This morning I attended a workshop at the Friends Meeting of Washington D.C. on Transgender organizing “Against Police Profiling, Better Jail Conditions, and Against Over-Incarceration” hosted by TransEquality as part of their 2014 Lobby Days. I went at the invitation of some of the young organizers there and was glad to be included.
The two primary speakers were Trans Equality policy expert Harper Jean Tobin (see her HuffPo piece here) and Houston-based Lou Weaver, who is working to launch a model program with sheriff’s department in Texas.
I went to listen and learn and to see where Trans issues cross into other justice avenues, such as protecting civil rights for Transfolks, addressing Trans issues in homelessness work, and especially in suicide prevention, as well as making sure we are including and advocating for and with Transfolks in Mass Incarceration work – especially since the majority of Trans people in the prison system are people of color, primarily African Americans.
One important part of the conversation focused on the history that much of the current Trans organizing and policy work came out of Gay and Lesbian organizing that has been primarily from white leadership groups and white leadership is who gets the primary funding. But, like in many situations, the vast majority of Transfolks who end up in the prison system are people of color. So once again, policy is being created by white leaders without the leadership and expertise of people of color who are disproportionately impacted.
There were some specific resources mentioned that I want to share with others:
Also, in case you missed it, Patti Shaw just won an important case in D.C. that will change (hopefully) police policies.
And Calvary Baptist in D.C. has called its first Trans pastor, Rev. Allyson Robinson. She’s serving as interim in the wake of Rev. Amy Butler moving up to the big pulpit at Riverside Church in NY. See their lovely liturgy here.
I missed this great op-ed piece by CNN’s Carol Costello that ran in May on the consistent ethic of life.
I find myself perpetually, uncomfortably, and instinctively part of the 8% of Americans who believe that both abortion and the death penalty are affronts to the God of Life and the call to reconciliation.
But there’s a vast ethical and moral difference between the “principalities and powers” of State-imposed execution and the pastoral universe of multivalent forces that may press down on a woman and her family. The ethic is engaged consistently: prophetically against the State, and pastorally with a human being.
Here’s Carol Costello:
Can you be pro-life and pro-death penalty?
It’s a question more than one person I know is asking after Oklahoma’s botched execution of Clayton Lockett. Not necessarily because of the way Oklahoma tortuously executed the convicted killer, but because of the hard-core way some reacted to Lockett’s execution.
Like Mike Christian. The pro-life Oklahoma state representative told The Associated Press, “I realize this may sound harsh, but as a father and former lawman, I really don’t care if it’s by lethal injection, by the electric chair, firing squad, hanging, the guillotine or being fed to the lions.”
He also threatened to impeach judges who dared delay executions for any reason.
This is from a man who is so strongly pro-life he voted for eight bills in four years to prevent women in Oklahoma from terminating their pregnancies, or, as many who oppose abortion say, “killing babies.”
Color me confused. So, Rep. Christian says it’s OK to kill, unless you’re a woman who wants to end her pregnancy?
As I told my friends during a heated debate last weekend, that smacks of hypocrisy.
The only nonhypocritical viewpoint, I argued, exists in the Catholic Church.
Catholics believe in the “Consistent Ethic of Life.” As Georgetown’s Father Thomas Reese puts it, “we are concerned about a person from womb to tomb.”
“Life is something that comes from God and shouldn’t be taken away by man,” Reese told me.
Put simply, the Catholic Church opposes abortion and the death penalty. Period. Except nothing in life is that simple. Especially our collective views on the death penalty and abortion.
If you ask a Southern Baptist, he or she will likely tell you the Catholic Church is wrong.
“There is no contradiction here,” R. Albert Mohler, president of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, told me, referring to Rep. Christian’s underlying position. …..
This summer, the Detroit Water and Sewerage Department announced that it would increase its shut-off campaign to 3,000 shutoffs per week.
Catarina de Albuquerque, the UN Special Rapporteur on the right to safe drinking water and sanitation says:
“Disconnection of services for lack of means to pay may constitute a violation of the right to water. Disconnection due to non-payment is only permissible if it can be shown that the householder is able to pay but is not paying—in other words, that the tariff is affordable.”
