Speak Life

Yes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*Cathedral Rock, Yosemite National Park.*

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

TGP

There are two reasons for grown-ups to avoid church. First, they’ve never been. My grandson once asked me with innocent curiosity what that building is with the “t” on top. Many others have been and see no reason to come back. The experience may have been repellent, demeaning or embarrassing. When you hear the worst people in public life explain their ugliness with faith, sensible people back away and keep the kids out of earshot. But it is far more likely that the church was inoffensive– less interesting than another cup of coffee, a walk around the block, tennis or whatever.

By Zach Stewart ( (a heck of a TGP) originally drawn for the Barefoot Guide book on Generative Leadership.

I’m speaking of church, but I’m guessing something happens like this in other religions, too.

I have found my closest working partners in two groups. The first are inside the church, but near the back door ready to get back on the streets. The second are already on the streets surprised to find themselves friends with a religious guy like me. We share the energy, joy and pathos—but not “god-talk.”

Next week twenty authors from Africa, Europe and the United States will gather at Wake Forest to blend our thinking on a book on religion and health to be published next year by Elgar Press. The intellectual sausage is still in process, so it’s premature to share detail. I mention it because most of the authors are in the two groups—some surprised to be invited to anything religious and all surprised by the creative energy released.

I am trying out the name “theogenerative practioner” for those propelled by an experience that feels ultimate and urgent, not just dutiful or godly. TGP for short. They are everywhere which is why I can’t despair. When Stakeholder Health gave Soma Saha and Ji Im our Jerry Winslow and Ruth Temple Bell Award in June, I called all of them that. Legendary practice; the theo signals the well from whence comes the imagination and resilience.

Writing in a more academic manner about “theogenerative practice” for the book I had to deal with “theo.” Jim Cochrane pointed me to Rev. Dr. Ted Jennings, our late friend from Chicago Theological Seminary, a TGP who wrote a wildly generative book, Beyond Theism, in 1985 (out of print, but available used on Alibris). He said we had been suckered into defending an abstraction called God—and the dangerous claptrap of theism. We misplaced the real mystery, that we humans experience God more like a verb than a noun. Ted did not care about God as an abstract ultimate cause that lends itself to authoritarianism. The abstract god justifies structures of religion, culture, politics and practice whose inertia robs the poor of hope for change and, risks the extinction of us all. A Christian theologian, he cared less about God as creator and more about the liberating Spirit. And he cared about the itinerant carpenter who was killed by the twisted authorities of religion and empire for proclaiming justice and mercy. Count me, in Ted.

Although TGP’s are often not religious, we find “god-talk” helpful as we talk to each other about the experiences of being drawn, called, called out, confronted by the deeper currents of life. Ted was careful to note that a lot of non-religious people experience this even when they don’t have “god-talk” to explain it: activists, artists, care-givers and healers. Maybe you and me.

I think of Brooks Hays, Jimmy Carter, Bill Foege, Jim Curran, Howard Koh. And John Lewis, of course, who became an icon of generative public justice-making. He was raised in the church; long called him “preacher” for his earnest way of preaching to the chickens under his care. (Read Walking in the Wind right away!). But his life changed when,

“on a Sunday morning in early 1955, I was listening to our radio…as always, when on the air came a sermon by a voice I’d never heard before, a young minister from Atlanta…. But even more than the voice, it was his message that sat me bolt upright with amazement….This was the first time I had ever heard something I would soon learn was called the social gospel….I felt that this man—his name was Martin Luther King Jr.—was speaking directly to me.” (Lewis, p. 56).

He was transformed forever; following, following, following and in then leading, leading and leading. This was an event that opened the possibility that oppressive political realities could be disrupted, too.

We may never have another John Lewis or Jimmy Carter. But we may never have another you or me, either. It is entirely normal to have one’s life disrupted by events and inbreakings that release us for what we are made to be, made to do. Ted would say the work of theology begins with these events, not the old dry abstractions of theism. God is not done. What?!?!?!

