Christianity

Remembering Baghdad, 2003

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When God’s people hold onto the hope of reconciliation through the peculiar way of the cross, we interrupt the assumptions of a culture of violence. But the truth is that all of us—not just soldiers and police officers—are well practiced in the use of worldly power. Those of us who come from positions of privilege in society lean on the silent power of money and social norms, trusting in systems of control that have favored people who speak our language or share our skin color. At the same time, people who live with their backs against the wall resort to subversive acts of violence, carving out a space for survival by manipulating the fears those who seem to be “in control.”

Non-Violent Communication (NVC)

Do I Want It or Should It Happen?

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A few years ago I published an article in Tikkun magazine called Wanting Fully without Attachment. In that article (an excerpt from a book in progress called The Power of Inner Freedom), I describe the foundation of what I see as the spiritual path underlying the practice of Nonviolent Communication. It is a passionate and courageous path that calls on us to keep opening our hearts wider and wider and wider to all that deeply matters to us, while at the same time developing more and more capacity to accept the possibility of not having what we want.
In the absence of developing this capacity, we tend to go in one of two directions: either giving up on what we want as the only way we understand of what it means to let go of attachment, or removing ourselves personally from what we want by claiming it to be bigger than ourselves, outside ourselves, because it “should” happen.

Culture

The Problem With Black Churches in the Public Arena

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Are black churches the best (or even a reliable) mechanism for shaping public thought and policy, and for distributing public resources? Simply put, should black churches play a role in shaping the public arena and the public life of African Americans?

Culture

When Collaboration Gets Hard

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Collaboration is the purest antidote to either/or thinking because it rests on the faith that, in addition to a solution that works for all involved being possible, it is also potentially better. The biggest obstacle to collaboration is whatever commitment we continue to maintain to seeing our own needs as separate or even opposed to what someone else wants, even if we philosophically believe in collaboration. This is part of why I am so often suspicious when parents talk about “cooperation” as a need – it’s too easy for that to mean “getting my child to do what I want.”

Culture

Blame, Responsibility, and Care

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One of the core milestones on the path of consciousness transformation is the moment when we can fully integrate the radical awareness that our emotional responses to the world and to things that happen to us are never caused by another person. This awareness stands in stark contrast to our habitual speech, which states that we feel what we feel because of what someone else did. Instead, we learn, if we apply ourselves deeply to this practice, that our emotions are only caused by the meaning we assign to what someone did, and that meaning is generated from within us, not by the actions.

Empathy

The Hourglass: What I Learned About Empire in the West Bank

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It took three vehicles to get to Jenin. The first and last were shared taxis that played pop music the whole way; the one in the middle was a bus driven by a handsome and solemn man with a big, religious beard, whose television played music videos memorializing martyrs. If the West Bank is shaped like an hourglass, Jenin is at the top of the upper bulb, where the sand is when it’s full. Thousands of years ago, the dusty city was named after its gardens, but more recently Ariel Sharon called it a “hornet’s nest of terrorism.”

Culture

Myths of Power-With: # 3 – The Maligning of Hierarchy

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Like many people I know, I used to think of hierarchy as entirely synonymous with power-over, and of both as fundamentally wrong. It still takes conscious, mindful practice to remember that I no longer see it this way. Because it’s not fully integrated in me, I am delighted to be writing about this particular myth, imagining that my own faltering understanding might improve as a result, and that it will also make it easier for others to follow my thinking, as I am less likely to speak from the other side of a piece of personal evolution.

Culture

A Billion Rising: A Movement of Spirit

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Valentine’s Day is the perfect day to highlight V-Day and the global movement to end violence against women. My mother was the victim of violence in her childhood, as was I and so many people, both women and men, whom I know. If we really love women, children, and other vulnerable people, we will not accept the astronomical rates of violence in our world today.

art

Getting Centered: A Musing by Jim Burklo

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I don’t understand the mathematics behind the gomboc. But my intuition suggests that its shape has some kind of eternal, universal quality about it, as does a sphere or a cube. In some way, it must be a shape that describes gravity itself. It’s a shape that represents, but also actually embodies, one of the fundamental relationships forming the cosmos.
Perhaps also it evokes the shape of the soul, tumbled about by this rough world but created to right itself in relationship to its divine Source. Had Bodhidharma lived long enough, and meditated deeply enough, perhaps his body would have melted further into the shape of the gomboc. Then the daruma doll would need no extra weight at the bottom to get it to return to “center”!