Tag: Wake Forest University School of Divinity

Hold

A silhouetted Celtic cross against a sunset backdrop over water, reflecting golden light, with a cloudy sky in the background.
Iona Cross that has seen kings and Bishops, saints and sinners come and go since 563

The polls suggest that people in Georgia, North Carolina, Texas, Alaska and Kansas seem poised to cast a vote that many would not have predicted. People of many identities will vote in revulsion against an unaccountable corrupt king. Bishop Scott Jones, who ordained the Reverend (and possible Senator) Adam Hamilton once described Kansas Methodists as the “extreme middle.” May we all be so extreme.

A few years ago a dull blade caught a knot in some walnut spinning at 800 revolutions a minute on my wood lathe. My hand was mangled before I could shout, much less comprehend. But it was blood, not bone, that flew across the room, so I lived to turn again, wiser for the injury. Lazy words are more dangerous than dull tools because it is our families, friends and neighbors that are spinning faster than we can discern.  I have four high voltage lights shining on the wood so I can see clearly. We need similar  bright lights for our civic language so we can see, not just to vote for, but who to work with afterwards to craft mercy in a hard-hearted time.

Most of our fellow citizens are not rejecting conservatives or embracing progressives. MAGA is not conservative; it is a radial attempt to change our system of government, especially who votes and how government power is distributed among different branches and levels of elected offices.

The issue at hand is not about conservatives or progressives. It is between those who believe in the rule of law based on one-person, one-vote representation and those who want someone with royal prerogatives to rule like a King. The royalists say we need a “unitary Executive”—same thing. This is a very old, very bad idea. But even at the time of our American Revolution, about a quarter of the colonists wanted King George. But even they thought the King should not steal.

Two groups I am part of have great challenges with words about the important things:  those in public health and those of faith. In July two brave friends bravely stirred both groups with an article in the American Journal of Public Health, suggesting that public health needed more conservatives. But what Conservatives, exactly? The ones about to vote for Hamilton and Talarico or the royalist radicals who reject democracy and basic public health services such as vaccination? They note six characteristics of conservatives that I doubt anyone in Texas or Oklahoma has ever heard of. Nevetheless, their simple point is that the field of public health would be better in these contentious times if it were easier for conservatives to be part of it. Karl and Tyler (they’re friends) are academics talking about the intellectual side of the public health movement. They barely note the vast majority of public health workers who labor in mostly dull anonymity doing the daily work of public health at the end of the road. Public health achieves its astonishing life-extending effects by what President Carter called “the mundane revolution.” We (I am of the tribe) focus on the obvious opportunities to conserve, protect and serve our fellow citizens (I’m borrowing the police motto on purpose).

Beside overlooking most of the people who actually do public health, they also ignored many leaders of the field who are and always have brought faith and science together in public service: Bill Foege, David Satcher, Jimmy and Rosallyn Carter, Soma Saha, Heidi Christensen, Christoph Benn, Howard Koh, Ray Baxter, Carl Taylor. Oh, and the fellow who spent at least a third of his time healing, Jesus (Martin Marty said that he spent three-thirds of his time doing that). Every one of these people knew that religion could warm the hearth or burn the house down in the hands of extremists, so they tended to talk with their hands, not from the pulpit.

A detailed bronze sculpture depicting a group of diverse figures engaged in reading and discussion, with some raising their hands and others focused on books, showcasing an intense moment of intellectual exchange.
“What is a country but the people?” Shakespeare. Sculpture in St. Pancras Station by Paul Day

They knew that academic squabbles are like pillow-fights compared to religious conflict that have often involved cages, bricks and fire. We were in Crete last week, where memory is still tender from 1823, when members of one religious group were burned alive in a cave by people of a different religious opinion. This is why we need  our religious language to reflects the hope for the world, not our tribal fears.

Some of the same friends are hosting another surprise in Boston where you’ll be able to attend a conference on Christianity and Public Health on October 24th. This is a long overdue dialogue across the wide spectrum of Christians about how public health science illuminates how to partner with a God who so loves the world—who so loves the public.