Don’t skip over “generative.” This is the quality we recognize in God and the people. And not just practice which is nice, kind or proper. This is what makes God disruptive and impossible to tame by human systems. And this is why generative theologians scare defenders of the old ways.

A critical role for TGP’s who are religious like me is to defend theogenerativity against authoritarian religion in the public square. We needed this in COVID when religion was used to undermine public health. And, sadly, we see it in the most ironic place—love and the wonders of sexuality. Amid so much hurtful blather, we have to say clearly that God delights in generative relationships; you can’t have too much love across the whole fluid alphabet of sexual identities. God loves love.

By Jimmy Carter. Hanging in the Zaban Room of The Carter Center

We need tens of thousands of theogenerative practioners. And I think we have them. We have twenty-five new ones starting at our School of Divinity. Jerry Winslow is still disruptively typing at 78. I promise you that Jimmy is doing something theogenerative on his 99^th birthday.

Why not you and me?

Bother

Did you even know there were boy and girl artichokes? My daughter tells me that this one is a boy.

Bob Matthews and I have shared a friendship for nearly 30 years, dating back to the time I worked with Jimmy Carter. Nowadays, both Bob and Jimmy, along with another close colleague, are on hospice care. Yet another friend depends on an annoying oxygen machine. It seems as if our whole species—humanity—is living in diminishing days.

Bob, who is living with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, is cared for by his wife Marjorie, his daughter Sarah, and hospice nurses, all blending both skill and humor. A few weeks ago, they hurriedly assisted him as he struggled for breath, to which he responded, “why bother?”

It’s a real question. And as a pediatric chaplain, Bob would know smarmy distraction.What justifies any effort or expenditure—bother—when the recipient can’t give back? Insurance may pay for the oxygen or rent the special bed, but no amount can offset the emotional investment of a daughter, wife, or friend. Why bother?

Bob’s patio blooms with flowers that he nurtured, now with help from his daughter Sarah. Did he earn their blossom? Do we ever truly earn anything? Certainly not through our clumsy endeavors labeled as “work.” Most of the most beautiful things in our lives are unearned and now in threat. The fading redwoods, air itself. Why should we bother?

As long as Bob can marvel at the beauty of a single blossom, he is on duty. The world runs on wonder, not mere logic. I suspect the flowers grow towards Bob’s awe just as they do toward the sun.

Later in the day, while in another garden with another daughter, I experienced the astonishing beauty of a raspberry. Can anyone truly earn even one of them? And there, from the same earth, an onion the size of her head emerged, worms wriggling away to prepare another one. Witness the egg laid by a generous hen, young Malbec grapes nearby, their roots digging into the same miraculous soil.

A honeybee paused to watch us. Most honeybees live six to eight weeks in the summer, their wings worn out from countless flights, collectively producing less than a teaspoon of honey. Does any human deserve enough for a single cup of tea?

Stone sober, I felt as high as any Californian had ever been at the audacious generosity of it all.

Most of the most beautiful things in our lives are entirely unearned, but often under threat; the redwoods, air itself. So there’s plenty of urgent work for the young and healthy, and even some for the grey, who can endure policy discussions in closed rooms. But work without wonder is unlikely to heal.

Just last Thursday, I saw half a trillion dollars worth of gold in the basement of the NY Federal Reserve Bank; money isn’tlacking in the world. The upper floors, though, offered something more valuable—brilliant minds, brimming with expertise and energy, contemplating the intersection of climate, health, and community. These minds can envision, then bring to life, things that haven’t existed before. But, why bother?

Some people are willing to give their lives away to the last breath—Jimmy, Bob, Jerry. Why wait to follow what they show us? What about the approximately four thousand weeks most of us get before those final moments? ‘We should begin, not end in wonder and then act. Any tool in a hand not guided by love, is more likely to harm than heal.’

