Stakeholder Health – garygunderson Blog

Do not pass over the stranger

This is the week in which the Jews, seeking God, were taught empathy for the “stranger” over and over for a couple millenia. It’s not an easy lesson.

This is also the week when Jesus turned toward Jerusalem, showing empathy for the Palestinian before being killed by the empire and its complicit todies. Same thing would happen this week on the very same tortured soil. Whether this is week is sacred for you by its eternal consequences (the saving cross) or eternal lesson of empathy, honor it.

Say the name of the stranger most strange to you.

“Palestinian” for the Jews and Americans who provide the two-ton genocide bombs turning hospitals to bloody dust. Ask why a dictator would want their name silent and do not pass over the answer: if you cannot share the human vulnerability of any stranger, you have already lost your humanity for those you think you love. You have already given the King—or somebody who foolishly wants to be King—power reserved only for God. It is the Jews who teach this. Honor them this week by saying the name of their stranger and ours. “Palestinian.”

And the names of nations nearby speaking Spanish who we have treated despicably; propping up their cruel tyrants valuing bananas more than the strangers who lived there. And now paying blood money to get the weakest ones off our streets. Say their names.

Say the names of the strangers who need Medicaid, HIV/AIDS medicine and mental health care. And the thousands of honorable strangers employed to serve them, now humiliated and discarded in political blood circus across the globe; community health workers in Cape Town and North Carolina.

It is, of course, not enough to say their names. Esppecially not just for one week. Few of us drop the strangers’ bombs; but we pay the taxes tomorrow so that others can. Few of us fly the planes to El Salvador; but we are quiet as they take off. Few of us take medicine from a child; but we don’t even call the Senator whose job it is to ensure the government functions. Surely this week is a good time to call?

I read the Contrarian, founded by Washington Post journalists who quit rather than drink from the timid complicity of its owner. Jennifer Rubin wrote about why Pesash matters now. She referred to to ProPublica’s bone-chilling reporting, that flight attendants on deportation flights were told that in case of an emergency, “evacuating detainees was not a priority or even the flight attendants’ responsibility.” It is hard to escape the conclusion that evacuees are treated as being less than human. (“Don’t talk to the detainees. Don’t feed them. Don’t make eye contact,” attendants were told.)

The empathy is not lacking only among those who tend toward red hats. I have worked in the organizations and universities who gathered their (our) privileges and wealth in the name of helping strangers. But we have often not been zealous, efficient, effective or much less empathetic. We have been bad or lazy managers at turning empathy into program and program into mercy and mercy into justice. We made it easy for cynical people to hurt the those we are supposed to serve.

Passover—Pesash—is for all of us own our lack of empathy and to own our complicity in the resulting cruelties.

Pause this week. Let you-know-who do whatever dumb and venal thing crosses his mind. But don’t us be dumb and venal. Listen for the stranger; do not look away. Call their name.

Praying for trouble

I’m really missing John Lewis today. Fearless, tenacious and non-violent, he’d know what to do and how to do it, . He went to jail dozens of times–usually getting beaten in the process—so that people could vote. And clear-eyed, he would not be surprised that 49.2% would fall for an ugly offer to reduce the price of eggs a bit and beaat up on somebody weaker. But he would also know that many of them are truly traumatized and don’t know who to trust. But he would not whine like my Democrats are. But he would not pout. He knew it was a long, long walk. Since it is King Day, I’m quite sure he’d be in a church praying for good trouble.

Good Trouble

God of anger, fire, trouble and cry,

Kindle us, your willing embers of the world that needs a cleansing fire. We are yours to risk, eager for fresh air beyond the safe spaces. We love your street, and concrete grit. We love the stride and the heft of things worth doing, unafraid of conflict.

Let us not hold your energy lightly, unexamined and unwashed of pride. Let us not waste your hope by tethering it to our short-ranging vision. Let us not waste voice and language by limiting it to our cleverness.

Tune our ears to those hardest to hear, the ones we find annoying and inconvenient. Especially help us hear the ones that embarrass our proper friends, just as You bothered them with tax collectors, working women and the rich. You were rejected by family, nearly thrown off a cliff by neighbors. Complicate our sense of connection and draw us into the tangled humanity You have made so wonderfully and inconveniently complex.

And then, after we sense the breadth of your impossibly wide family, let us speak with simplicity of mercy and justice in kindhearted firmness.

Protect us last. Put our bodies in the way of those who would harm the poor and despised; let the bruises intended for the weak fall on us; let the venom aimed at the despised be ours. Spend us as You have spent yourself.

We know in resistance we find release; in giving, all gain. For life finds a way where we let it flow through us into lives parched for mercy, aching for justice, despairing of peace. May our young be brave. Our families raising up new prophets as our old ones take the risks reserved for those who have lived enough to give it all away.

Make our lives a protest against the lie that You have not created enough food, space and freedom to go around for all your children. We deny with generous lives the lie that You failed to design a world that might work for us all. May our kind lives protest the lie that we must narrow our hope to only those who pray like us, look like us and talk like us. May our lack of anxiety protest the bitter penury that shrinks your mercy into a fist.

