Peace - Justice - Orthodox Christianity

Political View of Syriac Orthodox Church

2010-09-16T21:17:00.000-04:00

This I Believe - Edward R. Murrow

2010-08-29T14:22:00.000-04:00

Edward R. Murrow, We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason...

2010-08-29T14:20:00.000-04:00

The Good Muslim

2010-08-24T12:50:00.002-04:00

Luke 10:25-37

A Bible professor approached Jesus, wishing to test his teaching. He asked, “Teacher, what should I do to obtain God’s life that never ends?” Jesus said, “What does it say in the Bible? How do you understand it?” The professor answered, “You will love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, all your strength and all your mind. And you will love your neighbor as yourself.” Jesus, impressed, replied, “This is correct. Live this out, and eternal life is yours.” But knowing he had not lived this out—and had no intention to—but wishing to justify himself, he said to Jesus, “But, really, who is my neighbor?” Jesus sighed and responded, “There was a man traveling from Washington D.C. to New York and some terrorists kidnapped him, stripped his clothes off and beat him half to death, leaving by the side of the road, helpless. Now it so happened that a Mennonite pastor passed by, and he saw him. But, thinking he was a homeless bum, he ignored him and went on his way. Then a Baptist worship leader drove by the same spot, but since he was in a hurry to make it on time to his worship service, he also ignored him and made it to the service on time. Then a Muslim drove by and saw the man laying on the side of the road. Compassion welled up in his heart and he stopped, got out his first aid kit, covered his wounds, put him in his car (getting blood all over the new seats) and drove him to the hospital. There he told the doctor, “If he doesn’t have any insurance, here’s my credit card number—just take it from my account.’ Now,” Jesus concluded, “Which of these was the neighbor to man attacked by terrorists?” The professor said, “The M- the one who had compassion on him.” Jesus smiled and looked him in the eye, “Now you do the same.”

Do terrorists and Muslims really belong in this story?

Actually, they do! The Greek word “lestes” is often translated “robber.” But it actually means one who uses violence to achieve economic or political change, so one might translate it either as “revolutionary” or, possibly, “terrorist.” The Samaritans, on the other hand, are those who were similar to Jews—they worshipped the same God and had many of the same stories. But they had different centers of worship and they considered each other heretics. So if the original Jewish victim became an American Christian, who would the Samaritan be but a faithful Muslim? As far as D.C. and New York for Jerusalem and Jericho… well, that might be stretching it a bit.

The Th- Word

At some point or another, everyone has to deal with theology. It sounds scary (especially if you’ve heard of such words as dispensationalism and superlapsarian), but really its pretty simple—theology is just what we can say about God. Of course, Jesus then had a lot to say about theology. But whenever he wanted to get to the basics, to talk about what is most important to God and most important about our relationship with God, he gets back to these two commands: Love God and love your neighbor. That’s as basic as it gets.

Just Do It

But whenever any professor of theology or dogmatician tries to talk about theology, they do it on very different terms from Jesus. They always speak of “a doctrine statement” or a “confession of faith”. They emphasize what it is we believe about God. And that’s fine, as far as it goes. But whenever Jesus spoke about theology, he spoke about action and relationship. Either he is speaking about what God does for us or what we do for God. Even his most basic statement “God is spirit” is followed by a command, “And those who worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth.” (John 4:24). According to Jesus, God isn’t just someone who sits in heaven—he’s a person who interacts with his people, “God with us.” And we aren’t to be people who observe God like we would a tv screen—we are to be active participants with our theology. If we just believe about God in our head, that isn’t enough—we’ve got to have faith in our hands and feet. And so Jesus talked about a faith that is enacted in obedience and an obedience that is informed by faith. Just like sex and conception, you can’t have one without the other.

Two Relationships of Theology

So when Jesus tells us about theology, he says that in every aspect of it, there are two relationships. Theology, he says, isn’t something that happens in our head, it is a connection between (at least) two beings. First, there is the relationship between the human and God. And this relationship is defined by “love”, so whatever else you can say about this relationship, it is supposed to be positive, and not simply duty-based. Yes, we already know that there is obedience involved—after all, Jesus gave us commands—but the relationship behind these commands aren’t just that of slave to master. Rather, we are to have a positive relationship with God, one in which we both benefit from the process.
The second relationship is that between human and human. This is what is really odd. I mean, Jesus is speaking about theology—what we can say about God—and the very thing that Jesus puts in there is our relationship with other people. What do other people have to do with God? Well, two things. First of all, God is very concerned about people. I mean, He made them, and he gave them the earth to rule (Psalm 8). And he claims to love them all (John 3:16). Also, in this command, God is trying to help us PUT God into every relationship. Jesus is saying, “in your relationship with your neighbor, God is commanding it to be beneficial.” Thus, the relationship between human and human becomes theological, because God is forcing himself into that relationship (Ah, I know people like that…)
But what we need to realize in this basic of theology, is that Jesus is putting God and other human beings in everything we do religiously, theologically and spiritually. We cannot have a spirituality without God, according to Jesus. And we cannot have a faith without other people. If we claim to be doing something for God and it does not benefit others, then we do not have Jesus’ faith. Even so, if we attempt to do something for others and do not include God, then we do not have Jesus’ faith. Jesus’ theology is completely balanced between these two relationships—all has to do with both God and other people. To exclude one is to exclude true spirituality.