I’ve never been much attracted to contemplation, being busy myself. But I see that worthy labor only grows from a sense of wonder, especially as we grapple with the fear of losing our natural systems and social structures. Fear triggers action, but rarely discernment.

Nobody has ever been busier than Jimmy Carter, who even managed to squeeze in bird-watching en route from the airport during an election monitoring trip to Zambia. The miracles on the wing captivated him, just as the miracle of free voting did. He observed, then he worked.

Make haste to wonder.

Forgive anything that distracts from kindness.

Accept the bother of others with grace.

Take “yes” for an answer.

What the Past Gets Wrong

These days I tend to forget how much we know about finding our way through really difficult, depressing, anxiety-fomenting, soul-sucking, hope-chilling stuff. I wrote Speak Life: Crafting Mercy in a Hard-hearted Time in 2018 before COVID, Ukraine, the 2020 election and insurrection and falling glaciers. This section, from pages 182-3, 196 helped me today.

The past deceives us by asking us not to take the possibilities of our one life seriously.

In anxious times, we listen too carefully to all that the past teaches us about what has not worked. The past hides the most important things in plain sight, including the simple fact that history doesn’t repeat. It happened, but it isn’t destiny. It circles, as does the hawk above me as I type this; once, twice, then another six times, but never in quite exactly the same way. Finally, having seen enough, it lets the breeze over the ridge carry it down and away into another life. History is not a circle but a spiral, never quite repeating.

The challenge for us short-lived ones is that some life les- sons take more than one lifetime to clarify. This is especially true for the bad things. Wrong can triumph for a long, long time, far beyond what you’d think possible. Bad people often get away with things for pretty much their entire lifetimes. Sometime their kids pick right up where the parents left off and they get away with bad things, too. But Dr. King wasn’t delusional when he saw the arc of history bending toward justice.

Sometimes it takes more than one lifetime for even the most obvious good things to mature. All my life it seemed obvious that the sun was giving us plenty of energy every day, beyond any possible amount that could ever be needed. That could be enough for billions of trees to grow and trillions of plankton to feed all the fish in the swirling oceans. Or surely enough to warm our little human houses and to allow us to move around without bothering the horses. It was always out of reach, the iconic tree- huggers’ folly. Until in a blink it wasn’t. And in another blink the Peabody coal train was the folly. China—no country of tree huggers—cancelled a hundred coal-burning power plants and started covering desert sands with silicon wafers. Some dreams long deferred are just waiting for the converse to emerge.

This is not just true of technology, which is created by small groups of people acting ahead of what seems possible at any given time. In recent decades millions of wholly new organizations have been invented for the purpose of doing something new, usually intended for some sort of good. These groups compete with each other in some sense, always prompting someone to complain about innovation clutter. But mostly they compete with the past and almost always win.

Love sees most clearly in the aftermath of loss, betrayal and pain, when the cynical smirk seems most appropriate. Love does not always see how to restore that which is broken, but it always has eyes for how life can find a way. Love in the aftermath of loss is tuned with the sensitivity of a bruise.

I tend to hang around with groups of people with hopes verging on grandiosity. On many days we actually do think about world peace, saving the planet, and about the least of these. This is good; what else should grownups think about? The challenge is that we are deceived into thinking that the hero of the story always tends to be…us…because we can see the possibilities and those possibilities tend to be extrapolated from our kinds of skills. We can see the future and it looks like more of us at an even larger scale: Health insurance for all (so that everybody could come to our great hospitals!), public health unleashed to prevent everything possible to prevent, education so wide- spread and enlightened that nobody would ever do anything dumb again.

History exaggerates what has happened and undervalues what could have happened just as easily. And it says little about what is possible, what has not yet happened. Emmanuel Kant insisted that the possibilities are just as real as the actualities (McGaughey & Cochrane, 2017). The possibilities are all we can do anything about.

