END OF MY BLOGGING

In September 2008, I established this blog and began writing weekly blog articles. Those articles have not been quickly jotted reflections off the top of my head. In general, they have been 600-700 word essays about contemporary issues in the light of progressive Christian faith.

Unfortunately, only a few people have been reading those articles. Each week, approximately 15 people go to the blog and read an average of two articles each time. I don’t think those numbers justify the amount of work it takes to produce the articles.

And so I am not going to continue the blog. Instead, I will try to write some similar articles for the email version of The Pilgrim – just not on a weekly basis. Longer articles can go into the email version without requiring extra work by the editor or the extra printing and paper costs that a printed newsletter would face. We currently have around 650 people who get the email edition and that number of readers would justify the time and effort spent in preparing the articles. Those who have been reading the blog articles, but who do not receive the Pilgrim will be able to find the articles at the website for the First Congregational Church of Long Beach: www.firstchurchlb.org.

EXCOMMUNICATION & COMPASSION

Joan Chittister is a very wise Benedictine nun. Her writings and her very life form a testimony to the way that spirituality and the quest for justice and peace are wed together.

Last December, she wrote about another Roman Catholic, Maryknoll priest Roy Bourgeois, who was under threat of excommunication for speaking at the “unauthorized” priestly ordination of a woman sponsored by the group Roman Catholic Womenpriests.

She said, “The question, especially for those who know this priest to be a justice-loving, selfless prophet of peace, is how Father Roy’s ‘case’ will be handled by the Vatican. The situation is an important one – both for him and for the church who will judge him.”

She wrote: “A man who has given his life for the Gospel, been one of the church’s most public witnesses for human rights, stood for the best in the human condition and modeled the highest standards of the priesthood … is doing what a Christian is supposed to do: He is speaking for the disenfranchised, pursuing justice, witnessing to the love of God. That has been the Bourgeois story for years. Here is a man who, as a missionary in Bolivia, witnessed the results of the School of the Americas’ training there, and alerted the United States to the torture-teaching practices of the Fort Benning-based School of the Americas. A U.S. military training center designed to terrorize Central-American peasants working for human rights and just wages, this U.S-funded war against humanity kept many a dictator in power.”

She went on: “Roy’s public protests began with a handful of people and have grown to well over 15,000 demonstrators yearly. Thanks to Roy, the public pressure for a change of U.S. policies at the School of the Americas has become one of the country’s – one of the church’s – proudest moments of the last 20 years. Clearly, Roy is a priest whose courage and credibility have been tested by the State to the maximum. He’s not marginal to anything: measured by the best standards of both church and state, he is completely priest, completely American. “

Unfortunately, she pointed out, excommunicated saints dot the history of the church with far too much regularity. She said, “In our own time, church by fear and intimidation is clearly on the brink of becoming the norm again … Whole groups are being excommunicated everywhere: Call to Action, Dignity, parishes that seek more participation in making parish decisions, and the Women’s Ordination Conference. Even people who voted for Barack Obama have been told by some priests and bishops that they need to go to confession before they go to communion. And, of course, Roman Catholic Womenpriests is an excommunicated group as well. Despite the fact that over two-thirds of the U.S. Catholic church approves of the ordination of women, the discussion goes on being repressed, rebuffed and disregarded.”

She asks, “How is it that we excommunicate priests who stand for the expansion of women’s roles in the church but we do not excommunicate pedophile priests who abuse children?”

Sister Joan concluded her article this way: “From where I stand, it seems to me that now may well be a time when the church should proceed with great tenderness, an open mind, a listening heart – and a clear sense that, just as in times past, God’s future is on the way.”

The great Roman Catholic prophet, Pope John XXIIIN, opened the Second Vatican Council by reminding the assembled bishops that the church has always opposed errors regarding the faith and, in the past, did so with the greatest severity. But now, he said, “the spouse of Christ (the church) prefers to make use of the medicine of mercy rather than of severity. She considers that she meets the needs of the present day by demonstrating the validity of her teaching rather than by condemnations.”

