The Fruit of the Light

As the hours of sunlight spread like a slowly rising tide, green and growing things are waking up. The grass is waking, tufts stirring here and there in the yard after a long and surprisingly normal winter. The trees are all in bud, as are the scraggly blueberry bushes outside of my bedroom window.

It feels, some days, like spring is fully here. And other days, it most certainly does not, because March is a liar. “It’s summer,” March shouts to the world, “finally shorts weather!” And the next day, it’s winter again.

So even though the day for planting is nearly upon us, that temptation to put seeds in the ground must be resisted, because the only sure place to do that is indoors.

For the last few years, I’ve been using a converted section of shelving in my laundry room to start seeds. I lined the interior of the shelves with repurposed reflective insulation from an Amazon package, with access doors made of cardboard and attached with duct tape. For lights, I found the cheapest possible LED grow lamps on Amazon, and there you go. It worked. Mostly.

The problem, I discovered last year, was that the integrated timer on the grow lights metes out light only if the power is uninterrupted. If you lose power for ten seconds in a windstorm, the lights go off and then they stay off.

Which, if you forget to check on your seedlings for a couple of days? That’s not a good thing. Without light, there is no growth, or rather, no growth of anything but mold.

This isn’t exactly the optimal solution.

It’s easy to have those bunker places in our lives, where we hide away from the light and from the reality of our relationships with God and with other people. We feel safe there, secure from having to challenge ourselves, sheltered away from coming to terms with things that are undermining our integrity and our personhood.

But that sense of security is a false one.

We’re still clinging to an illusion about ourselves, one that doesn’t speak into the reality around us. If we have any interest at all in living as children of light, we need to be sure that our source of light is trustworthy and fosters the good growth that we need.

We have, these last few years, seen what the powers of this world do when they feel that nothing can hold them to account. They believe that there is no light, that everything but our own will to power is emptiness, that a person can do whatever they can get away with under the cover of the deadly shadow of moral entropy.

It’s easy, for example, to place our trust in lesser lights of the world, in wealth and power and social position. But Christian faith teaches that this just ain’t so.  

Those ersatz suns are less trustworthy than a no-name grow lamp.  

The light they cast isn’t light at all, but its own form of shadow. You can have all the gold in the world, all of the fame, and all of the influence, and all that means is that you live in an ever deeper world of shadow and shame and moral horror. That always, always, always comes to ruin. The probability that Andrew Mountbatten will read this is one in four point seven billion, but if he is, buddy, do you hear what I’m talking about?

The light of God’s justice is always present in the world, and it is the task of the disciple of Jesus to be sure that we are living in it.

When Salt is Salty

 

"The news of the new life is this: bringing joy precludes murder; love hates no one; truth brooks no compromise with deceit; the heart can remain pure only by making no concessions. For the Father of Jesus, who gives all, enters no mutual settlement with mammon, least of all in a heart that belongs to him.

In short, if we truly have joy in life, and love for all people, we will not tolerate any compromise with death, any concession to loveless indifference or murderous injustice and brutality, because the way of love reaches out to all people, touches all things, and transforms every situation. This is the essence of the new life, the message of the kingdom, the meaning of Jesus’ teachings. Here is his heart."  

-Eberhard Arnold, Salt and Light

 

The Wings of the Dragon

Left and right are the wings of the dragon

that flail as it falls from highest heaven

The Voice Falls Silent

The Voice of America was one of those things that rose from the height of America's greatness as a nation.

Most Americans are unaware of it, by design.  Unlike the BBC or Deutsche Welle, America's publicly funded news service was never permitted to broadcast here in the United States.  To prevent state-funded media from becoming a tool of a would-be despot, it couldn't operate here.  Overseas, though, it served a significant function.  That function was not propaganda or boosterism, but reliable information.  The idea, from the height of American power, was that being a trustworthy source was the best way to spread the message of American values.

Established by an Act of Congress in the era of shortwave radio, it was always meant to stand apart from the aspirations of any given Administration or party.  

I know this, personally and deeply, from dinner table conversations growing up.  

Mom and Dad met at the Voice.  Like pretty much every DC resident, they weren't from here.  Mom was a Georgia girl, raised in Athens.  Dad was a preacher's kid from Queens.   He noticed her, invited her to a party, and, well.  Without the Voice of America, I wouldn't exist. 

After serving at the Africa desk as an editor, Dad got an assignment to East Africa, which is why my very first memories are of Nairobi.  After that, it was back stateside for a few years, then to London, where he was bureau chief.  From that, back to the US, where he eventually became the head of the Africa division.

