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30-day Fasting Reflections

After 30 days of fasting against reactions to provocations of white supremacy, here are my summary reflections:

In times of trouble, we can say the answers lie inside of us. And we can also say, the answers lie outside of ourselves -- the selves we have constructed to fit the problematic life we want to be rid of, one that causes suffering, sustains injustices, or perpetuates oppressions.

In our UU faith, in the middle of unrest in our white faith identity, we keep looking at the familiar verses and hymns, the established historical highlights, the traceable lineage of theologians, the cyclical meetings, the same criteria of lifting up people and developing our elite formators. What have we changed?

If we cannot shift our attention, if we keep listening to the same voices, if the guardians of our faith are still in unison in their speech patterns, if the cadence of gravitas is still measured by the same standard, and if we haven't sought new teachers, what are we looking for? The Unitarian faith has always been one that is defined, broken, and transformed by heresies.

Black theologians have been shaking our footholds and we need to pay attention.

Revolutionaries have always belonged to the world. Their fight has been beyond themselves, the struggle against their oppression is against the oppression of all. "Water is life!" by Native Americans fighting for their own land is our fight for water now. "Bread and roses!" was the cry of a textile strike in Massachusetts that we carry until now. "Be the change!" was the exhortation of Indians to one another against the British rule. "There are no oppressors where there are no slaves", goes a quote from our national hero. "Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite", is just as portable and universal even today.

Even Christians view the victory of Christ as not just his own vindication but is the justification of every human being who believes in him. And in a similar vein, when I stand with Standing Rock, I liberate myself from poisoning the waters of life. Triumphant struggles are those supported by allies who seek their own liberation and are transformed in the process.

My point in all this is that revolutionaries have always been inclusive because we cannot alienate the world in our struggles. We need to include others because Unitarians need to expand their understanding of the world. Our struggle against inequalities need to ring true for many so that our liberation can liberate others. Otherwise, we will be emulating the pseudo-revolutionaries who have promised change and failed. Because they just wanted to replace their oppressors.

And with this I ask, what are we fighting for as Unitarians of one faith?

Once There Was A God

As usual, I was pretty hyped up coming from the International Council of Unitarians and Universalists (ICUU).  It was in Kathmandu, Nepal on the week that two biggest celebrations were expected.  The ICUU committee hadn't foreseen the auspiciousness of their chosen dates when they had planned. It was all serendipitous. One was Maha Shivaratri day, the other was Tibetan New Year which I spent at the largest stupa outside of Tibet --- the Bhodanath Stupa. 

Maha Shivaratri si the biggest Hindu festival for Shiva. For 3-5 days, Hindus gather around their temples to hold unending prayers, food sharing, songs and dancing.  I had an exhilirating time with Liz Weber, from Boston, my assigned roommate in the conference.  A couple of days before the festival, we went to Pashupatinath Temple to witness Hindu burials.  The term "Public Witness" takes on a new meaning when one attends the public grieving from ancient traditions here.  People crying and wailing in public, the ritual splashing of water on the body along the river banks, the audience of strangers that stand and watch, the adorning of the body after cleansing, the march from one part of the banks to the next where the body will be burned on the pyre, the explosion of skull, the silent watching of the burning --- all this was holy.  After partaking in one burial, Liz and I decided to climb the flight of stairs that leads to the exit.  In Nepal, like in India, animals run loose unhurt because of their belief in Karma.  Stray dogs, cows, monkeys, rats, and birds are some of the more common you will see on the streets and temples.  

As we alighted, Liz and I were followed by 2 bulls.  They were young and had new horns just growing which were pretty cute to look at.  I felt accompanied. And maybe, so did Liz. As we paused along the way up, the bulls would also pause. And when they'd pause, we would wait for them.  Until it felt like there was a magical bond between us.  "Why run with the bulls when you can walk with them?" I said to Liz. 

And there it hit me. In Hinduism, they have very little propensity to demonize energies. "Do you know how many gods we have?" said one guide who wanted to offer us his services. "I don't know.. a few thousands?" I attempted to answer in jest.  My best friend and business partner Eshan Esu is a Hindu from Darjeeling and he's told me that the term "33 million" was more like a figure of speech rather than a fact.  "Thirty-three million!" the guide retorted.  It is his truth. But no demons? There is none.

And there we were with the bulls demonized by the West --- gentle creatures of the East, escorting our strangeness as if saying, "These two are with us." As if I myself had to say, "These two bulls are with us, too." And so much of what we know about the world has been "occupied" by lenses of those who speak for us, who think they know us better that we forget who we really are.  

