Our Neighborhood MeetUP viewed a film on the life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German Lutheran pastor who collaborated with German leaders seeking to kill Hitler. Bonhoeffer wrote extensively about the Christian life, including Discipleship and Life Together, a description of daily life at an illegal seminary in Nazi Germany.

Discipleship is primarily an exposition of the Sermon on the Mount.

Bonhoeffer faced an impossible choice: either the defeat of his nation or the destruction of Christian civilization. He found that traditional ethics could not guide him. Therefore, he threw himself on the mercy of God and did what seemed right to him in the situation where he found himself.

Many Christians who lived in countries under the heel of Nazi Germany faced similar dilemmas. The ten Boom family of Holland also compromised traditional Christian values, such as obeying the laws of the state, always telling the truth, and so one— in order to achieve a higher good, resistance to tyranny and rescue of its victims.

In light of such historical events, a lot of Christian discourse today strikes me as irrelevant. Hundreds of thousands if not millions of persons die of preventable causes. Global warming and other ecological issues call the future of the planet into question. People of all faiths have more in common with each other than with people who share language, nationality, and other factors but lack a common worldview.

It’s time to rethink many of the basics. I’m looking forward to reading Rob Bell’s new book Love Wins. I understand Bell tackles many of these questions.

The idea of Resistance is fascinating to me. I’m reading a second time Dorothee Soelle’s masterwork The Silent Cry: Mysticism and Resistance (2001). She begins with a quote from Rumi

Why, when God’s world is so big,
did you fall asleep in a prison,
of all places?

I admit feeling terrified of being swallowed alive by “the big machine,” our culture, which with its mass media dulls our senses and silences the whispers of the still small voice that is God’s Spirit within.

Mohamed Bouazizi  a 26-year-old university graduate without a steady job immolated himself in Tunisia when police confiscated the fruits and vegetables he was selling without a license.

How does he fit the stereotype in Western media of youths named Mohamed?

In the democratic West we seldom see the suffering of people like him. They have to set themselves on fire to get a few moments of our attention.

The death knell is sounding for our consumer-based economy because we’re soon going to consume all there is. This, while billions—billions with a B—lack basic necessities of life.

What can one person do? How can humankind be my family in reality, not just in ideal?

These are questions I ask myself.

A sister’s account of the anti-Hitler leaflet campaign of her brother and sister Hans and Sophie Scholl and other students, most in their early 20s. They paid with their lives.

The book includes all the leaflets, the last of which was smuggled out of Germany and dropped by Allied planes throughout the country.

I think of students in the Middle East, demonstrating for human rights that I take for granted. Some of them also will pay with their lives.

Inge Scholl documents how her siblings’ courageous actions grew out of and deepened their faith in Christ, how they interacted with calm grace and hope for the future with those who tried them in the People’s Court (a travesty) and with fellow prisoners.

It makes what I do for Christ seem trivial. But I recall Naaman. Asked to bathe in the Jordan so that he might be healed, he became indignant. His servants asked, “Father, if the prophet had asked you to do something ‘hard and heroic,’ wouldn’t you have done it? Why not ‘wash and be clean’? (2 Kings 5)

Truth is, if I’m not up for the simple daily things Christ asks, I wouldn’t be up for some heroic deed either.

“Life without Principle” Collected Essays and Poems. Library of America. p. 365.

I love the Bible—having read it, learned it by heart, taught it, preached and (I hope) lived up to it all my days. I believe by composing, preserving, and passing down through generations these scriptures the Hebrew, Jewish and Christian peoples have sought to hear (often succeeding in  hearing) the true Word of God.

Darkness (whatever you understand it to be) also loves to use the Bible, however, creating diversion, division and hatred, and causing pride, hypocrisy. and legalism. Darkness also wrongly uses texts like Zephaniah to persuade us there’s no hope, no use, no future—when by God’s grace there is hope, there is a point, there is a bright future for all who listen and follow the God of light and love.

Zephaniah, one of the 12 short books at the end of the OT, gives End of the World crazies a reason to celebrate! Try this:

“I will sweep away everything from the face of the earth”
—declares the Lord.
“I will sweep away [humans] and beast;
I will sweep away the birds of the sky
And the fish of the sea….
And I will destroy [humankind]
from the face of the earth”—declares the Lord. (Zeph 1.2-3, TANAKH)

The note says the Hebrew may mean the total destruction of an area of the earth, rather than total annihilation. Either way, I’d rather not.

 For the Hebrew prophet, the issue of ecology is morality, not science. Science is a tool, a good tool, in the hands of good people. But science alone cannot correct this problem.

