Wake Forest University School of Divinity

Consequences

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

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

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

Surely grown-ups can do better.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Consequences can be good.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Project 2029, anyone? Want to dance?

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

Absolute Perhaps

A view of a cliffside trail overlooking a beach with waves crashing against the shore, featuring wooden posts and barbed wire along the edge. — *Before one trusts a fence, make sure it is attached to reality.*

I am so weary of the certainties. Not all of them are cynical, but all easily bent to serve bullets, venom and snark. It is hard to take the whole category of certainty seriously and do not wish to contribute to the cacophony. I must admit that I have contributed more noise than most and, from time to time, been more certain.

These days I am learning from those who think differently about thinking. Less talking; silence best of all. Not to flee from the mean chatter, but to go deeper so that we can discern what must be done to give life a chance.

Quakers are a radical minority among those holding religious opinions—barely a statistical rounding error. Never more than a million people at their zenith, which was quite some time ago. Thousands were jailed by kings, others killed by Puritans and at least one by a Pope (after dressing him down for his self-serving pride of certainty). Dr. Pink Dandelion, explains in his Oxford Press “Very Short Introduction of The Quakers” how their annoying grit produces theological pearls for our time of raw argumentative certainties.

Even for their Christian cousins, their adamance about remaining uncontained by creed is awkward. Likewise, their focus on Spirit is a bit embarrassing for their secular friends. But you really can’t run a modern anti-war, pro-peace or pro-environment campaign without them, so you’ll find them anywhere life breaks out. And they do make great business partners (they won’t steal or lie) and scientists, especially in the arena of cosmological physics, where uncertainty is the key. They heal (never punch) way above their weight.

Albert Einstein never formally joined the Quakers but held them in high regard, stating, “If I were not a Jew, I would be a Quaker,” and was associated with them through his pacifist beliefs and admiration for scientists like Arthur Eddington. And they admired him for the laser transparency of his politics. Great questions pursued honestly stay alive long after one quits breathing. I came across 2025 book about his profound 1949 article, “Why Socialism,” in the Friends London bookstore. I would have enjoyed listening to he and Mr. Kirk dialogue.

The urgent task of these ugly days is to think prepare for when we will build on the wreckage. Project 2029, perhaps. Focus on the perhaps of the project. What might be possible in the humble aftermath that was impossible in proud times and the present argumentative fog? Einstein and Bertrand Russel issued a joint statement a few days before he died, “There lies before us, if we choose, continual progress in happiness, knowledge and wisdom. Shall we, instead, choose death, because we cannot forget our quarrels? We appeal as human beings to human beings: Remember your humanity, and forget the rest. If you can do so, the way lies open to a new Paradise; if you cannot, there lies before you the risk of universal death.” (p. 81, above).

A scenic view of a rocky shoreline with remnants of a shipwreck partially submerged in shallow waters, surrounded by gentle waves. — *The captain was probably confident right up until the sound of the waves on the rocks.*

Every tyrant, petty or grandiose, has a chaplain squawking vapid theological nonsense to cover the evil. Thus, refusing to doff the hat, bend the knee or chatter along are political waves undermining the foundations of the sandcastles. Silence and laughter are political because they refuse to play along. The thuggish FCC is right to quake in its presence.

Clarity—not certainty—sometimes comes near the end. In the same bookstore a few shelves over I found Wildest Dream by David Gee. Another activist Quaker writer who lived on a narrowboat called Promise near Oxford. With a terminal cancer diagnosis he knew he had one book left. His publisher expected a final justice manifesto. Instead Gee wrote about how we are saved only when we are put in our place by untamable nature. Only in a humble posture beyond all vestiges of power can we finally be of use to those we love and the wider world. I thought of HoldHealth and the Leading Causes of Life Initiative as I read: “I’d sooner cast my lot with these motley movements of hope, shaken as they are, faltering on the way as they must, than with the kind of hope that expects to seize the future and save the world. Such total hope, trading in grand narratives of redemption, and hungering as it does just a little more power to realize them, forever slips from the fist that gropes for it.”

Honest, humble uncertainty serves the ultimate human hope—deep accountability. It is more likely to find the way through the “absolute perhaps” than strategy cobbled together of certainties that are only certain to be wrong.

I was reflecting on all this while walking the cliffside trail near Robinhood Bay on the Yorkshire coast. The smugglers loved the hidden coves and celebrated when the Spanish Armada blew onto the rocks here in the storm in 1588. The ones who didn’t die ended up marrying local, so you just don’t know what happens next here.

Scenic view of a rocky coastline under a cloudy sky, with gentle waves lapping at the shore. — Smugglers loved the ragged coast and fast tides as it gave them a home team advantage.

