About Last Night

First off: headlines screaming “PROTESTS TURN VIOLENT” are distortions that follow the same warped narrative that got us here. Without any clear evidence that the thousands of peaceful protesters from all over Boston had anything to do with localized and sporadic violence after dark, we need to question the assumption that there was a continuum or connection between the protests and whatever followed. The assumption that they are connected by anything except the presumption on the part of those engaging in violence after a day of peaceful protest that that connection would be drawn is specious.

Like most people I know, I’ve had some experience with protests, mostly when I was in college. We’re talking first Gulf War. Like, back in ‘91. Ancient times, but I suspect much of the story and the characters remain strikingly the same. That summer I lived in a tent city set up by war protesters in Dunn Meadow on the Indiana University campus in Bloomington. I had long curly hair, wore flannel, and looked like Eddie Vedder. I will not be providing photographic proof, but here is a reasonable facsimile:

Basically me, more or less, rocking the protest mic in Dunn Meadow, c.1991.

There were a series of protests that summer, over the whole agonizing build-up to military action, and over time a group of preppy kids took to antagonizing the grunge kids camping out in the meadow. This antagonism had more or less nothing to do with the war or the substance of the protests. It likely had more to do with dirty hippies taking up the meadow, which was a favorite spot among Chad, Brock and the ultimate frisbee set.

One night a group of twenty or so of the latter, dressed to the teeth in pink oxfords and boat shoes, ambushed our little tent city, raised a ruckus, overturning our tents, and chasing us — there were probably twenty or so of us as well — down past the Student Union to Showalter Fountain, where, probably owing to burning off the adrenaline rush in the sprint to the fountain (which was, frankly, exhilarating), it turned into one of those shouting debates that always seem to erupt among protesters and “counter-protesters” on college campuses. I would rather it had ended in some sort of ‘60s lovefest, but this was the ‘90s, and in the ’90s you had to pay for that shit.

After we’d all blown off some steam, we went back to our tents, they went back to Frat Row, and a few days later Operation Desert Shield went off as planned.

Later in the mid-aughts I did some organizing, and what I can tell you about any protest is that there will always be that group of shitty white kids from the suburbs who call themselves “anarchists” and want to hijack whatever it is you’re protesting (in my case it was public transit fare hikes) to quell the screaming maw of boredom of their meaningless existence. In the case of last night, we know suburban Nazis are stirring shit up, with the President’s encouragement, because they really want their race war, and he really wants them to have it. They know they’re not going to be held accountable. They know if anything goes down it will be: “PROTESTS TURN VIOLENT.”

This is not new information, is what I’m saying. Protests like these have been happening since the dawn of modernity. If you’re just now tuning in, that’s your problem. Point being: unless the media can verify who was responsible, making assumptions about “protesters” turned rabble-rousers is irresponsible. It also plays into a relentless and false narrative that associates protest with violence and justifies more militarization and brutality. And the band plays on.

I took a ride downtown this morning, by the way, to see what I could see of the aftermath, and, yeah, there were some smash-n-grabs last night, for sure. It sucks, because we’re heading into an economic depression — I lived through ‘70s stagflation, too — and those boarded-up shops: they’re gonna stay boarded up for years. I know just yesterday I was saying we can’t be for “Back to Normal.” At this point, I don’t think we have to worry too much about that happening.

Happy Valentine’s Day?

It being Valentine week, I thought I’d look into the human and environmental cost of the popular romantic holiday! Spoiler alert: this is kind of a “Mike Ruins Everything” post.

Depending on whom you ask, Americans spend between $18-20b on V-Day flowers, chocolates, plushies and foil or “mylar” balloons to prove their affection. Obviously all of these have environmental and human costs.

We’ll start with balloons and plushies. Latex balloons can take up to four years to biodegrade (don’t get me started on mylars, which are “metalicized polyester” and not classified as biodegradable) but it is their release into the environment that wreaks havoc on wildlife (if you need a good cry, check out the US Fish and Wildlife Service’s blog post on the subject, but be warned, there are pictures. )

Those cute little plushies are problematic, too, at every stage of their production. Most are made of materials derived from petrochemicals, some containing heavy metals like lead and cadmium. The manufacturing process “can result in harmful wastewater and other types of pollution”, and the toy industry has long been known to employ child labor.