The point is to give our life to the possibilities that allow life to emerge with the most mercy and justice possible. History also exaggerates the power of boundaries and differences, projecting today’s identities inappropriately backward across time, giving them far more power than they deserve. The actual testimony of life is all about dissolving boundaries, especially the ones in our head.

Love sees the unpredictable consequences of life more accurately than history because it knows that the future is not determined yet. The most important thing about the future is that it comes out of the utterly unpredictable expression of collective creative imagination.

Nothing ignites the imagination like love.

https://www.amazon.com/Speak-Life-Crafting-Mercy-Hard-hearted/dp/1732422206

Drive

I didn’t know there was a Winnumeuca, Nevada, but less an East and West one, too. People live there.

Six thousand miles through and around fires, hurricanes, political conventions and seven shots in the back. Red states and red parts of blue states in a Mini Cooper with a “Make America Kind Again” bumper sticker. I drove and pumped gas next to several thousand pick-up trucks through Tennessee, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Texas, Arizona, Nevada, Utah, Colorado, Kansas, Missouri, Illinois, Kentucky and West Virginia. I was taken by what did not happen and what I did not learn.

You’d think somebody somewhere would have at least muttered something. I never saw two hands on the wheel, so there was plenty of opportunity for gestures. I’d be an easy target and, well, sort of deserved it, what with my bumper sticker. Nothing. Not a peep or cross-eyed glance. I saw a couple dozen Trump/Pence signs—about one every 200 miles and maybe 6 for my guy. Hundreds of signs for citizens running for Sheriff and county commission. A few for Senate hopefuls who had lost in the primaries. More COVID signs than all of these combined.

People are sick of political sugar and spit. Maybe ready to stop shouting, go vote, do what we need to do to beat the virus, teach our kids and go back to work.

I-80 could be named for its average speed. 15 seconds equals a day on foot.

When I was planning the trip, I had, well, overlooked the nearly thousand miles of Utah and Nevada. To dodge the fires I ended up crossing their former ocean basin on US 50, the “loneliest highway in america.” From 37,000 feet in years past I had liked to pick out the Grand Canyon and been curious about the the tiny bright green dimes surrounded by brown rock to its north. Through my windshield I could now see that the pivot irrigation machines making green hay as well as rainbows in the morning light. But I would have to stop to learn anything about the people who tend them, what they hope or fear, where their kids are and how many cows the hay will feed. Driving back on I-80 I found myself following the California Trail which one wind-blown Nevada rest area explained was a walking path for thousands. Why would someone would walk Nevada with their kids? What were they leaving or seeking? How could I say anything about Nevada until I walk, too?

Ruby Mountain near the border of Nevada and Utah. Up close it is many colors, a rock rainbow.

US 50 road goes through through St. Louis and across the Mississippi, though no longer a lonely road. I had forgotten Illinois and the beautiful rolling forests gifted by glaciers on both sides of the Ohio. I jotted down the names dozens of museums I hope to stop at someday, constant reminders of the thousands of miles of things I did not know.

Sutro Tower out Charles and Asa’s bedroom windows. It ain’t fog. Smoke.

I did learn a lot about smoke. The brown acrid smoke of the Haight in San Francisco persisted in clouds, high haze and columns of fire till east of Denver. A continental-sized phenomenon that literally took my breath away. Not a thousand mile wall of flame, but the drifting smoke is clarifying things in the minds of people you might not expect. YHWH promised Noah no more floods; he didn’t swear off smoke.

On the high plains Sequoia-sized turbines are spinning by the thousands with hundreds more under construction. In the Kansas night they blink in unison from one horizon to the other, blades nearly touching. Only nimble birds make it to Canada and back and those only if they avoid looking into the glare of the solar arrays. Don’t buy oil stock. And don’t let them drill the arctic for oil we won’t need.

Among the things I know I don’t know is how to live our human lives when our machines are so powerful. My Mini gets 47 miles to the gallon, but still sucking my grandsons’ future from their air. Greta is right: we’re not trying hard enough. Get out of the planes and not because of the virus.