Surely it is your voice that speaks of a time when your promises will be realized, the weapons laid down, the rich with the poor eating together, lamb and honeybee, Baptist and Buddhist, Anglican and Atheist quiet in wonder at how great Thou art, how blessed we are.

May it be.

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The prayer is from God and the People: Prayers for a Newer New Awakening, published by Stakeholder Press. Available on Amazon here.

Carter, the Improbable Man

We must not lose memory of his decency, honesty, toil, service and faith.
White Dove, by Jimmy Carter in the Zaban Room of The Carter Center

Jimmy Carter’s life is now complete, a race run full out to the last day. The moravian bells of old Salem chime in his honor as I type. Many others will follow in the days, months and decades to come. We must not lose memory of his decency, honesty, toil, service and faith. And not dishonor him by elevating those virtues out of reach of all of us.

Counting him out was almost never a good idea whether he was running for an improbable office (every one he ever held) or an improbable health goal (guinea worm, polio, smoking or handgun violence). Or embracing improbable relationships—the Allman Brothers Band so key to the first steps of his race for President, Charles Taylor, the Liberian Pariah President or North Korean Pariah President, Kim Jong-un. Carter was able to live across improbable boundaries because he was comfortable with his own complexities and complicities; he knew he was human like all of the 8,018,082,868 of us. And he was clear-eyed about his own death, which most of us ignore until the last final shock.

Carter was always misread as being somewhat simplistic and moralistic. In fact, he worked through his own complexities to still choose to act, speak and do what he thought right. He was not surprised that his relationships sometimes made that harder; he was a loyal to people who made his life more complicated than a more ruthless man would have (thinking of a few bankers and entrepreneurs who clung to him like barnacles). A religious man with eclectic curiosity, he often confounded Baptist Christians who feared the grey areas (most of life). And he confounded secular friends who loved the grey so much they found it odd that a man could choose commitment and follow through. Not satisfied with a simplistic stab at polio, he did the hard work decade after decade after decade. Never satisfied with pontificating in a hotel ball room, he took African presidents to left-behind places in their own countries they had never seen. And then he went back again and again. He knew the complicated reasons for homelessness, but he never failed to pick up his own hammer and build one more home. He loved one woman his whole life, even though he was honest enough to almost lose an election by admitting “lust in his heart” for others. He gave the word “human” a good name.

Like many thousands, my life would be unrecognizably different had it not met his. Not long after he was involuntarily returned to civilian life from the White House, he started The Carter Center as a launching pad, more than a museum. He and Dr. Bill Foege, who had run the CDC under him, held the first global conference called Closing the Gap, even before he had a building. An engineer’s kind of conference, it asked how much of the burden of premature morality could be prevented based on what was already known. What could we actually do with what we already know? About two thirds was preventable back in the 80’s, as your grandmother would have guessed. And who needs to act? Among others, the ubiquitous faith networks who he knew tended to sit around and wait for something terrible to happen and then act surprised at the most predictable things (cancer, war, diabetes, river blindness). Could religious people grasp the vast moral chasm causes by not acting on the patterns we know cause needless suffering? He and Dr. Foege got the attention of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and started the Interfaith Health Program, which I ended up leading. Why me, and not some famous academic bishop? Frankly, I’m not sure, but both men had a preference for bold action over formal qualifications.

The first thing we did was blow up the perfectly respectable grant plan of work, which began with a big formal conference at the new Carter Center. We replaced it with two years of scrappy meetings in dumpy basements and raggedy centers all over the nation (not unlike his run for president, now that I think of it). We asked the leaders actually doing things what they would commend to him as worth replicating. And we asked where they were stumped for lack of a clear vision of what might work. The two lists were identical, of course, which meant that the big innovation was having enough humility enough to realize that somebody down the road had probably already figured out the answer we thought we had to invent. It is actually harder to adapt something as it demands even more intelligence than simply plopping down another idea from somewhere. He called this a “mundane revolution.”

Carter is known for protecting the Arctic reaches of the Alaskan wilderness. I rafted the Canning River which borders that vastness and I was grateful; what other President even knew it was there, or would spend scarce political capital to protect it? It wasn’t just big nature he loved; he never missed participating in the Audubon bird count in Plains. He personally called the American Chestnut Society to get some hybrid seedlings to plant at The Carter Center, where they are improbably growing strong. He accepted some gift of Koi from the Japanese government but refused to purify the pond so people could see them. (A Georgia pond is brown.) Life, even the mundane, is spectacular when you have eyes like his.

My very best ideas are tiny footnotes in the extraordinary legacy left by this special man. These include the “Memphis Model,” emulated by dozens of major healthcare systems all over the nation, the “religious health assets” which paved the way for the WHO into activating faith networks all over the world and, of course, Leading Causes of Life, which I spoke about the first time at a Conference in Milwaukee to which the former President sent me to in his place (imagine their disappointment!). Carter created a physical and a mental space where it seems reasonable to imagine things that had never happened and then try to do them. And then keep trying, maybe even for 98 years.

After decades of one unbearably oafish Christian after another desecrating the very idea of faith, he quietly gave his life as a long gift to his church and all people of faith: an example of sacred dignity and integrity. Not that the oafs understood. When he was gracious enough to invite evangelical leaders to the White House, more than one publicly prayed that he would become a better Christian. However, when my secular friends think that anyone who tries to believe is foolish, I could always say, “No, I mean people like Jimmy Carter.” They had to nod.