Dad fiercely internalized the core mission of the Voice, as a patriotic Kennedy-era Republican.   Not that he voted for Kennedy, of course.  Dad was a Nixon man, and Lord help me, would he tell you about it.

Republican though he was, Dad literally put his life on the line for that mission.  He disappeared for a long while into a Ugandan prison, seized by the regime of dictator Idi Amin.  He spent time on the streets of Belfast during the Troubles.  During the Iranian Revolution, he was called in to replace a correspondent who had been injured fleeing a mob.  While there, he lay flat on his belly in the International hotel in Tehran, filing a report while Khomeni's Revolutionary Guards sprayed it with small arms fire.

This is a little more dramatic than my small church pastoring.

There were always pressures from the executive, particularly when coverage wasn't Pollyannaish about the actions of any given president.  There was strong pressure during the Reagan years to "be more positive" about America, which meant constant pushback against efforts to water down journalistic neutrality.  Those efforts soured Dad on the Republican party.   Dad would dish at the dinner table about United States Information Agency director Gene Pell, or about efforts to get his successor Dick Carlson on board with the mission.  

The Voice, like all state-funded news services, had to adapt to the realities of the internet age.  Shortwave radio wasn't the future, eh?  But it rolled with the times, and stuck with the mission, showing the world the face of America...which looked a whole bunch like the face of the world.  Its journalistic ranks were often filled by those who had come to this country drawn by the promise that things here were different.

But the mission of the Voice is not the mission of Trumpism.  

For the Trumpist, media exists to praise Dear Leader and to attack those who oppose him.  Any media that does not do this will be attacked and slandered.  Because the Voice was publicly funded, Trump has ordered it closed.  Even though it's funded by Congress, and its closure isn't constitutional, that means nothing now.  Trump installed a sycophant as head of the agency, and she's obedient to him above all else.  Why close it?  It's "corrupt."  It's a "hubris-filled rogue operation filled with leftist bias."  

"Leftist?"  Oh, c'mon.  Actual leftists were always attacking the VOA as capitalist propaganda.  These were and are lies, of course, but the folks who are in thrall to Trump wouldn't know this, if they even noticed.  They live within the false and fawning information ecosystem of Fox News, which is precisely the sort of party-line support-the-regime media that the Voice was created to oppose.  They believe what they read on their X and Facebook feeds, even if much of that comes from Russian and Chinese troll farms.

And so, today, the broadcasts are silenced.  The beacon goes dark.  The America that the world once knew no longer speaks.

In its place, something else has arisen.  Something ignoble and self-serving.  Something crass and brutal and cynical.

The Voice that spoke out against the world's despots and authoritarians is no longer ours.

Stories, Data, and Truth

It was an excellent little article, an exploration of the struggle many Americans have with science.  On the one hand, we say we love it, because science is awesome and nifty and stuff.  On the other, we seem to have trouble processing science as a decision-making framework.

When presented with scientific findings, we are perfectly willing to ignore them, or find reasons to just keep on blundering along.  Science tells us that the universe is 13.9 billion years old, and does so definitively.  But we ignore it.  Science tells us, with charts and graphs and clear deductive reasoning, that homo sapiens sapiens evolved.  But we reject it.  Science coughs and suggests, strongly, that perhaps it might be a mistake to turn our planet into a superheated, carbon-choked Venus.  But we listen to the lies told by the folks who sell us gas instead, because we like our big SUVs.  Science sees us choosing not to vaccinate, and struggles not to punch us in the nose for being such complete morons.

It's a clear dissonance.  The question: why?

Part of it, I think, has to do with the way we human beings understand our world.  We are creatures of story.  Our stories define us, give us a sense of ourselves, and give us a sense of purpose.

And this, as the article describes it, is part of the problem.  For our understanding of what is true, the article laments, we rely on "stories rather than statistics."

We prefer our truths told as tales, not as data points.  So we'll base our decisions on anecdotes, which as we really should know, are not reliable reflections of broader realities.  That story spun out by the mom at your preschool whose sister knew a woman whose kid started showing signs of autism after he got his MMR shots?  That has more value than the reflections of a thousand researchers, God help us.

And that's problematic on a deeper level, not just because anecdotal evidence causes us to make stupid decisions, or to spin out tales that are fundamentally ungrounded in reality.

It is problematic because if we set the storytelling part of our humanity aside, we cease to be human.

None of us understand our lives in terms of statistics and data points.  That is not what gives us our personhood, what establishes who we are.  Narratives create both individual identity and community cohesion.

