Minnesotans will vote in November whether to amend the MN State Constitution to define marriage as between one man and one woman. This beautiful video of “old love” features couples in long relationships here in Minnesota. The music and the pictures speak for themselves. Some of the faces are from a congregation I once served. Enjoy.
Today “In the company of hysterical women” referred to Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs in the post “Living Below the Line – Day 2”. The reference to Maslow led to bringing this draft commentary out from the file drawer where it’s been gathering dust since early August. Here’s the reflection
Defining Human Needs and Their Satisfaction
Terry Gips, Sustainability Associates
Terry Gips, President of Sustainability Associates (click HERE for description), introduced me to Chilean philosopher-economist Manfred Max- Neef’s ground-breaking re-conception of human needs and needs-satisfaction. Max-Neef’s framework offers a different view from Abraham Maslow’s pyramid-hierarchical model of self-actualization that prevails in the West. While the Maslow model is typically Western in centering on the individual, the Max-Neef paradigm looks at the larger culture and society in terms of needs and needs-satisfyers. It’s focus is the community.
The basic human needs are listed here, along with a rating scale to measure how we’re doing (a person, group, nation, world).
Protection 1 2 3 4 5
Affection 1 2 3 4 5
Understanding 1 2 3 4 5
Participation 1 2 3 4 5
Idleness/Leisure 1 2 3 4 5
Creation 1 2 3 4 5
Identity 1 2 3 4 5
Freedom 1 2 3 4 5
– Manfred Max-Neef – Matrix, Human Scale Development
According to this framework, food and shelter, for example, are not regarded as needs, but as satisfiers of the fundamental need fo subsist.
In much the same way, education (either formal or informal), study, investigation, early stimulation and meditation are satisfiers of the need for Understanding. Curative systems, preventive systems and health schemes in general are satisfiers of the need for Protection.
There is no one-to-one correspondence between needs and satisfiers. A satisfier may contribute simultaneously to the satisfaction of different needs or, conversely, a need may require various satisfiers in order to be met. Not even these relations are fixed. They may vary according to time, place and circumstance. For example, a mother breastfeeding her baby is simultaneously satisfying the infant’s needs for Subsistence, Protection, Affection and Identity.
Think now of “The American Dream” – a phrase coined 1931 by J.T. Adams (1878-1949), U.S. writer and historian, in Epic of America. Here are the words that introduced the aspiration of “the American Dream” to the U.S. national lexicon:
“The American Dream is that dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone, with opportunity for each according to ability or achievement. It is a difficult dream for the European upper classes to interpret adequately, and too many of us ourselves have grown weary and mistrustful of it. It is not a dream of motor cars and high wages merely, but a dream of social order in which each man and each woman shall be able to attain to the fullest stature of which they are innately capable, and be recognized by others for what they are, regardless of the fortuitous circumstances of birth or position.”
Sipping coffee on Terry Gip’s porch with five seminary classmates, the discussion took a nose dive into theological and economic despair as the Christian pastors lamented the victory of environmental degradation, greed, concentration of wealth, militarism, and consumerism in American life. We were like the prophet Amos, or so we must have thought, thundering our cries of “Woe to you” when Terry, a person of deep and active Jewish faith, asked us to stop and think.
“We won’t get anywhere by negativity,” he said, or something like that. You guys are Christian pastors. People need good news. The old model is a model of scarcity; that’s not good news. We have to re-define abundance. Think about it. You can change the world if you take seriously what Jesus said by preaching a theology and ethic of abundance. We should be talking about a world of abundance, not scarcity.
Jesus: “I have come that you may have life, and have it abundantly.”
We left Terry’s porch wondering what it would look like to alter the approach to the proclamation of abundance re-defined in light of Jesus and Manfred Max-Neef’s human scale development. The “yoke” (responsibility) that brings satisfaction and rest, not only to the soul but to the body politic, is the shared yoke of humility and sharing.
The American Dream is again up for grabs on the road to the November election. I listen to every campaign ad asking which dream is being promoted, and the six Christian pastors go into the pulpit Sunday mornings chastened and deepened by a faithful Jewish brother who seemed to know our Lord, the Jewish rabbi, better than the Christian pastors on his back porch!
When only six, our son , Dan, was in school
and heard read there “The Ugly Duckling” tale.
The teacher asked, when putting the book down,
“How did the duckling learn he was a swan?”