Lydia Wylie-Kellermann, Detroit organizer, sent me this note:
Friends, the watershed in Detroit is crying out. We are working full force against the water department shutting off up to 150,000 homes in the city by September (this is 40% of households). They have already shut off thousands of families. No drinking water, no bathing, no flushing toilets. With no running water, there is a risk of child protective service taking children away from their parents. It is a human rights issue, a privatization of water issue, a health issue, and a watershed issue. The U.N. has responded to the crisis saying that this is a violation of human rights.
One doesn’t mourn the death yesterday of Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, one becomes him. Let the Holy Ones dance! Reb Zalman has been one of those great wisdom leaders whose spark has kept ours alive without most of us even knowing it. As one of the most influential “change-makers” of his generation, he gave birth to a worldwide Jewish renewal movement, that often overflowed beyond the cup of Judaism. Communities of commitment and joy sprung up in his footsteps, rooted in the mystical experience of God so rich in the Hassidic tradition.
“He was visionary in creating fully-inclusive community, making Jewish mysticism and joyful observance available to several generations of American Jews, and engaging in deep ecumenical relationships with leaders of the world’s religions. …
Reb Zalman was also committed to interfaith “deep ecumenism.” He explored “spiritual technologies” and sustained friendships with many significant leaders, including Ram Dass, Fr. Matthew Fox, Fr. Thomas Keating, Pir Vilayat Inayat Khan, Br. Thomas Merton, Br. David Steindl-Rast, and Ken Wilbur, among others. Where others saw walls, he saw doors. …
“It’s July when the summer begins to wear even the most dedicated of sun lovers down. Life begins to feel sticky; nights get close; days get long and dry. Everything becomes a major effort; we slow down like rusted cogs on old wheels. Time suspends. Nothing much gets done. Day follows day with not much to show for any of them. Oh, yes, monastics know all about that kind of thing. In ancient monasteries the warning of Evagrius of Ponticus to “beware the devil of the noonday sun” loomed large. Acedia they called it. Spiritual sloth.
July is the month that teaches us, as the Desert Monastics said, to prepare ourselves for the “heat of the noonday sun,” for those times in life when going on and going through something will take all the energy, all the hope we have. Then, July reminds us that on the other side of such intensity, such demanding effort, comes the harvest time of life when we see that all our efforts have been worth it.
The question in every life, of course, is how to keep on going when it seems fruitless. A Zen saying: “O snail, climb Mount Fuji, but slowly, slowly.” If we are to persevere for the long haul, we must not overdrive our souls. We must immerse ourselves in good music, good reading, great beauty and peace so that everything good in us can rise again and lead us beyond disappointment, beyond boredom, beyond criticism, beyond loss.
The prayer from Mary Lou Kownacki’s, The Sacred in the Simple, calls us all to new energy at the break point of every day. It reads:
Let not the heat
of the noonday sun
wither my spirit
or lay waste my hopes.
May I be ever green,
a strong shoot of justice,
a steadfast tree of peace.”
“To
you I offer my hull and the tattered cordage
of my will. The terrible channels where
the wind drives me against the brown lips
of the reeds are not all behind me. Yet
I trust the sanity of my vessel ….”
–Frank O’Hara
Meridian Hill Park, D.C., 2009It’s the feast day of Saint Joan of Arc. In the park near my house is a statue of her dedicated on her 510th birthday in 1922. “The statue of our French heroine will be built to the glory of womanhood, dedicated by the women of France in New York, to the women of America, and offered to the city of Washington,” wrote Madame Polifeme. It is the only equestrian statue in the District that has a woman rider.
I had the honor of reflecting on this statue with the wonderful poet Linda McCarriston and hearing her thoughts with regard to her powerful poem, below.
La Coursier de Jeanne D’Arc
by Linda McCarriston
You know that they burned her horse
before her. Though it is not recorded,
you know that they burned her Percheron
first, before her eyes, because you
know that story, so old that story,
the routine story, carried to its
extreme, of the cruelty that can make
of what a woman hears a silence,
that can make of what a woman sees
a lie. She had no son for them to burn,
for them to take from her in the world
not of her making and put to its pyre,
so they layered a greater one in front of
where she was staked to her own–
as you have seen her pictured sometimes,
her eyes raised to the sky. But they were
not raised. This is yet one of their lies.
They were not closed. Though her hands
were bound behind her, and her feet were
bound deep in what would become fire,
The story of Joan of Arc as we have known it is an almost mythical one, a fantasy of divine proportions. She was a simple French girl from the unsophisticated countryside who took it upon herself to save the country when its leaders could not. She was impelled by the voices of St. Catherine of Siena, St. Margaret, and the Archangel Michael, she said, to follow the will of God. She was to liberate a city, lead an army, save a king, and free a nation from foreign control. The story seems remote, the model suspect, and the voices from heaven not a common way of expressing contemporary spiritual insights or calls from God.