For me, it is very clear that the historical Jesus walked the way of Sister Joan’s “great tenderness, open mindedness and a listening heart.” His ministry clearly made use of Pope John XXIII’s “medicine of mercy.”

Scholar Karen Armstrong has said that the test of the validity of any religious idea in any tradition is that “it must lead directly to practical compassion.”

I think genuine religion is about compassion, kindness and mercy!

But sadly the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith did indeed excommunicate Father Roy Bourgeois.

Passionate Tears and Intellectual Clarity

In August, I made my third trip to Israel/Palestine. This time I was part of a 23-person delegation from Inter Faith Peace Builders. Our group was incredibly diverse – Christians, Jews, Muslims and Buddhists; young adults and senior citizens; people of various ethnic backgrounds; people from the United States, Canada, Scotland, Germany and Namibia.

I had many powerful experiences and there will be numerous references to the trip in future sermons and articles. I came away convinced more than ever, that Israel’s occupation of Palestine is a form of apartheid and ethnic cleansing. I came away saddened that the only change thus far under the Obama administration is a change in rhetoric, not in action. And I came away sure that only a one-state solution with an independent and secular Israel/Palestine will work. With 500,000 Israeli’s living in illegal Settlements in Palestine, with the diabolical apartheid wall and more than 600 checkpoints, with Israel stealing not only massive amounts of Palestinian land but also its water supplies – Israel has made dividing the land virtually impossible and has negated its own of hope of being a Jewish state. The only solution is a single unified nation led by a majority-ruled democratic government with a constitution that protects the civil liberties of all that nation’s people.

Let me share two powerful experiences with you.

As our delegation prepared to spend the night at the Deheisheh Refugee Camp in Bethlehem, we listened to a dynamic camp resident, a woman named Suheir Owdah tell of her own experiences as one born in that camp, married there and as one who has raised her children there. With a combination of fiery anger and passionate tears, she made real for us the awful reality of the Israeli occupation which has meant soldiers arriving under the cover of darkness to invade homes, humiliate parents in front of their children, murder young people and leave a trail of blood and terror throughout the camp. While American leaders turn their eyes away from the horror of the occupation and close their ears to the cries of the Palestinians, Suheir called on us to move beyond witnessing the impact of the occupation to actually doing something -- boycotting Israeli products and boycotting products made by American and European companies that support and help enable to occupation. Certainly that is the least we can do! We can become part of a global movement using boycotts, divestment and sanctions to isolate Israel in the same way that the world’s other apartheid state, South Africa, was isolated decades ago.

The second experience was listening to Zoughbi Zoughbi, the founder of the Wi’am Palestinian Conflict Resolution Centre. This is the third time I have heard him speak and each time I am amazed at his intellectual clarity, his gentle spirit and his unshakeable commitment to nonviolent activism. If Suheir brought the occupation to life with the stories of her personal experiences, Zoughbi Zoughbi did so with a long list of frightening statistics and accounts of how the occupation is destroying the fabric of Palestinian families. But he refused to let despair shut the door of hope – he kept returning to images of the success of Martin Luther King, Jr. and of the nonviolent liberation of South Africa.

Somehow we need to combine Suheir's fiery anger and Zoughbi Zoughbi's hope for nonviolent change as we seek to end Israel's immoral colonization of Palestine.

NEXT BLOG POSTING WILL BE IN SEPTEMBER

I am part of an Interfaith Peace Builders delegation going to Israel/Palestine. When I return I will be on vacation. So my next blog article will be written in early September.

PROPHETIC POSSIBILITIES AND MILITARY SPENDING

The great prophets of ancient Israel during the 8th and 7th centuries before the common era were visionaries creative in the use of their imaginations. Amos, Isaiah, Micah and Jeremiah all tried to imagine what would happen to their nation if people continued to behave the way they were currently behaving. They also tried to foresee what would happen if people’s behavior changed. Amos, for example, developed some frightening scenarios for the people of Israel if they didn’t address the injustices at the heart of their nation’s life. But he also imagined the wonderful new day ahead if people would simply let justice roll down like water and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.

