By Wesley Morris
The Crisis We Face
By Chris Hedges, from his most recent TruthDig column “Trump is the Symptom, not the Disease,” as always, keeping it real:
Forget the firing of James Comey. Forget the paralysis in Congress. Forget the idiocy of a press that covers our descent into tyranny as if it were a sports contest between corporate Republicans and corporate Democrats or a reality show starring our maniacal president and the idiots that surround him. Forget the noise. The crisis we face is not embodied in the public images of the politicians that run our dysfunctional government. The crisis we face is the result of a four-decade-long, slow-motion corporate coup that has rendered the citizen impotent, left us without any authentic democratic institutions and allowed corporate and military power to become omnipotent. This crisis has spawned a corrupt electoral system of legalized bribery and empowered those public figures that master the arts of entertainment and artifice. And if we do not overthrow the neoliberal, corporate forces that have destroyed our democracy we will continue to vomit up more monstrosities as dangerous as Donald Trump. Trump is the symptom, not the disease. Continue reading “The Crisis We Face”
More Deadly
An excerpt from chapter one of Howard Zinn’s The People’s History of the United States (1980):
It is not that the historian can avoid emphasis of some facts and not of others. This is as natural to him as to the mapmaker, who, in order to produce a usable drawing for practical purposes, must first flatten and distort the shape of the earth, then choose out of the bewildering mass of geographic information those things needed for the purpose of this or that particular map.
My argument cannot be against selection, simplification, emphasis, which are inevitable for both cartographers and historians. But the map-maker’s distortion is a technical necessity for a common purpose shared by all people who need maps. The historian’s distortion is more than technical, it is ideological; it is released into a world of contending interests, where any chosen emphasis supports (whether the historian means to or not) some kind of interest, whether economic or political or racial or national or sexual. Continue reading “More Deadly”
Suspended
By Denise Levertov (1923–1997)
I had grasped God’s garment in the void
but my hand slipped
on the rich silk of it.
The ‘everlasting arms’ my sister liked to remember
must have upheld my leaden weight
from falling, even so,
for though I claw at empty air and feel
nothing, no embrace,
I have not plummetted.
Passed on by Journey with Jesus
You give
By Talitha Fraser
you give
and you give
the emptying
is what fills you
you give
and you give
stretched and
outstretched and
enfolded
you give
and you give
and there is more
there is always more
Wild Lectionary: Wild Church
Sixth Sunday of Easter
Acts 17: 22-31
The God who made the world and everything in it, he who is Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in shrines made by human hands, nor is he served by human hands, as though he needed anything, since he himself gives to all mortals life and breath and all things. Acts 17:24-25
Re-connecting people with an untamed God in our wild homes.
There is a movement happening. From isolation to connection. From detachment to immersion. From dualism to integration. Spiritual leaders from a wide range of denominations are beginning to question the wisdom and consequences of regarding “church” as a building where you gather away from the rest of the world for a couple hours on Sundays.
In Texas, New Hampshire, Ontario, Colorado, Virginia, California, Washington DC and British Columbia. We are a growing network of pastors and spiritual leaders, who have made bold moves to launch new expressions of church outside to re-acquaint, re-cover, and re-member our congregations as loving participants of a larger community. In this age of mass extinctions, we feel burdened by the love of Christ to invite people into direct relationship with some of the most vulnerable victims of our destructive culture: our land, our waters, the creatures with whom we share our homes.
And, there, people remember that they belong to a larger beloved community. Along the way, we have remembered that our Christian tradition of spiritual transformation has always been rooted in the actual local wilderness.
Join the Wild Church Network if you lead or want to lead your congregation out of buildings and into deeper relationship with God through nature in your community.
Wild Lectionary is curated by Laurel Dykstra, Priest in Charge of Salal + Cedar, Coast Salish Territory.
Catonsville Nine: 49 Years Later
From Joe DeFilippo, a song written and recorded as a tribute to the Catonsville 9, an action on May 17, 1968
We make our prayer
In the name of that God
Whose name is Peace
And Decency, and Unity
And Love
Amen Continue reading “Catonsville Nine: 49 Years Later”
Chelsea Manning: Free At Last
By Tommy Airey
Today, as a result of one of Barack Obama’s last actions in the White House, Chelsea Manning, real American hero, walks free after 2,545 days in military captivity. We celebrate Manning, particularly the powerful contributions she made towards subversively exposing the ever-violent truth in an imperial context and for enduring 2,545 real-life episodes of The Handmaid’s Tale. Manning’s actions were truly apocalyptic (from the Greek apokalypsis meaning “unveiling” or “revealing”).
In July 2013, we drove 40 miles from Washington D.C. to Fort Meade, Maryland for the closing arguments of Manning’s trial. We joined 32 other spectators in the courtroom and three dozen others in an overflow portable with closed-circuit TV coverage of the trial. Most of these folks were curious activists who wore black shirts with TRUTH scrawled on the front. On the day we attended the festivities, the lead attorney for the prosecution took up six hours for his closing remarks (in contrast, the next day, the defense took three hours). He called Manning an “informational anarchist” and repeatedly claimed that Manning was only motivated by his quest for notoriety while methodically doing whatever it took to cover up his misdeeds.
Continue reading “Chelsea Manning: Free At Last”
Sermon: Mothering Peace
Reflections given by Halima Cassels, Michelle Martinez, and Lydia Wylie-Kellermann
at First Unitarian Universalist, Detroit, MI
May 14, 2017
Our Seemingly Small Gestures
By Julian Washio-Collette (right: with his wife, Lisa), on behalf of Casa de Clara, the San Jose Catholic Worker community (originally posted in the Fall Newsletter)
Everywhere in these days people have…ceased to understand that the true security is to be found in social solidarity rather than in isolated individual effort. But this terrible individualism must inevitably have an end, and all will suddenly understand how unnaturally they are separated from one another. It will be the spirit of the me, and people will marvel that they have sat so long in darkness without seeing the light.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Our friend Angie called this afternoon. She has been staying at a local shelter for the past couple of months and has been calling us regularly just to check in. Amazingly, she has been clean and sober since she arrived at the shelter, and has seen other remarkable health improvements. When I talk to her, her voice is clear, her mind is lucid, and she is in an upbeat mood. In other words, she seems like a completely different person from the Angie we know who comes to our door pushing her shopping cart, slurring her words, speaking incoherently, rambling about what to us sound like paranoid delusions. Continue reading “Our Seemingly Small Gestures”
Radical Discipleship 