Public health science is inherently anti-royalist  because its focus is on the whole public, not just this or that tribe. And the field is not ashamed to advance health using strategies which increasingly include the social, psychological and, yes, spiritual, factors that shape the health of entire public over time. That science cannot help but pose questions about complexity, diversity and inclusion that are harder for some political theories and theologies than others.  This is no problem for conservatives who accept democracy.  But royalists have long preferred medieval Catholic theories about God and government. Recently we’ve seen any number of “Baptists,” sound more like 14th century Catholics: Robert Jeffress, pastor of First Baptist Church in Dallas says that the book of Romans “teaches that God has given government the role of protecting society.” And “when I look for somebody who does that, I don’t want somebody with a demeanor of Jesus necessarily — be nice if they did — but I want the meanest, toughest S.O.B. I can find.” 

Others like JD Vance find shelter in very old fashioned Catholicism for policies stripping healthcare from the poor and cruelty to the immigrants that no Pope for hundreds of years would recognize, certainly not the current one from Chicago. I’m on the Quaker side of the Christian spectrum but I agree with the Pope.

Words that might have shed some light ten or 40 years ago now cast shadows like dancing monsters on the walls. “ Liberal,” “religious,” “democrat,” “progressive” and, least helpful of all, “conservative.” Those words wear as poorly as bell bottoms or narrow ties. More seriously, dull words can mangle hands that could be joined to share the weight of a very heavy lift ahead.

An artistic illustration depicting a pair of hands cradling a landscape with mountains and a winding river interspersed with abstract elements.
Cagn Cochrane.

We need language to help us imagine what might be possible when one aligns the most mature faith with the most relevant science. Public health science helps. Conservatives like my father and progressives like me can talk a long time about both of those qualities and how to turn them into wise government policy for a free people.

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You can get the AJPH article from Karl Johnson, PhD, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 135 Dauer Drive, CB #7469, 4105 McGavran-Greenberg Hall, Chapel Hill, NC 27599-7469. Reprints can be ordered at https://www.ajph.org by clicking the “Reprints” link.

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Silent Seed

A group of people gathered outside a building, with a large pink banner that says 'Quakers for peace' in white text on the ground.
A thousand silent witnesses gather outside St. Martins of the Fields across from Trafalgar Square. https://quakervigilforpeace.org/

A riot of sirens and horns blared as tourists look the wrong way amid a dozen double deck red buses. A plaintive girl sang sincerely of Jesus beneath the gaze of massive bronze lions. And behind the lions a highly microphoned deep voiced man repetively shouts alleluia; could be Hebrew or Arabic (528 Palestinian protesters were arrested here in April). I’m guessing he’s a Nigerian evangelist going for YouTube. Another day in Trafalgar Square.

It would easy to overlook one silent person. But a thousand silent people snaking through the chaos like a spiritual conga line? That’s hard to miss. Dressed in white except for the scatter of bright blue “Quakers for Peace,” they shouted nothing. Didn’t really have to say anything once you read “Quaker” (…”for peace” is like Baptists for Baptism). But the organizers had warned us  to be silent only about peace; save our many affiliate enthusiasms for later; only Quaker and only Peace.

A bronze relief sculpture featuring two figures: a woman in a long dress with a cross and a hood, and another woman in a simpler outfit, holding a shield inscribed with 'Right Fears No Might.'
The pedestal of the Royal Engineer killed in Khartoum boasted that “right fears no might” which all Quakers (and the Taliban for that matter) would agree means the exact opposite of what he thought.

It is impossible to find a place for 1,000 silent people in London that is not over-arched by statues honoring somebody who killed strangers to extend an ever-sprawling empire of territories. We gathered for silent worship beneath the bronze gaze of the Queen’s perplexed Royal Engineer who died in Khartoum. His pedestal boasted that “right fears no might” which all Quakers (and the Taliban for that matter) would agree means the exact opposite of what he thought.

Walking with a thousand silent Quakers through the chaos of Trafalgar Square tunes one to the irony—even absurdity—about collective action of any kind. Why would we think that any protest could be heard by anyone who matters? Especially one without words.