Americans consume 58 million lbs of chocolate on Valentine’s Day. Most of the cocoa comes from West Africa, where, because 1 cocoa tree produces only about half a pound of chocolate a year, and global demand is so high, tropical forests are often clearcut to make way for this cash crop. Child labor is another ongoing reality of chocolate production, with an estimated 2+ million West African children involved in harvesting cocoa.

And those Valentine’s Day roses? Around 2/3 of them come from Colombia, where labor laws (including, again, child labor laws) and environmental regulations are lax. One study found that floriculture workers (2:1 female to male) “were exposed to 127 different types of pesticides. The female workers as well as the female partners of male workers experienced an “increase in the prevalence of abortion, prematurity, and congenital malformations … for pregnancies occurring after the start of work in floriculture.” This is particularly horrifying, given the product and its intended purpose and message.

The good news is there are plenty of sustainable ways to celebrate Valentine’s day! Because, honestly, loving someone to the end of the earth doesn’t need to be a literal thing.

Travelers on Church Street

I work as the Church Street Ministry Coordinator at First Parish Unitarian Universalist on Church Street just off Harvard Square in Cambridge, Mass., and one of my jobs is to educate the Congregation on issues of housing and food insecurity in our neighborhood and beyond. I wrote the following for our monthly newsletter after having been asked by several congregants how to approach individuals they assume to be homeless in the neighborhood.

One of my favorite things to do when I was a young teacher in a little village in Eastern Hungary in the mid-’90s was to take the train 25 miles East to the Provincial Capital, Debrecen, near the Romanian border. It was a beautiful city, to be sure, but it was that hour traveling by train across the plains of Pannonia, the great Hungarian Puszta, that was the real attraction for me. The landscape, “flat as an ocean,” in the poet Sándor Petőfi’s words, reminded me of my Indiana home, and being a stranger among strangers on the old no-frills Soviet-era intercity train was oddly calming. Whenever I was homesick I could ride my janky old bicycle (provided at no cost by the local gimnázium) to the station, hop on a train, and I suddenly felt right at home amongst the rabble.

It’s good to be at home among strangers, and despite growing up in suburbia, where the appearance of a stranger is often cause for suspicion if not outright alarm, I think it’s in my blood. I recently became mildly obsessed with ancestry.com, and what struck me after doing a little research was the staggering scope of global displacement over the last several generations. Take my great-grandparents, who, like so many of their compatriots fleeing the grinding rural poverty of their Southern Italian home, arrived in New York around 1900 in what’s known as The Great Arrival. But while “L’America” was a land of opportunity, the story my genealogy tells of the century that followed was one of even greater fragmentation and displacement, with two World Wars and the Great Depression, and a relentless push West that saw relatives scattered from New York and Pennsylvania to Indiana, Texas and California. Growing up I hardly knew my relatives on my father’s side at all. I met my grandfather once. We’ve been in this country for 120 years.

First Parish Cambridge has been here much longer, of course. Many of its current congregants can no doubt trace their lineage back 400 years as well. One thing I’ve learned in my own short time in New England: folks take enormous pride in being of a place. I do it, too. Each September when the next freshman class floods in from parts unknown, despite only having lived here a mere 15 years, I’m suddenly a native. We often draw the arbitrary line of belonging to a place from the moment we arrived, whether it’s the queue for our morning coffee or Plymouth Rock. We take great, sometimes comical umbrage at strangers and newcomers, puffing our chests as if to say: “we were here first!” And when it comes to the line at Starbucks: yeah, ok, fair enough. But when we telescope out a bit, things get a little more complicated. Here isn’t always here. Take First Parish. In our first 200 years the Congregation moved five times (not to mention the much greater trek from Calvinism to Unitarian Universalism that accompanied all those moves.)