What is love of neighbor?

Well, we’d like to say more about loving God, but our teaching here by Jesus doesn’t give us any more than that it is love and it is God and well, that’s all that’s said. But the rest of the passage does talk quite a bit more about the love of neighbor. What exactly does it say?
Love of Neighbor isn’t exclusive
The professor wanted to exclude from the command everyone he didn’t like. Maybe he wanted to exclude heretics, or those who didn’t live in his country, or sinners or folks who did him wrong. But when Jesus asked his question, he made the professor answer that it was the Muslim—the heretic, the sinner, the foreigner, the persecutor—who was the neighbor. This means that if he was a neighbor, then EVERYONE is a neighbor, without exception. So the command involves every single human relationship we are in, without exception.

Love of Neighbor is demanded

Secondly, in Jesus’ story, he gave examples of two “good Christians” who didn’t follow the love of one’s neighbor. Thus, in Jesus’ story, although these people had a certain kind of faith, it wasn’t the kind that God was looking for. Their faith was practical and very pious, but it was wrong-headed. Because they thought that the love of God excluded them from the love of neighbor, then they were okay was NOT okay for God. God demands that the people who love Him also love those around them.

Love of Neighbor is compassion

The word that most defines the love of one’s neighbor is “compassion”. The Greek word for this is “splachna” which literally means “the feeling in your guts.” In other words, love is the gut-wrenching feeling you get when you see someone who is in need. To love someone is to recognize their need and to have compassion for it. No matter how evil they are, no matter how wrong-headed, compassion prevails in our attitude towards another.

Love of Neighbor is practical benefit

Lastly, when Jesus spoke about loving one’s neighbor, he was saying that the love was practical. The Muslim didn’t just pray a positive prayer for the man lying on the road. He didn’t just think good thoughts. Rather, he went out of his way to help him out in whatever way he could. He sacrificed his plans, his money and his vehicle to assist the stranger in need. Love doesn’t just stay in the heart (or the guts), but it gets out the pocketbook and gets dirty. Without being of practical benefit, it isn’t really love.

source: http://www.nowheretolayhishead.org/thegoodmuslim.html

Worship Prayers

2010-08-23T12:19:00.001-04:00

1.
Come now, High King of heaven.
Come to us in flesh and bone.
Bring life to us who are weary with misery.
Bring peace to us who are overcome with weeping,
Whose cheeks are covered with bitter salt tears.
Seek us out, who are lost in the darkness of depression.
Do not forget us.
Have mercy on us.
Impart to us your everlasting joy,
So that we, who are fashioned by your hands,
May praise your glory.

-The Exter Book

2.
Lord, have mercy on the suffering.
Give food to those who are hungry;
Give clothing to those who lack;
Give shelter to those who shiver in cold;
Give love to orphans and outcast;
Give comfort to abused women;
Give redemption to the oppressed;
Give assistance to those ravaged by war.
May you teach them to grow toward you
In light of the hardships they suffer.
And to all of these may you give your gospel
That they might attain your kingdom
Where their sufferings will be exchanged

For the joy of your loving presence.

3.
Dear Lord
You suffered so much pain
In order to save us and all mankind from sin.
Yet we find it hard to bear even our minor pains.
Lord, because of your great pain
Have mercy on our little pains.
And if you wish us simply to bear our pains
Send us the patience
And the courage

That we lack.

4.
Let us all become a true and faithful branch
On the vine Jesus
By accepting Him in our lives
As it pleases Him to come:
As the Truth—to be told
As the Life—to be lived
As the Light—to be lighted
As the Way—to be walked
As the Love—to be loved
As the Joy—to be given
As the Peace—to be spread
As the Sacrifice—to be offered
In our families
In our neighborhood,
In our city,
And in our world.

-Missionaries of Charity

5.
O God
Since you created everything we can see, hear and touch,
May we constantly acknowledge your bounty.
And since you sustain everything we can see hear and touch,
May we always be mindful of your strength.
Thus may we walk the path of life
With a spirit of humility

Knowing that in all things we depend on you.

6.
Plant in our hearts, Lord,
Such fear of your power
That we always strive to live according to your laws.
Let us always remember
That through You alone
Comes joy and happiness
And that without You
There is only misery and despair.

And thus may we learn to obey you in all things.

