Hold.Health – garygunderson Blog

Astrological

The eclipse drew a hundred of us to the ancient meadow hill that had seen earlier and better eclipses. This one got to about 90%, so the birds noticed and the light got weird. But the weather was so clear that we had to look at each other to decide if it had actually come and gone.

The eclipse drew a hundred of us to the ancient meadow hill that had seen better eclipses. This one got to about 90%, so the birds noticed and the light got weird. But it was still too sunny so we had to look at each other to decide if it had actually come and gone.

The last really good one was in 129 when the Romans had their boot on the neck of Brigante tribe. They would probably would have watched from the hill across the Aire Valley where a modest neolithic stone circle has seen a hundred eclipses. The Romans huddled in their posh villa.

In 629 another eclipse darkened Skipton briefly. The Romans left a clutter of petty kingdoms when they left. The Vikings would come a bit later. Skipton was part of Craven that survived in the fluid boundaries of the Saxons and Anglos, with everyone keeping an eye on the crazies to the north later known as Scots. This was not really a “civilization falls in flames” situation like our squabble feels like to us. But maybe it was more what the formerly proud Americans will be living through for the next couple of decades. The people kept their name—still called Craven, 2,000 years after Hadrian visited the tribes. But everything changed.

Even an incomplete astrological phenomenon puts our little human squabbles in context. It briefly gets my mind off of how ICE is writing down license plates in church parking lots to track Christians resisting our wanna-be petty king. They can just ask for mine. In 70 days his chariot’s wheels will fall off when the new Congress is elected. It might take till next March for them to start cleaning up the shambles, but they will do so. This may may not seem of astrological scale, but it is our little tribe and it matters to us.

*Fiddlesticks from about 300 feet above Bank Newton. Thank you DJI drone.*

We fight among ourselves like the Brigantes did before the Romans, who rolled in like China with ascendant technologies. My new boat heater is Chinese and is powered by Chinese solar panels as is the drone that shot this picture of it.

America may not be of astrological scale, but it’s ours and we should do the best we can in our time. Lets start by ridding ourselves of this petty tyrant and his lesser spawn who are so shamelessly leaving our government a hollowed out shambles. This collapse of democracy is impossible to explain to our British friends, since the whole point of the revolution was to get rid of their shameless tyrant. The Brits are not naive about the self-serving American people, as he is not our first transactional leader. Churchill was fighting the Nazis with nothing but his oratory from his London bunker while we were callously turning away inconvenient Jewish ships and bargaining to trade destroyers for Caribbean islands. We did eventually show up to help, but only after a river of British blood had flowed out of a thousand villages. Even so the Brits still honor us in ways we are now radically disrespecting. Not easy to be an American in a pub these days.

And its a lot harder to be an American in a Quaker meeting! We’ll be part of the remarkable Quaker silent march for peace in London September 19th. And we’ll be back to North Carolina to vote. And we’ll be part of the people rising up to ensure the petty tyrant is peacefully ushered back to whatever golden rock he crawled out from. Let him keep all his stolen crap; just go away.

*It is hard to describe the transcendent beauty of the natural life of the Dales, but we have paused in awe for millenia.*

Humans have understood the movement of planets for millennia. The Aztecs, Mayan, Lascaux and Druids all had their versions of stone circles to precisely capture the first light of the new season. Our IPhones are just the latest technology to tell us when the totality would pass over us in the meadow as we stood in our moment of awe.

How odd it is that we continually forget the arts and crafts of human relationships that make life possible. Every generation has to relearn how to deal with Roman provincials and their tribal underlords. Or the petty kings of Craven. Or the brothers in the colonies who were so clever with their 3/5th of a human arithmetic, as they spoke of natural rights of all people. And our shambles of a government now.

We have unprecedented connectional tools that somehow fail to connect us at all.The tyrants and their entrepreneurial vassals seem so powerful. But maybe it too easy for us to speak truth to the power who have everything but truth to work with, so we underestimate how much power we have. Blogs are like drones in this new era. They may not seem like much, but notice who is controlling Hormuz.

We must claim our lives in the places and predicaments in which we live now. The Brigantes couldn’t vote, but we can. So before reaching for the spear, make sure you are registered to vote and make damn sure your vote is counted.

It is not too late for money to matter for people you wish to govern. TC and I keep sending money to candidates like Roy Cooper and, locally, Amy North. It makes me happy to send funds to Talarico (my favorite seminary student) and Dan Koh, Howard’s son in Massachusetts. And Vote Common Good, William Barber, Interfaith Alliance and Move On. Don’t forget your local democratic party office. They are the ones that cross the finish line at precinct level.

*It is always worth paying attention to important cycles from eclipses to elections.*

And don’t just send your money, get on their websites, volunteer and show up.

Now.

Don’t wait for the next eclipse.

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Who we are

*It was critical to the painter/prophets of Lauscaux to locate humans among other species. How much more important for us now?*

You may have noticed that we live amid many ugly and cruel inhumanities in shockingly unexpected places, most weird of all, the land three religions call Holy. We seem to be getting worse. Last century was likely the most violent of our species long trail and this one is not shaping up well.

In 1940 Nazi-occupied Bordeaux, four teenagers stumbled across a cave near Lascaux that had been undisturbed for 18,000 years. One found it, looking for his dog, who had disappeared up on the side of an unremarkable hill, not mind-bending art. One of them was Jewish, living in the village hoping to be invisible. But the dog had gotten stuck in the entrance. Once all four crawled inside, they quickly realized they were in a limestone cathedral. They were the first humans in 18 thousand years to look up at Actual Intelligence.

I followed those boys along with TC and two grandsons and my daughter Lauren, who has written a play about the caves that will be premiered at the Roundhouse Theater next year. Ryan Rillette, the artistic Director, arranged the visit to the caves and walked in awe with us.