Frida Berrigan is senior program associate of the Arms and Security Initiative at the New America Foundation. In an article in Fellowship, a publication of the Fellowship of Reconciliation, she said: “Imagination is key to the work for social and political transformation … Our forebears imagined the end of slavery before they began to build it; they saw humanity after the Holocaust as they struggled against Nazism. Following in their footsteps, can we kindle our imagination in ways that will ignite change? Can we turn our imagination to the cut and dry world of paying for war? Can we imagine budgets being turned upside down, with money for education and jobs training, health care and social services, roads and other infrastructure programs dwarfing what is spent on the military? Once we imagine it – can we make it happen?”

Having asked that, Ms. Berrigan began to look at what the United States might look like without a permanent war footing and the military spending to match it.

She started by trying to imagine how much money is set aside for bombs.

In October 2008, the Congressional Research Service estimated that lawmakers have appropriated $864 billion for the Iraq war and occupation, ongoing military operations in Afghanistan, and other activities associated with the global war on terror since 2001. The Pentagon says that it will need another $170 billion for fiscal 2009, which would push war spending since 2001 to $922 billion – close to one trillion dollars.

To help the imagination absorb this inconceivable figure, New York Times columnist Bob Herbert has a useful comparison: He begins with a stack of one-thousand dollar bills roughly six inches high. That six-inch stack is worth one million dollars. Then, a $1 billion stack would be as tall as the Washington Monument, and a $1 trillion stack would be 95 miles high. $922 billion over seven years is about $2.5 billion per week to fight war.

And that is not the total amount of the money that we spend on the military. This $922 billion in war spending since 2001 is not part of the U.S. annual military budget – it is on top of the Pentagon’s regular budget. For fiscal year 2009, military spending will total roughly $541 billion – including the Pentagon’s budget, plus work on nuclear warheads and naval-reactors at the Department of Energy.

Military spending dwarfs all other aspects of the U.S. federal budget. Military spending represents 58 cents out of every dollar spent by the U.S. government on discretionary programs. This means that military spending is more than the combined totals of spending on education, environmental protection, justice administration, veteran’s benefits, housing assistance, transportation, job training, agriculture, energy, and economic development.

We have the resources to feed the hungry and house the homeless, to provide health care for all, to take care of the planet, to build a 21st century national infrastructure, and to chart a more sustainable course for meeting energy needs. What we seem to lack is that prophetic imagination that would compel us to forsake our trust in armaments and to put that money where it really belongs – it making this a better nation for all of its inhabitants.

FINALLY A HOME

The June 19, 2009 issue of the Los Angeles Times carried a remarkable article by Esmeralda Bermudez. For those who didn’t see that article, I will put an abbreviated version here and then share some of my reactions to it.

The article began: “Khadijah Williams stepped into chemistry class and instantly tuned out the commotion. She walked past students laughing, gossiping, napping and combing one another’s hair. Past a cell phone blaring rap songs. And past a substitute teacher sitting in a near-daze. Quietly, the 18-year-old settled into an empty table, flipped open her physics book and focused. Nothing mattered now except homework.”

“No wonder you’re going to Harvard,” a girl teased her. Khadijah is known as “Harvard girl,” the “smart girl” and the girl who landed at Jefferson High School only 18 months ago. What students don’t know is that she is also homeless.

Ms. Bermudez wrote: “As long as she can remember, Khadijah has floated from shelters to motels to armories along the West Coast with her mother. She has attended 12 schools in 12 years; lived out of garbage bags among pimps, prostitutes and drug dealers … On the streets, she learned how to hunt for their next meal, plot the next bus route and help choose a secure place to sleep – survival skills she applied with passion to her education.

