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Rally: Communal Prayers for the Movement
“This is a prayer book for revolution–a revolution of love and compassion and justice,” Shane Claiborne writes in the foreword to Rally, a collection of activist prayers edited by Britney Winn Lee. The prayers in this collection are meant to be prayed in community.
My (in)famous Litany of the Saints is included, written while walking with a donkey in a cemetery. Pre-order now on evil Amazon. (The publication date is in August, but you know, order now and surprise yourself in the dog days!)
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All Are Called to Climate Action
In a spirit of prayer, protest, and repentance, @melodyczhang led SojoAction and @YECAction in a die-in liturgy on #ClimateChange this weekend. #AllAreCalled to #ActonClimate! Thanks to YECA and SojoAction for this beautiful public liturgy and prayer.–Rose
For the millions of animals dead, the 25 people killed, and millions of acres of land burned from the Australian bushfires, we grieve. Lord have mercy.
For the 97 people and 6 firefighters killed last year fighting the deadliest wildfires ever recorded in California, we grieve. Lord have mercy.
For the 65 million displaced people who have fled their homelands and become climate migrants because of violence, humans rights abuse, and environmental disasters intensified by climate crisis, we pray. Lord have mercy.
For our brothers and sisters in Uganda and Kenya and other parts of sub-Saharan Africa whose livelihoods are in danger due to extended drought and flooding on their farms from climate change, we repent. Lord have mercy.
For the people and habitats affected by typhoons in the Philippines, which have intensified by 50% in the last 40 years, we pray for your protection and your mercy.
For neighborhoods near much higher rates of pollution & refineries that suffer alarming rates of cancer and asthma due to infrastructural racism, we grieve and repent for our indifference towards their health and well-being. Lord have mercy.
For island countries like Kiribati, the Marshall Islands, Tuvalu, and other small island developing states who are at risk of going completely underwater in the next 50 years due to sea level rise, we grieve and repent for our shortsightedness. Lord have mercy.
For those who suffered from the bomb cyclone in the midwest and extensive flooding in Nebraska last year, we pray. Lord have mercy.
For our brothers and sisters who live in Syria and Yemen, where unprecedented crippling drought periods are destabilizing their sense of security and peace, we pray. Lord have mercy.
For communities in India who are slipping into food insecurity and malnutrition because of unstable planting and harvesting seasons from flash floods, we pray. Lord have mercy.
For the black and brown communities who were most adversely affected and are still recovering from the devastating Hurricane Katrina and similar intensified hurricanes all across the US, we pray. Lord have mercy.
For the countless species of marine life which are under threat due to the warming bubbles popping up in our oceans at present day, we pray. Lord have mercy. Amen.
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POEM: Im PEACH ment
Philadelphia street art (three tiles) Im PEACH ment
for Father Daniel BerriganChattering in blue light
imposters eat peachesbefore a starving nation
the juice is fantasticaldripping as it does on Con
stitutions and posersbib fronts, cons, and tie tacks
Swift and furious fall tiny bluebirds, crushed
like children’s toys and rusty mothsEveryone watches
honest thieves have codes of honorpredictable, sequential, and con
sequential but not these violenttop dogs
staring in a dark windowabandoned back of father’s hand
Children watch the screenglass smudged with fat
These thieves gnaw others fleshy bitson live tv
spit out the thrones, pits between teethIn the middle, the three-legged dog
joyful, dancing, sideways step steppingprance prance from dawn’s first gape
limping and leaping for the forgotten treatSee the game of bones
scattered like sheep’s knucklesdumped on a pile
sweep the winnings up fastwipe your chin, send warm condolences
Before, beforeRose Marie Berger is a Catholic peace activist and poet. This poem is part of an unpublished collection.
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Iran: Bombs and Bible-Thumping
I know we are all reeling from the capricious Trump actions against Iran over the past few days. But we also know what the work is we have to do.
Below are four resources to help shape our messaging and action. It will be important for people to be in the streets at federal buildings and at their Congressional reps offices denouncing Trump’s action and demanding that Congress bring the Khanna-Gaetz Amendment to the floor for a stand-alone vote to cut any funding for war with Iran. (This passed with a bipartisan majority in June but was dropped from the final NDAA when it came out of committee.)
Trump is portraying his political assassination of Soleimani as “taking out a bad man” as if this were another rogue terrorist. It is not. Iran is a sovereign nation. Soleimani was the equivalent of our head of joint chief of staff and was a favorite to be the next president of Iran.
Trump’s calculation is that deadly chaos in the Middle East (with a concurrent national security crisis here at home) will maintain Republican lock-step in the Senate and unite his evangelical base with Manichean heresies about fighting evil and reheated apocalyptic fantasies for Christian Zionists on the restoration of Israel and the ushering in of the End Times. Trump’s “bombing and Bible-thumping” evangelical tour began last night at King Jesus International ministry in Miami.