He had little patience with superficial piety. Once he had all of us Directors reflect on whether Newt Gingrich had any good ideas in his “Contract with America.” I choked and noted this was not likely to go down well with the faith people who actually do the work on the streets. He snapped that the churches rarely break a sweat, while the government at least knows where all the poor live.

In the very first article for the Interfaith Health Program he wrote, “We must make the choices that lead toward life.” And who is accountable for those choices? Not just improbable Presidents, but hundreds of thousands of improbable grown-ups doing the right thing when people notice and when they don’t.

This is true, even unto the very end of their days, when the right thing means releasing into the love of one’s family, instead of the normal vain and fruitless medicalized struggle against death. James Carter was proud, but never vain, often overlooked, but few lives bore so much fruit. I hope his last thought was satisfaction of a life well lived.

Normal

As actual patriotism seems to harder to find, Memorial Day amps up the maudlin version of military valor which is almost never loud and bright.

As actual patriotism seems to harder to find, Memorial Day amps up the maudlin version of military valor. The 35^th version of the Memorial Day concert on the Mall gave us almost cartoon versions of the now-aged heroes and heroines.

Military valor should be normal, not exotic. I have family in Arlington; my sister’s husband Spence, a no kidding combat hero in Korea. He was always dismayed that his behavior was not more normal. My dad did not go abroad because the army needed a normal railroad as well as the occasional superhero.

Recently, TC and I saw military valor that was shocking in the same way a good railroad is.

We were disgorging from the airport bus to pick up a rental car when TC noticed that a woman was stranded behind. Not elderly, but a bad knee made the step just a tad too much to navigate. Her husband, just short of a MAGA hat, wasn’t much better off. A hefty African-American man had already turned and offered to help her; “just put both hands on my shoulders and I’ll get you down. For him this was military muscle memory ethic: “never leave your wounded behind.” A committee formed, of course, with helpful variations. Nobody asked about voter preferences. The bus driver poked a button to lower the vehicle 6 inches. Soon on the sidewalk, the woman turned to thank TC and complement on her on her shoes as everyone headed to the counter to get the rental cars.

Normal, not exemplary. That’s what makes actual valor so essential to the human prospect. As normal and essential as a bee giving its life to defend the hive.

Way more interesting that a wagon of fireworks. Real life every day valor.

Later in the evening, we were present as 31 Randal Lewis Fellows demonstrated intellectual valor as they graduated from their internship that they had stack on top of already rigorous graduate training in health-related fields. Partners for Better Health imagines academic health Green Berets. Their internships demanded highly technical analysis of some problem that turned out to be solvable they brought ethics and intellect to see the hopeful path. This is what normal humans do in the presence of possibility.

The next morning Stakeholder Health recognized three similar exemplars, Kevin Barnett, Lauran Hardin, and Maria Hernandez. Their awards were named after other exemplars, Ruth Temple, Jerry Winslow and Soma Saha. Brilliant leaders all, but as role models, not cartoons. Like Mandela, Tutu or Carter, or those on the Mall, really. Circumstances—sometimes extraordinary–offer different opportunities to do the right thing. As King noted, all work is honorable, if it serves the whole.

When we describe these choices as “moral courage” we risk elevating them to something only expected of rare heroes—and not ourselves. This only helps the venal ones who want their smallness to be the norm. Normal people don’t kidnap innocents, bomb and starve babies, gas civilians, twists the courts or stand by in the presence of horrible behavior.

I doubt that Mr. Netanyahu would do to children in person what he is ordering others to do by email. I doubt you or I would offer to chip in for a 2,000 pound bomb to drop on them, either. Or pour bleach on the last of the coral reefs, strangle the last caribou, spray neurotoxins on the garden honeybees.

Democracy swings in the wind. It always does. It helps the venal for the rest of us to wait for a superhero. They want us to stay behind our flat screens so that we are less likely to act normal. Normal people do love mercy. They do act justly. They tend to walk humbly. Those qualities are in the Bible precisely because they are expected of all of us.

Every day, whether we are on a New York jury the whole world was waiting for, or another down the hall on a case we’ll never hear about.

So it is not delusional to expect Joe to stop giving Bibi two-ton bombs in our name. Any normal guy from Scranton knows that. Somebody in Moscow knows to not gas their neighbors. Somebody in Winston-Salem knows how to build a house for poor people. And anyone on the bus could have helped the woman with a bad knee.

Bee sex in Texas

Humans get so many things wrong about honeybees. I’m sure they are a bit confused about us, too. But they must be especially mystified by the way we call the one who sows all the eggs in the hive a queen, which implies the off-putting and inefficient pomp of human royalty. Mother is closer, given her role in laying many thousands of eggs; but also wrong given her lack of maternal qualities. She lays eggs but has no role in raising them. And the first thing she does when she emerges with her impressive stinger is to kill her competitors. Not like my mother.

The one we call queen is more like a sower of seeds. She is not even a gardener that carefully plants a seedling, making sure the roots are nestled just right in the soil. Let’s call her Sower.