Khadijah doesn’t know a lot about her mother’s background. She knows her mother was only 14 when Khadijah was born. She says of her mother: “She tried her best; she never smoked or drank, never did drugs, and she never put us in abusive situations. However, that was the best she could do.”

Khadijah was in third grade when she placed in the 99th percentile on a state exam. Her teachers marked the 9-year-old as gifted, a category that Khadijah, even at that early age, vowed to keep.

In the years that followed, Khadijah’s mother pulled her out of school eight more times. When shelters closed, money ran out or her mother didn’t feel safe, they packed what little they carried and boarded buses to find housing in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Ventura, San Diego, San Bernardino and Orange County, staying for months, at most, in one place. She finished only half of fourth grade, half of fifth and skipped sixth. Seventh grade was split between Los Angeles and San Diego. Eighth grade consisted of two weeks in San Bernardino.

Ms. Bermudez wrote: “At every stop, Khadijah pushed to keep herself in each school’s gifted program. She read nutrition charts, newspapers and four to five books a month, anything to transport her mind away from the chaos and the sour smell. At school, she was the outsider. At the shelter, she was often bullied.

In 10th grade, Khadijah realized that if she wanted to succeed, she couldn’t do it alone. She began to reach out to organizations for help: the Upward Bound Program, Higher Edge L.A., Experience Berkeley and South Central Scholars. She also sought help from teachers, counselors and college alumni networks. They helped her enroll in summer community college classes, gave her access to computers and scholarship applications and taught her about networking.

When she enrolled in her junior year at Jefferson High School, she was determined to stay put, regardless of where her mother moved. Graduation was not far off and she needed strong college letters of recommendation from teachers who were familiar with her work. This soon meant commuting by bus from an Orange County armory. She awoke at 4 a.m. and returned at 11 p.m., and kept her grade-point average at just below a 4.0 while participating in the Academic Decathlon, the debate team and leading the school’s track and field team. “That’s when I was really stressed,” she said.

Khadijah expected to feel more connected after nearly two years at Jefferson, to make at least one good friend. Students flock to her for help with homework and tests. But when prom pictures arrive, they show her posing alone in a silky black and white dress. In her yearbook, hundreds of familiar faces look back, but the memories are missing. She said: “It’s a nice, glossy, shiny, colorful yearbook. But it feels like they’re all strangers. I’m nowhere in these pages.”

When her college applications were due last December, James and Patricia London of South Central Scholars invited Khadijah to their home in Rancho Palos Verdes to help her write her essays. When they went to return her to skid row, her mother and sister were gone. Khadijah accepted the Londons’ invitation to spend the rest of her school year with them.

Khadijah graduated in June with high honors, fourth in her class. She was accepted to more than 20 universities, including Brown, Columbia, Amherst and Williams. She chose a full scholarship to Harvard and aspires to become an education attorney.

In the last six months, she saw her mother only a few times. She tried to find her so the reporter could interview her. She found her at a South Central storage facility where they last stored their belongings, sitting on a garbage bag full of clothes.

“Khadijah’s here!” her sister Jeanine yelled. Her mother’s face lit up. Khadijah explained the details of her graduation and gave her mother a prom picture. She said she would leave for Harvard the next day. “Look at you,” her mother said. “You’re really going to Harvard, huh?” “Yeah,” she said, pausing. “I’m going to Harvard.”

On Sundays, when I look at the lines of people waiting to enter our Drop-In Center – waiting for a hot meal, for a chance to use the computers, for the opportunity to see the nurse or get some donated clothes or simply for a chair in which to sit for a while without being hassled – I have to wonder if there is a Khadijah among them.

On weeknights, when I leave a meeting at the church and chat with the folks sleeping outside against our building, I again ask myself if there may be a Khadijah among them or if there will be at some time in the future.

Khadijah is a remarkable young woman with incredible talent and the drive to do well in life. We can all stand in admiration of her and be inspired by her story. But we must remember – our society failed her and her family, just as it fails all those on the margins. Khadijah is off to Harvard, but her mother and sister are still on the streets. And Long Beach still doesn’t have even a shelter for the chronically homeless!