Deeper still, narrative establishes purpose and moral ground, in a way that science simply cannot.  Storytelling creates meaning, and establishes the valuations that determine how we choose to act on the information we're encountering.  The deepest and most transforming stories don't even need to have actually happened to create moral purpose.  The stories told by my Teacher, or the wisdom fables of Aesop?  They didn't happen, and yet they frame existence in a way that creates identity.

The purpose of science is establishing what is or is not empirically true in our material reality.  That's the point of scientific method.  What it cannot do, and has neither the tools nor the desire to accomplish, is make any meaningful statement about how that information should be used.  Data is simply the ground for gathering more data.  Knowledge serves only knowledge.  And that path, clinically removed from its impact on persons and living systems, is a dangerous one to journey.

So where, in this dialectic tension between these two very different ways of knowing, lies the synthesis?  How do we integrate the data into the tale, and the tale into the data?

It lies, I think, in being willing to listen to the impacts of our stories on reality.  If the purpose of the story we're telling is radical compassion for neighbor and stewardship over creation, the report we'll get back from the data will go one way.  If the purpose of the story we're telling is material power, profit-maximization, or the glazed-eye pursuit of a snarling, fever-dream delusion, the data will report back another way.

Ye shall know them by their fruits, as the Teacher once said, in a pause between stories.

Alinsky, The Truth, The Tea Party, and Jesus

One of the more significant things that Saul Alinsky pitches out for those who want to start a radical movement is how to approach one's opponents. It isn't enough to disagree, and to work for consensus.

Alinsky, being a deeply realistic critter, argues that respectful disagreement is absolutely useless when you're trying to motivate a group of folks. People don't get fired up to march and shout slogans if you present them with an honest and balanced appraisal of the opposing position. If you have sympathy for the opposing party, if you see some of the merits of what they're saying and are willing to present their position with all of it's nuances and possibilities, then you're a crappy organizer.

Not because what you're saying would be materially incorrect. Alinsky acknowledges that human systems are complex and interwoven things, and that even opposing positions likely have positive aspects. In fact, he banks on it, as ultimately his goal is to have his mobilized communities negotiate with his opponents for whatever gains can be made.

But when you're rousin' the rabble, you don't say those things, even if you know they're true. The rhetoric of Alinsky's community organizing is apocalyptic, meaning it is radically binary. Once you've identified your enemy, you define them as 100% evil, and your own position as the ne plus ultra of virtue and all things good and right and true. When things are pitched out in those binary terms, it becomes much easier to get people motivated.

Three things strike me about this approach.

First, it requires organizers to do what Alinsky describes as being "schizoid." Meaning, saying and arguing and passionately shouting about how The Man is the source of all oppression and monstrousness and evil, while deep down inside you know that isn't accurate. As Alinsky was writing before we knew that schizophrenia wasn't the same as multiple personality disorder, let me suggest a more accurate description of that state of being.

It requires that you be a liar. You hold a truth in yourself about your opponent, and you knowingly misrepresent their nature to your own people to stir up passions. Hmmm. Perhaps that little shout out to Lucifer at the beginning of Rules for Radicals is more apropos than I thought.

Second, this approach works great. It's wonderfully successful in the political arena. What it is not, however, is limited to the political left. If you honestly compare the Obama's leadership style and the Tea Party against this metric of successful organizing practice, it is the Tea Party that comes across as more Alinskian. Obama always had this pesky habit of being moderate and circumspect, of noting that McCain was a war hero and a patriot and the like. But folks like Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin have no such compunction. Obama is Hitler. DemocRats are Nazis. Or communists. They will take your guns and kill your babies and make you drive a tiny little car and eat tofu and broccoli. They know how to rile Americans up.

Alinsky's methodology has won some significant admirers on the American right. When I read smart conservatives...meaning, ones who are talking openly about Alinsky with one another for purposes other than faux anti-communist polemic...they like what he has to say. They glom onto his methods. They see how useful he can be. They are now, in fact, using his methods in their training. So far, it seems to be working.

Third, this way of approaching one's enemies just ain't Christian. Yeah, I know, Jesus cleansed the temple and took on the powers that be and yadda yadda yadda. But what made Yeshua Ben YHWH such a powerfully different presence was not that he taught us to love and honor our friends and demonize our enemies. That's always been the way of the world.

It was that he pressed that love ethic out to include opponents. Yeah, they might be messed up. Yeah, they might be cause of much hurt and oppression and brokenness. But real transforming revolution only occurs when you can look at Dick Cheney or Sarah Palin or Nancy Pelosi or the CEO of BP and realize that you've got to love 'em.

It doesn't feel as good, sure. It doesn't fill you with righteous glazed-eye partisan fire. But that's not why Jesus lived and taught and died and rose.