7.
Whatever you make us desire for our enemies
Give it to them and give the same back to us.
You who are the true Light,
Lighten their darkness.
You who are the whole Truth,
Correct their errors.
You who are the incarnate Word,
Give life to their souls.
Tender Lord Jesus,
Let us not be stumbling blocks to them,
Nor rocks of offense.
We beg your mercy on our fellow slaves.
Let them be reconciled with you

And through you be reconciled to us.

8.
Lord, inspire us to read your Scriptures
And meditate upon them day and night.
We beg you to give us a real understanding of what we need,
That we in turn may put its precepts into practice.
Yet we know that understanding and good intentions
Are worthless,
Unless rooted in your graceful love.
So we ask that the words of the Scriptures may also be
Not just signs on a page

But channels of grace into our hearts.

9.
Holy Father
Allow us to be transformed into your mercy
And so be your living reflection.
May your mercy pass through our souls to our neighbors.
Help our eyes to be merciful
So we do not judge by appearances
But look for what is beautiful in our neighbor’s souls.
Help our ears to be merciful
So we give heed to our neighbor’s needs
Not being indifferent to their moanings.
Help our tongues to be merciful
So we never speak negatively of another
But have words of comfort for all.
Help our hands to be merciful
So that we do good to our neighbors
And take up ourselves the more difficult tasks.
Help our feet to be merciful
Overcoming our own weariness
Hurrying to assist our neighbors.
Help our hearts to be merciful
So we feel the sufferings of our neighbors
And refuse our hearts to no one.

May we be locked into the merciful heart of Jesus.

10.
O God,
We come seeking you in our worship together.
We come to you for truth
Because we are untrue.
We come to you for strength
Because we are so weak.
We come to you for wisdom
Because we are unwise.
Move in our midst;
Show us your truth, your strength, and your wisdom,

Through our Savior, Jesus Christ.

11.
Praise the One who hears the cry of the poor,
Who lifts up the weak and gives them strength.
Praise the One who feeds the hungry
And satisfies the longing of those in need.
Praise the One who holds with tenderness the orphan and widow

And gives the stranger a land and a home.

12.
Merciful and loving Father,
We ask you with all our hearts
To bountifully pour out on our enemies
Whatever will be for their good.
Above all, give them a sound and uncorrupt mind
With which they might honor and love you
And also love us.
Do not let their hating us turn to their harm.
Lord, we desire their amendment and our own.
Do not separate them from us by punishing them;
Deal gently with them and join them to us.
Help us to see that we have all been called to be citizens
Of the everlasting city;
Let us begin to love each other now

Because love is the end we seek.

13.
God of redemption and reconciliation—
You call us to live together in peace.
Look upon us and judge what we have done with our stewardship:
Witness the burned houses, meth labs, drug dealers, slumlords and prostitutes.
See the emptiness and the false promises
The alienation and despair
The injustice and oppressions
That bring these tragedies among us.
Heal this place,
God of mercy and forgiveness!
Send your love and grace upon all
Prostitutes, drug dealers, slumlords, loan sharks, bankers, lawyers and politicians.
Fill the emptiness that is the source of these sorrows
With love, peace, mercy and justice.

And give us courage so that we may show them your love.

14.
Grant me the grace of a broken heart.
Allow me to understand the damage my sin does
to my relationship to you
and to those around me.
Cause me to so deeply regret my unloving, impure actions
that I cry and shamefully moan my confession.
I pray that I would so long for righteousness
that I would do whatever it takes,
sacrifice whatever I have
so that You could create righteousness within me.
Let me never be so arrogant or insensitive
to see my unloving or impure actions
as acceptable or understandable or excusable.
Rather, I cry out to you—
make me righteous,
make me holy or
remake me.
Let your Spirit so infuse me with your faith,
love
and humility
that it become my lifeblood,
my driving power,
my whole existence.
Crucify my flesh

that I might be like your Son in every way

15.
Lord, help me face the truth about myself.
Help me hear my words as others hear them;
To see my face as others see me;
Let me be honest enough to recognize my impatience and conceit;
Let me recognize my anger and selfishness;
Give me sufficient humility to accept my own weaknesses for what they are.

Give me the grace to say, “I was wrong—forgive me.”

16.
God of Jesus,
Center of all existence,
King of the universe,
I desire you alone.
I resolve to be filled with nothing but You alone—
For there is contentment in no other.
Let me not desire You and earthly security,
but You alone.
Let me not desire You and material possessions,
but You alone.
Let me not desire You and entertainments,
but You alone.
Let me not desire You and human love,
but You alone.
Let me not desire You and status,
but You alone.
May You be my inheritance,
You my sufficiency,
You my restoration,
You my rest.
Your kingdom,
your righteousness,
your will,
your glory,
Your praise,
your holiness,
your promises,
your love—
Your satisfaction only may I desire.

Please, exchange all my desires to be a pure desire for You.

