Tag: Hold.Health

Maybe you’re thinking that the tanks, drones and bunker-busters have a point. If something needs crushing, there are tools at hand that crush. And their promise seems so oddly clean; “once and for all.” Bust the bunker and be done. Why bother with the dubious prospect of persuading people to think differently, be they Iranians, MAGA, or my deep blue peeps.

But it never works. Ever. Not once.

Even the most obvious thing that deserve crushing (nuclear bombs buried in a mountain)—

who could argue against that? Nope. For millennia we have learned over and over that humiliating defeat metastasizes infinitely into generations of more bitter violence.  Three big guys trading in fear, 75, 79 and 86. Our big guy could kill their big guy whose last breath would be to issue a permanent fatwah on every American daughter and grandson using knives, not nukes.

Tutu was right, “anything war can do, peace can do better.” So obvious that it’s not even that smart. Just not 30,000 pounds of dumb.

It is possible to grow things, even peace. But the way is hard, like threading a camel through the eye of the needle; but only if the beast kneels.

The lazy urge to crush is driven by one unforgiveable sin: believing God has made a world in which there is simply not enough for all. If that is true—that God just miscalculated—then everything violent follows; it’s not even wrong. If there isn’t enough hamburger, water and whatever to go around, there will absolutely be a fight over the too-little. This what you-know- simply must sell in order for his fear to remain powerful: “Not enough! We’ll be replaced! Our children will never have jobs!” There’s not even enough sex and fun to go around as those damned gay blue people are having way too much for any to be left over for the normies.

All that’s wrong. But not entirely wrong. There is not enough for everyone to stay in gilded hotels, graze a stable of prostitutes and play golf every day. Peace is only possible in the presence of mature grown-ups that know when enough is enough for everyone. Peace needs the simple virtues of modesty, kindness, patience, forbearance, generosity and empathy. Sex is still okay, but not for rent.

Peace, like democracy, is something of an unnatural act among adults.

Peace, like democracy, is more like nurturing a meadow, than dropping a bomb. This occurred to me as I came across a rare urban meadow just a thousand steps and up a small hill from where our narrowboat is resting. Gawflat Meadow is a few acres on a small clay hill left by the glaciers 8,000 years ago, topped with too little soil to be worth a farmer’s bother. For hundreds of years the meadow grew enough grass to be mowed and thus resist the encroaching woods. And in the last 50 years as 97% of Britian’s other meadows disappeared beneath the crush of high intensity farming, this little patch caught the attention of the Skipton Civic Society, which looked after it—legally, by getting it included into an adjacent park and practically, by organizing volunteers to tend to it. Grown-ups.

A meadow, like democracy and peace, is something a bit unnatural. Even small human towns are easily overrun by blustery principalities and powers. When there is no law, process or civil norms, the venal and violent have their way. And how modest are the powers of law; mere agreements to not presume or take or suppress those who annoy by simply being in the way. How could that ever work?

A meadow never sleeps. It holds open a place for constant activity of hundreds of kinds of life—rabbits, voles, bees, nematodes and owls from the barn next door to swallows from South Africa finding their way year after year after millennium. Building peace is also everyday labor, making sure that the abundance we have to work with gets into the lives of everyone who needs it. The food—to all. The vaccines—to all. The books—to every daughter and son. There are far more people doing that work every day than in all the armies, commanded by all the impatient fearful commanders combined.

It turns out that meadows need little than the annual mowing. All the little plants and animals thrive; but they do need someone to keep the big trees from taking all the sunlight. This too needs some modesty and restraint. You can pour on fertilizer and grow stuff that looks like grass that can be mowed three times a year, but not for two hundred years. The grass of a long-tended meadow is rich with nutrients and the soil gets better every year. To rift off Tutu—anything chemicals can do, nature can do better.

Like a meadow, democracy is beautiful when the light is right. You can almost see the joy of people behaving naturally toward each other, celebrating the thriving of normal relationships of respect and delight in the wild variety of people creating the next horizon for their childrens’ children. It’s not all dull labor. Distinctive human qualities like ironic humor, multi-generation vision, curiosity and delight are there to see now and then. Like last Saturday, in thousands of places where citizens congregated stand up for the most obvious things—peace, law, decency for all.

Everything that lasts–faith, meadows, democracy–does so because of their adaptive complexity. They change, but slowly. Not rigid, so as to be easily busted.

The most mundane of all social structure—the congregation—in this way. Its strengths lie in the complexity of the social relationships over time.

“This all sounds so somber, dutiful, and full of heavy purpose. That is not at all what it feels like. It feels like life, surprising life.

“I have heard it said more than once that you can tell if anything lively and new is happening in a research laboratory by the laughter. Humor and discovery are closely linked because both thrive on surprise. So does a living congregation. It turns out that God has hardwired a joke into the universe that you only get once you have been to the breaking ground and been flipped upside down. Like all humor, this cosmic joke rests on unexpected reversal, and it is a good one: Humility endures, while pride dies in the dirt; sacrifice endures, while acquisitiveness ends with death; knowledge remains incomplete, while love fulfills and is never wasted.

A laughing God nudges us in the ribs: “Do you get it?”

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From Deeply Woven Roots (Fortress, 1997)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sorry.

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

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

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

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

Sorry.

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