Dan waved his hand and shouted his answer,
“He saw his erection in the water!”
– Steve Shoemaker, Urbana, IL. Sept. 22, 2012
The Ugly Duckling
Rev. Alexander Sharp on Wednesday, September 19, 2012
Not too long ago, the police department, the prosecutor’s office, and the public defenders association in Seattle, Washington were stalemated. They had been fighting for eight years over allegations of discriminatory law enforcement against African American and Hispanics for low level offenses. Finally, a police lieutenant interrupted one of their meetings: “This isn’t helping anyone. What can we do differently?”
They worked together to create a radically new approach. Those who designed it will be joining us at the Chicago Temple on October 10 for the Robert B. Wilcox Symposium, “Serving Our Communities: Alternatives to Incarceration.”
We hope you will be present to meet them and other leaders in criminal justice to learn about their solution: in Seattle’s LEAD (Law Enforcement Assisted Diversion) program, police work directly with social service providers without having to navigate the court system first. This may be the only place in the country where this is happening. Early signs are that it is working well.
Cook County Board President, Toni Preckwinkle; Cook County State’s Attorney, Anita Alvarez; Chicago Police Superintendent, Garry McCarthy; and Milwaukee County District Attorney, John Chisholm will participate. We will also be bringing forward two other models for keeping non-violent low-level offenders out of the criminal justice system: Milwaukee County Treatment Alternatives and Diversion and Adult Redeploy in Illinois. These programs are making communities safer, saving tax payers money, and enabling non-violent offenders to rebuild their lives.
Consider that Adult Redeploy Illinois, which funds counties to divert non-violent offenders who would otherwise be headed to the Department of Corrections, has 10 sites which have already saved $11 million in incarceration costs. We will be meeting the leaders of their Macon County project, an early success.
The need for such alternatives is overwhelming. Due in large part to the failed War on Drugs, the United States has become a prisoner nation, with 2.3 million incarcerated, more per capita than any other country on the planet. This includes 49,000 in Illinois, disproportionately African American and Hispanic. About 20% of those in Illinois prisons are there on average just 60 days. Most will be re-incarcerated within three years. We are cycling people in and out of prison at huge cost and great suffering.
Last week at the Illinois Justice Commission hearings organized by The Samuel DeWitt Proctor Conference, which organizes African American churches, one ex-offender observed: “We recycle cans, paper, and cardboard. Can’t we spend just a little bit more to restore our most valuable resource — human beings?” That’s what diversion does. It makes new lives possible.
These programs are leaders in a movement toward sane public policy. Wise investments now can help us avoid much larger costs later. The difficulty is in making the case so convincingly that even elected officials, some of whom won’t get the credit in future years, are willing to do the right thing today.
LEAD is the national test case of whether we can move toward this better way. Two foundations — Open Society and Ford — are providing drug treatment, housing, counseling and other services for next four years, long enough to establish what can be accomplished with adequate support. At the symposium, we will learn how the leaders of LEAD are approaching the difficult problem of evaluation.
Please join us on Wednesday, October 10, to hear more and ask questions. These models represent a new paradigm for responding to those on the margins whose lives have been damaged in no small measure by misguided drug policy. They deserve your attention and support.
Published by Protestants for the Common Good, 332 S. Michigan Ave.Suite 500 Chicago, IL 60604 | contact us.
Dr. Seuss weighed in on the news about the 47% of “dependent” Americans and “the distribution of wealth” and power with the non-partisan story of Yertle the Turtle.
A comment on “Uproar over video offers a warning about what happens when fundamentalism wins” (MPR commentary September 18, 2012) on religion as a tide pool).
Here’s an edited version of what someone named Dan Brunner wrote:
I think tide pools vary but are basically the same-1 source, (1 God) bound by laws of nature (God/humanity/morality) composed of bits of the ocean’s ecosystem (people/works). Tide pool waters are nature being apostolic; even if the ocean isn’t within eyesight, people are instinctively drawn to the marvel of and connection to it, and at the core are likely to believe the tide pool is evidence that there is something greater beyond.