The prophet Hosea, much earlier than Zephaniah, makes the connection crystal clear:

…”there is no  honesty and no goodness
And no obedience to God in the land.
[False] swearing, dishonesty, and murder,
And theft and adultery are rife;
Crime follows upon crime!
For that, the earth is withered:
Everything that dwells on it languishes—
Beasts of the field and birds of the sky—
Even the fish of the sea perish.” (Hosea 4.1b-3)

So what?

A scholar I can’t name said that Bible study involves two questions: what? and, so what?

“What” tells the message, “so what” the meaning for your life.

Zephaniah, Hosea said… So what? For decades pop culture has laughed at the bearded guy in a monk’s robe waving a placard “The End is Near.” Preachers don’t talk about this stuff so much any more. But Nature programs now routinely document the imminent extinction of species and decimation of habitat. “Mass extinction event” is part of our everyday vocabulary.

Yet, nothing changes.

BP makes bad decisions to speed things up and boost profits; and, millions of gallons of crude oil foul the Gulf of Mexico. A natural environment that cannot be valued is mired for a century or more. If (or when!) the stuff gets into the Gulf Stream, who knows what worldwide destructive impact is possible.

Here’s what I think:

We know of several civilizations which flourished, depleted their resources, and vanished from the earth: Easter Island, the Mayans, the culture centered in Angkor Wat, Southeast Asia. It’s very likely that is happening again, except this time on a global scale. Perhaps, if humans are utterly stupid, greedy and blind, we can cause a mass extinction event.

There aren’t enough tears to weep, when you realize that. Nevertheless:

I Will

• reach out my hand and heart to all who strive to follow the Wisdom Tradition of their culture. 
• speak out for justice and well-being of individuals and eco-systems.
• do my best to understand my position of privilege, and deconstruct as much of that as I can.
• strive to live as St. Francis and Gandhi lived, though I can’t reach anywhere close to their level.
• follow Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit, living in accord with
  • the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5-7),
  • the Great Commandments (love God, others, self), and,
  • the Ten Commandments.

I will live in hope.

 But the dinosaurs morphed into birds—still very much with us.

 There have been other mass extinctions, and each time God re-created the world.

 I’m thinking in these terms because the data I’m reading about the destruction of the planet are so sobering, I have to think my way out of paralyzing grief.

 Followers of Christ could learn a lot from Francis of Assisi, who was not an other-worldly saint, but this worldly—in love with the earth and its beauty, its creatures as well as its Creator.

 We need to

• keep hope alive
• be informed
• elect eco-activist officials
• adopt earth friendly habits

Scriptures to think about:

 In view of the impending crisis, it is well for you to remain as you are. I mean, brothers and sisters, the appointed time has grown short…. For the present form of this world is passing away. 1 Cor 7:26-31 (NRSV)

 The darkness is passing away and the true light is already shining. 1 John 2:8 (NRSV)

 Despair paralyzes. Hope invigorates.

Flush with the success of earlier efforts, I added a protein booster whey powder, a couple eggs, and two tablespoons of oil.

After 25 minutes in the oven, the knife came out clean.

We cut the cake the next day to store it. It consisted of an outside ring, inside ring and center.

The outside was perfect, a dream of a cake.

The inside was still semi-liquid, doughy.

The center was empty.

T. S. Eliot:

We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!

Wow! What an image of spiritual life!

It is critical for our spiritual lives to be real, nourishing, whole.

Not cream puffs without cream.

And, when you’re starving, a good hearty piece of bread is better than a pastry.

I’m reading Dom Helder Camara in the Orbis Books series Modern Spiritual Masters. I was intrigued that I never heard of him before, yet the blurb identified him as a major player in Vatican II and an archbishop (?) who implemented changes to move the Brazilian and Latin American church toward ideals of Poverty and Service.

He embodied the bishop Victor Hugo described in the opening pages of Les Miserables. Fluent in French,  he must have known that book well. The Brazilian dictatorship of the 1960s silenced him in the country, but could not outside.

Conservative, fervent anti-Communist pope John Paul II dismantled most of his accomplishments. His writings are largely in Portuguese and housed in Recife, I believe. Orbis is doing world Christianity a great service in bringing the riches of his thought to light.

I confess I  got a flyer offering them at half off. I purchased:

• Dom Helder Camara
• Pedro Arrupe
• Thomas Merton
• Evelyn Underhill
• Simone Weil
• Writings on Contemplation and Compassion, ed. Robert Ellsburg.