My phone pinged with a message—a smoke signal, he called it—from Jerry Winslow, the great mind and spirit at the root of both HoldHealth and Leading Causes of Life Initiative. He wanted me to see the dedication in William Stafford’s little collection titled A Glass Face in the Rain. As usual, Jerry accomplished in a message what takes me a book: “There are people on a parallel way. We do not seem them often, or even think of them often, but it is precious to us that they are sharing the world. Something about how they have accepted their lives or how the sunlight happens to them helps us hold the strange, enigmatic days in line for our own living.” He dedicates his book, just as we might dedicate our fellowship, “here is a smoke signal, unmistakable but unobtrusive, we are following what comes, going through the world, knowing each other, building our little fires.”

Absolutely. Perhaps.

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What to do?

What to do? Amid a paralyzing deluge of dismal surprises we ask simply; what to do? I was surprised to learn there is a whole violent alt-right movement to the far right of the young Turning Point man killed in Utah. He died doing a very American thing—speaking freely–although I disagree with his viewpoints. I’ve known young men like Kirk, so I wonder how he would have evolved as many like him do. I’m so sorry he fell to cowardly violence.

We are well and truly off any map. It was already clear that our tools for answering that question were simply inadequate, unhelpful before the volcanic maga explosion and its continued deadly shards. Frankly, our old ways of thinking are in the way of a serious attempt to act in an accountable manner.

So the Fellows of the Leading Causes of Life Initiative wrote a book that turns to be more relevant that we knew it would be back in the old days (a year ago ago). Thin book, thick title: Taking Responsibility for the Life of Complex Human Systems: Deep Accountability. You may say, along with my sister in law, “I’m out; can’t do it!” If you have grandchildren, you can’t be out. They will ask you what you did in these days and you will want an answer.

This book moves crisply through 83 pages unlocking and weaving new tools for thinking in the new ways we will all need in order to look each other in the eye (grandchildren can wait). It’s available now on Amazon but consider buying direct from Elgar. We will be officially releasing the book at Cambridge University the afternoon of October 3^rd.

I am tempted to focus on the chapter that was the bravest (at least for me), “storm. This roots in the polymath radical, Ivan Illich, who five decades ago surgically eviscerated the self-serving intellectual corruption of the health science industry. He could see even then, it would its own ugly reckoning, now imminent. At this point we have seen the demolition of public health, but that is a small potato compared to the savagery about to ensue when the maga-mob goes after the serious money of non-profit healthcare. I’ll come back to that chapter in a few weeks.

The chapter we need most this week is the one on Joy.

“There is an intelligence, a deep knowing, we may call joy. Joy is not what we experience as an end. Joy is how we navigate, the evidence we are on the right track, doing the right work with the right people in the right way. When in doubt, move boldly toward joy.”

*Nature just won’t quit trying. Here’s a happy dandelion emerging from our parking lot. Never quit trying….*

Joy is how we navigate; it tells us what to do as it tells us why. I don’t mean stupid optimism or Facebook puppies. I mean joy informed by the science, experience, tradition and presence of how thing work in this amazing world by moving toward each other (chapter 6, Involution).

Joy and lament are sisters. I am also sorry for all the public health friends taunted and humiliated by the cowardly destruction of institutions such as the CDC, HRSA, WHO, USAID, AHCR. All flawed and compromised, of course. And they all worthy of respect for their moral and intellectual foundations. This is the time for every scientist, administrator, student, researcher and policy-maker to claim the joy of work well done, policy well-conceived, risks-well-taken, arguments well-made and discipline sustained. Although you have lost your badge, remember that joy as it will tell you what to do next.

Go clean up the vacant lot down the street, take some trash out of the stream. If you know the joy of pursuing equity, go do that with some actual humans down the block. If you thrilled with the joy of creating climate policy, go to a grove of trees. TC and I often go to the meadow above the canal and put our fingers into the living soil to feel the fierce emergent energy. Let the joy in.

There will be a time—soon—for us build again. We must prepare to do that work guided by science, ethics and spirit, tuned to the deep joy a free people experience doing the right things.

Fear can be a true signal. But most of the fear today is artificial, self-serving and disingenuous. The loud lies and willful obfuscation are designed to be entirely false signals.

These false fears all rest on the lie that there is not enough.

There is enough in the world for everyone of every difference that can be named in every language. There is enough. I would not have thought so even five years ago in the former times, but there is even enough energy. Read Bill McKibben’s new and shockingly hopeful book, Here Comes the Sun. Bill is a somewhat dower Methodist ecologist who once almost made me drive my car into an abutment while listening to his audiobook Eaarth. He now writes—surprised—that the sun has arrived in the very nick of time. The exponential growth in solar and collapse of prices is a true signal that we have enough energy. And that sun falls everywhere all the time. No cabal can own it as has been true of our short-lived coal and oil age. It really is a new day.

*Sun above Gawflats meadow near the canal.*

This is why the fear people want to destroy the true signals of abundance, the solar panels and turbines that even Texas loves.

