By Sherman Alexie, reposted from Orion Magazine
———–
1. The river is empty. 2. Empty of salmon, I mean. 3. But if you were talking to my grandmother, she would say the water doesn’t matter if the salmon are gone. 4. She never said that. I just did. But I’m giving her those words as a gesture of love. 5. She’s been gone for thirty-one years. 6. The water doesn’t matter if my grandmother is gone. 7. She swam wearing all of her clothes, even her shoes. 8. I don’t know if that was a tribal thing to do, or if she was just eccentric. 9. Has anybody ever said that dam building is an act of war against Indians? 10. And, yet, we need the electricity, too. 11. My mother said the reservation needs a new electrical grid because of all the brown- and blackouts. 12. “Why so many power outages?” I ask her. 13. “All the computers,” she says. 14. Today, in Seattle, I watched a cute couple at the next table whispering to their cell phones instead of to each other. But, chivalrous, he walked to the self-service coffee bar to get her a cup. Lovely, I thought. She was busy on her phone while he was ten feet away. When he sat back down, she said, “Oh, I was texting you to get me sugar and cream.”
Not Another Nickel
Local chapters of Black Lives Matter and Jewish Voice for Peace coordinated actions in Chicago, Illinois on the weekend of October 24-25, 2015. CPTers attended the events, employing our public witness, human rights documentation, and nonviolent direct action support skills. We’re in the middle of a month-long training of 10 new recruits; people from across the organization—administrative team, field team, and a trainee—participated.
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Stories
I will tell you something about stories,
(he said)
They aren’t just entertainment.
Don’t be fooled.
They are all we have, you see,
all we have to fight off illness and death
You don’t have anything
if you don’t have stories.
Their evil is mighty
but it can’t stand up to our stories.
So they try to destroy the stories
let the stories be confused or forgotten.
They would like that
They would be happy
Because we would be defenseless then…”
- Leslie Silko, Ceremony
24
By Amber Cullen a member of Mission Year Team Member in Philadelphia.
I’m drivin’ down the highway at 65mph
And I’m lookin’ out on the plains, the beautiful Ohio plains
With trees standing solitary in the middle of the vastness
And the sky so blue like the most satisfying drink of water
And the tires are pounding the pavement and my hair is out and
All at once I’m laughing, tears flying, exhilarated to be—just be.
Not like the world is any less painful or that things are any less messed up
Or like somehow I’ve convinced myself that these plains are the escape from it all
Because it all is still here (right here) and everything is still hard
But for now Ima sit with the rhythm of the plains and just be. Continue reading “24”
Tangela Harris—Remembering a Fierce Midwife of Justice
By Lindsay Airey
The white fathers told us, I think therefore I am; and the black mothers in each of us—the poet—whispers in our dreams, I feel therefore I can be free.
Audre Lorde
Tangela. Dear, fierce and tender Tangela. I just heard the news. I don’t even know how you died. I just got word pouring in over social media. 40 years old. How can you be dead? How can it be true?
Mind racing with questions. And tears. Tears and tears and tears. How can it be so? You were so ALIVE! Oh, and the children. The babies who must be grieving your loss. You were so beloved. So depended upon. So ready to respond in the time of need. So true a human. Oh, and how great were the burdens you carried. Rest now, dear Sister. Though our tears and cries long to bring you back, to fill the great void you have left.
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Reflections on the Hebrew Midwives
Third post in the series on radical biblical women. Written by Amanda Dalosio who lives in NYC with her family and is part of the New York Catholic Worker community.
Exodus 1:15 The king of Egypt said to the Hebrew midwives, one of whom was named Shiphrah and the other Puah, 16 “When you act as midwives to the Hebrew women, and see them on the birthstool, if it is a boy, kill him; but if it is a girl, she shall live.” 17 But the midwives feared God; they did not do as the king of Egypt commanded them, but they let the boys live. 18 So the king of Egypt summoned the midwives and said to them, “Why have you done this, and allowed the boys to live?” 19 The midwives said to Pharaoh, “Because the Hebrew women are not like the Egyptian women; for they are vigorous and give birth before the midwife comes to them.” 20 So God dealt well with the midwives; and the people multiplied and became very strong.
The account of the two midwives, Shiphrah and Puah, is set in a scene of overwhelming cruelty and oppression. The King of Egypt has enslaved the people of Israel having set taskmasters over them to oppress them with forced labor Ex1:11 who are ruthless in all the tasks that they imposed on them Ex 1:14. Yet out of this misery comes a moment of great courage. The women disregard the edict of death imposed by the empire and instead choose to remain faithful to life. And so is recounted the first biblical example of individual moral resistance to an empire. Continue reading “Reflections on the Hebrew Midwives”
Remembering the Cloud of Witnesses
This All Saints Day, we pause to remember those saints who have crossed over this year especially mindful of those who have filled these pages and gifted our movements. Here are those we have covered this year, we invite other to add names and stories and to cry out Presente!
We give thanks for their lives and rejoice that they are among us still. Presente!
Honoring St. James
By Tommy Airey
Whatever confusion there may be among Christians about redemption today, it must be small compared to that which accompanied the birth of the Christian movement in the first century…Yet we can be sure of the upshot: the disciples’ recognition that Jesus’ story that had engaged them was not ended by his death. For him and for them, there was a new beginning. Strangely but surely a new era had begun.
James McClendon, Doctrine (1994)
Today, on the 15th anniversary of his passing, we honor James McClendon, one of the most underrated Christian theologians of the 20th century. McClendon, raised in Southern Baptist Louisiana, became the first Protestant theologian to ever be hired by a Catholic theology department (University of San Francisco). His contract was mysteriously not renewed at USF after he passed around a petition denouncing American military adventures in Vietnam. Later in the 70s, McClendon became a pioneer in postmodern theological endeavors after reading John Howard Yoder’s The Politics of Jesus and attending a conference in Manhattan with his wife (the philosopher and theologian Nancey Murphy) called “The Church in a Postmodern Age.” From there, McClendon did ground breaking work at Berkeley’s Graduate Theological Union and Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena.
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Radical Discipleship 