The painter prophets of Lascaux were us, minus IPhones, our plastic avalanche and 2,000 pound bombs dropped mindlessly on strangers. But they were probably no better or worse, smarter or dumber, than we. About the same size, same vocal chords, brains and posture with which to speak, sing, dance and do art of a very high order. They ate a lot of reindeer, which they did not think any more sacred than we do chickens, so did not paint them. Standing below the paintings, I see that while we’ve learned a lot, we have perhaps forgotten more.

*The point wasn’t to celebrating killing the deer, but to SEE the animal in its vitality. Notice the breath!*

The cave was painted by people set apart by such sophisticated nuance that they inspired Picasso. They painted animals so vivid they moved, swam and leaped on the walls. You can almost smell the breath of the bull and draw back from the bear’s claws. They didn’t just paint on the rock; they studied it so closely that they used its texture to give perspective and dynamism. It was part of their palette: the calcite in one place made the pigments leap; the limestone in another gave a different aura to the animals.

They seem to have chosen the cave partly because it was oriented so, at the summer solstice, it would catch the sun to make the cathedral vibrate and dance.

Why would they pour time and energy into something in the ground? It would be arrogant to think we know. But the auroch, buffalo, bear and elk our fellow humans painted shows it was important to them to know who they were as humans among a complex order of species. That is exactly what we have forgotten.

*See how the animals are in and among each other in such muscular vitality and presence.*

With such high technical proficiency, they would probably like our IPhones. But they would pity us for not knowing who we are and where we live.

Who are we? We are animals among a pantheon of other animals, from auroch to earthworms, who together keep the world fit for all. All of us—every one—is made for good and made to be good for all. That is the moral point of the painting that can’t be missed as we see it 18,000 years after the pigments were blown onto the rock so carefully.

There is only one human in Lascaux, an odd stick-figure missing the grace and detail of all the other animals.

These were artists of Michelangelo skill, so they could have made a human of monumental towering grace. Instead, they left us a fellow with an impressive erection, a bird-like head and staff, falling backward. Maybe he had disemboweled the charging massive buffalo, or maybe the other way around. Not triumphal; kind of pathetic and small, really.

If you laid just 200 of my lives end to end you’d be among those artists who saw a world of dynamic nuance, Spirit and energy. They knew they were as weak and slow as we are,but maybe also prone to exaggerated pride and privilege. So they said to stop and be still. Consider the creatures of grace and rippling power. See how they move and breath, swim and leap. Notice especially their breath that later Greeks would call Spirit. They—and dare we say even we—are alive.

The artists did not leave a single moral mandate, no ecological tips and tricks, no guidance on dealing with damaged tyrants, no user manual for the world. There are symbols among the paintings, but we do not know what they mean. But we can’t miss the point: pay attention.

Once we know with whom we share the world, we can figure everything else out, although it is late, frankly. There are no aurochs or cave lions left. We proud penis people have disemboweled entire continents, even turning ocean currents bent and flaccid. None of the species painted on the rock exist anymore. In only 200 of my lifetimes, all were killed leaving behind weak domesticated imitations. Maybe it is too late for us, too, and we should find a cave built for sorrow at what is lost so that some boys in 40,026 can begin again.

But maybe not because the natural world is coiled to spring back.

*River Six guides our view over the Broughton Estate land finding its way back to normal after 32 generations.*

As we visited Lascaux I was reading about the movement to “rewild” the earth. The leading icon is Knepp Estate in southern England, that turned back toward life only a quarter century ago. And only three miles from where we sleep in our narrowboat, the Broughton Sanctuary turned onto the same path seven years ago. William the Conqueror (THAT one) gave the estate to the family in 1097. The 32nd “custodian” had a daughter and realized that she—the 33rd—needed a whole different plan. He knew who and where the family was. His daughter’s 3,000 acres is early in the process of releasing the wildness on land, nearly eaten to the root by sheep for centuries. I’ll write more about this in a later blog. But I’ll just say that the message written on the recovering moorland is the same as that on the Lascaux walls.

*Alive because of the mycelliar web, and already giving birth to a young ash beneath its branches.*

The ecologist, River Six, guided us through Broughton. We stood next to a 300 year ash that almost died down to its last leaf, now healthy and even casting seeds (one of which is already 7 feet tall). He casually noted that it lived on the mycelliar web that crossed over beneath a path to the nearest Ash about 200 feet away. He said that a normal tree in a normal season produces way more nutrient and energy that it consumes, so is happy for its excess to flow to kin species and then to others nearby, such as the Hawthorne. “Are trees made for generosity?,” I asked. He liked the thought and agreed, noting you can see it even in a violated and degraded landscape where you’d think it was every tree for itself. A normal open forest is a thriving web so generous it even welcomes–depends on–grazing animals and beavers to live.

Once we see where we are and who we are, we realize the big surprise is not the consequences of centuries of rapacious behavior, but the capacity of the natural systems to spring back with astonishing speed. Our intelligence can make us good partners—the biblical word is steward—to help the systems do what they are made to do. If the beavers are missing, a steward can go find some and introduce them to the the ruined watershed.

What if you, like me, have not inherited a three thousand of acres estate with capital and connections? My brother and brother-in-law have a quiet clue. Wild what you do have. David and Lisa live in a 150 year old Victorian home next to our canal in Skipton with a front yard about 20 feet by 40 feet. Half of it is now wild with the miniature riot of bees, bugs and volunteer plants—Broughton in a microcosm (without the beaver).

*David and Lisa Lumb’s half wild front yard in Skipton. The bugs are happy with the start.*

My older brother Ron invested 10 years to lead his otherwise normal Presbyterian church near Baltimore to restore their two acre overgrown back lot into a miniature native wilderness. Long lost birds have found it and raise their young. People from miles around come to walk its paths and remember who they are. Wild!

“Only a drop in the ocean,” you might say. But what do you think an ocean is?