17.
O God, our true Life,
to know You is life
to praise you is the joy and happiness of the soul.
We praise and bless and adore You,
We worship You, I glorify You.
We give thanks to You for Your great glory.
We humbly beg You to live with us,
To reign in us
To make our hearts a holy temple,
A fit habitation for your divine majesty.

-Augustine

18.
May God bless us with discomfort
at easy answers, half truths, and superficial relationships
so that we may live deep within your heart
May God bless us with anger
at injustice, oppression and exploitation of people
so that we may work for justice, freedom and peace
May God bless us with tears
to shed for those who suffer pain, rejection, hunger and war
so that we may reach out your hand to comfort them and
to turn their pain into joy
And may God bless us with enough foolishness
to believe that you can make a difference in the world
so that we can do what others claim cannot be done
to bring justice and kindness to all our children and the poor.

- A Franciscan Benediction

source: http://www.nowheretolayhishead.org/worshipprayers.html

Down and Out Leadership

2010-08-23T12:10:00.000-04:00

Luke 22:24-30

The disciples had an argument, there at the Last Supper. They were debating which of them would be the most important ruler beside Jesus when His kingdom comes. Jesus calmly said to them, “It is presidents and kings of the world that are concerned about authority and power. These wield great authority over all men and everyone must call them ‘gracious’, as in ‘gracious lord,’ or “Wow, you are the greatest thing since Oprah”. But if you want rule in my kingdom, you can’t act like that. The ones who will have the greatest authority in my kingdom must prepare themselves for it by acting like the least important. If you want to be important, then be like a waiter. In a restaurant, who is in charge, the waiter or the customer? Isn’t the customer who orders the waiter around, telling him what to get and how much and sending something back because it isn’t quite right? And doesn’t the waiter have to run around, doing the bidding of the customer? Now look at me—I am the waiter. I am here to serve others, not to tell others how to serve me.

“Look, guys, you are great already. You have stayed with me during my most difficult days, though all the struggles and trials. Because of this, you will rule with me because the Father has given me His kingdom to rule. So you will be feasting at my side—even as we are feasting here!—in my kingdom. And then I will give you authority to rule all of God’s people. Each of you will sit on a throne, and you will rule the twelve nations of Israel.

Everybody Wants To Rule The World…Sometimes

Well, this is kinda embarrassing. After all, Jesus is the one who is always talking about lowliness, about humility. Yet, here He is, encouraging arrogance. You see, even though he is correcting the disciples about some things, he is in agreement with them about the thing most of us are uncomfortable with: It is a good thing to want to be in charge of the world.

Most of us feel that this is inappropriate. After all, its just too lofty of a goal, and it is straight hubris—blatant pride to think that we should rule the world. That’s God’s job, isn’t it?

Well, in fact, its not. God gave the job over of ruling the world to human beings way back in Genesis 1. It is our job and we should want to do the job that God has given us. So when Jesus answers their question, He doesn’t deny that we should want to rule the world. Frankly, we should.

And even if ruling the world seems distasteful to you, we all have a hint of it in ourselves. We all want to be respected by the people who know us. And we all want a certain measure of control to make things “right” over our lives. And we get angry when we see that something isn’t right, either in our lives or in the lives of those around us. These are God-given characteristics to everyone in humanity so that we can do the job that God gave us, namely, to rule the world.

The Wile E. Principle of Leadership

The problem is that we take the characteristics that God has given us and go too far with it. Waaaaay too far. God gave us anger at injustice and we have turned it into anger against anyone who irritates us for any little reason, without regard to what is really right. God gave us the desire to make things right and we have turned this into control-freakishness or harshly punishing those who are different than us. God gave us the desire to be respected and we turn this into a hunger for fame or a fear of negative responses. This is not the kind of world-leadership Jesus is looking for.

So when Jesus responded to his disciples, he didn’t correct their desire for world leadership. In fact, He affirmed it. He said that they would be world leaders in the kingdom. And desiring it is a good thing. What he needed to correct was their methods in achieving it.

Most of us think of obtaining leadership like Wile E. Coyote. Wile E. is on one cliff and he is running as fast as he can to the other side, but he doesn’t realize that there is a canyon between him and the other cliff-top. So he runs out.. and there he is, standing on thin air. And then he falls— Bam!— at the bottom of the canyon and we next see him wrapped in hospital gauze.

Even so, we often think that leadership—as well as wealth and popularity— is a straight line. If we want it, we just go get it. And although we must work hard to achieve success, we will get it if we just take it by the throat. But what we don’t realize is that there is a huge canyon between us and our goal. And if we just try to achieve success in a straight line, then we will be the one in hospital gauze.

The Power Broker

Jesus helps us realize that the only one who can give us success, or power or popularity or wealth— in any positive, permanent way—is God. He is the one ultimately in charge of all things and He gives these things to whom He wills. And while the power-hungry may be in charge now, it will not be that way forever. God will come down to kick out the power hungry and instead welcome a different kind of person.