Charles in “school.” Easier to find Waldo than the teacher.

School was pretending to open as I drove. I watched my way-too-smart grandson try to pay attention to a screen on a wall, picking out the teacher’s voice amid a cacophony of chattering kids. It’s easy to say the kids aren’t learning much. I’m sure the adults are no better picking out the lessons from noise. Our kids watch as we pretend to notice the screams of our burning planet.

We’ll have lost about a quarter million Americans by Election Day. And a few more cubic miles of Greenland ice. And a few million acres of trees, including bristle cone and sequoia that finally met people too dumb to survive.

“Go back to your screens and don’t bother us,” our kids see us say. They notice. COVID invites some adult behavior.

Door hangers! Not much help, this democracy stuff. But our best and only hope.

Saturday morning after I got back a handful of citizens met at our garage door over a precinct map and box of election door hangers. Some of us headed to the apartments near the highway, another and his two grandsons headed to Washington Park. It went quick without the door knocking and conversations. We had instructions to only poke the Democrats awake, but we think everyone is paying enough attention to remind them to act like citizens. It is possible that all the wheels will fall off our cultural wagon; that we are too late with too little wisdom to make the choices that give life a chance. But maybe cultures and democracies, like ecosystems, rebound when the grown-ups show a tiny bit of respect for each other and their place.

Another thing I did not see in 6,000 miles of American pavement: “Jesus is coming back; prepare to meet your doom.” But maybe Jesus is already back, teaching us steps one and two of Shalom: Don’t shout at people you don’t know. And don’t give up on the world that God so loves.

Hurricanes

Winston-Salem as the storms of Florence came near.

Things move fast and urgently in an operating room early on a Monday. The churn of events and flood of people in the hallways are wondering why the nurses are standing holding hands right there in the surgery suite. A dozen family members are hoping for comforting words while a dozen feet away across a couple of gurneys, eight surgical nurses have no words at all, struggling to process the loss of one of their colleagues, apparently shot down dead by her husband right there in front of the kids. Feels like a hole in the eye of the circle with enough emotion to swirl a hundred miles out and around. Hurricane, indeed.

Florence ground slowly from the coast across the sandy flats up and through the rolling Piedmont and is now picking up speed on Interstate 81 like a northbound trucker. The winds could have been a lot worse. But this was a post-modern storm following no pattern at all, inexorably overflowing norms, breaking rules and making entire communities uninhabitable.

Hurricanes are about as big a show as nature puts on. What could be bigger? It turns out that jet streams and oceans are; even a tiny twitch in the speed or warmth of either one and you get the deadly meandering of storms like Florence. When the driving currents collapse, the flood isn’t far behind. So why would a hurricane behave in such an odd and deadly manner? Why would a democracy just forget to bother to follow its own rules anymore, chasing its own inevitable slow collapse? Why would we just forget to try to stem the tide of guns, now so over our heads that any pissed-off husband can just blow away the one they probably still loved? Surgery can’t stitch together what’s broken in this world. Hurricanes, all.

What to do?

Don’t look away.

Don’t look for the answer on a screen.

What can a nurse do as their own heart is breaking for a friend they loved? Form a circle, hold hands and feel the blood and spirit pumping. Let a few tears out, have a chaplain murmur a prayer. And then go scrub in to help someone else.

Last week before the deluge, TC and I went by the Forsyth County Democratic Party headquarters where Eric Ellison gave us our street assignment and over the next two hours knocked on 96 actual American doors. Being 2018 we only met 7 humans. One of them had become a citizen after immigrating from Spain two decades ago. Another grew up in the neighborhood 50 years back. We asked our fellow citizens to remember to vote, now in less than 55 days. A few thought they might want to volunteer, too, so we’ll follow up on that. Heading to higher ground door by door.

Anyone with a brain bigger than a 22 caliber slug knows it’s probably too late to stop global warming, the collapse of democracy or gun violence. All the data tell us so. But what parent, brother, or daughter would not try? What sentient mammal would not at least stir and try to get their kids to higher ground?