Honeybees have successfully flourished for 30 million years precisely because they have no royal qualities at all. We have no idea how 60,000 bees in the hive think collectively, but we know it’s not the queen. Every single worker bee—all girls—have the identical genetics of the Sower. The hive every egg “royal jelly” for three days before switching to the more mundane “bee bread.” But the hive feeds the Sower special food her whole life turning on the genes that make her much bigger and living 10 times as long and, of course, able to lay a thousand eggs a day. But she isn’t any smarter than the other bees. Her most consequential decision is which egg to lay in which cell and doesn’t really decide even that. She sticks her tentacles into the cell to see which one the architect bees intended (the 10% drone cells are slightly bigger).

Why is this important for humans? We have long fallen for the idea of the Elevated Decider who receives ridiculously disproportionate privileges in exchange for making big decisions. The honeybees make those decisions collectively without the process skewed by privilege. Flat democracy so perfect humans can’t even recognize it.

Now and then humans approach smart by accident, such as recently seen in Texas of all places.

Honeybees typically produce way more honey than they can possibly consume, leaving plenty for us. They can also produce more hives, which is why they are so adaptive, able to explode into almost any niche given the chance. The Texas department of agriculture triggered an explosion of bee hives by granting agricultural tax abatements to any “farm” over 5 acres with 5 or more hives. Texans are not known for environmentalism, but they known a lucrative write-off when they see it.

Honeybees are insects, as TC reminds me, with little emotional bandwidth. They don’t care about dubious Texan morality. Suddenly, there were bees everywhere! And the people dumping poisons suddenly were surrounded by tax-incented Texans. (Here’s the story.)

We are so used to complaining about environmental decline that we overlook the natural superpowers like the honeybees’. They can make a new Sower and thus entire new hive when they need or want to do so. Normally, this is when the old Sower starts to show signs of wearing out and getting erratic. The hive puts some promising eggs in larger cells and feeds those eggs nothing but special food. In about 16 days a Sower will emerge. (She isn’t nice: as I mentioned, her first act is to kill the other potential queens.) She’ll fly off to mate with six or ten drones and returns to lay eggs in the dark for a couple years.

Often in the Springtime the the hive will find itself thinking of reproduces itself. Honeybee sex involves the whole hive. The existing Sower is chased around the hive to lose weight so she can fly one last time. About half the bees in the hive pour into the air in a swirling ecstatic cloud bringing the old Sower with them. They pause in a tree branch to give the scouts a chance to find a new permanent location in the neighborhood. While they are pausing an opportunistic human can persuade them into a box they may find it acceptable.

Kelly Carpenter’s bait hive for Methodist bees. So far it has captured four swarms that have come from his church rafters.

Kelly Carpenter and I have captured three Methodist hives this way in the past couple weeks. Combined with some Texas-style splits, 5 hives are now 16. The process is risky and wild. They bet everything on expansive possibility which has worked for thousands of millennia.

Last year about half of all hives in the United States did not make it through the gauntlet of toxins, sprays, overcrowding and stupid human behavior that magnify the threats of mites and such. But it is important to note that most of the hives that failed were the ones kept by humans.

Many natural species are also capable of exuberant expansion once humans quit pumping poison into their neighborhood. Nature out-generates death every chance it finds. Humans can help the most by removing the financial incentives to poison. Just imagine if we gave tax rebates for planting butterfly and pollinator flowers. Do we really need Texans to show us?

Why five acres? Our townhouse community has one acre of sanitized fescue vacuumed in the fall. The city council could change the game for bees and bugs and songbirds with a 5% property tax rebate. Of course, we could just do it. We not legally bound to spray neurotoxins on ourselves.

Too small to matter? One of my favorite organizations is Homegrown National Parks. “Homegrown National Park® addresses the urgent biodiversity crisis with a simple, science-based solution to a global challenge. We are a grassroots call-to-action to regenerate biodiversity by planting and preserving native plants that support critical ecosystem services and removing invasive plants that do not. We are catalyzing action that will have meaningful, tangible, measurable, and immediate results. We can do this NOW, without waiting for legislation.”

We are not inherently smart as honeybees. We have to think hard and do things on purpose. Somebody had to notice that there is more private land currently planted in lawns than in all the national parks put together. And think about what that means.

We can just stop behind stupid. Start choosing abundance.

Nature just won’t quit trying. Here’s an eager dandelion emerging from our parking lot. Never quit trying….

Community Perspective on CalAIM

Life is generous, although most humans don’t notice.

*Sunrise in God’s Acre in Old Salem, March 31, 2024*

I offer evidence, if you failed to notice the azaleas, not to mention the rising sun. I’ll point to a full bloom of creative generosity where you might not expect it—in a complicated partnership between government, healthcare and hundreds of small community-based organizations in California.

This week Stakeholder Health released some careful research into a radical innovation in how the state of California is providing health care for the poor.

Here is the link to the webinar.

Here is a link to a two-page summary of the research.

Here is a link to the full report.