Joy is curious, appreciative and thus creatively grounded in the nitty gritty world of what might be possible. In this sense, joy and love are synonyms as both drive out fear (1 John 4:18) How does it do that? Fear is nothing but an absence of hope; joy and love are stirred authentic hope. Fear evaporates—turns to vapor—in the presence of the real.

Fear sees nothing beyond its own exaggerated weaknesses. Fear is anxious with no fine motor skills and none of the patience or diligence that the work of discovery demands.

The possibilities out of which the future emerges are unlocked by the unlimited creative imagination of spirited humans. Every act of creation, innovation and way-finding I have ever seen is marked by joy, often laughter. And the joy is not postponed to the end of the process; it is the energy along the way. It is the sense of emergent discovery long before the way is found.

Fear can’t take a joke. Joy laughs all the way down the road to the future. Measure our steps, says the great hymn. Measure them in joy.

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Positive virus

You and I are made up of 30 trillion cells and about 38 trillion microbes. Most all of that colony works like a family. No small part of that is our immune system which recognizes the other viruses that like to eat us for lunch. Those might snack on your daughter if they notice her parents did not get her vaccinated. Public health and faith are like the social immune system. When disingenuous blather breaks it down the virus notice the opening for every kind of infectious disease.

A handmade sign in a rural area expressing gratitude to frontline workers and first responders, decorated with an American flag. The sign reads: 'THANK You THANK U to: All OUR Frontline Workers & 1st Responders. WE LUV U ALL! :)' — *The Navajo Nation was severely affected by COVID19. So they thanked their public health workers ceaselessly.*

Public health science is not entirely easy to understand and its experts often get in their own way. And there is some class divide at work. Their scientists are usually paid more than, say, a textile worker (but a hell of a lot less than a hospital executive or specialty physician). And sometimes they talk in more syllables than is entirely necessary. If those scientists imply this gives them certainty and that their pills will always work—it set up an epidemic of dumb.

Every type of discernment is a gift of God, which is why I have special disdain for anyone who splits faith from science, especially those who do it for cash or political gain. It weakens the primary defense against infectious disease—human trust in each other.

Nobody should presume trust any more than one should assume that all 38 trillion microbes are well-meaning. Trust is earned, not granted with the academic degree; earned on the streets eyeball-to-eyeball. A great public health director like Joshua Swift in Winston-Salem is hardly ever in his office; always out and about talking to as many of the 300,000 people in his county as physically possible. He lives Rule One: if the people don’t believe you care enough to know them, they won’t care what else you know.

The curbside public health is more important than the bedside manner of clinical medicine. Why? Because the window of opportunity for public health is before the disease is next door. And you have to experience yourself as being part of a “public.” If you love your daughter, you want everyone in her county vaccinated, too. It helps to have met your local public health officer and they seemed to care about you.

The focus on humility at public scale is why religion has always insisted on accumulating human experience over time and turning the hard-won learning into rules to protect the social body. At one point, priests and epidemiologists were the same team. Leviticus was the first text of precision public health, but 3,500 years later we are still learning new lessons together as evidence accumulates such as the lesson from COVID19: Don’t close the churches if you leave Walmart open. And don’t blame God if your members die from bad leadership that leaves them unvaccinated.

A vintage US postage stamp depicting a woman in a robe holding a shield with a medical symbol, flanked by two children, honoring those who fought polio. — *When I was a tiny child, my grateful nation thanked the literally millions of researchers and volunteers that figured it out.*

Nearly everyone I have met in the practice of public health or its supporting researchers is deeply Spirited. They are no more or less likely to go to church or synagogue than any other Republican, Democrat, lawyer or janitor. You just don’t do this kind of work if you are not filled with wonder about how those 68 trillion cells work together multiplied by 7 billion bodies.

Anyone vile enough to intentionally split science from human community is, technically, shitting in the water we all drink from. Jesus said that contaminated speech was worse than contaminated water or unclean hands (Matthew 15:11)

Vaccination is a lot more subtle. It can seem an expensive annoyance to have somebody tell you that your kid can’t go to school without a proof of vaccination. Especially in Skipton in 1875 when the local pastor leading the national Anti-Vaccination League claimed, “that more people who were vaccinated caught the disease than unvaccinated.”

Further, “Every last one of them (vaccines) is wrong and drips with disdain and slavery. Who am I as a government or anyone else to tell you what you should put in your body? Your body is a gift from God. What you put into your body is between your relationship with you and your God.”

Actually, this last quote was last week by an ordained Florida bloviate named Ladapo. Nobody in Yorkshire would be that stupid now as the last real resistance to vaccination in Skipton died out in 1961 when 4 people died of smallpox, including three-year old Denise.