But to obtain that kind of position, we have to be that different kind of person. God is looking for the lowly, the Anawim, to be in charge of the world. God can’t have the control freaks, the judgmental, the quick to anger or the anxious be in charge of the world. So for world leadership, God is looking for a the lowly and righteous. For the Anawim. God is looking for the people who will act as Jesus said they should—People who are repentant of their sins; people who will sacrifice their life, family and possessions to love Jesus; people who will endure in Jesus through persecution. People who will set aside their comfort in order to serve others. God is looking for faithful disciples.

Jesus Leadership

But not just disciples. Different disciples will obtain different levels of leadership in the final kingdom. And those in charge won’t just be the good disciple—the whole world will be filled with those. But the world leaders will be those who have certain characteristics of leadership

To be an anawimic leader, we have to follow certain principles of leadership now:

Hang out with the down and out—To be a leader in Jesus’ methodology, we cannot be shy of having the outcast be our friends and companions.

Live like the down and out—To be in charge, we have to remain lowly, not seeking wealth or power, but constantly giving to those in need. A godly leader doesn’t think how he can benefit from a resource, but how the whole community can benefit from it.

Get used to taking orders—To be in charge, we have to listen to other’s needs and act on them, rather than our own ambitions. When we see someone’s need, we take that as an order from them to act. If we act in accordance with the other’s need, then we are living out Jesus’ leadership.

Lead by example—It isn’t enough to tell others to do good, to repent, to live purely—we have to do it ourselves. We must show the life of Jesus and not just teach it to others.

Encourage, don’t demand—To be Jesus leader is to be gentle and to recognize other’s freedom to do as they please. If we give others freedom and opportunity to live for God, then they can have a relationship with God. But if we end up controlling others, they have no relationship with God, only us, which defeats the purpose of trying to get people to live for Jesus.

So to be a leader in Christ is to be the Anawim. It is to live as a waiter, a servant of others, only living to act for others and not for our own ambition. If we attempt to get our own ambition, then we end up like Wile E.— Falling to our doom.

source: http://www.nowheretolayhishead.org/downandoutleadership.html

The Recyclable and the Trash

2010-08-22T12:08:00.000-04:00

Matthew 25:31-46

When the Emperor of God descends from heaven displaying his power, having all the angels of heaven surrounding him, then he will rule from his throne and every person on earth will be collected and will stand before His throne. He will judge them all and will divide them up as a rag picker will separate the useful from the trash. And the recyclable he will stand at his right, and the trash he will stand at his left.

The King will proclaim to the right, “I welcome you, those whom my Father speaks well of. You may now possess the Kingdom—my Kingdom—which has been made ready for you, the righteous of humanity, from the creation of the world. You are worthy of this, because of your assistance to me. I was hungry in your neighborhood, and you gave me food. I was parched, passing by your dwelling, and you offered me some water. I was an immigrant and outcast and you let me in your house for the night. I was walking around freezing, and you give me your coat. I was sick and you nursed me to health. I was in prison and you came and met my needs. You listened to me when I was lonely. You kept me safe when I was fearful. You gave me work when I was in need and paid me at the end of the day.” These righteous will answer the Emperor thus, “Our Lord, we thank you. But are you sure you are speaking of us? Did we really see you hungry and feed you? Did we see you needing a drink and gave you something? When did we see you—you of all people-- an outcast and bring you into our house? When were you freezing and we gave you clothes or a blanket? And when, my Lord, when were you in prison and we had opportunity to visit you?”

And the Emperor will answer them, “Listen carefully—whatever you did it to these disciples of mine—even these lowly ones— you did the same to me.”

Then the Emperor will turn to his other side. “You will leave me, you whom the Father curses with his every breath. You will be cast into the punishment which was created for Satan and his messengers. Because I came to your town, hungry, and you told me to get a job. I came to your street, parched with thirst, and you wouldn’t talk to me. I was an immigrant, a homeless person, a mentally ill person on the street, a traveler and you refused me entrance at your doorstep. I was shivering in the cold and you passed by me, although you had closets full of coats, shelves full of extra blankets you weren’t using. I became bed-ridden and disabled and you were too busy with your own life to assist me, or even check in on me. I was in prison, through no fault of my own, and in a locked mental health facility and in the state hospital and you didn’t even write to me, let alone visit me. You cannot live with me in my kingdom, since you did not share your life with me when I was with you.”

