “I started it; you go the next step!”

Surely dad is glad I finally put down the nostagia and picked up a decent tool for work that honors him. — Surely dad is glad I finally put down the nostalgia and picked up a decent tool for work that honors him.

Every nook and cupboard among the health field is filled with guilds, national associations (with local chapters!), honoring this and that habitual practice and committee that made some sense long ago. They all have founders and officers—and sometimes even endowments(!)—but have long lost their capacity to cut cleanly or make useful connections. They have not moved with the science that gives more and more power to the integrated strategies managing conditions over time outside the professional enclaves. We live a long time now mainly because of better food and pharma not because we get surguries frequently. So there are way more ethical implications in the price of drugs than when or whether a surgeon does a procedure. They obstruct and no longer aid the joining of good science to good intentions. We need to honor our moral legacy with a new set of intellectual tools nearly as much as I needed a new saw.

We honor those who have given us life by acting with the creative courage they showed in their time; not by doing the same things their courage demanded then, but doing what courage demands now. We grown-up humans build things out of brick and steel. And we craft habits and patterns of power that guide the flow of money and time to the new glass towers. All these artifacts look solid and lasting, but they are as blowing sand at the beach.

Twice a day the tides wash the in-between land of the marshes.

I am typing this at St. Helena Island, South Carolina watching another morning tide move another day’s load of sand a few feet up the shore. These are called barrier islands because they protect the vital salt marshes which the tides wash twice a day, nurturing its wildly generative life. Very little important happens on the beach; all the life stuff happens in the muck and goop where the shrimp and a zillion other things are born and nurtured before heading to sea. The sand islands protect this vitality because they constantly move and adapt dynamically to the next big storm and even the next shift in climate rising the level of the seas.

Old maps tell the tale: the beaches move; the marshes live on.

In the handful of centuries white humans have settled here, the islands have moved miles. From the top of the 132 foot high light house you can see a few miles to the waves north east where the old one once stood. This new one (1889) is built to move again. Geologists know the whole chain of islands have moved back and forth for millennia. They last because they are dynamic; they serve life because they change. They are like tools built for a season of good craft.

The scope points 8 miles away and a quarter mile off shore where the lighthouse once stood.

Those of us holding positions of influence in institutions like to think our work and our organizations are the key to the life of our communities. Smart people at Stanford play to this pretense by suggesting adaptive change is dependent on “collective impact” organized by “anchor institutions.” These ideas are not just wrong, but dangerously misleading. Living communities don’t need to be impacted, but nurtured; they don’t need more anchors but heart, muscle and guts that serve movement. They do need protection from the raw tides, heavy winds and bitter storms, but protection in the service of change, not protection from it.

What else does any leader have to do that protect the creative energy so that it generates life? Do we have something better to do than that. Whether we are stewards of a church or hospital or public health agency or community health center, the life does not come from the edges, but the heart. I learned in Memphis that if I could protect the creative space for those who usually don’t have much power, they would craft beautiful and useful structure perfectly joined to the possibilities the neighborhoods needed. That process is the “Memphis Model” not the specific apparatus that emerged at that point in time. Don’t confuse the craft (mercy and care) for the cabinet (the structure) and certainly not the wobbly saw (me).

Leaders give life a chance by protecting the generative spaces in which life emerges, especially when those spaces need the complex processes over time. Any human community is way more complex than any salt marsh.

This is almost exactly the opposite of the role big institutions want to play. The leaders of the big things like hospitals can always rent consultants who are happy to tell us to tell the neighborhoods how they should live and how they should change, not us. The model for this is the old way that beach engineers tried to build concrete barriers to stop the tides and the natural shift of the sand (sort of like the one now under 40 feet of water a quarter mile from shore). The more we think like anchors, the more we’re in the way of life, which will most certainly have its way with us.

Roots are a kind of anchor that serve for a time and then not.

This is why I find surprising hope in the small stirring of faith and faithfulness in the faith-inspired healthcare systems of Stakeholder Health. Just about the time when you think smart and cynical are the same thing, along comes life to surprise us. In reality sometimes, large institutions such as foundations and hospitals can provide some shelter amid the raw power of the market forces (the “hurricane” in my extended metaphor). We can be barrier islands against the forces of raw money power, preserving the neighborhoods’ function as the salt marsh where life flourishes and creates the next generation. It actually does happen sometimes. It could happen more.

Francis Rivers Meza, one of our faculty in the FaithHealth Division, shared an article by Patricia Fernández-Kelly (2012): “Rethinking the deserving body: altruism, markets, and political action in health care provision,” in the journal Ethnic and Racial Studies. (click here for the article). She explores the way that religious organizations, including the huge ones such as hospitals, sometimes choose to act against the logic of the capital markets, providing crucial buffering for neighborhoods of poor and often stigmatized people. And they do this on purpose with craft and skill year after year. The authors cite one of our stakeholder health friends, Baptist Healthcare of South Florida and their long term work in Homestead Florida, a place that knows all about the need for barriers against storms.

Life finds a way, Jonas Salk liked to say. Jason McLennan, writing in Yes! Magazine this month says, “If there is one thing that’s certain, it’s that the future hasn’t happened yet.” Bingo! Honor both past and future by helping life finding its next way, not by protecting our old way.

The lighthouse just across the inlet above the gull. Everything moves; life finds a way.