Easily a year’s worth of reading and reflection.  I was introduced to the series by the volume on Dorothee Sölle, the German theologian. That led me to read her magnum opus The Silent Cry, which I’ve written about.

Reading is a way out of despair for me. It helps me in these increasingly dark days. Advent is around the corner, my heart cries out for light, light, light!

Quoting Reinaldo Arenas, Before Night Falls (1993):

“At the [Cuban] National Library in 1969 Lezama [Lima] gave a reading of perhaps one of the most extraordinary essays of Cuban literature under the title ‘Confluences.’ It reaffirmed the creative force, the love of language, the struggle for an integrated image against all  those who opposed it. A sense of beauty is always dangerous and antagonistic to any dictatorship because it implies a realm extending beyond the limits that a dictatorship can impose on human beings. Beauty is a territory that escapes the control of the political police. Being independent and outside of their domain, beauty is so irritating to dictators that they attempt to destroy it whichever way they can. Under a dictatorship, beauty is always a dissident force, because a dictatorship is itself unaesthetic, grotesque, to a dictator and his agents, the attempt to create beauty is an escapist or reactionary act.” p. 87

Arenas is not somebody conservative Christians typically read. He was a promiscuous gay activist in communist Cuba. His writings caught the acclaim of an international audience, and of Castro’s State Security, which hounded Arenas and imprisoned him in El Morro, a notorious lockup for murderers and the like.

Arenas was brutalized. Even after he escaped Cuba by slipping into Key West in the Mariel exodus in 1980, Castro’s agents sought to destroy him.

One night a mysterious blast, like a gunshot, shattered a glass of water in his apartment. Unfortunately, because he was debilitated due to AIDS, poverty, and the struggle to publish as an ostracized Cuban expatriate, he took this shattered glass as an omen, a metaphor of his life. The protective aura he had enjoyed from childhood abandoned him. He died.

He ended a letter published posthumously:  “I do not want to convey to you a message of defeat but of continued struggle and of hope. Cuba will be free. I already am.” (p. 317)

Yet, I find some lessons from his memoir:

• Faith and a living relationship with God make a difference. As tyranny hammered Arenas, he could have benefited from experiencing the unconditional love of God [not the stereotypical right-wing deity, however].
• His commitment to Beauty, truth expressed through literature, and his refusal to use his gift to glorify the state, have transcendent value. Quakers speak about “that of God in everyone.” Arenas’s commitment to writing were “that of God” in him.
• His experience of America as “a country without a soul,” a country tyrannized by “the power of money” is a legitimate warning. I know another America, where people’s love of God and one another is the primary power. But I believe Arenas’ experience is also true. I can’t read the Hebrew prophets, who condemn the rich for caring not at all about the poor, without recognizing parallels in the US today.

Other voices have sounded the warning, too. Aleksandr Solzehnitsyn addressed Harvard; he spoke about how human potential must be balanced by belief in a Supreme Being who gives value to human life and responsibility to human freedom. I also compare Maria von Trapp in Sound of Music with Sally Bowles in Cabaret, two figures iconic of America–but which will we ultimately choose to become?

Not the kind of book you’d expect a preacher to be reading. Lots of rowdy sex.

Besides that, what I like in this book is the longing evident from early days in Arenas’s life, a longing for something missing in the Communist paradise he grew up in.

Maybe food. As a boy he often ate dirt to fill his stomach.

His writing brought him to the attention of the literary community in Cuba. Despite the many parasites who sold out to State Security, there were others who gathered in small groups to read their work.

In one meeting the poet read his original poems, then burned the only copy in a hibachi to the gasps of the crowd. In Cuba it’s criminal to write except in connivance with the State.

Arenas’ friends smuggled his work out of Cuba, and it was published in France, winning acclaim.

He writes that tyranny hates the Beauty of a poem which cannot be enslaved to its purposes.

He would have liked Ephesians 2.10, “We are God’s works of art…” [lit. poema] NJB.

In my heart is a longing that Arenas somewhere, somehow met the God, who might be known by other names—such as Beauty, Medicine, Truth, Justice, Love. Transcendent names.

I don’t know. I’m just really clear that the system I grew up with, in which people were either saved or lost (no other possibilities), doesn’t cover all the people I know.

There are those souls who long for a better God than all the gods they know, souls who serve their better God even though they have no proof their God exists, souls who put many “saved” folks to shame.

