Tikkun Daily Blog Archive (https://www.tikkun.org/tikkundaily/author/nicholatorbett/)
In Downtown Oakland on August 31, a group of Buddhists and interfaith allies sat in meditation, blocking the doors of the Marriott Hotel. The group was protesting the hotel hosting Urban Shield this week, a militarized police expo and SWAT Team training. Nichola Torbett shares her friend’s reflection of the demonstration.
I had the opportunity the other night to present Seminary of the Street and our West Oakland Reconciliation and Social Healing Project to a local West Oakland Neighborhood Crime Prevention Council (NCPC). It didn’t go particularly well, and it’s taken me a long time to figure out exactly why and what I could have done differently. I realize now that the whole framework of crime prevention as it is currently conceived is a framework of preserving and protecting me and mine—my life, my family, my house, my stuff, and in the best instances, my community, understood as the people I know and care about in the neighborhood. The good guys. There’s nothing surprising or unusual about this goal.
A few months ago, I signed up with the good folks at Tikkun to write a post on July 4th. I was hopeful at that time that I could write something encouraging, something hopeful, maybe something about interdependence. But yesterday, when I sat down to write, I found myself unable to. I had stopped off on my way home from visiting my sister and was drinking coffee in Union Square in San Francisco, my laptop open in front of me. The sunlight was gentle and clear.
Someone asked me recently why I have gravitated toward the church as a context for justice work. Is there something different, he asked, about doing social change work from a Christian perspective, or is it just convenient to work within a body of people who are already assembled? It’s a good question, and it’s one that both the Christian lectionary of recent weeks and my life have been speaking to in surprising and disorienting ways. As some of you know, I spent the first week of June at Duke Divinity School, taking part in a Christian summer institute on reconciliation. It started on a Monday night, and we began, appropriately enough, in a garden.
“For to survive in this dragon we call America, we have had to learn this first and most vital lesson – that we were never meant to survive. Not as human beings.” –Audre Lorde, in “The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action”
The first time I read Audre Lorde’s words, above, they exploded my understanding of my relationship to this life. At some level, I had known for a while that I HAD NOT survived, not intact, not as a fully alive person. Although I probably couldn’t have articulated all this back then, I knew that somewhere along the way, I had lost my connection to my body, my ability to connect at the deepest levels with other people, my sense of awe and wonder, my ability to hear constructive feedback from others without my world disintegrating, and much of my ability to feel.
“Obama is not a brown-skinned anti-war socialist who gives away free healthcare. You’re thinking of Jesus.”-John Fugelsang
Probably the most tweeted and Facebook-shared quote of the week, this quip from actor, comedian, and spiritual progressive John Fugelsang gives voice to a particularly ironic feature of the current political debate: Many of those who hurled insults at the legislators who voted for health care reform will, on this Good Friday, be mourning in church services over the death of a revolutionary healer whose uncompromising generosity and compassion got him killed. On Good Friday, Christians remember the crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth, an event that over the years has become so sentimentalized, personalized, and spiritualized that its political significance has been all but lost, except perhaps among those of us most desperate for hope of an alternative to the violence, exploitation, callousness, and domination of our own current social order. But then, Jesus has always spoken most powerfully to the nearly hopeless and desperate. In order to grasp the spiritual significance of the crucifixion, we must remember that Jesus was not some kind of airbrushed ancient guru surrounded at all time with soft lighting and an ethereal glow, or a friendly ancient Santa Claus figure who welcomed children onto his lap, but an iconoclastic, ragged, homeless healer and teacher known for inspiring prostitutes, criminals, lepers, and low-level government workers with a message of their own wholeness, essential sufficiency, and belovedness of God.
How many of us know what it is like to have someone love us enough to go all the way to the wall for us? I was thinking about this question yesterday, and about how it relates to our struggles for social justice. In the “praise and worship” part of our service, we sang “Everybody Ought to Know,” a song that often makes me squirm amidst our extremely diverse congregation, which draws people from a variety of faith traditions to walk together what we call the “Jesus path” (which doesn’t require that you identify as Christian). The lyrics go
Everybody oughtta know
Everybody oughtta know
Everybody oughtta know
Who Jesus is. Oh, he’s the lily of the valley.
Kathryn Bigelow’s film THE HURT LOCKER is an explosive device buried deep in a somnolent country. Marketed as an action movie (“As tense and compelling an action drama as you are likely to see all year,” claims critic Eric Snider in his review on films.com), this intense on-screen portrait of a three-man Explosive Ordnance Disposal unit in Iraq is actually a subtle critique of a deadening and unendurably trivial stateside culture, and it raises some questions we need to be asking ourselves. The film begins with this quote from the book WAR IS A FORCE THAT GIVES US MEANING by former NEW YORK TIMES war correspondent Christopher Hedges: “The rush of battle is a potent and often lethal addiction, for war is a drug.” In this sense, the film is about an addict, Sergeant William James, who gets his “meaning and purpose” fix by dismantling explosive devices at great risk to himself and the other two members of his unit. The almost unbearably tense dismantling scenes stand in stark contrast to the scene that struck me most in the film: a long, slow shot of one of those seemingly endless supermarket aisles of sugary cereals, where James, now back in the United States following the end of his tour of duty, has been sent by his wife on a quest for breakfast food.
I’m praying today for the “Bonhoeffer Four,” a group of four Christians who are playing a game of “hide and seek” on a military base in Australia in order to disrupt war games. Read the story here.
It was one of those moments that make or break meetings, the kind of moments that cause meeting facilitators to hold their breath and pray. We were “just” checking-in, just getting started with the gathering. The participants–all leaders of one sort or another within nonprofit social change organizations in the East Bay area of Northern California–were sharing what they’d been working on, thinking about, or struggling with in the month since the group’s first meeting: new programs, questions about the tone of a policy campaign, struggles to lead with integrity–that sort of thing. Then, near the end of the check-in round, one woman shared the depth of her agony as she struggled to follow God’s call within the institutional expectations of the organization for which she worked. There was something in the way she spoke, something in her refusal to tidy up her feelings, to be “upbeat” or casual or mater-of-fact, that plunged the group into new territory.