In the end, Joan is captured by her English enemies and burned at the stake with the help of churchmen who consider her a heretic, label her a witch, and condemn her to death because of her refusal to denounce her voices as the church has commanded her to do.
The relation of all that to sanctity in the twenty-first century seems at best obscure until little by little the local history is peeled away and the light is focused on the very human and very universal situation that underlies it. Joan is not to be revered because she was a soldier in the service of the king. Joan is to be revered because she is a model of conscience development, a monument to the feminine relationship to God, and a breaker of the stereotypes that block the will of God for people.
Suddenly, Joan of Arc appears in the plain light of our own lives. She is a woman with a conscience. She is a woman with a mission. She is a woman who has been chosen by God for a man’s job. She is a woman who is bold enough to claim that she has access to God and that God has outrageous plans for her. She is a woman who dares to confront the authorities of the time with a greater question than they are able to handle. She is a woman who threatens the status quo. She tells an inspired truth and leads a life consecrated to her God.
Joan of Arc is not simply the patron of France in times such as ours. Joan of Arc is patron of all those who hear the voice of God calling them beyond present impossibilities to the fullness of conscience everywhere.”–-excerpted from “Joan of Arc: A Voice of Conscience,” A Passion for Life, Devotional Edition by Joan Chittister (Orbis)
Dr. Maya Angelou, the great voice of American letters and human rights, who grew up in the tiny town of Stamps, Arkansas, is dead at age 86. She died at her home in North Carolina where she was teaching at Wake Forest University.
Maya Angelou’s writing and voice imprinted on me at an early age. My Mom and Grandmother are from Magnolia, Arkansas, 18 miles east of Stamps on Rt. 82. She wrote about her experiences in “I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings.”
In 1982, she traveled with Bill Moyers back to Stamps – the first time she’d returned since leaving as a teenager, for a piece titled “The Black Side of the Tracks” (see video clip above).
On Jan. 20, 1993, she returned American poetry to its place in democracy when she was asked to be the poet for President Bill Clinton’s inauguration. Her reading of On The Pulse of Morning, written for the occasion, was reminiscent of Robert Frost’s reading of The Gift Outright at Kennedy’s inauguration–but her poem and voice carried the voice of the ancestors and the prophets. It has become a classic of American literature.
Detroit Water Protests (WWJ Newsradio 950-Beth Fisher)
“It is our profound conviction that the future of the human family depends also on how we safeguard – both prudently and compassionately, with justice and fairness – the gift of creation that our Creator has entrusted to us. Therefore, we acknowledge in repentance the wrongful mistreatment of our planet, which is tantamount to sin before the eyes of God. We reaffirm our responsibility and obligation to foster a sense of humility and moderation so that all may feel the need to respect creation and to safeguard it with care. Together, we pledge our commitment to raising awareness about the stewardship of creation; we appeal to all people of goodwill to consider ways of living less wastefully and more frugally, manifesting less greed and more generosity for the protection of God’s world and the benefit of His people.” —Pope Francis and Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew (from Joint Declaration, 25 May 2014)
Pope Francis speaks out on creation care and Mitch Hescox, head of the Environmental Evangelical Network, challenges Florida Gov. Rick Scott to take climate change seriously, since “Florida is ground zero.”
This morning I attended a workshop at the Friends Meeting of Washington D.C. on Transgender organizing “Against Police Profiling, Better Jail Conditions, and Against Over-Incarceration” hosted by TransEquality as part of their 2014 Lobby Days. I went at the invitation of some of the young organizers there and was glad to be included.
I missed this great op-ed piece by CNN’s Carol Costello that ran in May on the consistent ethic of life.
One doesn’t mourn the death yesterday of Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, one becomes him. Let the Holy Ones dance! Reb Zalman has been one of those great wisdom leaders whose spark has kept ours alive without most of us even knowing it. As one of the most influential “change-makers” of his generation, he gave birth to a worldwide Jewish renewal movement, that often overflowed beyond the cup of Judaism. Communities of commitment and joy sprung up in his footsteps, rooted in the mystical experience of God so rich in the Hassidic tradition.
“To
Rose Marie Berger 