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Impossible Things

*“I cannot think it,” says the gullible ones who find it impossible to imagine shameless perfidy. (a small part of Paul Day’s amazing sculpture in St. Pancras Station, London.*

Impossible things happen all the time, but they usually don’t last long enough to celebrate. You’d think that once a people protected by deep water on east and west had settled on way to manage their land, they would be able to fend off the waste and pillage of tyranny. But the centuries after the magna carta had finally brought tyrannical kinds to heel, England fell prey to tyrants more than one time. It’s offspring—the United Colonies of America—has learned about tyrants more quickly—didn’t even it make it 250 years. Citizens rise, forget and get distracted allowing the most remarkably unfit people to seize absolute control. How it possible for a whole country to fall into the hands of a tyrant?

A century and a half before the colonial experiment produced a fragile democracy that would wobble and totter for another 250 years, Shakespeare explored this question in a number of plays about tyrants. I didn’t fully grasp how much he could help us until I visited Stratford-upon-Avon a few weeks ago and discovered a book by Stephan Greenblatt, Tyrant: Shakespeare on Power. Greenblatt is an impeccable scholar who, like me, was distressed following the election of you-know-who. “Under what circumstances do such cherished institutions, seemingly deeply-rooted and impregnable, suddenly prove fragile?” The answer lay not just with the tyrant but those complicit. With uncomfortable precision Greenblatt identifies five types of complicities that would read like CNN, if it had not fallen into the control of one of the types.

The gullible are only one: “Such people find it almost impossible to resist the big bold lie, shamelessly reiterated. The young and inexperienced are a relatively easy mark. When the murdered Clarence’s son is told his uncle Richard’s grief is fraudulent, the child replies , ‘I cannot think it.’ (Richard III 2.2.31.33). “I cannot think it” serves as the motto for those who simply cannot get their minds around such perfidy.

*Paul Day sculpts in bronze with the penetrating vision of Shakespeare. The most radical humanity is at the bottom of the massive work most walk past.* *St. Pancras Station, London.*

But why does it work? “Why would anyone be drawn to a leader manifestly unsuited to govern, someone dangerously impulsive or viciously conniving or indifferent to the truth? Why in some circumstances, does evidence of mendacity, crudeness or cruelty serve not as a fatal disadvantage but as an allure, attracting ardent followers? Why do otherwise proud and self-respecting people submit to the sheer effrontery of the tyrant, his sense that he can get away with saying and doing anything he likes, his spectacular indecency.”

Good question much on my mind this July 4^th.

Shakespeare was an entertainer more like than Stephen Colbert than a research scholar. He knew where the line was and did not get cancelled or, as was common in the time, tortured, drawn and quartered. Fortunately for him, he didn’t need to be current; history is littered with tyrants to write about. That is Greenblatt’s first point: tyrants always look unique, but they are just a type that slithers through political cracks now and then before quickly collapsing in humiliation and always alone.

*Paul Day attracts with romance but knows the pedestal is the politics. St. Pancras Station, London.*

MacBeth says, “Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more. It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury signifying nothing.” (5.5.19-28) Greenblatt stresses, “It is important to understand that this devastating experience of utter meaninglessness….is not the existential condition of humankind. The play insists that it is the fate precisely of the tyrant.” Normal people are not condemned to this bleakness; we can—and most of us do–choose decency, love and community.

The Bard would not be surprised that the American experiment’s multilayered checks and balances could Such people find it almost impossible to resist the big bold lie, shamelessly reiterated.

“There are periods, sometimes extended periods, during which the cruelest motives of the basest people seem to be triumphant. But Shakespeare believed that tyrants and their minions would ultimately fail, brought down by their own viciousness and by a popular spirit of humanity that could be suppressed but never completely extinguished.

Any hope? “He imagined the best hope lay in the sheer unpredictability of collective life, its refusal to march in lockstep to a one person’s orders. The incalculable number of factors constantly in play make it impossible for an idealist or a tyrant…to remain in charge of the course of events.”

*“What is* the city but the people?” Shakespeare

“The best chance for the recovery of collective decency lay, he thought in the political action of ordinary citizens. He never lost sight of the people who steadfastly reminded silent when exhorted to shout their support for the tyrant. “What is the city but the people.”

Happy 4th.

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Speaking of the banal evil complicity note that you can buy Greenblatt’s book almost anywhere, but on July 4th do so anywhere but Amazon.

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Way

A picturesque view of a green field surrounded by trees, with rolling hills and a clear blue sky in the background. — *What is most interesting is how you get from here to there. Stepping through the hawthorn to the meadow. Or from who I was to who I am becoming.*

We were in the Beer Engine—our preferred Skipton pub—talking with three men from Liverpool who detected we were not from nearby. I tried on Canada and then admitted to North Carolina with Memphis sauce, ending with an apology for all that is America these days. “Don’t worry, mate; everyone has a rough patch; this is yours, but we know you’ll come out the America we know.” Generous people who have seen Kings, despots and even Beatles come and pass in time.

Everyone paying any attention these days is a former whatever they used to be. Whoever you were 5 years ago tells me nothing about today, much less tomorrow. We are all in motion; those who grieve what has been lost and, interestingly, those who thought they won. This is true for those clear about ideas and identities they left behind and, interestingly, those who thought they were snug in a new intellectual, spiritual or political home.

Several rabbits grazing on a grassy field adorned with yellow flowers, with one rabbit in mid-leap. — *My grandson Charles took this of bunnies on the hop. It’s all about the motion.*

We are all in motion.

We are former something.

We are all hyphenated.

Some of us have more than one hyphen: Methodist-Baptist-Quaker, with a side order of Celtic, Buddhist and Bhai influence all the while thinking the agnostics have a point.

Hyphens don’t hold things apart; they mark where the energy is most alive, where the intellect is dynamic. The hyphen, like a boundary, is where the life is emergent, testifying to where former and future engage. The Quakers speak of the “absolute perhaps,” refusing to stop creation of any kind. In the early 1600’s they risked their lives to “seek” and have not quit.

The hyphen is a witness to life-in-process. Giving up on the binary this-or-that in favor of the dynamic flow.