In the Maori tradition, stories about gods are used to heal.  You will be told about a god that has your own "problems", condundrums and difficulties.  And so I wondered what if, in our "Time for All Ages", the way we relate stories to the young, we would start with --- instead of "once there was a child", we could say, "once there was a god."  You'll find more stuff about Maori storytelling as therapy here.

So there we were --- Liz and I -- walking with gods.  God energy is everywhere --- one of the beliefs of Hinduism. Mostly humans see them in those that make us feel attended to, minded, seen.   There is a bull god in Hinduism named Nandi, which means to flourish or to appear.  I'd like to believe that it was a blessing. Because it was.  The two bulls reminded me of Nandi energy, teacher of wisdom.  I hope there's wisdom in this writing.

Here's an entry from Wikipedia: 

Where bulls are treated as gods, they become gods.  Where we treat people as hungry beasts as we do treat our corporate bosses and heads of capitalistic pantheons, they become beasts.  Where we see ourselves as bad eggs, we will be those. There is prophetic work in our narratives and we need to be mindful of how our stories create our reality for us. 

Enlightenment: Whitewashing Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

This is going to be messy. I am livid with how the Enlightenment is being used to revise history as a worldview whose ideas come from the West. It is being imposed as the West's contribution to humanity's progress. I cringe at this fakery. It is a whitewashing of reason, humanism, science, and all other things we have developed in the East, that is Asia, Arab countries, Africa, etc. So I'm just cutting and pasting from things I've googled, mostly Wikipedia. Please validate these on your own, but the general thesis is that human advancement didn't begin with the Greeks and Romans.

REASON, the ability to discern through logic and observation, as early as 6th century BCE

SCIENCE, as methodical, started as early as 3500 BC



HUMANISM, the philosophy that human beings are the sum of all things.

In China, Yellow Emperor is regarded as the humanistic primogenitor. Sage kings such as Yao and Shun are humanistic figures as recorded. King Wu of Zhou has the famous saying: "Humanity is the Ling (efficacious essence) of the world (among all)."  1000 BC

EQUALITY OF THE SEXES

SECULARISM - a liberation from religious imposition

As early as 551 BC, here's a good read: "Confucius: The Secular as Sacred".

In Solidarity With Christina Rivera

I have been thinking intermittently since 2014, since I came up-close to the UUA culture, that perhaps this isn't my faith calling. It was only 1 year after my ordination, after 7 years of serving the UU Church of the Philippines mostly on zeal. And tonight, I cry soulful tears for these truths shared by Christina Rivera. And for the first time, I daydreamed in my ride home of how a world would be if I wasn't Unitarian, as it was before. 

Because beyond these mostly posturings we call ritual, there is an emptiness. When watching Youtube, when eating with farmers, when getting lost on the German rail, when relying on the mercy of strangers in Nepal has brought me higher hopes in normalizing non-partisan, transcendent, and enlightened moments of human connections while getting more and more wounded in my encounters in the UUA, I flood myself with hurtful questions whose possible answers point to the fact that there is a culture of complicity, an affirmation of systems of oppression in all their intersectionalities, and a smokescreen of reducing the gargantuan white supremacy to black oppression. We cannot live one-issue lives, so let's get real here. This will be my last post about this religion. I offer my 30-day silence as protest while I dedicate those days to powerful prayer, fasting, healing and discernment.

Her blog is here:
https://uuchristinarivera.wordpress.com/2018/03/04/a-culture-of-complicity/

I have started a 30-day blog of reflections of how I had contributed to this culture of complicity.

Weekend Meditation

In reunion with all that is true, we meet freedom.

We stray no more from self. And we can love.

We wish no more absence of confrontation yet

we repect each teacher also as learner in our care.

Thus we find love in each meeting.

There is no conversation between two people

that is not a chance for healing of the world.

There is no voice too small that cannot add to the force of good.  

Even stillness can be God’s compelling presence, if we so desire.

And there is no limit to which the human heart can expand

to embrace the sincerity of any human striving to contribute.

And so we must forge our relationships

with accommodation as well as with the creative calling

to bring the human experience closer to divine.

And find compassion for each earthly life.

Out in June, 2018
250 pages
US$ 15.00 pre-order. US$ 25.00 launch.