They will respond, “But Great Lord, I’m sure you weren’t hungry or thirsty! And you couldn’t have been an outcast or freezing. You were never in our neighborhood—I would remember! And you, being sick—I don’t think so. And you would never have been in prison or a mental health hospital. And if you were, we would have been there for you, serving you, Lord!” The Emperor answers, “Listen carefully, inasmuch as you did not serve these lowly ones, you did not serve me. I was there, through my disciples, as crazy as they seemed, as insignificant as they seemed, and you didn’t let them in your life. Even so, I don’t want you in mine.” And they will leave the Lord and go to eternal punishment. But those who acted with justice lived with the Lord eternally.

A Parable or the Real Thing?

Some think of this passage as a parable. But other parables don’t take place all in future tense, nor give such a clear, plain description of judgment day. Yes, it uses the simile of the sheep and the goats for a single verse, but the text quickly forgets it and gets back to the stark, though spiritual, reality. The reality is this: Jesus is coming back to earth to establish a world-wide takeover. When he is emperor of the world, then he will put every person in front of him, and they will all be judged. There are many references to Jesus’ judging the world (John 5, II Corinthians 5, I Corinthians 3, to name a few), but this is the most detailed description.

Service and Salvation

Like all passages about judgment, it has a clear message of what one must do to be saved on this day. And if we don’t get it the first time, then we can hear it again. And again. Four times in all. What do we do to be saved on the final day? We must serve the poor. Anyone in need, we work for them. It is interesting that it doesn’t talk about giving them money. Rather it talks about using what small resources we have and directly providing their needs. So the saved one, when he sees someone hungry, he feeds them. She will see someone homeless and house them. They know of someone sick and they nurse them to health. It is interesting about the section about those in prison. Those in prison in the ancient world are not granted food or other care. It is expected that their family and friends would do that. So the one who really assists the other is the one who feeds them, cares for them when no one else would.
Even as Jesus before focused on giving to the poor or repenting or being persecuted, now he shows that the one item that is significant on the judgment day is service. And this isn’t service in general. Rather it is free provision to those in need, directly to their area of need, without expecting anything in return.

Faithfulness to the absent king

But haven’t we always learned that salvation is based on faith, not works? Doesn’t this passage teach just the opposite. Actually, this passage teaches what the whole New Testament affirms—that we obtain our salvation by acting on our faith in Jesus. If, this passage teaches, you believe in Jesus, then you will help out those who are disciples of Jesus when they are in need. Because if we help out the disciples of Jesus in need, then we are, by proxy, helping Jesus himself.
The message of the Sheep and the Goats is that the King is absent for right now, and how we treat his servants is how we will be treated. If we don’t invite the people of Jesus in our lives by feeding, clothing, housing and caring for them, then Jesus will not want us in His life, in the kingdom of God. But if we welcome the people of Jesus in need, then we will be welcomed by Jesus into his kingdom.
Some might say, “Is this passage only talking about the church? Isn’t Jesus talking about all the poor?” The passage says specifically of the people Jesus calls his “brothers”. In Matthew, Jesus’ “brothers” are specifically those who are his disciples who do God’s will (Matthew 12:48-50). So it is especially for the church. And it is in agreement with Matthew 10:40-42 which says that those who offer hospitality, “even a cup of cold water” to Jesus’ prophets, righteous people and disciples “because he is a disciple” then they will obtain their reward from God—that is, entrance in the kingdom. This does not mean that helping the homeless and needy in general isn’t a benefit. But it may or may not be an act of faith. Helping Jesus’ disciples specifically is an act of faith.

The Big Test

This passage certainly tells us to help the poor, which many in the church want to do anyway. But it has a special challenge to the church today. Often the church sees itself as being specifically middle class. Yes, they say, there are certainly Christians who are persecuted all throughout the world. But the church often assumes that the “crazy man” pretending to pray on the corner isn’t a “real” Christian. The homeless man who used to be a drug addict and can’t get off of the street can’t be a Christian. Those who have to beg for their food aren’t real believers. So when we help the homeless or the mentally ill, we assume that these are people who need to be saved. As a contrast, Jesus himself says that these believers on the street, rather than only being a marginal Christian are the center of the faith. We will be judged on our every response to these folks, more than any other act. Every act we do is important, but how we respond to the cold, the poor, the helpless, the mentally ill, is how we will be treated by Jesus on the final day.

Universal Determination

There is one last shock in this passage. Everyone goes through this judgment. Not just believers, not just non-believers. Everyone. Without exception. And Jesus isn’t having everyone show their faith statements they signed before they enter the judgment hall. Or their church affiliation. Rather, he is ONLY looking at people’s response to the helpless disciple. Thus, we will all be surprised as to who will be on the one side or the other on Judgment Day. There will be some pretty immoral folks on the side the Father speaks well of. And there will be some people we thought of as “living saints” on the rejected side with the demons. All of it based on whether one is helping the helpless disciple. Our whole eternal life could be based on one time of us either saying “no” or “yes” to a Christian in need, depending on how many opportunities we receive.