We are a people on the move, a species of travelers from the beginning, for whom “home” is a fairly recent adaptation. The first shelters may have been built as long ago as 400,000 years, but the first proto-houses did not appear until just 15,000 years ago, give or take. We would do well to keep that in mind when we think about homelessness. Like “displacement,” “homelessness” is a word that hides its privilege in plain sight. We rarely dig too deeply into the root — “home,” “place,” even less so “placement” — when we think of those who are homeless or displaced. We sometimes lament that they (and they are always a “they”) have had to leave their homes, but we invariably conceive of “home” as the place they are from, not the place they are in. It is a way of reinforcing that they are “out of place” here and now. The fact that many have had to leave the place they are from doesn’t mean that they need to feel or be treated as out of place where they are. We sometimes assume that those we encounter on our streets have nowhere to be without considering how it is that we have found our place here, on the same street where they are. They are here, we sometimes seem to be saying, in the place where we belong!

But home is not just an ephemeral and transient idea for them, as much as our own good fortune in having found a place for the moment might suggest to us. I say this as a renter in Boston who has been forced to move eight times in the past 13 years. And that’s stable compared to friends earning the minimum wage. In Cambridge today they’d have to work 145 hours per week to afford a two-bedroom rent. If we zoom out to the even bigger picture, we are in the middle of an epoch of global displacement, fueled by radical income inequality and unstoppable climate change. A recent study from the Union of Concerned Scientists warns that rising sea levels will, by the end of the century, cause a third of the homes in Cambridge to face flooding every other week. A third of Cambridge underwater. (It seems likely this will only exacerbate the housing crunch.)

We have one home, not many. That much is obvious. It can be hard to remember that in moments of encounter with those who seem out of place to us in the here and now. When I forget, myself, I like to hop on the train. It doesn’t really matter where to. It’s just good to be at home among my fellow travelers.

“Get thee to a diverse community of scholars committed to social justice on a global scale!”

OK, the countdown has begun in earnest! In a mere two weeks I’ll start classes at Boston University’s School of Theology.

While I’ve done a lot of “discernment” around this myself, I realized recently that this is a confusing concept for some in my wider circle. Just yesterday I had someone tell me with an incredulous chuckle he’d heard I was “joining a seminary.”

The picture he had was, let’s say: Rabelaisian. Maybe if it were the 15th Century, but with everything going on right now in the Catholic Church I don’t want people to get this twisted. It’s not that.

Nor is this a “get thee to a nunnery” scenario.

I haven’t renounced my… well, anything, really. (Except the eight or nine grand I’m paying in tuition and insurance per academic year and any chance of an off-campus social life for the foreseeable future.)

So. Real talk:

I chose BU because they gave me a reasonable package and the Global & Community Engagement track offers a number of useful courses and certificates in awesome stuff like Nonprofit Management and opportunities for study abroad as part of my three-year degree. This track offers training in interfaith dialogue and conflict transformation in ecumenical settings, to be sure, but it also offers more broadly applicable work in social and economic justice and nonprofit leadership.

Having worked in higher ed administration and nonprofits and not really finding a happy or stable niche in either, my career sort of took a turn a few years back into areas of social and economic justice, working pretty intensively with food and housing insecurity in a number of contexts, from leading an organization dedicated to urban agriculture to mentoring youth in transitional housing.

One organization I currently work for around these issues is a Community Mental Health Center, the other is a Unitarian Universalist Church. Both gigs put me in touch with extraordinary people from all walks of life who are committed to making their communities more inclusive, more responsive, and more just. (I know it sounds hokey, but there really are incredibly smart people out there doing this work, trust me!)

Anyway, I knew I wanted to go on to get another degree that could help me get better situated to do the organizational work I wanted to do. I didn’t want something as limiting as an MSW or as wonky as an MPA, though either of these could easily have been a next step, careerwise.

What I did want was a program that had a built-in community component. I had dated a guy for a couple years who was getting his MBA from Harvard and what struck me about his program was how much of it was really geared toward creating a sustainable network of relationships. It struck me that there are Masters programs that are geared almost exclusively toward professional certification, and then there are those, like MBAs and MDivs (as strange as it might seem to compare them), that have this community element that’s so essential to their true purpose and lasting value.

At no point was I required by Admissions to have or state a religious affiliation, which is awesome, because I don’t really have one, and the students I met there when visiting the program were from an extraordinary array of religious (and non-religious) backgrounds. There was not a lot of talk at the community lunch I attended about metaphysics and dogma. I’m sure it goes on, but everyone I spoke to seemed much more concerned with the logistics of making the world a better place. And that’s the kind of community I need right now.