Two men painting a 'Thank You Dr. Salk' sign in a storefront window, expressing gratitude for medical contributions. — Jonas Salk believed the answers were in nature once we found the right questions. He did not patent the “Salk Vaccine.”

Once somebody makes money dumping their intellectual waste into the public stream, it is hard to make them stop. I’m talking about Fox news, not Ladapo. But it may be possible to drain the swamp of grievance that feeds their business model.

The Thanksgiving holiday may be the most important public vaccination of our public spirit. I will participate in the next worldwide protest October 18^th against the political open sewer. But that will rally our tribe, probably not convert anyone. For that we need Thanksgiving. The only protection against the vulnerabilities of grievance is gratitude, appreciation and wonder at the bounty of God’s provision for us all. And why once a year? We need a Thanksgiving every quarter until the ugly poison is out of system and the children can grow freely in safe places as God intends.

There is a lazy story about the inevitable clash between religious people and public health that will always come to a conflicted head around vaccination. James Fallows, the veteran reporter, writes about how the New York Times has been framing the story of the Harvard resistance the Trumpian blitzkrieg as a slow inevitable collapse. No named sources and no collapse; the storyline itself is a moral collapse. “It affects how people in a movement feel about themselves, and whether they think they are entirely on their own or part of something larger. If 50 people protest in a small-town park, is it just those few people, at that one site? Or are other groups of 50 to 5,000 standing up in other places, for the same reason, at the same time?” The same lazy doom-casting frames public health. Both are nearly as dangerous as the sad little Lapado fellow.

Let’s flip the script. If you walk over to your public health office and ask anyone you meet where they go to church, they’ll have one (probably Baptist). If you’re a pastor, you know you have members who work in public health or the sister field, social work. Why not do it near Why not organize all the houses of worship in town to honor them on the same weekend; Thanksgiving is perfect. Buy an ad in your local paper? And a billboard. Take turkeys or cake to the public health office.

Gratitude for the people who vaccinate us against fear is the best public vaccination of all.

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Sh-t

A scenic view of an open field with tall grass under a bright blue sky and the sun shining in the upper right corner. A wooden fence line is visible in the foreground, surrounded by greenery.

Sunday night on our canal narrowboat often involves sunsets and pub music. But Monday morning usually finds me trundling down the towpath a quarter mile to dump our 35 pounds of the week’s waste. The technology involves a plastic cassette and a special little building to which we have a key. Still, not much different from thousands of African townships in which this is done with open buckets.

Likewise, we keep an eye on our fresh water that lasts about a week. But TC, unlike African women, does not have to walk miles with the water tank on her head. It is my job to fill up our 200 liter stainless steel tank by hose from either the common tap or, sometimes through the hedge from David and Lisa’s handy home. We have three big solar panels and deep batteries, but I am sharply aware that my three minute hot shower draws down 10% of the battery and a few gallons of precious water. My pot of tea draws less, but still some. Unlike propane both pleasures are quickly replenished by the sun.

Still, the floating tiny house teaches us about living gratefully within limits. We sold our Bolt electric car and electric bike to help buy this little boat. I now pedal under my own power for scones, tea and pub. An upgrade. We move slowly enough to appreciate the hand-dug canals with stonework for coal, slave cotton and trade.A quarter millennium later we layer on sophisticated solar electronics but still learn all about the cycles of change.

Few Americans even know there are any limits at all; much of the current political savagery is aimed at the very thought. But any grown up knows that. Every religious tradition of any duration at all knows. It is cruel to hide that from our children from whom we borrow every single thing we consume. This thing I think of “my life” is entirely and only what passes through—”dissipative creatures,” said Capra. Not a single cell will be with me as I finally turn to compost. Ridiculous poofs perched on golden toilets, the nameless poor with metal buckets or me with my plastic cassette; all same at the end (pun intended).

View of a canal with a small building for waste disposal beside it, shaded by a large tree, under a partly cloudy sky. — *The Skipton “elsan” site where boaters have a key to dump our waste cassettes. The second door is a bathroom and the gate opens to rubbish bins. The ambience is all you’d expect.*

As I walked this morning, I thought of Rev. Dr. Steve DeGruchy one of the creative founders of the Africa Religious Health Assets Programme who died tubing in one of his beloved rivers in 2010. He knew sh-t, including its profound theological implications. He imagined a Jordan River theology “that invites a spirituality of taking responsibility for the land for one’s children and one’s children’s children. It is a rules-based tradition in which law binds the rich and the powerful, reminding them that they are not gods. It gives rise to a prophetic tradition which speaks truth to power. It reminds us of the gift of the earth, and of the importance of the common good, celebrating those who find their vocation in serving this wider good. It is a spirituality of song and dance and art, responding to the rhythms of the earth’s seasons. In recognizing that we all live downstream, it knows that freedom from bondage is nothing if it does not come with the responsibility to tend one’s garden, respect both the neighbor and the stranger, and deal with one’s own shit.”