How we treat the lowly disciple is how we will be treated by God

source: http://www.nowheretolayhishead.org/therecyclableandthetrash.html

Society of Christian Socialists

2010-07-11T09:55:00.000-04:00

Society of Christian Socialists: "The Society of Christian Socialists (SCS) is an association of persons who hold that the Socialist project is a fulfillment of the Christian vision. Christian Socialists are those for whom the message of Jesus Christ is both the salvation of the human race and an instruction to begin building the Kingdom on earth. Christian Socialism has its foundation in the New Testament book of Acts, 2:44-45 and 4:32-35."

Home — Center for Deployment Psychology

2010-05-24T13:53:00.000-04:00

Home — Center for Deployment Psychology: "The Center for Deployment Psychology (CDP) trains military and civilian behavioral health professionals to provide high-quality deployment-related behavioral health services to military personnel and their families."

your neighbor does not love you

2010-05-16T11:29:00.001-04:00

When Your Neighbor Does Not Love You

Maria C. Khoury, Ed. D.

Here in the Holy Land, as Christians we should be in the forefront of non-violent action since one of our very basic commandments is not just to love our neighbor but love our enemy also. We know this directly from Christ who always forgave others no matter what. However, in a high conflict area like the West Bank, this is easier said than done.

It’s a struggle for Christians, Muslims and Jews to get along. First, the only Jewish people we know are the Israeli soldiers. And truly, it takes all of Christ’s love in your heart to love people who are always pointing guns at you. We are completely segregated and forbidden to go anywhere near any settlement with their extreme security of the Israeli army. Settlers can carry arms and of course Palestinians are not allowed; not that I would want to carry a gun that most likely would end up being used against me. But the first personal settler attack I have survived was as early as 1984 on one of my earlier visits to Palestine. Settler attacks are nothing new but it seems that the world does not hold Israel accountable for any of its injustices. Therefore I will keep reminding all my friends of the necessity to end Israel’s violations of international law, including ending its illegal occupation and building of settlements.

These last few months are more violently intense than ever because the settlers do not like the message coming from President Obama’s administration. And I do believe they have to show the world, “who is boss.” The more talk about freezing the settlements and the more attacks we have on Palestinians. Twenty-five Palestinians have been injured by settlers in one week alone. Last month, a young Palestinian-Christian father of three boys from Taybeh was attacked while driving his car on his way home from the Kalandia checkpoint. The rocks that hit his head required him to have surgery and stay in the intensive care for four days. The night before this attack when I was also showered with stones at 9pm at the Taybeh Municipality, I was simply grateful I did not end up in the hospital.

I was feeling very low in spirits and I heard this very remarkable broadcast on “Come Receive the Light” about Prophet Job and I have come to accept that bad things might just keep happening to good people. But it reassured me of the power of media and the internet to help inspire me since I am so isolated. Thus, I will continue to encourage others in non-violent ways to speak out against the injustices we are experiencing from the illegal settlements all around us that are simply closing us in and hoping we disappear as Palestinian villages.

On May 15th, Israel will celebrate another glorious independence day and Palestine will mourn 62 years of the Nakbeh, the catastrophe of 1948 and the total destruction of more than 500 Palestinian villages to make way for a Jewish homeland. Since 1967 when Israel also took over the West Bank it has been building illegal Israeli settlements to transfer as much of its Jewish population over the “Green Line” as Israel proper is referred to with the 1967 boarders in the desire to make a Greater Israel.

This week, Israel also celebrated Jerusalem Day and the gift to Palestinians for this celebration of wanting to make Jerusalem 100% Jewish is that two new illegal settlements will be build behind the American Consulate office where the YMCA is located in East Jerusalem and in the Old City near Al-Aqsa Mosque. In the mean time, the ongoing onslaught on throwing out Palestinians from their Jerusalem homes of 30 years on the Sheikh Jarrah area and in Silwan has intensified.

What is of great amazement to me in “the only democracy in the Middle East” is that this month the Israeli government is proposing a new bill which will make it possible to outlaw the important human rights groups in Israel among the organizations mentioned are Doctors for Human rights.

In these very tense times and with the violence that will never stop, I can only think that when my neighbor does not love me that I simply have to Love my Lord and My God with all my heart, mind and soul so I can keep a little inner peace. I will try as hard as possible to find peaceful ways to resist the discriminatory policies and injustices. Intense prayer around the world is needed because the settlers have gone crazy and do not want a free Palestine in 22% of historic Palestine which currently they have colonized over half of this small amount being discussed for a two state solution. “Hear my prayer, O Lord, And let my cry come to You.” Psalm 102.

Persecution of Christians in Nineveh/Iraq May, 2 / 2010

2010-05-11T17:33:00.000-04:00

The original Mother's Day proclamation.

2010-05-09T08:05:00.000-04:00

This proclamation was written by Julia Ward Howe in 1870, in reaction to
the carnage of the Civil War, was the first call for a national holiday
to celebrate motherhood. Below is its text in full.

