Tag Archives: current-events

WORSE THAN WATERGATE

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We’re pleased to re-blog Marilyn’s SERENDIPITY post. The information from this Rachel Maddow Show clip merits broad dissemination.

SERENDIPITY: SEEKING INTELLIGENT LIFE ON EARTH

This was too good not to post. If you’ve already watched it, then you know and of course, if you’ve been following U.S. national events, you also know. But this is a very good wrap up and I didn’t know whether I should laugh or cry. Both? Because this is the worst of times for the U.S. … but maybe, if we prove we have a country that can withstand the worst, maybe it’s after all, a good time. The world is a crazy place and this is one crazy time to be living in it.

http://player.theplatform.com/p/7wvmTC/MSNBCEmbeddedOffSite?guid=n_maddow_atrump_170324

Someone commented yesterday (I wish I remembered who and I apologize) that “When you elect a game show host without any experience in government or legislation to run the United States, what could possibly go wrong?”

I think we are beginning to see an answer to that.

I feel so young again. Just like…

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Puppy salutes Martin Luther King’s Dream

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Barclay and the memory of Martin Luther King, Jr.

Barclay and the memory of Martin Luther King, Jr.

Fourteen-week old Barclay was reading the morning paper where he read for the first time about the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and his “I have a Dream speech” 50 years ago this Wednesday. “Woof!” said Barclay. Then his eyes became sad as he read the other stories in the paper and told his Dad to put on the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (SPCA) shirt Barclay’s Mom found at a garage sale. The America Barclay wants is one that prevents cruelty to animals, including humans.

“Dad,” he said, “We have to go to Washington this Wednesday! We have to keep the dream alive.”

“We can’t go to Washington,” said Dad. “We’re not ready to go to Washington. Not until you learn to go potty outside. Maybe next year, when you’ve learned that going outside is your contribution to the prevention of cruelty to humans and the American way of life, we can go to Washington and visit Congress to train them too.”

Barclay looked at Dad and said Dad wasn’t worthy to wear that t-shirt. Dad goes inside all the time. “It’s prejudice, pure and simple and I won’t have any part in it! Dad hates dogs!”

“Sit,” said Dad.

“Just another form of cruelty and intimidation,” said Barclay. “Martin would never have treated me like that.”

“You don’t understand,” said Dad. “Martin was able to accomplish what he did in the Civil Rights Movement and the Peace Movement because he put himself under the strict discipline of non-violent resistance. Martin Luther King, Jr. understood discipline and self-discipline. I want you to learn the same thing. Every time you go in the house, it’s an act of violent resistance. It’s an act of terror. Do you understand? Sit!”

Barclay sat, knowing that the treat was in Dad’s hand. He took the treat, then squatted right in front of Dad, and said, “Maybe some day I’ll be self-disciplined like Dr. King. Right now I’m just a puppy in training. … So next year we can go Washington, D.C. and train everyone in Congress and the White House not to make a mess in their own houses?”

The President’s Speech on the Economy

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Aired earlier today on All Things Considered (MPR, KNOW, 91.1 FM).

Paul Tillich quote in Tillich Park, New Harmony, IN.

Paul Tillich quote in Tillich Park, New Harmony, IN.

Today President Obama began a series of speeches about the future of the American economy. I hope he takes us back to the basics of what an “economy” is.

Economics is about a household and how to manage it. The household is a family, a state, a nation, a planet.

The English word “economy” comes from the Greek work oikos – the Greek word for house. The word “economics” derives from the Greek word oikonomia–the management of a household.

Before it is anything else, economics is a perspective, a frame of reference. Before it decides anything about household management, it knows that there is only one house. Good household management – good economics – pays attention to the wellbeing of the entire house and all its residents.

In America and elsewhere across the world, we are coming to realize that the planet itself is one house. What happens in one room of the house – one family, one city, one nation – affects what happens everywhere in the house. Paul Tillich caught the clear sense of it when he wrote that “Man and nature belong together in their created glory – in their tragedy and in their salvation.” That is to say, there is only one house.