He sought an “olive” program and ethic that blended the brown poverty agenda with the green ecology movement as he saw that water and sh-t made them inseperable. Gary Machlis recent book “Sustainability for the Forgotten” is following the same intellectual current that should be drawing us toward everything worthy. We must see an even broader unity among what must be built as those who see the links among what must be suppressed.

In these toxic times we must nurture the vision of graceful lives given to the service of the whole—the whole people, all we need, have and pass through, including all our sh-it. Says Steve: “The development of public capacity is therefore crucial. Those who believe in freedom have to encourage good people to take up vocations as public servants, scientists, engineers, technicians, public health workers who can provide the leadership and knowhow to protect our water and deal with our sewage.”

We are awash in a flood of shamelessly childish behavior. But only the most damaged souls are proud of the reckless cruelty and feckless waste. Tragically they have most of the billions and the silicon. We forget that most people pick up after their dogs even if tiny a minority does not. I expect the rise of the normies who do.

I have come to learn, albeit slowly, that limits are gifts as they help us savor what we have, hardly noticing the absence of what we never needed in the first place.

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Find Steve’s amazing 2009 paper here. Steve de Gruchy. ‘Dealing with our Own Sewage: Spirituality and Ethics in the Sustainability Agenda’. In Journal of Theology for Southern Africa 134 (July 2009) 53-65. Republished in Steve de Gruchy, Keeping Body and Soul Together: Reflections by Steve de Gruchy on Theology and Development, ed. Beverley Haddad (Pietermaritzburg: Cluster Publications, 2015).

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Collecting trash

A scenic view of a lush green meadow filled with wildflowers, with rolling hills in the background and two birds flying overhead under a clear blue sky. — *Gawflat Meadow in Skipton, Yorkshire, retrieved from decades of trash.* *A good place for a prayer about trash collectors.*

More lives have been saved by trash collection than all the pills and stainless steel combined. I find this comforting guidance as I wonder how to be relevant in our social political dumpster fire.

It has always been inconvenient to know that public scale contagion is unnecessary. And deeply annoying that this makes it immoral. Many deadly phenomena have patterns: vehicles injuries (hence seat belts and motorcycle helmets), the long gestation of cancer (hence smoking and environmental laws). Handwashing and food inspection is still really important.

Now, we see more and more clearly the long-term pathological effect of the micro-aggressions of being devalued all the time and having that be treated as normal in the toxic media soup we all slurp down. In recent decades we have learned to put these patterns on maps which makes the knowledge almost too clear for comfort (thank you Bill Davenhall!). Where to begin? Look on the map you are living on.

The whole point of “public” is that it includes everyone—everyone—and that all the relationships matter. The beginning of public health profession began with the Broad Street Cholera epidemic that everyone thought was caused by smelly air (miasma). A physician with a knack for data and a pastor who people trusted figured out it was being spread by a contaminated well. They took off the pump handle and that outbreak stopped. Cholera still breaks out whenever government forgets its duty to inspect the water.

What does that mean for you and me?

Take the handle off the pump. We are already turning from the last election to the mid-term elections. It’s only the legislative branch but a start. The executive branch another two years. The courts will take a decade or two.
Think like a sanitation engineer. Notice the people picking up your trash! These are our heroes and guides. Remember that Dr. King died on their behalf in Memphis teaching that all work is honorable if done in a spirit of service. I’ve left a prayer inspired by them at the end.
Think about your own trash—the insults, divisions and aggressions done on your behalf and in your name. The political grenades tossed from “your side” at others. The actual bombs being dropped on people who will never forget that your tax dollars purchased them.
Pick up what you can. Tom Peterson once told me of how he was evermore affected by reading about a Nobel prize winner who made a habit of cleaning up any restroom he visited. I think of that and often pick up the paper towels thrown by somebody else that missed the trash can. So minor! And there are so many other trashy aggressions that also missed the mark. Pick up your own trash. And why not others’?

Jesus was a trash collector sent to retrieve the human possibility. God starts every day dealing with the trash we have left to sort out. Some can be recycled, some buried. God never seems surprised or disheartened; never quits or gives up on the possibilities that all the damage and disrespect could yet turn toward healing, even beauty.

A scenic view of a meadow at sunset, with vibrant yellow flowers and silhouettes of trees against a cloudy sky. — *Everything that lasts–faith, meadows, democracy–does so because somebody at some point picked up the trash.*

TC and I live on a tiny narrowboat in a canal at the bottom of a stunning meadow. The soil was too poor for proper farming, so it had become the village “tip” where people just dumped their broken stuff. In the British way, a “civic society” arose and decided to honor the queen by cleaning the tip up, planting a proper hedge of trees and nurturing the meadow that had always somehow stayed alive beneath all of it. It turns out that the little plot of land had never tasted pesticide or RoundUp. Beneath the trash it was pristine—organic across the centuries—just waiting for some responsible grown-ups to give it a chance.