In most places government and healthcare are built proudly with nonchalant acceptance of the fact that the poor live demeaning lives and then die in humiliating pain. Sorry, there’s just not enough to go around, says the hard-hearted god of the castles. Even when the poor can slither through the doors into the emergency rooms, they have little access to 21st century preventive medicine. For decades it has been clear that most of the drivers of disease and suffering are not medical and need relatively inexpensive preventative care. Most conditions that look medical are best managed by something social, mental or spiritual before leaping to the expensive pill or carving up a body part.

This is technically called the social determinants of health (SDOH) which is unhelpful language because they go way beyond social work. Everything that happens in human life has biological-psychological-social-and Spirit drivers and implications. Duh. Humans are complex and wonderfully made (Psalm 89). Even straightforward medical problems—say a broken leg, which my kid is still recovering from— has a four-fold a healing path. It works the other way, too: childhood trauma shows up as wickedly complex biological issues decades later.

The healthcare industry is not organized this way. Governmental programs usually take the head off the body and put it over in the mental health agency, then detach body parts in thousands of reimbursable codes. Everything outside one’s skin goes under a totally different set of social services agencies leaving a scrap for public health to inspect the food, chase rats and get ready for the next pandemic.

BUT now California launched the first really large-scale trial (CalAIM) using Medicaid to treat humans as they actually are—complex and wonderfully made and living in communities that are complex human systems that can care for each other. The technicians in government (usually called bureaucrats) leaned into all that complexity and got the federal government to grant a “waiver” to spend Medicaid money on a wide range of SDOH drivers. North Carolina had been lauded for talking about this. California has done it in a state five times larger following science to embrace 10 times the range of SDOH factors. Bold.

AND they are spending that money through the extraordinary array of community-based organizations. In reality, these groups have only had scraps of money from bake sales or philanthropic largess (social justice one chardonnay at a time, says Dr. Suzanne Henderson). CalAIM has put $4 billion in motion, which, even in California, is a lot of chardonnay.

AND the innovations continued by investing millions in helping community organizations strengthen their capacities to interface with governmental funding procedures. This would be impossible except for the last innovation—the government folks listen, adapt in real time and change their way of doing things, too. Note the research was paid for by CommonSpirit Health, one of the largest healthcare systems in the nation. It is rare for such systems to even be curious about the reality of community organizations, much less partner in learning. It is head-breakingly difficult to blend institutional cultures and ancient practices. Easier to shame, blame and whine. Not here.

The initiative has released creative energy and imagination through changing the work of many hundreds of organizations. Many of the groups were built from faith, which is supposed to believe in generosity and even resurrection, but settle for much less. The Stakeholder Health panel included Lutheran Services, which has been doing this kind of work for many decades, now accelerated with the partnerships. And it includes “Pneumacare” (spirit—get it?)—a collaborative that grew out of a ministerial association, now managing millions of dollars to provide care that that cares in partnership with CalAIM. And yes, the healing is for everybody of every kind of faith and no-faith, skin and language. It’s California.

You have to watch the video to hear the story of real resurrection going on and be amazed at the technical skill making it work. (Here’s the link.)

This is smart generosity, not dumb give away. It is obviously smarter to invest in what people actually need when they need it will prove less expensive than the obviously dumb current idea of waiting for their life to blow up so completely, that they then end up in an emergency room. This kind of work is hard with many technical challenges. You have to do the right things right. It breaks every day and is fixed in real time. The research reveals a bold effort still underway.

California chicken from a generous california hen.

The only unforgivable sin is to accuse God of creating a world broken from the beginning without enough for everyone. All the disciples of every religion can’t work around that because it assumes that inequity is inevitable; God’s fault, really. That sin is the root of every angry political movement. If they would open it, even You-Know-Who’s $60 Bible tells of a God who did a good job for everyone and expects us to do so, too. Turn on the lights to the most the most obvious thing in the world– there is enough for everyone. Everything works—politics, faith, family, health, food systems, housing, education—if you begin with that most obvious fact. Witness California.

Just Peace, please

Weapons on their way to another failed peace. Wow, indeed. says the Memphis billboard.

These are tender days for those who wish to be peacemakers amid the savagery in Ukraine, Palestine, Israel and dozens of African countries too accustomed to being forgotten. Who can speak of peace with any credibility without empathizing with the rage and bitterness? But how to empathize without enabling? Is there nothing in play but raw violence ending only with extermination?

I was raised in a military family and predictably entered ROTC at Wake Forest. But then I woke up (I’ll claim it!) and began the process of applying to be a conscientious objector, thinking of Canada if my application was denied by the draft board, as it likely would have been given my family. I pulled #348 in the draft lottery which made the question entirely theoretical, never applied and don’t know to this day what I would have actually done. One never does until one is in the actual moment of decision.

Years later I found myself at the Thomas Merton’s Abbey of Gethsemane in bourbon country south of Louisville for a meeting to develop a protocol of just peacemaking to balance the many centuries old protocol about just war. The more appropriate ambassador types at The Carter Center sent me because it sounded more like religion than serious statecraft. I found a spot in the back row until I was informed, I was supposed to be one of the experts to provide some basic principles to guide the discussion. Yikes. (The story of that otherwise dignified event is here.)