Pre-order via Paypal   : tet.gallardo@gmail.com

Reverend Tet Gallardo speaks about those Unitarian moments that call to us. Those are the times when humans learn to be with each other despite their differences, often occurring when differences are most pronounced.  Mexican doctors cross the border to help American disaster victims; Filipinos helping earthquake victims in Nepal; a group of women from different countries gather around a mother when her toddler melts down in an airport. 

Rev. Tet examines how our faith is in pursuit of such moments and how we are called to make those moments last, boundless and timeless until such practices are normalized in all human communities.  Unitarians who think we are unique in producing such momets are like Christians who think they are experts in the two basic Christian tenets - love God and love your neighbor.  Unitarians are called to learn from humanity, outside its own walls.  In learning from those moments, we do not give birth to the new, but we aid in normalizing what people have already been practicing outside our walls - empathy, radical welcome, diversity.

Who Owns the White Supremacy Conversation? Are We Done?

This article was written back in October 2017.

Unitarian Universalists have been known for decades to be at the forefront of liberal religion, but in the first half of 2017, the UU Association (UUA) has been rocked by a series of resignations and exposés as Christina Rivera, board member, seized a truth-telling moment to call out the culture of white supremacy in this centuries-old faith tradition.  Not only was the board able to name the problem in a meeting last April 2017, pundits and pedestrians alike began to voraciously engage in meaning-making with several attempts to define and express contempt against dominant culture which continued even through the General Assembly of 2017 in New Orleans.  Still, the tension between theology and counter-oppression have been largely downplayed, with questions and opinions on the front being more about values and beliefs and operational questions were hardly even alluded to, such as what concrete transformational steps might be.

Should Unitarian Universalism enable the toxicity of the insular nature of American politics to seep into our faith that no longer belongs only to America alone? All Souls Tulsa’s website recalls, "Unitarian Universalism has been called “The Quintessential American Faith.” And "Some of the same people who founded this nation, also were among the earliest American Unitarians and Universalists." Perhaps it is time to ask how UUs still want an identity that has become limiting of religion and damaging of humanity.

The level of whitesplaining on what UU identity is assures me it is a colonial religion. The level of sterling names in theology along with MDivs and PhDs tell me this faith has been modeled after the corporate pyramid which has been modeled after empires, thus the term “corporate empire”, where there is a top and a bottom, and more importantly, the way to the top is paved with scarcity and not abundance. Leadership as a scarce commodity is the ideology.

It also tells me that this faith is not yet transcending belief as it cannot transcend culture. We have been too easy on ourselves to say we can take a Buddhist, an Atheist, a cult follower, and anyone else, so long as they adhere to our 7 principles and keep to our covenants. As I answered my mom who asked me if we took in Satanists, “Beliefs are of no use, it is practice we count on.  Even Satan will be bound and gagged in this church.”

But people of color continue to feel bound and gagged here.  As an Asian, I am saddened to have witnessed only about 3 instances Asians were made prominent in the whole week from Ministry Days to GA, and in all 3 instances, these Asians did not have a chance to speak their minds:  Rev. Leslie Takahashi was named moderator for the Berry Street Essay, which clips her opinionating powers. Sana Saeed was at the GA closing day worship service to read the words of Naomi Shihab Nye.  I, myself, was highlighted and introduced with much glee from the audience, but not to be heard.

Empire is clearly present and this is most evident in terms of who gets to define our faith and the center of our conversations.  Tribal pride still marks the rhetoric of Unitarians when on the pulpit, people still say, “UUs are about” one thing or the next.  The lack of cultural fluency is appalling for a faith that proclaims to be transcendental and inclusive.  It is like having left-handed language for the right-handed mind and they have no clue how relatively situated they sound.  The pretentious impartiality also known as objective or empirical language has seeped into our conversations.  And conversations are the units that make up right relationship.  Without partial positions out there disclosing our situatedness, there are no real conversations to be made.

DRUUMM’s Asian / Pacific Islander Caucus in the Bay Area met for the first time in 3 years last week.  To me, it feels like it has been silenced by the system into believing that it is doing collaboration work with the UUA when it does not even “harvest the power” of confrontation.  It has allowed the silencing of “other voices” in favor of white supremacy being “reduced” to black oppression.  However, giving Black Lives UU an enormous amount of resources and airtime barely scratches the surface of the complexity of white supremacy and its accompanying ills in the neoliberal hetero-patriarchal capitalist global hegemonic system. It is a feasible lie to equate white supremacy with black oppression because the latter is a monstrous historical injustice that has gripped the imaginations of liberals and caused unfathomable concern among its allies and resolving and healing it will be a huge manifestation of justice that will be felt far and wide.  But it will not even begin to unravel white supremacy.