The essential question of economics is not about systems – capitalism, communism, socialism, or something else. The essential question is spiritual, philosophical, and ethical. It’s whether we believe that there is only one oikos, one house; the subsequent question is about how best to manage it for the wellbeing of all its residents and the fragile web of nature without which the house of the living would not exist.

Very often what we call ‘economics’ is not economics. It’s not oikonomia. It’s something else. It assumes something else, and when we forget what an economy and economics really are, we enshrine greed as the essential virtue, ignoring and imperiling everyone else and everthing in the one house in which we all live.

I dream that the President will preach the old Greek common sense: that in his own way, he will reclaim the essential premise of an economy and the ethical task of economics. By bringing the Greek origins to our television sets, headsets, and iPads, he can call us to move forward out of the partisan houses of nonsense.

There is only one house.

I’m not going to take it anymore!

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A dear friend sent an email about cause-weariness. She’s not alone in suffering an assault of email alarms and solicitations. She’s very conscientious and exhausted. I responded:

I, too, find myself increasingly angry. And that’s not a good thing. It’s right, but it’s not good for my soul. You have always been a tender, gentle, loving, musical person with that unique sense of humor, and this hits you hard, maybe harder than it hits me. I, too, am weary of all the emails and solicitations. They, too, have come to make me angry. “Just leave me alone!!!” I say to myself…and… out loud sometimes. “I’m not on your team. I’m not on anybody’s team. I don’t like teams. And stop treating me like one of the President’s best friends! He doesn’t know me from the man-in-the-moon, and, NO, you can’t get another $100 from me by peddling a raffle for lunch with the president! I don’t like gambling. Never have. Never will. Giving should be giving, not for purposes of getting.”

Anyway, you get my point.

I am torn between being a responsible disciple and citizen – staying abreast of current events and looking deeply into their meaning and the powers and principalities behind them – and living in the joy to which we are called.

I don’t know what to do either. I do know that you are one of God’s very precious children with a love of music and the arts. Listen to LOTS of music and spend time with beauty to off-set the ugliness.

Marriage Equality in Minnesota

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gaymarriageMy younger son is gay. For 12 years he’s been in a committed relationship in New York.

His response to the news that Minnesota will now become a marriage equality state was:

“Great. One more state in which I get to choose not to get married!”

He doesn’t want to get married. He just wants for anyone who chooses the covenant of marriage to have that choice. He just wants to live his life.

In 1978 students at The College of Wooster began “coming out” to me in the safe space of my office at The Church House”, the campus ministry center that housed the offices of the College Church, Westminster Presbyterian Church. I served the dual role of Pastor of the church and Pastor to the College of Wooster.

Dr. Violet Startzman, the physician at the College’s Health Center, came home with the results of a three-year study on homosexuality commissioned by the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (USA). Westminster sponsored public forums, adult studies, and less formal conversations about the core finding of the study: same-gender orientation is not a choice; it’s part of the natural spectrum of human sexual attraction and love.

It was in that context that previously fearful or confused students shared in the privacy of the pastor’s office and found affirmation. They were active in the college church. They were ordained (student) elders on the church board.

My story since then is complicated, more so than I would like it to have been, in retrospect. Pastors are teachers and educators as well as advocates. Those of us who seek to minister to a congregation wear the mantle of conflicting responsibilities of conscience, patience, unity, and advocacy. We are first and foremost rabbis (teachers). Teaching is different from preaching, although the good preacher is also a teacher. And teachers begin by respecting their students, no matter what their views are on a given subject. Each of us perceives the world through eyes that see what experience has taught us to see.

When my son came out to us, we were grateful. Grateful for his self-knowledge. Grateful for his trust. Grateful that a (not-so-secret) secret was no longer a secret. So very grateful and proud of who he was as a young man and all that he had done and stood for.

Now, today, I am in Minnesota. He is in New York. I, like him, am grateful that there is one more state in which he can choose whether or not to be married.