You can’t grow a meadow or a people. But you can give them a chance.

Here’s a prayer about that: Collecting.

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That prayer is in the book God and the People: Prayers for a newer new awakening.

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Praying

Silhouette of an old stone building against a twilight sky, with a window framing a sunset. — *Sunset through the chapel of the women’s chapel on Iona, Scotland. Women prayed here long before the Christians showed up in 563.*

I wrote this about praying for justice Sunday morning. Still a good read. But today is Moral Monday in Memphis You might want to jump right to the. prayer inspired by John Lewis. Here it is.

Now back to the brief blog:

Plague and contagion are a recurrent part of human life at every scale. During the last plague—COVID-19– the humans were more or less on the same side. At least they were until some saw political profit to be made in disabling the social body so that we lost our mind. COVID-19 killed somewhere north of 6 million people and it’s not over: 1,001 died yesterday. It dropped me to my knees. The current political plague seems harder in which to pray, oddly, although there is no shortage of loud religiosity. Nobody with any actual Spirit wants any of that, but we risk the wellspring of hope, resilience and kindness by not praying at all.

During COVID-19 I wrote a book of prayers, Prayers for a Newer New Awakening inspired by people like us a hundred years ago. They, too, were struggling with a society gone mad with unaccountable corporations, intentionally ignorant politicians and a church split between those who wanted the simplicities of an imagined past and those who leaned into the modern social implications of the Gospel.

The social gospel folks got so much wrong. They were naïve, just as we have been. They managed to overlook the dynamics of gender and race! And they were annoying with their righteousness (easy pickings for the Right). But still, much of the social infrastructure of America was created in the early 1900s by people blending the Spirit with the gifts of health technology and exploding science. They built hundreds of hospitals, public health departments in every county and a vast array of social service organizations. They created the politics that enabled serious government policy. Altogether they advanced life expectancy by decades. It is what Jimmy Carter once called the “mundane revolution” and it succeeded until now, of course.

My point is not the politics, but where politics come from. That is, the Spirit that tried to bring some of the promises of God into reality as justice, mercy, kindness and generosity. They prayed and did their best. We should, too—pray, that is.

Book cover for 'God and the People: Prayers for a Newer New Awakening' by Gary Gunderson, featuring a silhouette of a figure next to a tree with intertwining roots and branches.

So, the small book of prayers I wrote in COVID-19 may be even more relevant now.

The point is not to read my prayers, but maybe to kindle your own. And to do so with people who share the hope of a new awakening.

Every couple of days, I’ll point to a video. Here’s an interview about the prayers that Walt and Elliott Peterson did back then about praying in times like this.

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The book is available on Amazon, of course. All the money goes to Partners for Better Health, which is home to the Leading Causes of Life Initiative and Hold.Health

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Seed after fire

A solitary tree with green leaves emerges from a barren landscape, under a bright sun and pale blue sky, symbolizing hope and renewal. — *Seeds fulfil their role when released by fire. And wise humans can help them. So we learned at the McElvoy Ranch in Montana.*

“The arc of history bends toward justice,” promised Dr. King. I was saved for the church and America by that promise. I had decided as a Vietnam era student at Wake Forest to turn from my military family, suburban Jesus and American war-making when chaplain Richard McBride stopped me. He noted that I was nearly ignorant of my faith tradition beyond the tiny suburban rivulet I had dabbled in till then. He gave me a book by Berrigan and another by King; I am still living out the implications of that intellectual and spiritual metanoia.

But, since I had not grown up Black, I did not know that the bend toward justice would include savage reversals. Tulsa, Wilmington, Emmet Till. King himself spoke as that arc seemed hopeless. It was always faith, not logic, that those without power could hope for justice.

So I am new to cruel men laughing with alligator teeth, ablaze with disdain for the weak, all the time preening about their mean God.
Maybe the arc needs fire to bend.

Maybe without fire nothing changes.

Pyriscence is an ecological phenomenon some plants have adapted to release their seeds in response to fire which can melt the resins that seal seed structures like cones closed. I learned of this in an odd CNN piece about some tech guys that had developed an artificial pine cone that would only signal in the presence of fire to help with early warning. Pine cones figured this out over 300 million years, so we can be forgiven how little we’ve learned in a handful of thousands, much less the paltry 250 of our adolescent nation.

Maybe faith works more like Pyriscence than the gradually bending arc of my moderate hopefulness.

We will see soon, as people like Stephen Miller are busy setting the modern civilized nation state ablaze. Libraries, scientific research, healthcare, citizenship and the statue of Liberty all on fire. No need for white robes. But the ones doing the worst work are ashamed enough to wear masks as they bully their neighbors.