White supremacy has been so downplayed in the last GA as almost equated with black oppression as it is not even clear how talking heads had been decided on in favor mostly of black and white leaders, with very few Muslims, Latinos, Asian / Pacific Islanders, and multiracial people. My question is why aren't we, the "others" in this binary, not siezing our seats from white people? Where are the muslims, for instance? Blacks and Muslims have long suffered direct violence in the USA, and even outside of the USA where Black or Muslim Americans are considered beneficiaries of US colonial power, benefitting from the higher currency value of the dollar, enjoying better purchasing power, and getting first dibs at American education and business.  

It is not just white people who have enabled the GA, the UUA, and our congregations; we all did. And I hope that is clear.   The main problem was that the negotiations for the seats at the table of power --- the board, the UUA staff, the committees were preempted. The co-presidents came out with an announcement of a great leap forward from the past in terms of percentages offered to people of color.  The Robert’s Rules of Order did not help to foster collaborative thinking in which a person with a conundrum could ask for consideration, disruption had to place, and a person had to offer solutions only in responsive resolutions which blocked confrontation of the major question that we all avoided to ask, “How do we share the table before us?”  Asking is confronting.  If we wanted to get the answers we have never heard of, we need to ask questions we have been afraid to ask.

----

The Rev. Tet Gallardo has been the UU Minister in the UU Church of the Philippines' congregation of Bicutan since 2013.  She was also the Balazs Scholar 206-2017 at Starr King School for the Ministry.  She currently serves the consulting group of the International Council of Unitarians and Universalists (ICUU).

Why I'm Insecure

Just a few days back, I was at the receiving end of a lashing out over a comment I made "I'm jealous of that person", which was based on a misunderstanding that the person was showing me their object of fascination, which wasn't the case, after all.

I don't know how many ministers will admit to being insecure. I would.

To be an effective minister, I need to question my comfort zone, my assurances, my sense of certainty, my relevance and effectiveness. Despite that I do not at all question the value of me being alive and worthy of love, it still matters to me to give space to the fact that I may not be valuable to one person or another, and those people may be people who matter to me --- they could be my congregants, my stakeholders, and others. 

Is insecurity evil? Do we have to be secure all the time? What is it like being insecure or secure?  How many people can actually say, "I will be in a great place no matter if no one likes me at all?"  I wonder if those same people have any appreciation for human connection and how isolation is really evil.

Do I get jealous? Hardly, but yes. I'm human. I would wonder about inequalities, discrimination, and equal opportunity.  Is jealousy evil?  Does it deserve a huge harsh reaction that judges my insecurity? Without giving the self-interested answer, I would then ask the question, "How was the jealousy expressed?"  Was it expressed to assert control over a person or was it a friendly?  It's like how a love song by Damien Rice can go, "I can't take my mind off of you.  I can't take my mind off of you.  I can't take my mind off of you. I can't take my mind off of you", and so on.  This is dangerous and lethal at its worst, but really very very normal for people who are in the beginning stage of romantic attraction.  Must the object of fascination feel threatened? Not necessarily, especially if it wasn't told you the way Damien Rice said it repeatedly.

Once, I entered the office of the New York Anti-Violence Project to have myself checked.  My partner said I needed myself checked. After a series of tests and interviews, it was concluded that my easily-offended partner was the one who had been violent to me, psychologically.  She, after all, held my passport, was controlling the finances, and earned 3 times I did. She also wanted to control my interests, managing my band, etc. Bossy was not something I easily detected because I grew up with really strong women.  My grandmother was like Margaret Thatcher and we lived in an all-female home with my cousins who were great decision-makers, all at least 10 years older than me.  I have a blindness to this kind of domination and controlling behavior.  And the guilt trip is such a useful tool against me, someone who constantly re-examines, "Have I done well? Am I harming someone?"

A single minister like me, looking for a potential partner, is highly vulnerable.  I have a policy that I can only see counsellees in public places like a café, otherwise, they will have to chat only online.  I don't know how far worse it is for the members of a royal family, but we, ministers, have to ensure that we have our vocation in mind when we connect with people. Sometimes my friends joke, "Do you play your minister card when you date people?"  I have unequivocally said no.  How can someone do that and expect an authenticity on the other side of the table?  I think the best way is to play the crazy girl card and let the other person feel comfortable with their own crazy.  And so I usually mention I'm an artist with many mediums, --- a drummer, a music video director,  a training designer, an entrepreneur. 