It all made perfect sense at the time, anyway.

I’ll let you know how I feel about it when I’m cramming for my Hebrew Bible final in a couple months.

“So you’re a divinity student, huh…?”

I haven’t even started classes yet, but I had my first, “so you’re a divinity student, huh…?” conversation last night.

You know the one: where someone says “so you’re a divinity student, huh…?” and you say, “uhhh…” and they launch into a forty-minute monologue about life, the universe and everything that inevitably ends with the Ancient Aliens guy.

Because I work in a Church setting (I head the Church Street Ministry of First Parish Unitarian Universalist, which works with home- and food-security in Cambridge, Mass.) this isn’t a totally unexpected scenario, and because it’s UU, the Ancient Aliens thing is also, um, not totally unexpected.

Don’t get me wrong. I love talking to people about Ancient Aliens. See, I’m particularly interested in the individual and vernacular “deviations” from creeds and practices, their origins in oral traditions, nascent religions and religions like Christianity in their oral, incipient stages. I am always fascinated by how people are interpreting and utilizing the received wisdom of religious traditions, de- and re-contextualizing them, mixing, matching, recycling, re-purposing, and tweaking them for their own ends.

And while I am, in fact, delighted to hear from people about their beliefs, let’s call them, although we don’t really live in an age of belief so much as credulity, I emphatically reject the idea that divinity students have any more “insight on divinity,” as one friend recently put it. You can talk to literally anyone about literally anything and get insight into divinity. That may, in fact, be the main takeaway of divinity school for divinity students (I’ll let you know in three years when I finish my MDiv).

So, yeah: the conversation started with that ominous “so you’re in divinity school, huh?” And I knew immediately where it was headed. But it’s the journey, you know? And this one started with a visit to a Catholic shrine where my fellow pilgrim observed a worshiper in deep thrall to a statue of the Blessed Virgin.

“Isn’t that idolatry?” He huffed.

I treated this as a sincere inquiry, not a rhetorical question, which I’m guessing is, like, Day 1 of Divinity Student 101, right? (Again, I’ll let you know).

The Cult of the Blessed Virgin is right up my alley, a great example of one of the developments of early Christology so central to the establishing of orthodoxy on the nature of Christ that borrows from ancient archetypes. It took 400 years to sort that out — it was not until the Council of Ephesus in 431 that the cult of the Virgin as Mother of God was finally sanctioned. It was in committee for half a millennium.

My traveling companion was more interested in the general issue of idolatry and pagan influence, as he saw it, as evidence of an inherent and irreconcilable internal contradiction (not to say conspiracy) in the Orthodoxy of the Church. (We’re about 1/5 of the way to Ancient Aliens, for those of you keeping track of our mileage.)

“Worshiping the likeness of the Virgin Mary,” he said, raising an eyebrow, “when, hey, didn’t God say something about ‘graven images’?”

I was like: “I mean, technically it came from the Finger of God rather than His Mouth, but, yeah, something like that.”

And then: “But here’s the thing…”

I’d just been reading about the Hellenization of Christianity in those first crucial years, and suggested nascent Christianity’s break from Judaism, particularly after the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 CE, and its incorporation into the imperialist project of the Roman Empire might have something to do with the more pagan elements of worship that have come down to us today. Early Christians distanced themselves from their Jewish roots, partly because their roots were ripped out of the ground.

He pricked up his ears at the mention of Jerusalem, and, wresting the wheel, he took a sharp turn to the right, pulled into a dark alley, and picked up Louis Farrakhan, whom I had not even seen on the side of the road there! I mean, bowtie and all!

“Why,” he asked, a note of heightened indignation creeping into his voice, “do the Jews think that’s their land?” He didn’t wait for an answer, instead repeating Minister Farrakhan’s inflammatory contention that “the State of Israel has ‘no home’ in the Middle East and that the Holy Land does not belong to the ‘white Jew.’”

Now, I suppose I could have said WHOOAA. HEYYY. HEY NOW NO. PULL OVER. LET ME OUT OF THIS CAR.

But this is, as they say, The Work.