We need your prayers, tweets, FB posts, videos, sermons, public talks, etc to amplify a focused response. We need our people to be knowledgable, strategic, and active. Please use your communication networks to educate and activate.–Rose Berger
1. Will We See Through the “Fog of War’ This Time? by Rose Marie Berger
2. Iran: Break the Cycle of Violence With a Just Peace Framework by Eli S. McCarthy
3. Blocking Trump’s War with Iran by the Authority of Faith and Congress by Jim Wallis
4. Call on Congress to bring the Khanna-Gaetz Amendment to the NDAA to the floor as a stand-alone bill to prohibit funding of a war with Iran by Maryknoll Office of Global Concerns
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Alan Bean: Custodians of American civil religion?
Below I am excerpting an excellent article by Alan Bean reflecting on the unholy alliance between “aging white evangelicals” and Donald Trump and the changing American civil religion. Alan is executive director of Friends of Justice, an alliance of community members that advocates for criminal justice reform. He lives in Arlington, Texas.–Rose Berger
An excerpt from Last call for aging white evangelicals: The political marriage to Trump will collapse. What then? by Alan Bean (in Baptist News Global).
Alan Bean, Friends of Justice >>Conservative evangelicals punch above their weight because they are custodians of American civil religion, a vision of America as God’s beacon in a dark world. Civil religion enjoyed bipartisan support during the Eisenhower years. For generations, American history and civics classes were exercises in self-congratulation.
For the past half century, however, our civil religion has been “deconstructed” by academics who see it as little more than a mask for white supremacy and the oppression of women and racial and sexual minorities. America, in this view, has a lot of explaining to do. College educated whites broke decisively for Hillary Clinton in 2016, the only white demographic to do so.
In response, aging white evangelicals have doubled down on the myth of American righteousness. In the hands of evangelical faux historians like David Barton, the old civil religion has become a great, sprawling story of God’s providential love for America with footnotes a mile long. Trump’s promise to make America great again dovetails perfectly with American civil religion in both its classic and expanded iterations.
In defending Trump, aging white evangelicals are fighting for their identity. The liberals have transformed a gleaming army of Christian soldiers into a rabble of bigots and fools. Evangelicals won’t take this demotion lying down, especially with Donald John Trump emerging as their champion. A civil religion designed to unify a nation now serves as a dividing line.
All this is quite by design. Trump’s political strategy comes straight out of professional wrestling. Half the crowd is hailing Trump as a Savior while everybody else is baying for his blood. The president has our attention, and that’s all he has ever wanted.
As the impeachment process so clearly reveals, the GOP is now the party of Trump. But the power behind the throne is a band of aging white evangelicals, the most powerful people on earth, and therefore the most to be pitied.
Like the biblical Samson, Trump will eventually bring the entire edifice of American conservatism crashing down around him. Some species of evangelical religion will ultimately rise from the rubble, but it will be greatly curtailed, politically irrelevant and, I pray, more recognizably Christian.
Sometimes it takes a cataclysm to advance the cause of Christ.–Alan Bean<<
An excerpt from Last call for aging white evangelicals: The political marriage to Trump will collapse. What then? by Alan Bean (in Baptist News Global).
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A Word of Hope for 2020
Bishop Marc Stenger and Sr. Wamuyu Wachira, co-presidents of Pax Christi International REFLECTION BY THE CO-PRESIDENTS OF PAX CHRISTI INTERNATIONAL ON POPE FRANCIS 53rd WORLD DAY OF PEACE MESSAGE (for 1 JANUARY 2020)
Pope Francis’ 52nd World Day of Peace message in the year 2019, invited us to reflect on the theme “Good politics is at the service of peace”. The Pope’s message was that politics, though essential to building human communities and institutions, can become a means of oppression, marginalization and even destruction when political life is not seen as a form of service to society as a whole. This year, 2020 Pope Francis’s 53rd World Day of Peace theme is “Peace as a journey of hope: dialogue, reconciliation and ecological conversion”. The reflection on this theme is captured in the following sections of his message (i) Peace, a journey of hope in the face of obstacles and trial. (2) Peace, a journey of listening based on memory, solidarity and fraternity. (3) Peace, a journey of reconciliation in fraternal communion. (4) Peace, a journey of ecological conversion.
In a world devastated by war and conflicts which often affect the marginalized and the vulnerable of our society, we are being invited to reflect on peace as the object of our hope and the aspiration of the entire human family. The virtue of hope inspires us and keeps us moving forward, even when obstacles seem overwhelming. The Pope discusses the different forms of violence that are tearing humanity apart and their true significance. He points out: “Every war is a form of fratricide that destroys the human family’s innate vocation to brotherhood and [sisterhood]”.