Network theory used to stress the nodes; Ingold’s more advanced meshwork theory emphasizes the knots where lines of relationship stabilize. Both can be transactional, focused on mere exchange, but brilliant Dr. Thandeka Cochrane noticed in Malawi that the complex human mesh is influenced by affection, not just exchange. Hyphen theory is most interested in what is happening in between stable states, nodes or knots. In our current time—and as far ahead as I can see—we will live in between. We. must not dispare our former selves, not fully landing on our new names as we know there is another hyphen to come as politics, theology and life itself move.

A few years ago we realized there were more people who chose “none” as their religious identity than any of the name brands—about 100 million people in the United States alone. A closer look at the “nones” shows that only about 10% are actively hostile to religion with another 20% simply so done with religion as to not care about the question. About that same number are confused by the categories or disappointed by the religions on offer, But they have the same prayer life as most Protestants and Catholics. The study calls these “NINO—Nones In Name Only.” The largest group have few religious behaviors, but continue active curiosity about things spiritual—classic “spiritual but not religious.”

Interior view of a grand hall with wooden arches, featuring a large globe suspended from the ceiling and numerous busts displayed along the walls. — *The Long Room, Trinity College, Dublin where thinking has been in motion since 1712. They raised the roof in 1860 to make room for new thoughts.* *They added four women to the statuary and the globe more recently.*

These last two groups are the hyphenated people in dynamic motion from who they were to who they are becoming. These are the people I meet in every movement doing something good, from delivering food to terrified immigrants in Minneapolis to patiently knocking on doors to register voters. This is who goes to theater. It includes almost everyone in a school of divinity like Wake Forest.

A vibrant garden scene featuring colorful flowers and greenery, with a wooden sign displaying the words 'Simple. Radical. Spiritual.' — Two hundred seekers–Quakers–are buried in this garden of the Skipton Friends Meeting that still seeks here 350 years on.

The hyphen marks an upwelling of energy. It is much more interesting and lively than adding or subtracting an opinion. A hyphen inevitably draws one into working relationship with other people who are also hyphenated and in motion.

My friend Wayne Merritt taught me Greek a long time ago. He translated Jesus as “you shall know the truth and the truth will make you odd.” Followers find a Way, not a place; a Way between.

How do you know which Way? Do not follow someone else’s anger. Head toward life; head away from death. Follow your deepest joy.

You will not be alone.

Consider

Colorful stained glass window depicting various biblical scenes and figures, featuring angels and characters in historical garments. — *We must all protest at some risk, artist, writer, citizen.*

I pray for any man with a tortured soul, whether hiding in the bamboo forest behind Walmart or awake all night in the White House. And I pray for all those within range for the courage to protect others from his actions. We have emergency centers for the fellow behind Walmart; 25^th amendment for the other one.

I do not know whether the military of my nation will follow orders they know to be war crimes. They are bound by oath to say no because it is wrong and it is stupid.

They know we cannot live in a world where political differences permit one to starve civilians or deprive them of water. Why should not the Iranians feel justified to dump a bucket of poison in my town’s Salem Lake?

I remember my disgust and shame at the Vietnam pictures and the eventual trials that stained an entire people. This current abomination in Iran is worse–premeditated, taunting, wrapped in childish sacrilege and swagger. We will never know all the names of all the innocent dead.

We the American people elected this man twice, so all this is our shame. When the war crime trials go forward we will feel shame. Ask any German.

I am among the Quakers these days in my spirit. Theirs is an inconvenient,odd and quirky witness, odd and quirky. Hundreds died in cold English prisons for those quirks; generations were refused access to university, medicine, law and elected office. They are still regularly arrested even today for Palestinian protests. Hard people, these. But they have been exactly correct for 350 years about state violence. They said that preparing for war creates war. No Christian may participate. How does one—me— unravel that participation while living in the most militarized and now lawless empire in the history of the species?

I write this before his deadline threats about something he said he didn’t care about three days ago for which he is now willing to erase a whole civilization. We’ll be relieved if he declares victory and goes onto something else. But this is still a Nuremburg moment; the whole thing violated law from the start. It has already been a warm crime that will trigger trials to come. Nuremburg prosecuters—Americans– accused everyone involved in the design, planning, construction and administration of the death camps. Everyone was tried, not just the person pushing the button to turn on the gas.

All of us must protest at some risk. In Weil der Stadt, Germany, a wartime stained glass artist risked everything with a window panel showing Jesus sending Satan away — with Hitler depicted as Satan! (You can see him in the upper right panel above.) Eight decades later the powerful witness resonates.

I only blog and teach, which seems not so brave. When I flew from LaGuardia Saturday morning a young ICE agent fed my backpack through the scanning machine. He could have taken my phone, read my blog and detained me. Next week, after the war crimes make the government even more afraid of its citizens, he may well be ordered to do so. I hope I write clearly enough to trouble him.

It is never enough to just withhold endorsement of an illegal act, however.

Christians find ourselves entangled with heretical nutters doing violence in Jesus name have a special problem. We just celebrated the miracle of new life born anew! Not enough. We should send money to Central World Kitchen to feed people in Gaza (remember that war crime?) TC and I sent $500 hoping that our daughters and grandsons will live to see a world of law and justice that Jesus and Mohammed (peace be their names) might recognize.

Pray for that man and those who care for him before he hurts even more people.

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A note about the stained witness: The artist, JoKarl Huber, who was considered ‘degenerate’ by the Nazis and faced a three-year work ban, completed the window in 1940, so it was definitely a risk! Thanks to Jim and Reneta Cochrane.

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King Year

A person holding a bouquet of colorful flowers, wearing a brown beanie and traditional clothing with rich textures and earth tones. — https://dhammacetiya.com/walk-for-peace-the-venerables/

Buddhists walk for peace in my Carolina Winter while I, a Baptist/Quaker, walk their Monks’ Trail in Chiang Mai. Here in Thailand it is hard to see the mountains through the blizzard of campaign signs for their election February 8^th. The campaign is skewed by live fire border conflict with Cambodia that makes this Buddhist nation think more about their military than their monks, but nothing remotely as brazen and raw as my own country. The people here will vote and the government will be who they choose.