The group had giants in the field, so despite me, they identified 10 basic practices to judge whether a government, religious group or non-governmental organization can claim they have exhausted the peacemaking. Only then—after all the peacemaking–is just war theory relevant at all. War can only be considered ethical after the peacemaking.

Despite about sixteen centuries of weirdly meticulous ethics debate about its principles, Just War theory is almost always an ineffectual footnote applied after all the blood and tears has soaked into the soil. How do we know when peacemaking is enough?

This week the International Court said that the state of Israel had plausibly failed to conduct a just war so egregiously that genocide may be underway. Generations of Israelis will have to explain that to their children, a desecration of the memory of the lives so horribly lost on October 7^th. Their failure is not my point here. I have a lot to live with, too.

I am am pretty sure the court would find those of us claiming to be peacemakers negligent, too. We are guilty of malpractice, lazy practice and no practice at all as the engines of war were tuned and the lies so necessary for hatred were refined and repeated. We have known better for at least 30 years, from the beginning of Just Peacemaking theory at Merton’s abbey. More than that as he wrote 14 years earlier:

“Finally, we must be reminded of the way we are ourselves tend to operate, the significance of the secret forces that rise up within us and dictate fatal decisions. We must learn to distinguish the free voice of conscience from the irrational compulsions of prejudice and hate. We must be reminded of objective moral standards, and of the wisdom, which goes into every judgment, every choice, every political act that deserves to be called civilized. We cannot think this way, unless we shake off our passive ear responsibility, renounce our fatalistic submission to economic and social forces, and give up the unquestioning belief in machines and processes which characterizes the mass mind. History is ours to make. Above all we must try to recover our freedom, or moral autonomy, or capacity, to control the forces to make for life and death in our society.” (Thomas merton, The Non-violent Altnerative (New York: Farrar, Strais and Giroux, 1980) 78-79.)

The group at his Abbey came up with these guidelines which have become official policy of numerous religious bodies. An academic industry has risen up around them. You can get a PhD in them. But as a generation we have failed to do them with anything like the scale or energy of those seeking death. As Dr. Fred Smith says, we have allowed evil to out-organize us. Guilty.

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

You can’t say you have sought peace until we:

1. Support nonviolent direct action.
2. Take independent initiatives to reduce threat.
3. Use cooperative conflict resolution.
4. Acknowledge responsibility for conflict and injustice and seek repentance and forgiveness.
5. Advance democracy, human rights, and religious liberty.
6. Foster just and sustainable economic development.
7. Work with emerging cooperative forces in the international system.
8. Strengthen the United Nations and international efforts for cooperation and human rights.
9. Reduce offensive weapons and weapons trade.
10. Encourage grassroots peacemaking groups and voluntary associations.

From Just Peacemaking, edited by Glen Stassen (Pilgrim Press, 1998)

No American voter can be proud, measured by these standards.

But it is not only up to the leaders of statecraft to do peace. The politicians and their technicians are trapped unless we the people lead in making peace possible. A brilliant interview of Mahmood Mandani in The Nation provocatively argues that the state itself is built to exclude and that genocide is just an extension of its logic.

Dr. Mandani is not a cynical man, but inconveniently clear-eyed for those of us who think the instruments of state will just do the right thing. We citizens must not give up on the means of peacemaking, including the structures of government. He and Merton warn us that the seeds of the next war are already germinating in us, the people.

We must hurry to do justice and mercy now. Who will build back the ruined hospitals, public health and social services of Gaza? Why would we imagine that it is anyone else’s job than those of us who dare to think we are peacemakers?

How Long?

Dr King has been dead longer than he was alive. And his dream seems as wobbly as the 94 years old he would have been this year. This is what happens to dreams too tethered to specific humans as we tend to age quicker than grand hopes can be fulfilled. King got the idea of “beloved community” from Josiah Royce, who would have been 169 this year. Amos, the prophet who imagined the waters of justice rolling down would be 2,788. Born 11 miles south of Jerusalem, I doubt he’d be feeling fulfilled if he’s watching from wherever.

Closer to home in little Winston Salem there is energy stirring to come together in a different way, one organized around the “vital conditions” linked to the Leading Causes of Life. Deeply informed and illuminated by the strategic fervor for equity, the vital conditions look at the community of people and organizations who hope with the tenacity of King and Amos for justice to roll at least a bit. Monte Roulier, the bard of Community Initiatives, was here just a month ago to talk about how we might do the plumbing for those rolling waters and not just chase whatever bothers us the most at the moment (homelessness, no–addiction, no-reading levels, no-toxic waste, no-poverty, no-whatever). Precisely because we have so many non-profits within 10 miles of city hall, each of which is organized around solving something ugly, it is very hard to work together long enough to see any change. Most of the organizations have some staff and a Board and donors whose attention span competes with all the other organizations’ needs.

Our fears compete while our common hopes are starved. While tribes can be built on fear, community is built on hope and possibility.

It is odd to look at civic body experiencing the Iowa caucuses next to the day honoring Dr. King, while the journalists run out of adjectives for the suffering in Gaza, Ukraine and among those struggling north to the US border. All this while a man who once held our highest office does all he can to shred the social and legal threads that hold us together. He has a tribe built on the fear of of community. It’s not the only such tribe around the world.

Anyone who is not depressed and anxious is simply not paying attention.