Our hospital has one of the worst parking lots built since the model T rolled out of Detroit. Dark, low ceilings and always oddly damp. The other day I was hurrying to my car and almost knocked down a woman standing in the middle of a lane looking this way and that, glancing down at the paper in her hand. I asked if she needed help and I thought I saw tears of gratitude. The real problem was that her eyes were dilated and she couldn’t even see the paper in her hand, much less her grey Toyota in the grey parking lot. I could help. In spite of my ordination, she trusted me enough to let me do something and we ended up circling six floors in my Mini Cooper, both squinting until we found the car. Probably wasn’t a great idea to let her drive away!

If you look up from the screen in your hand for a bit, you’ll notice people around you, doing this or that, going about their lives. You can’t know if their house is under water, their best friend dead or scared to go home. You probably don’t even know those things about people you work and walk beside every day. You have to make eye contact.

Last Spring my daughter Lauren, now a mom, watched with us all on live TV as Parkland high school students fled from their building, learning shortly that 17 of their friends were dead inside. She writes plays,“so instead of closing my eyes and thinking back to being a junior and watching the news in horror curing my AP US History class and thinking those poor mothers and please god someone do something about this… I posted a query on Facebook asking for help with this play in the wake of this new violence.” Her friend and fellow theatre activist Christina Wallace reached out immediately, read Natural Shocks, and said “Let’s do this.”

Lauren contradicted Hamlet; “the play is not the thing. You are. Your community, your company, yourself. Any play is just the metal that attracts the lightning. We are the lightning – actor, artistic team, audience, community. We are the undeniable force of nature that will light up this darkness and change it forever.”

More than two hundred theaters of every sort and size did the play, including the very best performance in our own Green Street United Methodist by the brilliant Mellissa Jones. Next month a full production of the play will open in New York, keeping the movement going.

That’s how it works. Most of us are not famous. But when the hurricane hits, we move and don’t quit, not when people we love are in high water.

On November 10th the See2See Road Trip will begin making eye contact with about 3,300 miles of people beginning in San Diego with the 100 Million Healthier Lives annual meeting and then the American Public Health Association with our Public Health Law friends. That afternoon we’ll grab a bite at our friend Heather’s home up the coast, then winding through friends and strangers in San Bernardino, Phoenix, Tucson and El Paso where Dr. Arvind Singhal is teaching his band of positive deviates (seriously, check out his book). Then over to Abilene and Lubbock before landing with the friends at Baylor and Parkland in Dallas. Over to Floyd with the astonishing Redeemed Christian Church ….. and over to Little Rock, a hugely creative node in what’s coming next. Memphis, down to the Delta for a nod to the very first community health clinic and activist Fannie Lou Hammer, over to Chattanooga, Cherokee, Hickory and Winston-Salem. Raleigh for William Barber, John Hatch at Shaw University. We’ll ending our discovery where the surge from Florence met the flooding of the Pamlico Sound in little Washington.

We’ll make eye contact with people finding the way to heal their communities. That’s what movements do: they make eye contact, grab hands and move. That’s how the P2P movement is springing up everywhere, ditto Stakeholder Health.

You could just get on the web and watch famous people saying really smart things about it all. These days nothing is quite so urgent as to look at another human and ask about how they are hoping to heal, themselves and the ones they love. For that matter, why are you still reading this? Go talk to somebody, put your hand in theirs and go find somebody who needs you both.

Oh, it’s available on Amazon for $15. Here.

I wish I was handing you this in person in a decent restaurant with a bit more ceremony involved. But I didn’t want to wait to get my new book in your hands.

Speak Life: Crafting Mercy in a Hard-Hearted Time, is written for you, who have given your life to advance the health and well-being of the places and neighbors you love. Like you, most of the people captured by such a movement persist year after year for decades sustained by shared spirit, intelligence and sweat. I hope this new book will deepen and strengthen your energy for that movement.