C.S. Lewis wrote of one such soul in The Last Battle. Emeth [Hebrew word meaning faithful] was an enemy soldier who loved the pagan bird god Tash fiercely, risked his life to catch a glimpse of Tash, only to learn in Aslan’s country that he had worshiped the great Lion all his life.

Lewis explained, you can’t offer true worship to a false god; nor can you give false worship to the true God. By whatever name they call God true worshipers serve the true God; false worshipers, false gods.

O true God of mercy, love and grace, you have other sheep, belonging to other folds. May you bring them home in peace at the last. Amen

 Note: high pain today, so I can’t write a lot.

I come more and more to believe the Western idolizing of the rugged individual, the Marlboro man, is pathological. My friend Jean-Emile Ngué suggested that Buber ought to have a category, not simply of I-Thou, but  of

We-Thou.

The more I think about it, the more profound my brother’s insight strikes me.

The incarnation of Christ continues in the community he founded: the Church. Not the political entities such as the Southern Baptist Convention or the Roman Catholic Church. These are instances of the Church. But the whole, the mystical reality of all who are in Christ is the Church.

Preferential option for the poor

I watched a Paulist film Romero, with Raul Julia in the title role. Oscar Romero was a bookish, conservative mouse who was elevated to Archbishop of El Salvador in the late 1970s. His priests were involved in the liberation theology movement. He was killed by an assassin in 1980, while saying mass in a small chapel of a cancer hospital.

Right-wing elements of the government opposed the people’s growing demands for free elections, full voting rights, education, and land reform. Romero recognized the power of his radio addresses and became the voice of the poor. He wrote the U.S. President Jimmy Carter, asking that the U.S. stop selling arms to El Salvador. Carter eventually did stop, I think; Reagan resumed the sales under the banner of defeating Communists.

In the German Peasants’ War 1524 Luther faced demands of the poor for such things as open grazing rights, and the right to choose their own pastor. Luther, sadly, sided with the powerful German princes who protected him from the Pope.

The Anabaptists, whom I consider my forebears, were among these people.

In the American Colonies Baptists rocked along, not making headway until the Revolution. Then, Baptists sided with the revolutionaries. Baptist numbers swelled.

Fear words: liberal, communist, terrorist

All this to say that we as Christians need to be wary of cries such as “Terrorists!” Is our government pursuing geopolitical goals, and manufacturing consent by hiding its real ambitions beneath a banner that most Americans will accept?

All this is so murky. People who profit from our ignorance don’t want us to know the truth.

But I’ve discovered some things that average people can do.

Fair Trade expresses faith and solidarity

One thing is buy Fair Trade coffee, chocolate, and crafts. The Free Trade agreements impoverish the farmers and workers who produce these goods while those who roast the coffee beans and sell it in North America make huge profits.

Fair Trade, on the other hand, assures that the producer—the small farmer—receives a little more and the goods are sold at less profit to the end of the line seller.

A Pound of Free Trade Coffee

 Farmer receives about 25 cents from buyer

 Coffee is Imported to the U.S. for about 61 cents

 Coffee is Roasted and Sold to the Coffee Company

 Your Retailer buys it from the Roaster and sells it for about $10.00

A Pound of Fair Trade Coffee

 Farmer Receives 90 cents from Cooperative

Cooperative Sells to Fair Trade Company for $1.26

Fair Trade Company Roasts Coffee and Sells it to you for $6.00

Source: SHARE Foundation here.

In memory of Romero and others martyred in El Salvador, Roman Catholics and others founded

the SHARE Foundation here

 helps accomplish the goals of the people to improve their lives: education for their children, food and peace.

Increasingly, consumers ask about the worker who produced the goods they are buying. Both Fair working conditions, wages, and sustainability are concerns.

Christ followers must take the lead in asking such questions.

Your Sunday morning coffee
can be Fair Trade coffee!

It seems to be a little thing. But in fact it is not. Check out Fair Trade facts here.

Solidarity

A beautiful word. We belong together. On the night of his arrest Christ prayed that God’s people might be One. What happens to the West Bank Palestinian who is barred from land that his ancestors have farmed for hundreds of years,  cocoa farmer in Africa, and the coffee farmer in El Salvador happens to me.

In 19th century England anti-slavery forces promoted the boycott of sugar because the working conditions of slaves on plantations in the West Indies were sub-human. William Wilberforce worked in Parliament for 26 years  to end slave trafficking in the British Empire.

How can we imagine that we might have stood with Wilberforce or Bonhoeffer or Martin Luther King Jr. or Gandhi or Oscar Romero, when we won’t do such a small thing as find out about those who grow our coffee and act to assure them Fair Trade.