TC urged me to read Johann Hari’s book, Lost Connections, an exploration of the roots of our pandemic of depression and anxiety. He unpacks how our therapists and physicians are treating our depression and anxiety with a staggering amount of pharmaceuticals rolling down like a mighty river in our veins. His simple point is that the epidemic of depression can’t be fixed by pharma because the problem is not in our heads; it’s in the space between us, the one now filled with vitriol driving us farther apart at the very moment we need each other most.

“You aren’t a machine with broken parts. You are an animal whose needs are not being met. You need to have a community. You need to have meaningful values, not the junk values you’ve been pumped full of all your life, telling you happiness comes through money and buying objects. You need to have meaningful work. You need the natural world. You need to feel you are respected. You need a secure future. You need connections to all these things.” (p318)

And of course, when he says “you,” he means me, you, himself and every single one of those we think we should fear or want to hurt. When depressed and anxious we lose the capacity to trust ourselves or anyone around us. The pills only dull the pain; they can’t resolve the disconnection.

We are deeply ill as a body politic, circling in our fears from the very people we need the most. Who do we need most? People who are annoyingly different, inconveniently complex, who don’t echo what we want to hear. Sort of like you’d find sitting down the row from you in church or standing next to you in line to vote.

Johann Hari is clear that this circling inward is serves the interests of the professionals plundering our souls by misdiagnosing our suffering . The pills for depression and anxiety are not medically effective except in rare circumstances. They create collateral damage at the individual level in such predictable things as weight gain. The pills and pill hucksters gain from our loss of energy, clarity and self efficacy. Every syllable is an accurate description of the venal way politicians exploit our fears.

No wonder people would vote for a transparent fraud. No wonder so few weep over Gaza and Nova Rave. No wonder people find the institutions of faith so hollow.

Hari suggests 7 anti-depressants—reconnections. None of these are in our heads or even our Spirit. Rather, the solutions are near at hand. He means literally at the fingertips where we touch other humans and focus on their joy or possibilities instead doing another lap inside ourselves.

Ask ourselves who is trying to make me and you more afraid. Walk away from them. Certainly, do not vote or give money to anyone who would gain from your fear.

Ask instead who might need some hope. Go toward them and show up in a real way. You should not go alone. Our culture, even hollowed out and brittle, still has an almost bizarre range of voluntary associations that will be happy to see you and give you a task that fits your hand.

Many such organizations were created in the aftermath of Dr King’s murder those many decades ago. They are what Jimmy Carter once called the mundane revolution, as practical as a bag of food, as basic electricity not being turned off, as modern as vaccine.

Hari’s hope is realistic and well-founded because it is not normal for humans to be so disconnected, medicated and fearful. Rather, we should expect to see a great turning toward the life of the whole people. It would be normal to experience an epidemic of connections of meaning, trust and respect.

A 94-year old King would remind us that he never promised that he would get there with us, and we might not either. Walking in hand is the way.

Iris Dement sings it:

Power, greed, and profit
Will never feed the soul
These three shovels have dug us
A deep dark hole
Compassion, understanding
And living one for all
And all for one is what it’s gonna take
To break this fall

How long? How long?

He said “Till justice rolls down like water
‘Till justice rolls down like water
‘Till justice rolls down like water
And righteousness flows like a mighty stream”

(You can listen to How Long: https://irisdementofficial.bandcamp.com/track/how-long)

Honeybee Collaboration

I once got up in a frigid December night to put a blanket on the honeybee hive on our deck. I do not know how to “keep” them or assure their thriving. But I sit with the bees and notice they find their way improvising amid circumstances no one bee or any one hive has encountered. I wonder what we could learn.

Worst bee picture ever. But they are alive where I thought them all dead after the frost! A great picture!

Late in the summer a hive that I thought robust was overcome by wax worms. You may have read about them because of their recently discovered capacity to digest plastic. They prefer eating wax and also spin a sticky web of yucky gloop inside the hive that the bees can’t overcome. The bees in this hive gave up, took their queen and fled about 100 feet across the circle underneath an empty hive box—a desperate tactic. I jiggered a way to get them inside a box but thought they were too few with too little time to build up for winter. I was not surprised that after the first frosty night, I saw no activity. And then I was surprised again when they mocked my despair this week coming and going with elan. I wrapped them in insulating foil to celebrate.

I wrapped the other six hives, too, after our state bee magazine reminded me that bees are supposed to be inside a tree surrounded by 3-5 inches of trunk, not our flimsy ¾” pine boxes. Anything we can do to keep the bees from expending energy is good the winter. I put a “sugar board” for nutrition and then added a “quilt box” on top filled with cedar shavings for warmth and to absorb moisture. I’ll do a final treatment for mites this week, blowing in oxalic acid to beat down the mites.

This hive is ready for the sugar board for winter nutrition and quilt of cedar shavings for insulation and to absorb moisture

The only thing I don’t try is to coordinate anything. Nobody has ever tamed honeybees, though we humans subject them to bizarre circumstances to which they adapt as best they can. No bee coordinates anything, either. How bees think is as much a mystery as the how a three pound squishy mass in our skull “thinks.” Thirty million years with no boss, much less royalty. No executive committee. No “table” around which important bees gather to decide the future. And they don’t get tripped up by “perfect;” taking what is real and finding the way.