There should be simple joy/peace in such a marvelous place, given space and freedom, there probably wouldn’t be conflict, however a turtle without good motive, without talent or merit can make itself king of a pond, can control and oppress other turtles to elevate oneself/opinion. With the myth that Yertle has achieved the height required for the greater vision, he’s given the power to create arguments around whose tide pool is better, bigger of more virtue; Yertle can burn Korans, yell God hates __ and misrepresent both history and what other Yertles say.In the book, supporters supported until they physically couldn’t, but sometimes, in real life, Yertle supporters crawl out of the pond and get on a bus. Each tide pool can have its own Yertle and Yertle-supporters….
The Yertles argue; supporters support. Like a commodity, the tide pool can be fortified, quartered, used, harvested and polluted. The spiritual draw is weakened, but we sit there content and convinced we are right, or we feel obligated to follow tribe/tradition/peers to the point where we end up like the water you describe – slimy, stinky and immune to the stench. It’s good to be part of the tide pool, but isn’t our quest to be towards the ever-fresh ocean? Could/would Yertle ever explain that, if it meant he would no longer be seen as king of the pond?
Join Dan and chime in on the discussion of the tide pools (ponds), the kings, and poor little Mac at the bottom of the Yertle tower (the Tower of Babel) whose burp saved turtles from the tyranny of Yertle.
The Grand Canyon
Dad thought Dave and I were going to hell,
since we had left his fundamentalist
God. My brother sent me Bertrand Russell,
“Why I am NOT a Christian.”
Atheist,
he–liberal Presbyterian, me–
stood at the rim and watched the rising sun/
paint all the colors far below. “Maybe
there is a God…” Dave said. But his was one
cry like “O God!” at orgasm, sincere,
but not a creed. My faith was mixed with doubt.
Before he died Dad told his own pastor
to preach to us, his sons, to call us out
at his funeral. So “Just As I Am”
was played. We never felt so far from him.
– Steve Shoemaker, Urbana, IL, September 16, 2012
“Wisdom cries out in the street; in the squares she raises her voice. At the busiest corner she cries out; at the entrance of the city gates, she speaks:
‘How long, O simple ones, will you love being simple? How long will scoffers delight in their scoffing and fools hate knowledge?’” (Proverbs 1:20-22)
We come here this morning in mourning, seeking light in the midst of a great darkness created by religious hatred.
Listening to and watching the news from the Middle East and the viral videos that call the founder of Islam “Mo” is deeply disturbing. Once again, religious fanaticism betrays its claim to bear witness to the One who remains shrouded in mystery. The fires that were set by a flame-throwing video raise the question “Will religious fanaticism prevail?
“There are only kinds of religion: one burns, the other learns.”
Those words were spoken from this pulpit two years ago. They came not from the preacher. They came from Ghafar Lackanwal, a Muslim Afghani-American, who came at our invitation after the Christian pastor in Florida threatened to burn the Quran. Ghafar accepted our invitation. He opened his Quran, read from his Book, and brought greetings peace to this congregation.
The two kinds of religion are not Christianity and Islam, or Islam and Judaism. The two kinds of religion are intransigent fundamentalism, on the one hand, and the humble search for wisdom’s guidance, on the other.
Ninety years ago a great preacher lost his pulpit for asking the question “Shall the fundamentalist win?” Harry Emerson Fosdick asked the question in 1922. He was subsequently removed from his pulpit, but he John D. Rockefeller built a church called “Riverside” where Fosdick would become one of America’s best known and most loved preachers. Some called him “America’s counselor” because of the radio broadcasts of his sermon across the country. “Shall the fundamentalists win?” By fundamentalists he meant those who claim absolute truth, denying all other claims to truth or wisdom.
Ninety years later I’m asking myself the same question.
Like Fosdick, I spent my boyhood summers on the coast of the Atlantic Ocean. The ocean became my teacher. It became, you might say, my enduring metaphor for God.
As a boy I would spend hours lost in the magnificence of the tide pools that dotted the coast of Rockport, Massachusetts. Wading in the tide pools is still my favorite thing to do. I did it again last month with my grandchildren at Coquille Point on the Pacific Coast of Oregon.
The tide pools are filled with fresh sea water. They are the temporary homes that give shelter to the starfish, crabs, periwinkles, sea anemones left there for a few hours at low tide. They are not the ocean itself.
Perhaps religion is like a tide pool, a small pool of ocean water that tastes the Ocean while pointing to the vast mystery of the Ocean on which its life depends. The tide pools hold a few drops of a vast sea. They are filled with the Ocean, but they are not the Ocean. Their health depends on the eternal rolling of the tides to refresh them.