I am not sure that will happen for my people as the increasingly brazen, desperate man coming apart in real time on world screens simply can’t afford one. After losing 43 out of 43 smaller elections since the presidential squeaker a year ago, every poll signals that the light at the end of our authoritarian tunnel is a very fast moving train that will take the House and Senate like hitting a bug on the tracks.

They have no other man and no other plan than to stop the elections from happening. Like a bizarre version of Thelma and Louise they accelerate maybe taking another mother on the way off the cliff. They will try to claim insurrection, posting goons at every polling station. Black People have seen that before and stood in lines winding down the streets. I doubt that Brown people will have any less courage. White people are too dim to understand the threat, so will show up with breezy optimism as the People take the House and Senate. But then we have a true knife fight in the mud for two years more.

A tranquil view of a still water pool surrounded by lush greenery and trees, reflecting the clear blue sky. — *Wat Pha Lat, over Chiang Mai (tourists cropped out)*

With troops in Caracas, untrained goons in Minneapolis, soon Charlotte and Winston-Salem, we have to ask what faith has to do with raw power.

We know that any faith can be frivolous and silly. Yesterday on the Monk’s Trail was like Buddha-rama, a tourist conga line up the hill and through the sacred spaces. Christians have singing Christmas trees and incredibly stupid museums of the Bible down the street from where the Department of Education is vacant.

But….every now and then the Spirit stirs with power.

For faith doesn’t have opinions about power; it is power. Faith has no fear of what simplistic violence can take away. Death? Pain? Jail? Our best theology from Paul, Bonhoeffer to King was written there shaming the timid Bishops outside counselling patience. Bull Connor raged against the children raised in Sunday School for courage who marched—beat them, jailed them and bombed them in their church. And still they walked, shaming the by-standing adults until even the reluctant Feds had to cave.

King Day is over; King year just lifting off.

Said he: “The past is strewn with the ruins of the empires of tyranny, and each is a monument not merely to man’s blunders but to his capacity to overcome them. While it is a bitter fact that in America in 1968, I am denied equality solely because I am black, yet I am not a chattel slave. Millions of people have fought thousands of battles to enlarge my freedom; restricted as it still is, progress has been made.

“This is why I remain an optimist, though I am also a realist, about the barriers before us. Why is the issue of equality still so far from solution in America, a nation that professes itself to be democratic, inventive, hospitable to new ideas, rich, productive and awesomely powerful?

“The problem is so tenacious because, despite its virtues and attributes, America is deeply racist and its democracy is flawed both economically and socially.”

That was with Bobby Kennedy sitting where Stephen Miller now poses while his boss watches TV shows that making him think Greenland is bigger than Africa.

The little people surrounding him know it’s over. The only question is how many more dead mothers it will take. How many children?

Haven’t had any dead preachers, yet, but there are plenty on the front lines, running for office, building the protest and electoral machinery already running like a train in the tunnel. William Barber marching in NC Feb 11^th. Talarico, a seminary student running for senate drawing thousands in the dust of Plano. Vote Common Good aimed like a laser at the 40 house seats most likely to flip Blue. Bishop Budde as clear as a newly forged bell sounding with grace and clarity in the morning. And, if you need a soundtrack, Jesse Welles.

No wonder the goons are hiring more goons.

Faith does not blink when God turns on the lights. Granted, faith can snooze through an approaching storm piddling and fiddling, doing not much until it hears the voices of its prophets, the young ones rising up on wings, the old ones giving voice to dreams long held waiting, waiting, waiting.

Says William Barber, our modern King, “Only when we refuse to accept the mythology around King and the Movement can we comprehend the legacy they entrusted to us. They did not leave us a perfect union. They inherited from those before them and passed down to us a way to challenge injustice and become what we’ve never yet been through moral force. They showed us the way up and out of the mess we are in.”

A group of monks in orange robes and brown hats walking along a road, some carrying flowers and displaying peace signs. — https://dhammacetiya.com/walk-for-peace-the-venerables/

Not one day. This is King year.

We are seeing what we’ve been waiting for. Indeed, we are the ones we’ve been waiting for.

Now.

Bee

Radical non-conformists built this first Friends meeting house in Skipton in 1689 when slavery was utterly normal.

TC and I got back from England some weeks ago but writing is harder here. Especially as I agreed to teach an online asynchronous Divinity School class next semester. I didn’t quite grasp that this requires all 14 weeks of the teaching in advance by video. Yikes. It’s on the Leading Causes of Life, and I’ve got lots of help. But rather pushed my blog writing to the side.

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This is surely the worst Christmas since the slaughter of the innocents. So many slaughtered in Gaza, Ukraine and Sudan by despots worse than Herod. Uncountable innocents bleeding out from the callous withdrawal of USAID across Africa. More ripped away by thugs at Home Depot in the land of the formerly free and brave. Blood on all our hands.

Against this ugly tide we celebrated Christmas for the City in Winston-Salem Saturday evening organized by the preposterously brilliant Love Out Loud. This is a quirky local extravaganza that for 14 years has filled our Convention Center with food, gifts, music from dozens of churches and vaccinations from the health department. This year included our one local Jewish Temple, so Jesus’ parents could have come, too.

Rev Dr David Docusen reminds us that Jesus knew all about the dark and was not afraid.

This event has lots of Hispanic energy, including those hunted by ICE. The organizers work closely with Siembra to monitor the surrounding streets for ICE. This the David that famously hounded Goliath ICE into the light and out of North Carolina and then out of New Orleans, too, which adapted Siembra’s technique, technology and Spirit. Still, as we moved toward the closing candle light vigil out in the street, all eyes were pealed for black SUV’s and big guys in boots. I volunteered to be the Nordic guy to obstruct and get arrested first, which turned out to be untested. David Docusen noted that Jesus knew all about darkness and only promised that we could walk home together as neighbors.