Maybe this is how the arc works. We are the ones fired and bent; our faith released like seeds that need the fire to find the new soil.

Gradual improvement over time makes the tree brittle, prone to storm, wind and then fire. Much of our public and non-profit structure grew more than a bit satisfied with ourselves. It has created an entire class of workers who make more money than those they are serving, setting the kindling for wrong but powerful accusations from those who find all mercy inconvenient and any talk of justice anathema.

Now the fire burns hot and unpredictable. Once alight, it follows wind, not logic. It creates its own storm as we saw in the LA fires, burning the poor and rich alike.

At the very moment the fire is triumphant, we can sense it is melting our resistance to being blown to new soil. We are the seed released by the fire to become our new selves the only way we ever could.

How, exactly? The Germans and South Africans are our best teachers.

The Reich was far more frightening than Mr. Miller’s little band of colleagues could ever hope to be. A sinking plurality supports him and his sad boss which is why they are in such a desperate hurry. In Germany those who resisted by showing compassion for the despised ones are now honored. I have written before about how the children place bronze “stumble stones” marking the homes from which Jewish neighbors were dragged. Cruelty morphed to shame which released the seeds of new generations that honor those who stood for justice. Not fast, but sure.

A stone carving depicting a hand raised with a small star above it, textured surface with moss and lichen. — One of 128 stone is a collective sculpture The the young people from Graben who designed this stone wanted to warn and remember:“A raised index finger signals to the viewer that they have to pay attention. It demands attention and urges vigilance. The string on the finger is barbed wire.

South Africa teaches that it takes more than one fire to forge a new arc. One impossible bend after another. The raw power of the Christian Apartheid state, falling before the peaceful miracle of Mandela, Tutu and Hani. But then pandemic AIDS, and ugly failure of the ANC to prevent the capture of the state (the Gupta family inspiring the Trumpian scourge). And now a bend toward collaborative governance. All while the tiny white minority owns most of the assets, whining all the while. Each fire, another bend, more seeds finding new soil.

But ever fire is different. And the seeds must be many variations on hope. No one seed starts a forest. Most seeds fail entirely. But this is the only way forests happen.

This political fire focuses on immigrants of color, a typical feature in American history. But I think this is the first time featuring people fed to alligators. Evil evolves, so we must, too.

This reign’s attack on the poor, immigrant and dark are a wicked tangle. The evisceration of Medicaid will undermine the capacity of healthcare, community health and public health to provide even the most basic of 20^th century medicine—while forbidding them to track the results. To keep the lights on, hospitals will seek revenue anywhere they can and cut everything without a billing code. Forget chaplains, translators and social workers. Ash on the wind.

These fires are burning away the vanity of wealthy non-profit healthcare organizations that have treated mission as a hobby. The community expects little of substance from them and will not protect them from the blaze. Instead, community organizations with fiery passion like Action4Equity and Love Out Loud are forming alliances with community health centers and local government networks. You can see this scrappy practicality in Winston-Salem. It works and is attracting national funding, such as the bold Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Justice Squared grant. Fire, seed, good soil.

As the LA firest still smoked and smoldered, The Randal Lewis Fellows of Partners for Better Health formed teams to envision a whole new way forward integrating all the assets, public, private, faith and neighborhood grit.

I don’t think the Germans ever had $45 billion dollars to spend on “the ultimate solution.” Mr. Miller does, which is more money than any racist in history; more per deportable victim than is possible to spend. He literally can’t find enough people to be cruel to. So he’ll look silly, which morphs quickly into performative cruelty. Expect horror; it’s the point. People kidnapped at emergency rooms and churches. And the alligators.

What is the opposite of fire? Not water; it is the seed. And what is vital kernel of the fire-born seed? Tell the truth. Which does not mean poking “like” to a Facebook post. It means getting close to reality and then tell the truth with your life. Don’t let evil keep its mask on. Talk to Hispanic pastors. Do what they say will help them.And yes, be generous with cash and time. We are seeing new channels emerge more efficient than the big old non-profits. Intermediary organizations like Love Out Loud and Neighborliness Center are giving shelter to smaller neighborhood scale ministries close to those in most extreme need. This is how TC and I help Una Bendición. Don’t “like”—give cash. All you can.

A sunset view showing the Statue of Liberty silhouetted against a vibrant orange and blue sky, with industrial cranes visible in the background. — *Statue of Liberty which welcomed my ancestors. It has been mocked before and still stands.*

Don’t romanticize fire; a cruel hunter. But we have no reason to fear it. A fire fears itself more than water, for its very nature it to burn out its fuel. In the same way cruelty consumes itself. It builds nothing, plants nothing, grows nothing. Fire falters even in the presence of a shift in humidity. In politics that is sort of like a shift in the polling that we are seeing now. It is realistic to not be afraid of the cruel.