Wading in a tide pools, it’s easy to lose track of time.
But there are other tide pools far back from the water’s edge, created by the unusually high waves of a storm. Unreachable by the normal daily tides that would refresh them, they are cut off from the Ocean that gave them life. They are without oxygen, yellow, and covered by green-yellow slime. Their original beauty has left them to the flies.
Perhaps the human soul or, a religious tradition, is like a tide pool.
“Since when has the Pacific Ocean been poured into a pint cup,” asked Fosdick, “that the God of this vast universe should be fully comprehended in human words?” One tea-cup will reveal the quality of the whole ocean. Yet it will not reveal all the truth about the ocean.
“When one considers the reach of the sea over the rim of the world; thinks of the depths that no eye can pierce…, one dare not try to put these into a tea-cup. So God sweeps out beyond the reach of human symbols. At once so true and so inadequate are all our words….”
As a Christian pastor, I can only take responsibility from within the tide pool of my Christian faith tradition. Muslim Imams like Minneapolis Imam Makram El-Amin, are doing the same in theirs. “We will stand,” he said, “in unity against these attacks and the appalling killing of the diplomat who was there on a peaceful mission” (“State Muslims denounce attacks,” Star Tribune, Sept. 13). Every Christian pastor is called to do the same in the wake of the viral film that poisoned the Ocean from a yellow tide pool in Florida.
This morning I ask you to listen to three prayers. Ask yourself who spoke them. A rabbi, an imam, or a Christian pastor.
1) O God Source of Life, Creator of Peace. . .
Help Your children, anguished and confused,
To understand the futility of hatred and violence
And grant them the ability to stretch across
Political, religious and national boundaries
So they may confront horror and fear
By continuing together
In the search for justice, peace and truth. . . .
With every fiber of our being
We beg You, O God,
To help us not to fail nor falter. Amen
2) In the Name of God, The Everlasting Merciful, The Cherisher
Of the Worlds and Worthy of all Praise,
Our Lord: You have created us from a single (pair) of a male
And a female and made us into Nations and Tribes that we may
Know one another (not that we may despise each other) so
Help us to love each other and take the hatred and anger from our
Hearts so that the People of The Book (Christians, Jews and Muslims)
In the Middle East may live in Peace and Justice. Amen
3)Two peoples, one land,
Three faiths, one root,
One earth, one mother,
One sky, one beginning, one future, one destiny,
One broken heart,
One God.
We pray to You:
Grant us a vision of unity.
May we see the many in the one and the one in the many.
May you, Life of All the Worlds, Source of All Amazing Differences
Help us to see clearly.
Guide us gently and firmly toward each other,
Toward peace. Amen.
The first prayer comes from the lips of Rabbi H. Rolando Matalon from Congregation B’nai Jeshurunin New York, NY. The second comes from Dawud Ahmad Assad of the Council of Mosques here in the USA. The third comes from the National Council of Churches of Christ.
Each of them is humble. Each of them looks to the larger Ocean to refresh us. Each begs for wisdom to guide us. Each honors the God and Creator of all.
There are only two kinds of religion. One burns; the other learns. “How long will you love being simple? How long will scoffers delight in their scoffing and fools hate knowledge?”
When any religious tradition mistakes its pool for the Ocean itself, denying the existence of neighboring tide pools along the edges of Eternity, fundamentalism wins. Things turn yellow and nasty. For those of us who are disciples of Jesus, there is only one enduring question by which our tide pool can remain open and fresh: “How shall we love the Lord our God with all our mind, hearts, soul, and strength and our neighbor as ourselves?”
Only the daily refreshment of the tides can keep the tide pools fresh. Otherwise we watch the news, asking Fosdick’s old question, and hope and pray that fundamentalism and fanaticism will not win.
– Sermon preached by Gordon C. Stewart at Shepherd of the Hill Presbyterian Church, Chaska, MN Sunday, September 16, 2012.
Alaskan tide pool photo by Susan Linz
“How a Single Voice Threatened to Spark a Forest Fire”
Gordon C. Stewart, September 28, 2010
Minnesota Public Radio (MPR, 91.1 FM) published this commentary after a Florida pastor threatened to burn the Quran. The same Rev. Jones is part of the story of the toxic video that has inflamed the Muslim world today. Some things never change.