I’m sure Mary sang in an early version of Spanish:

“God’s mercy is for those who fear God

from generation to generation.

God has shown strength with God’s arm;

God has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts.

God has brought down the powerful from their thrones,

and lifted up the lowly;

God has filled the hungry with good things,

and sent the rich away empty.” (Luke 1:46f)

This year has been about the art and craft of avoiding the total eclipse of the heart. TC and I lived half time on a narrowboat in England on the canal dug in 1770’s to link Yorkshire to the slave cotton and tobacco fields of North Carolina. Dug by what were effectively Irish slaves and the local landless just as desperate. Dark. But this is also where the non-conformists hid out from both King and Parliament which finally let them build meeting houses including the one where I worship in silence, listening for the way ahead. That seems—and has always seemed–so little and weak!

I’ve been kept by honeybees for some years as they gerenously to teach, tend my Spirit and feed me with honey and mead. But you can’t do that across an ocean, so I gave them and all the equipment to a local cooperative.

Then I become a honeybee myself. Quakers are as close to honeybees as humans can get. Both are generous, diligent, peaceful and so democratic they don’t even vote. Quakers seek in silence, bees vibrating in the dark. Neither kill to defend themselves, but are fierce for the babies. Both sting. Not like aggressive wasps (or the Christian Nationalists). Quakers sting just as Mary singing the magnificat; refusing to be complicit with the slaveholders, royalty and rich.

The most famous American Quaker prophet was a weaver from Philadelphia known as John Woolman famous for walking and talking across the South meeting with Friends about slavery. And then he followed the cotton thread of complicity to Skipton where he giving his inconvenient witness about their entanglement in slavery the canal made possible. He actually died nearby in Yorkshire after falling ill. Many Quakers were unexpectedly wealthy because their famous honesty made them trusted business partners. They were early investors in cotton mills, shoes (Clarkes) and chocolate (Cadbury and KitKat) and finance (Barclay’s Bank) and canals. They did not want to listen to Woolman; half of all slave ships had been built in Liverpool where the canal meets the sea. But in their silent seeking, his words percolated, turned to conviction and witness that ended the slave trade.

Our modern struggle is so much easier. Even amid the Trumpian blitzkrieg American democracy isfar more vibrant and robust than anything imagined by British Quakers, who were lucky to even have their tiny meeting house in Skipton. Less than 6% of white men could vote; no women at all. They had Thomas Paine pamplets (he, a Quaker). Imagine him with our websites! We citizens have liberties, technologies and revolutionary techniques honed in the long walk fromo the Magna Carta. Give the trumpians credit seeing and acting on all the weaknesses. But they are melting as they are dragged into the light, backbones withering like salted slugs.

Quakers are famous for what they won’t do–take off their hats in the presence of royalty and, of course, refusing arms. But their silence ferments endless creativity for justice and mercy. I’m guessing the Portland frog is one. But once creative courage is in the water, it spreads like a positive virus. King, Lewis, Barber, Indivisible—thousands whose names we will never know.

The Friends’ promise seems whimsical. Simple, radical, spiritual. Be quiet. Listen. Then act on what you hear and never stop.

Prayer After the Shut-down Vote

Prayer After the Shutdown Vote
For Those Living Between Relief and Uncertainty

Shared on the Moral Monday. Repairers of the Breach Clergy Call

November 11, 2025.
By Rev. Dr. Hanna R. Broome

Eternal God, who is called by so many names,
Known in every tongue, worshiped in every land—
we stand today between almost and not yet.
The Senate has spoken, the votes are counted,
but the hungry still wait on confirmation—
mothers still count cans and calories,
fathers still stretch prescriptions,
elders still pray that tomorrow the lights stay on.

Creator, we thank You for the flicker of relief,
for the doors that may soon reopen,
for the workers who will be called back,
and for the food that will again find its way to tables.
But we do not confuse delay with deliverance,
nor cloture with closure.
This was a procedural mercy, not yet a moral reckoning.

You, O Holy One, are not impressed by votes without vision,
nor cloture without compassion.
We name the violence still lingering—
the SNAP cuts that slice through family budgets,
the healthcare premiums rising like tombstones
over a system that buries the poor while billing the sick.
We refuse to call this “normal.”
We will not celebrate crumbs while the loaf is withheld.

So breathe on us, O Spirit of the Living One that connects us in humanity
breathe courage into every organizer,
breathe endurance into every faith leader,
breathe wisdom into every policymaker who still dares to listen.
Make us restless in comfort,
and relentless in hope.
Until justice rolls down like water,
until every child eats without shame,
until healthcare is treated as holy,
and until this nation learns that budgets are moral documents,
not weapons of war against its own people.

We seal this prayer with the faith of those who refused to be silent,
and the ancestors who built freedom out of scarcity.

Ashe, Ameen, Amen, and It Is So.

Consequences

I have a friend whose life has led him to be one of the most powerful Republicans in the North Carolina state legislature, marked by his tenacious commitment to expand Medicaid. He is a grandfather, a religious man with a diligent spirit. I reached out to him a few days ago, knowing he would be voting in a razor-thin decision to gerrymander one more Congressional district to support the desperate effort to protect MAGA. North Carolina is 50/50 Democrat to Republican voters, but our state legislature is ridiculously gerrymandered into a Republican “supermajority”, dependent on his vote to make it 11-3 guaranteed GOP districts. I urged him to have a John McCain moment and do the right thing.

He graciously replied almost immediately to say he had no choice. His district voted 2-1 for that fellow and, after all, “elections have consequences.” In reality, he helped design his district so created his own captivity. Made me sad. For him.

This isn’t about the GOP. The most egregiously ugly and racist actions in North Carolina history were done by Democrats (google Wilmington race riots, 1898). Powerful Democrats did the same things he did at one point.

Surely grown-ups can do better.

MAGA is circling the drain, maybe already down the pipe entirely out of sight of the light. When you bulldoze the White House, kill all the reindeer and prepare the first family landing spot in Argentina, it is clear this will be over soon.