Many important humans are currently making such abysmal choices that the whole species seems locked in a doom loop. Artificial fears blind us to our real peril. It was hard for the “last chance” climate conference in Qatar to remember to even pretend to try. The honeybees don’t care, except that the horrible decisions include releasing plumes of toxic chemicals that make it hard for them to fly straight. It’s a small planet.

As the global people were squandering their opportunity in Qatar, some key people in our little city met to think differently about how our civic hive might work better. We brought in Monte Roulier of Community Initiatives, one of our Stakeholder Health friends who, with ReThink Health and We In the World, have brought the Vital Conditions framework alive all across the nation, even into the dysfunctional thicket of Washington. Honeybees have the Vital Conditions in their DNA; every single bee and every single hive knows what to aim for, not just what to fear. Fears fragment our focus, while vitality integrates. If every human—like every bee—had roughly the same idea of vitality and life, we would need far less complicated coordination. We would count on everyone buzzing to a roughly similar tune.

Even a small town of 250,000 humans is an ensemble of many hives, neighborhoods and overlapping zones of power and ways of being. Nobody can possibly coordinate such a complexity even when so much depends on working together. We burn energy and time trying to create a table with clear agenda, shared data, distinct roles of authority. But the more power is concentrated, the more energy emerges to resist. We, like bees, work better knowing the other hives have a similar idea of what to hope for. Honeybee organization spends little friction on forced coordination; entirely focused on adapting to the actual circumstances. Multiple generative nodes are way smarter than any table of self-chosen geniuses trying for a singularity.

Better to gather with curiosity about each other’s hopes for vitality, hopes for life. Food helps with coffee in the morning and wine later in the evening. Like hearts learning to beat together, common life will emerge.

At The Carter Center’s Interfaith Health Program we traveled widely to help complex communities find their way to implement the gifts of science for health. We spoke of a “limited domain collaboration” as a way of creating multiple nodes of aspiration without leaders quarrelling. I was not yet informed by honeybees, so I didn’t realize they figured this out 30 million years ago. It’s Honeybee Collaboration; giving credit where it is due.

Humans have less baked into our DNA than honeybees. This makes us more adaptable but also easier to miss the point, chase our fears and waste time on needless friction. Every honeybee is imprinted with the ideal dimensions and qualities of the cavity in which to build a good hive. Maybe the Leading Causes of Life which underlay the Vital Conditions are like that. They see the interplay of five facets—Connection, Coherence, Agency, Intergenerativity and Hope as a pattern out of which life emerges over and over again. Jim Cochrane points out that the Causes of Life are actively dangerous if captured by any one tribe, nation or committee. If informed by the creative imagination for the whole and animated by the energy we call Spirit, they find the way toward life even when all seems lost. But that is a lot less exact than the bees, with their DNA imprint of the dimensions for the ideal hive cavity (22 quarts, dry, with a 1 ½” hole).

The wisdom tradition of Islam, the Jews and later, Christians, thought the honeybees were the species closest to the qualities of God with the sole exception of humans. We emerged millions of years later, so we may be an experiment by God to see if a species without the imprinted DNA can be agents of life for everybody on the little planet. It’s a perilous risk, working barely, if at all.

But that may be the Christmas miracle. Kate Hauk reminded me of the poem by John Roedel:

Me: Hey God

God: Hello there, my love.

Me: It’s over

God: That’s not true. You won.

Me: How can you tell?

God: Because you’re still here.

Me: Barely.

God: Barely is all it takes. Barely is amazing. Barely is a miracle.

The bees longest day is Friday. Six weeks later, still amid the frost, the queen will lay the eggs that will become the bees who will leap into the Spring sky to greet the early blooming maple and redbud. Miracle.

A bit ridiculous with foam insulation around perfectly dignified honeybees. It beats getting up in the the night with a blanket.

Rosalynn Carter

Now that’s how to spend 96 years.

Rosalynn Carter’s life is an extraordinary witness that demands that we pause in respect. But she would know we were not paying attention if we paused longer than that. She was fierce, urgent and tenacious in doing good, especially for those who suffered with any kind of mental or emotional burden. In the book, Everything to Gain, written just after they returned home to Plains from Washington, DC., Rosalynn said, “What I have learned over these years of work and study is that mental illnesses are less understood than almost any other major health problems, and that most people who experience difficulties suffer needlessly. The mystery, stigma, and misconceptions that surround mental illnesses prevent many people in need of psychiatric help from seeking treatment.” I once drafted notes for her to speak at a meeting in Pittsburgh at a Divinity School about the church and mental health. I thought the notes were somewhat aggressive, but she wanted them tougher: “the first word anyone in the church should say about mental health is an apology. The church has been the last bastion of the worst stigmas.” She never gave up on the church but had eyes wide open to the ugly complicity it has with the cruelty experienced by those it finds inconvenient to care about. That stigma is, was and will be the biggest challenge facing those individuals and their families.

If you want to honor Rosalynn Carter today, reach out to one of those you know (you do know more than one) and say you care.

Don’t pause.