The whole point of Quaker silence is so we can put two coherent thoughts together, then maybe a third. We hope for light, but not some mystical beam splitting the clouds—more like a flashlight so we can put one foot in front of another on a path to peace. You can walk a long way one flashlight beam at a time. Imagine a thousand of them!

A thousand Quakers asked for exactly that amid the din. We were, of course, silent amid a cacophony;  almost—but not quite—overwhelmed  by the Nigerian ompha ompha Jesus fellow. Given the ugly history of British slaving, cotton, sugar and oil theft, Nigerians should be free to say anything they choose in London.

But I think the actual Jesus would have been quiet, too.

A busy street scene in London with a large crowd of people waiting in line, red buses in the foreground, and Nelson's Column visible in the background against a cloudy sky.
A thousand silent people make a point that is hard to miss even amid the chaotid din of London.

A small island with a big history watches America make a “dog’s breakfast” of proper imperial power against tyrants such as Putin and Xi. The Brits subdued most of the planet, but what they have actually learned is humility. So they can hear the silence of Quakers who never give up asking about the things that make for shalom—the same things that made Jesus weep over Jerusalem, Tehran, Khartoum, London and Winston Salem.

You might say there is little evidence that silence “works.” But what else does? London is littered with statues testifying to the futility of violence, extraction and domination. All these proud “HighT” men as silly as our current pathetic Pentagon poof.  A thousand failed empires in a row. Tutu was right; anything war can do, peace can do better.

What works is collective action that emerges from the humble-spirited silent question, “What is the next right thing we can do now?”

We ended our moving worship march behind St. Martin in the Fields church. People have gathered on this site to worship since 1222 hoping for a clue to God’s work. Most of those 293,553 days people did find a clue and it was always about healing and helping someone else. Many of us went in after our worship to see that from the inside where there is now an oddly beautiful window that replaced the one blown out in the second world war. In that most sacred of all places was a few tables about a ministry that focuses on homelessness.

Architectural interior featuring an ornate window design with a grid pattern and an oval shape, framed by classical architectural details and a decorative ceiling ornament.
This most modern of windows above the altar in St. Martin’s of the Fields drew me in.

That’s the clue.

Find some people with whom to shut up and stop thinking about yourself. Ask a question worthy of your breath and then go do something with your one and only life, per Mary Oliver.

It’s not hard for an American to find some things worth doing. Make sure you are properly registerd to vote with a literally bulletproof plan to get that vote counted. Vote early and in person. Dr. Barber is organizing a thousand marches to the polls, probably not in silence, so walk along and lend your courage to others. If you fail to vote, you wil not be able to look your grandchildren in the eye on your deathbed. Do it.

On the other side of the election you may need some more silence to figure out where to give your treasure and time. But don’t think too hard; it’s only a life after all. The whole point of it is to give it away to something that matters more than yourself.

The afternoon before the silent witness, Jim and I met with Craig Stewart, one of the Leading Causes of Life Fellows who, with his wife Liesl, try to live relationship-sized efforts to meet global scale challenges. He works for World Vision,  responsible for helping 40,000 churches around the world do the same thing. She has quietly built a web of 60 farm-to-table cooperatives in Cape Town. And they figured out how to buy and operate a small apartment building to be available affordably for black and brown people with more to come. It happens.

It doesn’t really matter exactly what you do, since every good seed enables the other seeds to grow, too. Shalom isn’t the name of a magical beanstalk but the garden, watered with Jesus’ silent tears for shalom, so that our hearts might be tender enough to love what is still possible in this beautiful world.

Astrological

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Now.

Don’t wait for the next eclipse.

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Who we are

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Impossible Things

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

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

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

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

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

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

Good question much on my mind this July 4th.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What is the city but the people?” Shakespeare

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

Happy 4th.

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

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Way

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

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

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

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

We are all in motion.

We are former something.

We are all hyphenated.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You will not be alone.

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. 18th 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?

Cagn Cochrane.

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 3rd.

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 18th 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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