And this is what keeps me wanting to maintain my insecurity - that I want to keep myself open to surprises, avoiding being comforted with my assumptions or my expectations.  I'd like to know that I can live with uncertainty, surprises, the unplanned, the getting lost, the errors and the trials.  I will occasionally say I'm jealous, don't worry, it will be harmless, you don't need to address it, you don't need to change, I never wanted to be in charge of someone else's life.  I think it's better to be loved than feared.  I took on this "job" of being inspirational to other people and have been paid well, have been recognized, and have been consistent in making sure I've been accountable to those whose lives I affect.

I am insecure because I want to make sure you are okay with the things I do, that I don't harm you, that I help you, that I don't live in a bubble of entitlements.  This makes me anxious sometimes, that's for sure.  Again, not to worry, I am an avid learner of Zen in order to breathe in the unexplainable and befriend my demons. 

Attention. Conversation. Communion.

In business, politics, and religion, any revolution needs these three means of transformation. And they could be the last frontier of preserving the soul of the human race.

---

In medieval times, Empire can do as they please and ranters get killed. Now ranters just go on FB and complain and think there’s free speech until disappearances, assasinations, mass shootings and hate crimes go unabated while health care is doomed, drugs insist upon our social fabric, poverty rises and oligarchs get subsidies and protections from prosecution. The very act of organizing society has solidified inequalities in power and economic opportunities.

I’ve always marvelled at the difference between East and West. Yes, I’m likely to extol our Eastern values of community, interbeing, and fluidity, while consistently questioning if there’s anything that came from the West that has nothing to do with nihilism. Many Western research do not seek beyond the West in attributing how ideas and thoughts have emerged, often completely ignoring the sophistication of ancient Eastern civilizations for their own supremacy notions.

I am biased, that is true. And that’s because it has been an excruciating journey of decolonizing from the dominant narrative. For three decades, I’ve supported, been employed, volunteered for, and assisted more than 30 social development agencies, non-government organizations, and other non-profits possessed by one question : how do we make the goods of the world more accessible to those who are disadvantaged by the prevailing cultures and systems.

In the course of my years-long inquiry, I’ve observed that organizations tend to produce the very problems that they seek to address. For instance, if inequality is to be solved, how can inequality within organizations first be resolved? My inquiry has brought me to become an avid student of organizational development and led me to found a company (Aman Sinaya Management Services) which is currently undergoing its own leadership transformation. The very act of organizing is inherently characterized by a scarcity model of power, where roles are assigned theoretically by merit and expertise, is restricted by “professionalism”, and compartmentalized from the individual’s personal life. Organizations often measure their performance based on consistency such that the goal is to become closer to an automaton with each variable becoming predictable in its tendency given certain scenarios, in essence killing spontaneity, creativity, and divergence.

I have always had trouble accepting that organized religion was Jesus’s aim in telling Peter, “On this rock, I build my church.” It seems that the manner of his disruption was more in keeping with the way to social transformation without creating a problematic organism called an organization (Jesus did not have a organized hierarchical structure among the 12), but to free up creative tendencies by focusing on the why’s. His was more a counter-culture than a community-organizing effort. He reminded us, look at the birds, they worry not what to eat next. And that’s exactly what happens when people learn to share like the birds and live in harmony with natural abundance.

In this time of losing hope, with only 11 countries in the world not engaged in wars, as of last time I checked, and we are grasping at shreds for what transcendent weapons we have that cannot be taken away from us, intrinsic and durable, I submit the following:

ATTENTION

By now, it’s pretty obvious that one can monetize attention. It does not only create value, places and people we pay attention to are visited by helpers and are reached by people who have the capabilities needed for the work. The first act of love is attention. Beings we pay attention to glow and grow overtime, science has proven time and again. Sadly, much of our attention is still directed by the dominant narrative and many of us haven’t found the way out of our socialized preferences in order to pay more attention to more beauty, mystery, and richness of the world. The comforting familiarity of stories that privilege some and ignores others, fairy tales or Hollywood material, reinforces those who play god among us whose gaze determine who shall rise and fall. The most revolutionary thing one can do is to pay attention to those we haven’t paid attention to before, mindfully checking your own tendencies to pair one thing with another, like science to boys and dolls to girls. Changing these tendencies by changing the tendency of your own attention is going to change the world faster than any protest. Pay attention to your neighbor, for starters.