And anyway, we were now halfway to Ancient Aliens. I mean, let’s ditch Farrakhan at the next Gas Food Lodging. But I might as well stick it out, right? I could almost make out the Great Pyramid of Tenochtitlán peeping up over the horizon up ahead, as we raced past a thousand years of Secret History via The History Channel.

“There are written records they don’t want us to see hidden in a room somewhere!” my comrade cried, his eyes bright as a fire worshiper on the twelfth day of Izcalli. “They’ve kept the truth from us!”

Not to be gendered about this, but I feel like the belief that there’s always a windowless room somewhere with the truth hidden away in a desk drawer is a very mansplainy way to look at truth. Because if it’s all stuffed in a file cabinet on Skull Island or whatever, you can always Mission: Impossible that shit, right? Just, like, bust in guns blazing and catch the Illuminati by surprise, steal back the truth and save the day!

I get it. The idea — you might even call it faith — that there is hidden proof is one of our species’ most persistent idées fixes. It may come from our early days digging for tubers and cracking the shells of nuts with stones.

The certainty that a staggering Truth is being hidden and withheld is part of our popular understanding of the forces of oppression at work in our world. It’s also a way we’ve been conditioned, or maybe condition ourselves to deny the power of our own truths. But what if what’s really being hidden on Skull Island is not the Truth that No One Must Know but the Truth That Everyone Knows?

My fellow seeker nodded sagely.

“Yeah,” he said, appreciatively. “You know, how is it that they’ve never found human remains in any of those pyramids in Mexico.”

I was like: “uhhh, I’m not sure that’s… ”

He gave me a significant look that cut me to the quick. We had arrived.

“I’m not saying it’s aliens, but…”

Back to The Garden

I am a Candidean in my heart of hearts. The garden is my church. Its lessons and parables make perfect sense to me, its rhythm, hymns, and liturgy are those of life, and are immediately recognizable as such. That’s because gardens (aside from sex and death) are always about returning.

I’ve always been a fan of the great outdoors. In the summers of my youth, my parents flung the screen door open at dawn and did not expect us back until dusk (except maybe for a PB&J around noon). I hiked a good portion of the Appalachian Trail in my twenties and worked in an orchard in New Hampshire on and off for years after college. But I didn’t get into gardening until later, in my thirties.

It started with a phone call. My father had been diagnosed with stage-four lung cancer. His prognosis was 6 months to a year. We had been semi-estranged, as they say, for some years, both seething from some unspoken insult, so common in relations between fathers and sons. He had not been The World’s #1 Dad. I had not been The World’s #1 Son. We both bore a ridiculous grudge about it, as you do.

I was living in Boston, and, of course, traveled back to Indiana to do what I could to help. I say of course, but to be 100% honest: I only offered because I fully expected them to say no. I knew there wouldn’t be much I could do. Maybe lend a hand around the house, run errands. I had never faced anything quite like this, and had not an inkling of what was involved, thank God. Because had I known I would have sent thoughts and prayers and missed out on what was one of the most profound, complex, sad, joyous experiences of my life.

It was December, and as bleak a homecoming as you can imagine. My father had just had emergency surgery to have a tumor in his brainstem removed. He had had a round of radiation, and had fallen ill with pneumonia. We spent Christmas with him in the hospital, but it was the first Christmas in memory we had all been together. There was some Christmas Magic in that. It was the first of many such strangely hopeful, happy moments in a seemingly dark and hopeless situation.

We got him home and it was decided I would stick around and help out for as long as necessary. There was a mixture of elation at reunion and anxiety about the reason. But it was a time of gratitude more than trepidation. I took over running the household day-to-day. My father had been retired for years, but my mother, who was much younger, was still working full-time. My brothers and their families pitched in daily as well. As we adjusted over the next few weeks to this odd new normal my attention turned increasingly to a sad, nagging sight outside the breakfast nook.

My father had a small “secret garden” outside the nook that he had designed in all its details (typically, with my mother in mind, who was simply grateful that in retirement he had found a hobby that kept him out of her hair). There was a hedge around a large round bed with four fussy beds in the corners. It was now as forlorn and haunted as an empty tomb. He had fallen ill in the autumn, and had not had a chance to lay it down for the winter, everything had died but remained there to be seen day after day from the nook.