The message of Pope Francis is a very strong message, a vocational message. This vocation is that of children of God, brothers and sisters. But the Pope underlines “our inability to accept the diversity of others, which then fosters attitudes of … domination born of selfishness and pride, hatred and the desire to caricature, exclude and even destroy the other”. He emphasizes the fact that “war is fueled by a perversion of relationship, by hegemonic ambitions, by abuse of power, by fear of others and seeing diversity as an obstacle”. On the contrary, in respecting, trusting others and seeing them as sons and daughters of God, brothers and sisters, we can ‘break the spirit of vengeance and set out on the journey of hope’. …
Read the full letter from Pax Christi International’s co-presidents, Bishop Marc Stenger (France) and Sr. Teresia Wamuyu Wachira (Kenya)
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December 7: Advent and Pearl Harbor
“Ask not, doubt not. You have, My Heart, already chosen the joy of Advent. As a force against the great uncertainty, bravely tell yourself, ‘It is the Advent of the great God’” —Karl Rahner
“What is your opinion? If a shepherd has a hundred sheep and one of them goes astray, will the shepherd not leave the ninety-nine in the hills and go in search of the stray?“—Matthew 18: 12
In the United States yesterday, December 7, is remembered as “Pearl Harbor Day.” Early on a Sunday morning in 1941 the Japanese military attacked a U.S. naval base on Oahu, Hawaii, killing 2,403 Americans. There were about 100 Japanese killed. The Japanese squadron leader was Mitsuo Fuchida.“We hate, and are hated in return, and then we hate more, and we have all seen where that can lead,” said Fuchida years later. But, he said, “We love, and we are likely to be loved in return, which begins the cycle of love.”
In the late 1940s, Fuchida heard some Japanese POWs returning from U.S. detainee camps, talking about an American teenager who visited them. She brought them soap, toothpaste, and asked what else she could do for them. The prisoners didn’t trust her. Finally they asked why she had been so kind to them, her enemies. She told them that her parents had been Christian missionaries in Japan and the Philippines.
They had been murdered, beheaded, by Japanese soldiers who thought they were spies. The girl’s life began to be consumed by hate for the Japanese, until she was able to reconnect with what her parents had taught: Love of enemies and forgiveness. She gave “aid and comfort” to the enemy to honor her parents and because she was a Christian.
Mitsuo Fuchida was deeply moved by this story. Eventually, Fuchida became a Christian out of a need to heal the hate in his own life. “I have participated in the cycle of hate for much of my life,” said Fuchida. “For the rest of my life I want to begin the cycle of love as often and in as many places as possible.”
Fuchida traveled extensively in the United States. Every time a Pearl Harbor survivor approached him Fuchida bowed slightly and said “Gomenasai” [I’m sorry], then reached out and took their hand.
To whom do you need to apologize before the Christ Child arrives?
Breathe in. Breathe out. Ad…..vent.
With gratitude to Pax Christi USA where some of these reflections first appeared in print..
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Video: What Is an Advocate? with Ched Myers
Ched Myers offers an 18-minute video on what it means to be an “advocate” by looking at Luke 7:36-8:3. The work of advocacy, he says, is “calling people in, both allies and adversaries, to the work of justice for all.”
Or as activists today say, “You don’t need to be a voice for the voiceless–just pass the mic!”
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DID POPE FRANCIS JUST ELEVATE THESE ANTI-NUCLEAR ACTIVISTS TO RELIGIOUS PRISONERS OF CONSCIENCE?
by Rose Marie Berger
Pope Francis announced this week that “the use of nuclear weapons is immoral, which is why it must be added to the Catechism of the Catholic Church.”
Two years after the Vatican State signed the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (currently ratified by 34 countries), he declared during an in-flight press briefing from Japan to Rome, “Not only their use, but also possessing them: because an accident or the madness of some government leader, one person’s madness can destroy humanity.”
Nearly 75 years after the United States used nuclear weapons against Japan —killing, by some estimates 150,000 people in Hiroshima and 75,000 in the historic Catholic city of Nagasaki — Pope Francis reiterated that nuclear weapons are a threat to humanity, strategically reckless, and an offense to the poor and to God.
If the pro-life, anti-nuke Pope’s position is formally added to the catechism, the collected principles of faith used in basic instruction in the Catholic Church, then second-graders in Catholic schools will learn that that nuclear weapons are a sin, in the same moral category as intentional murder and the death penalty. As Jesuit Richard McSorley put it in Sojourners in 1977, “building a nuclear weapon is a sin” and “our possession of them is a proximate occasion of sin.”
What does this evolution of moral principles mean for lay Catholics who are required to answer for our complicity in unjust laws or unjust social situations? Read more.
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Found Border Poem
This is from a Facebook Messenger exchange between Rose Marie Berger in Washington, D.C.and Nate Bacon, from Guatemala who was visiting the U.S.-Mexico border in El Paso, Texas. Nate took the photo from the U.S. side of a Beautiful Girl on the Mexico side.
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Rose Marie Berger 