CONVERSATION

Our conversations are a reinforcement of our freedom of association, a fundamental freedom that ensures we are truly free human beings, whose interests are not dictated upon by the powerful. “No self survives a real conversation” is a refrain I oft repeat, thanks to David Whyte. We often do not pay attention to how we conduct our conversations and often think that conversations are only limited to the ones talking, or the ones in attendance, or the ones spoken of. Our conversations shape our culture by the way we choose its focus, its participants, its stakeholders, and its aims. Teachers know that informal conversations teach better than formal conversations, and yet we insist on formalizing the conversations that truly matter when words are limited while the spirit in the conversation can transmit the message faster than words. The spirit in conversation can transmit sensibilities that can change the world under the radar of those who do not get the spirit being transmitted. You may have experienced conversation where people around you thought you were talking about the cooking, but you and your loved one are actually alluding to a more intimate topic. Conversations can transmit values without insisting on them. Parties, dancing, music, and art are ways of conversing. The culture that emanates from a group is a result of many elements conversing, and most of them have no words.

COMMUNION

It is easier to imagine a communion between two souls, and yet it is very exciting to learn community intimacy, where the trust level achieved is so strong that each person is understood for why they do as they do, freeing them to be authentic individuals while partaking of each other in communal responsibility. I often tell a joke about two people, survivors of a shipwreck, who found themselves in a place after their death. One of them guesses, “We are in hell. I mean look at these puny people who have no sense of their own selves, quite like doormats, they welcome strangers and danger unto themselves.” The other says, “Oh, so we are in heaven.” And a Filipino passes them by and says, “No, you’re just in the Philippines.

“We see things for who we are not for what they are”, says Anais Nin. A communion helps people build stronger moral imaginations and a sense of trusting what a community can hold together as what they know so far. Today’s capitalist societies often sabotage communal knowing, the role of elders have all but disapppeared with being “progressive”. But the role of elder serves as a marker of evolving communal wisdom, a sense of the journey of a people and their rootedness in their values. Communions supplant ill systems. Communions are rituals that help community visualize social transformation. Who we eat with had always been the subject of heavy regulation in many cultures and religions for this very reason.

SOCIAL CHANGE

A government is always a people’s indictment. I like social questions; however, government is not the answer but culture and the way we situate power within this complex society. We can change the government all we want but if our conversations have not become the platforms of transformation towards a new culture, then we are just trapped on the platforms of politicians along with their given options to us — we are trapped in the matrix of nihilism — choose your poison: death by gun, by starvation, by hacienda massacres, by disaster, by illness, by drugs, by invasion, or by capitalism, etc. If we want another way, we must produce it independently of this matrix until a better reality competes competently with this system we’re in. And that new order must first be found in conversation. Right now our conversations are hijacked by our reactions to the system and we’re not really producing anything independent of it. Religious culture has that potential to produce something independent of the realities that bind us at the moment. It can compete with rationalizations we have made to do and act the way we have in perpetuating existing problems. However, it must learn to be in the loop of developing a deeper understanding of human nature by listening to science and art.

Not all is lost. The war has always been spiritual. If evil organizes more efficiently, as Martin Luther King says, we have to remain disorganized even as we foment a counterculture that needs no formal roles. Let us be like the birds who know when they lead, when they serve, when they fly and be still. Birds are not anarchists, they are co-leaders. All because they have a sense of paying attention, being with each other, and communing with all that is good.

Everyone vies for our attention. It is gold!  Yet we grant it mindlessly to the vam-/ em-pire clout miner to starve those who would nourish us, serve us, look after us, reflect us.

It will be subversion to pay attention differently, to mind the unminded.

Prayer For A Hurting World

I pray to the light, shine on those we have forgotten.

I pray to the divine, may all love be made holy.

I pray to the strong, liberate us with your vulnerability.

I pray to the wise, listen with your heart.

I pray to the outcast, take me with you.

I pray to the wild, show me my chains.

I pray to my neighbor, let's keep each other safe.

I pray to my friends, help me love my enemies.

I pray to my enemies, change with me.

I pray to my loved ones, be patient with me.

I pray to my leaders, stand with the people.

I pray to my church, may we bring peace.

I pray to my heart, breathe well, the journey is long.

The American Dream