The ravages of cancer were relentless, and the view of that forlorn, abandoned garden day after day seemed to amplify the despair in the house. The January snow covered it, and for a while it was invisible. By first thaw my father was frail. Mentally and emotionally it seemed as though he was aging in reverse, and he had reached a brief, charming phase of reverse childhood where he said silly things and spoke in ways that were strange, romantic and bright, and because of the way the morning light fell in the nook that time of year, I would often roll him out there and we would have breakfast together overlooking that forlorn, ravaged garden.

He would peer out of the window, squinting, and tell me about the apparitions he saw. My father had not had a poetic imagination, that I could recall, but in these last weeks of life his mind seemed flooded with Blakeian visions.

One day as we sat looking out on his secret ruin I realized it was my time to get my hands dirty. It’s strange how the obvious can so often strike us as a revelation, isn’t it? Had I been waiting for some other gardener to show up and clear away the remains of a wasted harvest? Who had I expected would come and plant flowers in the spring in my father’s infirmity and absence?

I have seldom launched into anything with such a spirit of unabashed hope as I did that garden at the first thaw. I went to the nursery daily and brought home whatever I could find to add a pop of color. I was inept, but if anything didn’t take, I didn’t hesitate to pluck it out and throw something in the ground that would.

Finally my brothers and I pitched in on a fountain, which was the only accoutrement the tiny garden lacked. We ran plumbing out to it, and it trickled and gurgled serenely amid the purple coneflowers and orange and vermilion butterfly weed, the Virginia bluebells and black-eyed susans. The morning of that reveal, just a week or two before his passing, my father’s eyes lit up like a child’s, and I knew that whatever I had given him in that moment, he had already returned to me a hundredfold.

(See what I mean about parables?)

Theologies of Courage

Independence Day was hard for many Americans to celebrate this year, and Therese Patricia Okoumou, who climbed up to the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty on the 4th, demonstrated succinctly in word and deed exactly why that is.

“In a democracy we do not put children in cages,” she said in remarks after her arraignment.“Period.”

“There is no debating it,” she added emphatically. “Nothing you will say to me will justify putting children in cages.”

That this not only needed to be said, but needed a public act of political protest, a singular act of courage by an individual with a story of her own to tell in her own words to drive it home, reminds us that we are in a moment that requires acts of courage from all of us. That requires us to radically change the course of our own stories.

One reason I’m so interested in Bonhoeffer is that his life story is the search for how we answer a radical evil in word and deed. His is a political theology. There’s a lot that I don’t know that I agree with in the nitty-gritty of his theology, but my agreeing with it or not (and there is literally no agreement among Bonhoeffer scholars about his theology, so no pressure) certainly doesn’t change the fact that Bonhoeffer was a genuine badass, and his theology was absolutely central to his badassery.

I have read just enough of theology to realize already that there’s really no such thing as Theology. Whether we would like or not, there are only theologies. And these theologies themselves are dynamic, each a living narrative, each a life. Bonhoeffer’s biography was his theology, his theology was biography. I think that’s why he remains such an object of fascination: you simply cannot separate the two, and the implications are positively vexing.

Such is life. And the capital T Truth of all theologies must be lived. But that dynamism shouldn’t frighten us. In fact, it’s what propels us forward, into experience, engagement and encounter. Deeper and further into life in all its vexations.

So there really is no theology outside of experience, in my thinking, and experience is therefore not merely incidental to our theologies, sola fide (more about which later) be damned.

Bonhoeffer’s theology was as extraordinarily dynamic as his times, because, again, there is no theology outside of living relation and encounter. There is no Truth that does not lead back to encounter.

Our theologies are not really there to give us answers, they’re there to give us courage.

They are not there to provide the certainty of reward in this or a next life. They are there to give us courage to act in this one without any thought of reward.

Here’s where I’m going with this, and I’ll expand on it going forward: the presumption of certainty has brought us manifest evil, and we need dynamic theologies of courage to combat it. And not only that, we need to recognize and acknowledge the sanctity of these living theologies of courage, and challenge ourselves to engage in authentic encounter with them.

To have courage to be transformed by them, and thereby transform the world through them.