“We are nature; nature is us. We are NOT the exception to nature.” Rev. Gordon Stewart looks at basic religious assumptions of Western culture and the need to reinterpret the stories that got us here. He looks at the stories of creation, Cain and Abel, and the Wise Men who “departed by another way” as holding clues to the change in consciousness that is required in our time.
My country ‘tis of thee,
Sweet land of baronry,
Of thee I sing.Land where my fathers died,
Land of the pilgrim’s pride,
On every mountainside,
Let freedom ring!
Tuesday’s U.S. Supreme Court decision for McCutcheon in McCutcheon et. al. v. Federal Election Commission makes very clear the view of the Court that is remaking America.
Freedom of speech is protected; it’s just that a few of us have a whole lot more of it than the rest of us. We all are “equally” protected by the Constitution no matter how unequal we are economically.
Most of us understand that money is not speech. Money is purchasing power. Money comes from our pockets; speech comes from our mouths. Those who represent us in Congress and in state legislatures do not represent us so long as their campaigns are funded by the “free speech” that comes from the pockets of the robber barons.
The sweet land of liberty is the land of barony.
“My country ’twas of thee.”
Only the most sweeping legislation to remove this unequal purchasing power from the electoral process can restore what we thought we had. But even if the miracle were to occur, this 5-4 Court will strike it down on the basis of its skewed interpretation of the First Amendment right to free speech.
My inbox is stacked up with funding solicitations. Delete. Delete. Delete. Delete. It depresses me. I don’t have the money, and, even if I had more, I would still have the sense that I would be throwing money into the wind. So I write. I speak. I throw into the wind words and sentences and paragraphs believing that ultimately the Wind is with us, the people. It’s my way of praying for the miracle that will give us back our country. I use what little free speech the Court has protected to effect the day when we will sing “America” that way it should be sung.
In the meantime I gain courage from the joyful spirit of the late Pete Seeger. I imagine Pete standing with his banjo outside the U.S. Supreme Court singing “God’s counting on me; God’s counting on you.”
This brief film from the University of California at Berkley posted by upworthy.com is as clear as it gets re: poverty, wealth, and government welfare. Well worth a watch.
What might Winston Churchill say about climate change and the prognosis of climate departure around 2020?
“So they go on in strange paradox, decided only to be undecided, resolved to be irresolute, adamant for drift, solid for fluidity, all-powerful to be impotent… Owing to past neglect, in the face of the plainest warnings, we have entered upon a period of danger. The era of procrastination, of half measures, of soothing and baffling expedients, of delays, is coming to its close. In its place we are now entering a period of consequences…. We cannot avoid this period, we are in it now…”
– Winston Churchill, November 12, 1936
The Last Lion – Winston Churchill
Pete Seeger sings a song that rallies the best in us to continue his work of changing the world. God’s countin’ on me; God’s countin’ on you!
Yet Again, for the 21st Century:
The Perpetual Question
Based upon a preponderance of evidence, the question of climate change and its potential ramifications is no longer a valid debate for the 21st century. Once again, like thunder reverberating from Genesis, comes the ancient and perpetual question:
“Am I my Brother’s Keeper”?
As we reach the tipping point of climate and climate departure becomes a global concern through the remainder of the 21st Century, a driving and as yet unaddressed question looms large before us:
“In light of what we now know, how are we to be the keepers of our brothers and sisters as our world changes and climate stress affects vast populations”?
The UN High Commission on Refuges (UNHCR) and the governments of the world have not yet addressed this question nor adopted a legal definition of “Climate Refugee”.
The year 2020 is a statistical marker, more or less, when we begin to see the first indications of climate departure in the western Pacific near Indonesia. In the ensuing 50 years or so, climate departure is projected to spread from the tropics to the poles until it becomes global.
The time is NOW to begin the discussion.
– John Lince-Hopkins, scientist, artist, and developer of Requiem.org. (http://requiem2020.org)
NOTE TO THE READER: Please chime in here or on Requiem.org and help spread awareness and the consideration of the question. Thank you, John, for raising the perpetual question.
Tillich Park – “Man and nature belong together…”
Our hearts in the West are well-trained in possessing, controlling, and cajoling reality, bending it to suit our wants. The spiritual culture that accompanies “free market” economics is the drive to acquire and possess. Could our training in the culture of acquisition and possession be like the wall through which the flower breaks in Tennyson’s poem “Flower in the Crannied Wall”?
Flower in the crannied wall,
I pluck you out of the crannies,
I hold you here, root and all, in my hand,
Little flower—but if I could understand
What you are, root and all, and all in all,
I should know what God and man is.
– Alfred Lord Tennyson, 1863
The flower lures him. Yet seeking to possess it, he destines its death. Having to possess it, analyze it “root and all”, he destroys the magnificent beauty that had drawn his eye.
Having and being are not the same. Only being is filled with wonder. Perhaps that is why Christmas Eve Candlelight services are packed with people who otherwise are not drawn there. There is a beauty to the story and the natural light which lifts yearning hearts from the wintry chill of an having into the warmth of wonder beyond our control or possession.
New Year’s Eve.
Every calendar with its years is a culture’s invention, a way of breaking the eternal rolling of sunrises and sunsets into an order that suits our needs for what?
For celebration? For budgets? For control? For forgiveness? For hope?
All of the above and more?
Between the passing of one year and the dawning of another we sense a shifting, the movement of something that does not exist: time, the human way of marking turf in the eternal rolling of the spheres.
The tides of time pay no attention because, like time itself, the tides are timeless. They know nothing of us. They ebb and flow in ceaseless rounds of who knows what. And we, standing on the shore’s edge between two tides awaken again to the sense of wonder before what we do not control.
Perhaps Isaac Watts had something like that in mind when he paraphrased Psalm 90:
Before the hills in order stood,
or earth received its frame,
from everlasting thou art God
to endless years the same.A thousand ages in thy sight
are like an evening gone,
short as the watch that ends the night
before the rising sun.Time, like an ever rolling stream,
bears all its sons away;
they fly forgotten as a dream
dies at the opening day.Our God, our help in ages past,
our hope for years to come,
be thou our guard while life shall last,
and our eternal home.
– Isaac Watts, 1719
Since the middle of the 19th century, Watt’s paraphrase has been sung to the tune of St. Anne, named after the London parish where Watts was organist. Click HERE for more on Sir Isaac Watts.
Preached the Sunday after the death of Nelson Mandela, this sermon sought to tie together the first anniversary of the tragedy of Sandy Hook in Newtown, CT (December 15) and the date of Reconciliation Day in post-Apartheid South Africa (December 16), the date in 1977 when Nelson Mandela marked a quote from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar in what became known as The Robbins Bible, a complete works of Shakespeare that had been smuggled into the Robbins Prison by an Indian inmate.
Views from the Edge 