*Farmers, minders andd traders have walked this path above Hebden since neolithic times trying to give the next generation a chance.*

The seven million citizens in the street on Oct. 18^th were so cross-cuttingly normal that David Brooks is thinking of joining them next time. There will be ten million next time and fifteen before the mid-terms.

People like my friend will claim they were friends of democracy all along.

We need to move now from just stopping the thieves to working on Project 2029 so that we create a new possibility, not just another swing of the political pendulum.

We need role models not just ideas. Even better would be a role model with ideas. This is what I found in the London Quaker bookstore, where I stumbled across 87-year-old George Lakey, the author of Viking Economics. Bill McKibben says of Lakey, “almost no one I can think of has made better use of their time on earth.”He also wrote a guide to nonviolent direction action campaigns, called “How We Win” that McKibben compares to West Point for change-makers. But I think we’re already winning; my question is what we do with the victory.

Lakey was like electricity in my wires as he describes how the “Nordic model” was born out of similar polarization as we’re experiencing now in the States. He notes that the greatest changes of the past century become possible in the heat of social/cultural and political pressures. He describes how the poorest country in Europe—Norway—became the happiest, healthiest, best educated, most entrepreneurial and equitable, before it discovered the oil off-shore.

This was totally unexpected–preposterous. The Norway we now know came out of the deep conflicts of the early 1920’s that culminated with an elected retrogressive government that became complicit with the Nazis in World War Two. The name of that president–“Quisling”–is now synonymous with betrayal, but he was elected president before he tried to destroy the electoral process itself. Same deep hole we’re in.

*Just below Skipton Castle where royalty shat down “the long drop.” Times change. People change.*

Lakey knew the inside story as he married into the movement—his new father-in-law was one of the key Christian socialists who began organizing as a college student. He lays out the detailed analysis how the Nordic model (Norway, Sweden, Denmark and Iceland), which offers a practical path for what I call project 2029. Refusing to accept the polarities, the practical politics focus on what is good for everyone, not the poor, minorities, identities, urbanites, soccer moms, or any other specific group. Everybody rises. Or everyone sinks.

”Arguably, what motivates Nordics to pay high taxes for services is that the services are universal rather than targeted to a subgroup of ‘the needy’.” Everyone benefits from quality health care, schools, transportation and pensions, but those who benefit most of all are the political majority composed of the working and middle classes. When someone proposes chipping away at the quality of universal systems, a political defense is mounted by the majority almost regardless of the party they belong to.” Page 174

In a time of radical economic changes, this model makes it safe for innovation. The Nordic countries are pro-business with more start-up companies than the US because nobody has to risk their retirement, healthcare or education for their kids. Basic shared security makes it much safer to take entrepreneurial job-creating risks. Companies pay a lot of tax, but they get an extraordinarily rich environment in which to do business with a highly educated mobile workforce, free to innovate. Everyone is expected to work and hardest of all, speak Norwegian.

This avoids the easy stigmatization and what-about-me poison in American politics. And we would not have to learn Norwegian.

This is very practical good news; the way to channel the solidarity in the streets into clear vision of a better way for everyone. Lakey argues that the severity of the crisis is exactly what makes possible that new thing, a more perfect union built on the unfulfilled promise signaled in the stumbling efforts of those white slave-holding men who risked everything to make the United States happen a quarter millennium ago.

Consequences can be good.

His most difficult counsel is to reject the story of radical polarization itself. Take health care policy: “The reason the United States has failed to adopt universal health insurance is not because it violates our culture, but because special interests prevented the majority from getting what they were ready for.” Page 224

“The mainstream media continues to report the discourse of the political class as if it accurately reflects what Americans think. I find that many people in my audiences who think that Nordic style policies are sensible have no idea that they are, in fact, members of the American majority.” Page 233

Lakey says that “At any time we choose, Americans could decide to learn from our own abundant experience of people-power triumphing despite harsh opposition. In the 1960s, the civil rights movement faced down the largest terrorist movement in US history, the Ku Klux Klan, as well as lawless police. Brave African Americans with white allies won gains and took casualties, while a largely indifferent federal government looked on. Finally, the federal government was forced to act—by that same civil rights movement.” Page 238.

He urges us not to splinter the 5 to 12 million Americans in the streets which are succeeding to break the back of the current ugly cabal. We must not drive away many of the partners we will need for Project 2029. And likewise, we must not personalize this about you-know-who.

Again, Lakey is right on target in noting that the Norwegian left “understood that Quisling was a symptom, not the cause of the mess Norway was in, just as Donald Trump is a symptom, not the cause of the mess the United States is in. Rather than obsess about the symptom, progressive Norwegians focused on the cause, which was primarily the dominance of the economic elite…..by targeting the elite in nonviolent campaigns for specific widely shared demands. So many people joined the growing non-violent direct-action campaigns that Norway became ungovernable by the economic elite.“ Page 256.

Lakey closes his autobiography with a story from the improbably successful struggle against apartheid and the “joy that comes from going beyond awareness of injustice and toward acting for justice.” He remembers, “we turned a large protest in front of City Hall on frigid evening into an all-night dance, fueled by the heat of South African movement songs…..hour after hour of dancing did more than keep us warm physically. It reminded us that if we tune into what’s happening and act with others, we get to dance with history.”

Project 2029, anyone? Want to dance?

This is where Fiddlesticks will spend the winter across from the Boathouse Pub and Pennine Cruisers. The Leeds and Liverpool Canal was dug in 1770’s by shovel by Irish and Yorkshire workers to move livestone, coal and cotton.

Torrent

Videos and photo from the River Wharfe.

I was supposed to be in India two weeks ago to participate in the Christian Medical College of Vellore’s strategic conclave and to attend the astonishing Sikh Sathya Sai Grama in Bangalore. Instead my visa got caught in the US government’s sabotage of international relations. You can imagine how badly I felt to not be in these sacred places at this time so pregnant with possibility and, yes, danger.