GEORGETOWN UNIVERSITY’S INSTITUTE ON CHRISTIAN-MUSLIM RELATIONS

In June, I spent a week in Washington DC at Georgetown University in an intense program designed to help Christian leaders better understand Islam and to help Islamic leaders better understand Christianity. The institute was sponsored by the Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding at Georgetown and by the Center for the Study of Islam and Christian-Muslim Relations at the Hartford Theological Seminary.

I spent six hours a day in a classroom – which at times was mentally exhausting. But I learned so much! Each day included two 30-minute sessions for the Christian participants devoted to studying passages from the Qur’an while the Islamic leaders studied the Christian scriptures. This was the first time I had seriously read and studied the Qur’an and I found the texts to be fascinating and often filled with wisdom.

The Christian participants spent a great deal of time studying Islamic theology and Islamic history. I discovered how little I knew about both. My knowledge of Islam didn’t go much deeper than the six principles of basic beliefs and the five pillars of Islamic practice. I knew about and had experienced Islamic worship but again my knowledge was quite superficial. The Institute took me much deeper into all of these areas and for that I am grateful. In addition, I realized just how “western” my studies of history had been. My high school and college history classes had taught me a lot about the kings and queens of England and France, but almost nothing about the various caliphates.

I came away from this time of study with profound respect for Islam, the world’s second largest religion. I also continue to feel that there is much that can be learned from other religious faiths that can enrich my own Christian faith.

For instance, I am deeply impressed by the importance that Muslims give to their faith convictions. Most Muslims identify themselves first and foremost by their religious convictions. I don’t think that is true of most modern Christians. Most Muslims put their religious faith into the very heart of their daily living. I suspect many if not most Christians go through most of each day without any reflections on God or their faith. Each day, Muslims stop what they are doing and pray at five different times. They pray not just silent prayers uttered in their minds, but actual prayers that include gestures and motions of the body. The taxi driver who pulls out his or her rug and kneels to pray at the taxi stand is clearly not embarrassed to be practiving his or her religion. Likewise, most Muslims fast during Ramadan from sunrise to sunset, a devotional practice that few Christians would emulate. The Islamic faith is central to every day’s experiences – we could learn a lot from that.

In spite of the media emphasis on a very small fringe element of Islamic extremists (and certainly there is a similar fringe element in Christianity like those who shoot doctors or carry hate signs to pride parades), I find that most of the Muslims with whom I interact are quite humble and generous. That’s part of what it means to serve God for them. I think the emphasis on modest dress is part of that. I have learned a lot from talking with Islamic feminists who value wearing a hijab and value having separate areas for men and women to worship. Like difficult issues in Christianity, there is a wide range of thinking about these issues and much diversity in Islam. But I think it is far too easy for people who know little about Islam to be judgmental without really understanding that faith and without talking with those who affirm that faith.

I also think we must always separate religion from the cultures in which it is found. That is often hard to do since religions profoundly influence and change cultures, and likewise cultures influence and change religious beliefs and practices. I think our stereotypes of Islam are much more about a few Middle Eastern cultures than about the religion itself. At our discussions during the Institute about marriage and death, there was considerable disagreement between the Muslim participants about what Islam says about those issues and that disagreement was clearly rooted in the cultures in which the participants were raised. An African American Muslim woman strongly disagreed on a particular issue with an Iranian Muslim man. A Muslim scholar from Turkey pointed out differences in the way Islam is practiced in her country in contrast to the practices other countries. I think the same cultural differences can be found in the way Christianity is practiced throughout the world.

So I think the more we know about other religions, the easier it will be to avoid simplistic stereotypes. I also came away from this institute convinced more than ever before that in a pluralistic world, the more we engage in genuine conversation with one another about our religious beliefs and practices, the more likely we will be to respect one another and to live peacefully with one another.