Speak Life is being released in Orlando June 20^th at the Distinguished Lecture Series sponsored by Florida Hospitals, one of our Stakeholder Health partners. Most of the speakers and all of the audience are distinguished by their people and places they care about and the Spirit that carries them. If you’re anywhere nearby, please come (You can register here.)

If you’ve read my other stuff, you’ll recognize echoes of Boundary Leaders and the earlier Deeply Woven Roots. And of course, Leading Causes of Life and the Fellows Jim Cochrane leads. Speak Life is a more radical take on both leadership and Spirit. I’m quite sure you’ve experienced the same dramatic move yourself in these hard-hearted times.

Thank god for critical readers, editors, fact-checkers and proof-readers! Ray Tetz’s amazing team led by Alberto Valenzuelea and Becky De Oliveriera and our home team, especially Tom Peterson, Jim Cochrane, Maria Parries and, of course, TC.

Speak Life is published by Stakeholder Press and all the profits go to Stakeholder Health. This is a learning group tracing back ten years to the tough streets of Memphis, Detroit, San Bernardino, Bithlo and several times at the White House (back a couple of years). Speak Life is, in a sense, a radical view of the life of leaders that undergirds our earlier book, “Insights from New Systems of Health.” Nearly all of those practices demand grit and courage to cross over many lines of discipline and institutional politics.

The learning is accelerating: we will be releasing a third in the Fall that is more technical exploration of how the Leading Causes helps us understand how to organize and set priorities for our work in community. And then we really do put the pedal down in November in a bold “See2See Road Trip” traveling from San Diego to Raleigh: the move in movement.

Jerry Winslow, the Chair of the Stakeholder Health Advisory Group, writes in the forward: “From one perspective, the movement might appear to be merely the sharing of smart approaches to what is now called population health. But a more careful look, with focused attention to the spirit of the work, reveals something deeper and more lasting. It is life-giving joy in the hard work of the journey toward social justice. The real fuel for this movement is the conviction that together we can build communities in which every person counts, where no one is left out, and no one suffers needlessly because of institutionalized unfairness. To speak life, then, is to adopt the ways of life so that every person is celebrated by a community that genuinely cares.”

Rev. Larry Pray, the prophetic genius of Big Timber. He taught me that life has a language, which he is still speaking in his hardest of all days.

I want you to see Speak Life in the light of all of that highly collaborative learning. Writing is about the least impressive—undistinguished—thing you can do with a large number of hours. It is typing, often with a lot of silence between the clicks. When I slowed down, I thought of all the astonishing people who were generally not typing, but lending their lives to the urgency of mercy and justice. I tried to see what matters most through those many eyes.

I’m like one of the nameless grey neurons way back behind the eyeballs trying to connect the signals those many eyes are seeing. I’m not qualified to do very much useful most days, but I am privileged to work among wide extended webs of those who know what to do in the middle of the night standing with the First Responders at a suicide with weeping parents, who build a school for young women in the fire and dust of Kabul, who do surgery, administration, therapy, research and discovery into the mysteries of molecules and neighborhoods. Some of those agents are named Big Dog (the benevolent gang leader in 38109 of Memphis) and R. Ernest Cohen, the Jewish Integrative Medicine Chiropractor who runs a free clinic in Wilkesboro so frugal it borrows its Wifi signal from the tattoo parlor next door. Richard Joyner with his anointed prophetic tractor, the weekly amazements of Oakhurst and Green Street and so many more. You can get a sense of this in the new article about Soma Stout 100 Million Lives, which NewsWeek is smart enough to cover, too.

Taize France, early on the morning when Jim Cochrane, TC, Masana, Shingai and I spoke life.

Through this collective eye we can see life, tenacious and fiercely protective of its most tender edges.

And together we find the words to Speak Life.

I hope you like the book. Oh, it’s available on Amazon for $15. Here.

Gary