The Sikh One World One Family Foundation supports the Sri Madhusudan Sai Global Humanitarian Mission that provides essential services in 5 world regions, to over 100 countries, and maintains 12 Centers for Human Development (one is coming up in Los Gatos, CA). One of our Leading Causes of Life Fellows, Dr. Sunny Anand is deeply involved.

CMC asked me to speak about the theological clues from the Leading Causes of Life relevant to strategic planning. They take theology more seriously than any Christian hospital in the world—at least that I know about. So I leaned in and spoke frankly. (find the full text here)

CMC expected my remarks to be framed by the new book that came from the Leading Causes of Initiative, Taking Responsibility for the Life of Complex Human Ecosystems—Deep Accountability. And also in the context of my 18 years in hospital leadership roles. That title sounds preposterous but that’s exactly what CMC is trying to do in India in the most complex human ecosystem imaginable. The challenge is especially, dangerously, vexingly hard for a massive academic medical center trying to be Christian in a wildly interfaith context. Especially at a time in India when the god of the medical market is rising in power every week. CMC is among the most eminent medical schools and clinical systems in a nation with more middle class and wealthy people than in the United States.

I based my theological comments on the passage from Ezekiel 47 that Larry Pray told me about one day. “Gary, grab the Bible on your desk and turn to Ezekiel 47! I asked my secretary to go find one, then quickly read about the trickle of living water escaping the temple, running down the street, growing into a torrent downstream over his head. “Man do you not see it?” “See what?” I asked with the man in the water. “That you are being carried by a torrent of life, surrounded by even more life on the banks.” That is what we must build strategy on–that torrent.

Our new book addresses this in the chapter called “Storm” which is inspired by Ivan Illich’s 1970 book, Medical Nemesis. It was audacious to jam Illich in a chapter, even worse in a blog but even a teaspoon makes for hot and uncomfortable reading. Every faith-based hospital and academic medical center I know about long ago became comfortable with the ugly complicities and intellectual capitulations he predicted a half century ago.

In the USA Mr Kennedy may finish off the last remaining scraps of thoughtful mission as the trillion-dollar array of organizations betray their founders, patients, staff and communities by joining in the whitewashing of their complex human ecology. Illich is sadly prescient, but not just sad. Nemesis is the Greek God who brings justice to those enjoying privileges they do not deserve because they betrayed their gifts. Illich focused on the medical science—obvious even a half century ago—as these institutions tuned their financial logic to the most profitable sciences, mostly cardiology, cancer and, as the public aged, orthopedics. That’s what drives the financial engine, builds the massive buildings and pays the ridiculous salaries. And that’s part of what calls forth the certain storm Illich predicted.

These organizations also betray the moral intentions of the thousands of people who give their lives to these organizations. Illich didn’t address that, but I was one of them and I know many more hugely decent people involved. So our book not only grieves for the waste of moral intention but asks us all to focus on being deeply accountable – from wherever we are in the span of our lives.

It is never a convenient time to face the complexity of the human ecology, especially when one is making vast sums patching up the damage that comes from ignoring it. Hospital executives and Board members have nearly unanimously decided to take giant steps backward as quietly as they can terrified that the MAGA or MAHA people will notice the estimated trillion dollars in financial reserves held by non-profit healthcare organizations. So the earlier chest thumping commitments to a diverse community—what we call complex human ecosystems—evaporated as quietly and totally as morning dew in a southern summer day. Shameless; but what attracts Nemesis is their pride in these business decisions that betray both faith and science.

Promotional poster for a double book launch at the University of Cambridge, featuring two books: 'Taking Responsibility for the Life of Complex Human Ecosystems' and 'Handbook on Religion and Health'. The event includes details such as date, time, location, and speakers. — *Follow the link to register for the event by Zoom.*

The most obvious action of Nemesis is likely be the taking away these organizations’ non-profit tax benefits. MAHA cares as little about their mission as do their Boards, viewing them realistically as just part of the corporate healthcare industry which they believe should be in the hands of the most efficient capitalists—Google, Microsoft, Amazon, whoever. Without well-funded Medicaid, Medicare and public health these organizations are forced toward the high-margin services and they will supplicate before these deep wells of capital. Of course, the health-tech firms know that Artificial Intelligence will decimate physician-driven hospitals and allow for precision cherry-picking of paying patients. They will let somebody else feed medical scraps to the poorly insured middle class and the poor. Faith-based hospitals could have invested this past half century arguing for policies building deep accountability to the science of prevention, chronic condition management and truly effective care. Instead they invested in self-serving revenue-oriented policies. This eroded any possibility that the public they were supposed to serve would now protect them when Nemesis comes to call with all its profoundly bad news.

The good news is clarity that it didn’t have to be this way; and it doesn’t need to be this way in the future.

Every part of this book is about deep accountability, and only one chapter deals with healthcare. Those of us who do care about the health organizations – public, private and faith-based – will need the other chapters to think with, to break the deadly intellectual dead-end the health sciences have trapped themselves in. We need clarity about how much capacity we have to act, invent, choose and imagine. We need to join economist Mariana Mazzucato’s fundamental new thinking about what and who produces value in our current world, unmasking, like Illich, those who are satisfied with mere cost and acritical profit-taking. We need mycologist Merlin Sheldrake’s whole new way of seeing how we humans move toward each other to make new social and political possibilities real. And we need the dramatic insights about social meshworks that are so much smarter than the dumb computer networks we’ve long tried to emulate with such meager swill.

A serene landscape featuring a river reflecting trees with autumn foliage, surrounded by lush green hills and a blue sky.

We can reclaim the light we have to live by, the joy that is the natural fruit of taking responsibility for the full life of the complex human and natural ecology where we live. We are not leaves before the harsh winter wind.

It is Spring time. It is always Spring time. Even in the dark and cold of January life is finding its way all day and night, never resting, always emerging, never quitting. Joy! Life works.

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