Everyone from time to time feels insignificant. As I did, while watching fires burn across the world, lit by the words of one pastor in Florida. I felt like a spectator in the stands watching the game I care about go terribly wrong, a hostage of verbal terrorism uttered in the name of Christ.
I would imagine that the Rev. Terry Jones and his small congregation also had felt insignificant before they announced the 9/11 Quran burning, and that they were stunned when their pastor’s voice, although terribly misguided, lit the forest on fire without ever burning a Quran. One of their own, one who had felt insignificant, had raised his voice and now had the ear of a commanding general, the secretary of defense and the president of the United States.
The difference between the Rev. Jones and most people is that he has a pulpit. On any given Sunday he speaks and a few people actually listen. Most of us do our ranting and raving in the shower, at the water cooler or with like-minded people at the coffee shop, but we don’t much expect anyone to listen.
But as the Jones story developed, those of us with pulpits were feeling no less beside the point. Then, as I prepared for worship, I was drawn by some old lines about spiritual arson. “Consider what a great forest is set on fire by a small spark. The tongue is a fire … a restless evil, full of deadly poison” and “the seeds of righteousness are sown in peace by those who make peace” (Letter of James 3).
The thought crossed my mind: We could invite a Muslim friend to join me in the pulpit, perhaps my neighbor Muhammad or Abdi or one of their children, whom I meet daily while walking the dogs. I decided to invite Ghafar Lakanwal, a Pashtun Afghan-American cultural diversity trainer, a Muslim and naturalized U.S. citizen, to bring greetings of peace and share some passages about peacemaking from the Quran in our Sunday worship on 9/12.
Our little church in Chaska welcomed Ghafar, and his words about the spiritual “obligation to learn, not burn” still ring in our ears. Our service drew media attention, and Ghafar’s words were heard on the evening news and noticed by a stranger in Australia, who sent a message through the church website. “I was touched,” he wrote, “when I read about your recent Sunday service in the news. … I for one can testify that it has certainly comforted a far away Muslim to know that there are neighbors who will stand together in difficult times. My salaam [to you]. May we all grow together to attain Allah’s pleasure.”
“Ah!” someone will say. How can any Christian rejoice when the author uses the name “Allah” for God? But the reaction to the “name” is misbegotten. It is not the name of God; it’s the Arabic word for what we in English call God. The forest fire lit in defense of “God” in advance of the anniversary of 9/11 reminds us that two kinds of religion potentially exist everywhere people gather to practice their faith. One kind burns. The other kind learns. One hates; the other loves.
As James, writing to those who would follow Jesus, put it: “With [the tongue] we bless the Lord and Father, and with it we curse those who are made in the likeness of God. From the same mouth come blessing and cursing. My brothers and sisters, this ought not to be so” (James 3:9-10). We can set the forest ablaze with our small spark or we can use it to light a candle of hope and peace. But, after the events of this month, none of us can again think that what we say is insignificant.
Cushman Eagle Motor Scooter
Cushman Eagle
…
In the mid-’50s, Illinois (and maybe
other foolish States) for just a year
or two allowed 15 year olds to pay
a small fee for what was a lawn-mower
engine on two wheels: a motor scooter
built by a guy named Cushman. And for less
than $400 I bought a new
top-of-the-line Eagle. It had two gears,
a clutch, and a weak horn that barely made
the boys on bikes glance at me going by.
Like me, most scooter riders must have paid,
as well, for bones reset–for with a high
speed of 50, many kids of 15
would crash when hormones mixed with gasoline.
– Steve “You-Know-Who” of WILL was lucky. He got a Cushman Eagle as a kid. Here’s a another guy who wasn’t so fortunate, but who had to wait until he was 60. Look in on the family Christmas. It’s enough to make a grown man cry, in the best of all ways..with joy.
The Minnesota Department of Natural Resources (DNR) has authorized a new Wolf Hunting and Trapping Season that begins November 3rd. Apparently the once endangered species is getting too large. Click this Link to MN DNR site for information.
Here are two alternative world views on the hunt – those of the Mountain Lion and Elmer Fudd – in a classic Looney Toons cartoon on Elmer the hunter, “What’s My Lion?”.
“I set a new wecord this year; it took me only thwee hours to get wid of aww of them!” – Elmer Fudd’s last words in “What’s My Lion?”, his final appearance.
Views from the Edge 