Be the seed after fire. Cultivate your deep kindness, your most fierce love of the truth. You are born for what comes next and you will be ready.

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Democracy is a meadow

A scenic view of a vibrant, green meadow filled with wildflowers, extending towards rolling hills under a clear blue sky. Two birds are seen flying across the horizon. — *Democracy is like a meadow, dependent on grown-ups acting wisely over time, which creates space for radical abundance. Gawflat Meadow, Skipton, North Yorkshire.*

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.

A patch of yellow wildflowers growing between stone slabs, surrounded by greenery. — *Nature never misses an opportunity for beauty, even amid the bricks.*

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.

A serene meadow at sunset, featuring a variety of wildflowers and silhouetted trees against a cloudy sky. — *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.*

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)

Boss power

An abstract painting featuring vibrant swirls of colors including blue, green, yellow, red, and purple on a white background. — *The many paths of the Mississippi North of Memphis. Drawn by Kathryn Gunderson for the Cover of Religion and the Health of the Public (Cohrane and me, Palgrave).*

How does power work in a time of no boundaries, rules, or words that mean anything?

Robert Reich, who is normally pretty smart, said the other day that power is a zero-sum struggle; that is, if someone has more, the other has less. There is a limited amount of power; the only issue is who has it. This is a mistake as it turns our attention to taking power instead of making power. Generals usually prepare to fight the last war, unprepared for the one they are in. So are social change-makers. It focuses us backward, thinking we need the kinds of power that created the mess instead of building the strength to subvert or bypass with new power. Even the Mississippi River, when confronted with a new barrier erected by some foolish human, goes around or under it, leaving it behind as a monument to folly.

There is no taking back the money Trump and his awful dependents have stolen. But how many gilded hotels can a family rent to how many bit-coin suckers? Who is going to stay in Trump Gaza for $1,000 night? The stuff stolen is mainly circulating among other thieves, so let them stay in each other’s hotels, fly on jets and swap wives, too.

The techno-poofs of Amazon, Apple and Meta didn’t become big by preying on whales. They want to be whales by consuming teeny krill like you and me one download at a time. They are mass market consumer companies just as vulnerable as Tesla has been in the face of global revulsion against its owner.

Tim Cook, Zuckerberg and Bezos have surely joined millions of their customers in downloading Springsteen’s meteoric hit recorded live just days ago in Manchester, England about 50 miles south of where TC and I are at the moment. I ran into a woman at a Skipton store yesterday. She was SO disappointed that I was an American but I assured her I was a Springsteen patriot not, well, you know. “Oh, she said, I heard about his Manchester concert…..”

Download his four-song set from pretty much anywhere and thrill to the “sound of freedom ringing.” You’ll be reminded “it’s going to be a long walk home.” He is as vivid as Dr. William Barber: “the world’s richest men are taking satisfaction in abandoning the poorest children to sickness and death.” You’ll find courage as he quotes James Baldwin “In this world there isn’t as much humanity as we would like.” And you’ll probably follow him as he urges us to pray as a bridge into “this train.”

It’s not his best music, but surely his best speech. (The speech is My City of Ruins (Introduction) [Live in Manchester, May 14, 2025])

I believe when the Boss says that we’ll survive this.

But how? The Don taunts the courts and those who hope law prevail, “whose army will enforce your judgements?” Good question. Can new power be created enough to turn over a lopsided accumulation of old power?

You’ll be watching the answer happen June 14^th, which is when we’ll see two kinds of power face off—62,000 soldiers embarrassed to be disgracing themselves in the Don’s silly parade dwarfed by 6 or 10 million disgusted citizens. First time we’ve ever seen president with such weak self-esteem that he needed such a ridiculous thing; soldiers are for fighting not fawning. So even the soldiers will be be humming Springsteen, not Kid Rock. The organizers are calling this “no kings day,” which is really not fair to actual kings, which have agreed to submit themselves to the Law and the People for a thousand years.

Many, many of the citizens will be signing songs forged in the long walk to freedom of the Black Church. If you are of the faithful persuasion, you can register here to find the Interfaith Alliance march closest to your church.

Aerial view of a winding river with vibrant blue hues, showcasing its curves and natural patterns. — Landstat image of the Mississippi’s wandering ways–never ceasing to power around, never through.

Last month I noted a new song by my friend Sally Morris whose new hymn makes the same point as Springsteen (and millennia of saints): “These simple lessons are the teachings of God. Diverse and Equal and Included by God, we rise to righteous calls

each time we topple walls.”

You can listen here. My earlier blog has the words. Here’s the link to the full sheet music so your choir can sing it Sunday, if they can’t do Springsteen.

Is there new power in the world or are we left to scrape and struggle for scraps of the old? Jesus laughed at those who thought that God had already spent all the creative energies there were in the world. God can raise up new children out of dry stones (Matthew 3:9). And if children, why not citizens?