Arise, then, women of this day!

Arise, all women who have hearts,
Whether our baptism be of water or of tears!

Say firmly:
"We will not have great questions decided by irrelevant agencies,
Our husbands will not come to us, reeking with carnage, for caresses and
applause.
Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn
All that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience.
We, the women of one country, will be too tender of those of another country
To allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs."

From the bosom of the devastated Earth a voice goes up with our own.
It says: "Disarm! Disarm! The sword of murder is not the balance of
justice."
Blood does not wipe out dishonor, nor violence indicate possession.
As men have often forsaken the plough and the anvil at the summons of war,
Let women now leave all that may be left of home for a great and earnest
day of counsel.

Let them meet first, as women, to bewail and commemorate the dead.
Let them solemnly take counsel with each other as to the means
Whereby the great human family can live in peace,
Each bearing after his own time the sacred impress, not of Caesar,
But of God.

In the name of womanhood and humanity, I earnestly ask
That a general congress of women without limit of nationality
May be appointed and held at someplace deemed most convenient
And at the earliest period consistent with its objects,
To promote the alliance of the different nationalities,
The amicable settlement of international questions,
The great and general interests of peace.

Home Banished Veterans

2010-05-02T14:26:00.000-04:00

Home Banished Veterans: "Thousands of U.S. Military Veterans are facing deportation.
Please help us stop this injustice and fight for the men who bravely fought for us."

Make peace, not war

2010-04-30T08:55:00.000-04:00

by Fr. Philip LeMasters
There is no question that we Orthodox Christians would prefer to make peace instead of war, but even in the context of Christian ethics, it is difficult to shift the categories of discussion from “just war” to “just peace.” Unfortunately, like so many others, we too are in the habit of giving more serious attention to the question of when war is justified, or can be tolerated, than to the moral imperative of building a peace among nations and peoples that is based on justice and protects human beings from harm. The well-established centrality of peace within Orthodoxy provides the proper context for discourse about pacifism, just-war theory, the crusade, and other stances on the use of military force. Rather than abstract moral theories, these orientations point to the tensions experienced by those who seek to bring peace in our fallen world. Orthodoxy does not have an abstract theory of peace so much as a commitment to the praxis of peace, a dynamic project which is compatible with the vision espoused by advocates of “just peace.”
It is well established that, in contrast to churches in the West, Orthodoxy does not have an explicit just-war theory there is certainly no “crusade” ethic and sees the taking of life in war, even in wars that might be regarded as necessary and unavoidable, as a tragic, broken undertaking for which repentance is required. The Church does not require pacifism in the sense of renouncing all use of violence or force, though the normative Christ-like response to evil is to turn the other cheek and forgive. (The root meaning of the word “pacifism” is peace, from the Latin word pax.) However, while the Church views war as an unsuitable undertaking for the clergy or members of monastic communities, participation in war is not canonically prohibited for the laity.
While peace is the norm for human relations, the imperfect peace that sometimes exists among us is sustained by arrangements of political, social, economic and military power. Rather than condemn these dynamics, our challenge is to do what we can to make peace within the context of the realities we face.
Orthodox Christians should embody a true pacifism which engages the dynamics of human society in order to work for a peace based on justice that is pleasing to God. Our concern should not be whether the use of violence is ever acceptable, but whether we are doing the things that make for peace. The question is: Are we living as the peacemakers who will be blessed in God’s Kingdom?
Orthodox Christianity rejects the Gnostic view of salvation as escape from the world, as well as Manichean dualism. These ancient heresies are not dead museum pieces from the early centuries of Christian thought. They represent enduring temptations which are especially powerful when we consider the relationship between the “peace from above” and the broken realities of politics and international relations. We will not bear witness to God’s peace by fleeing to an imaginary, disembodied realm of spirituality that ignores the suffering of those who bear the image of God or by demonizing the less appealing dimensions of humanity’s collective life. Instead, our calling is to offer all dimensions of our creaturely reality to the Holy Trinity as best we can for blessing, healing, and transformation.
In the Divine Liturgy, the many petitions for peace reflect a holistic vision of a world participating in God’s peace. Immediately after the priest’s opening exclamation of the blessedness of the Kingdom of the Holy Trinity, the deacon exhorts the people to pray in peace. The biblical roots of this peace are in the Hebrew shalom, understood not merely as the absence of war but as freedom from fear and threats. In the New Testament, peace becomes a synonym for salvation.
The first petitions of the Liturgy are for our participation in God’s peace and salvation, including “the peace of the whole world” and “the union of all.” We pray for government authorities, healthful seasons, abundance of the fruits of the earth, and peaceful times, as well as deliverance from all tribulation, wrath, danger, and necessity. We pray for peace both as the absence of war and strife, and as God’s eschatological gift of salvation.
It would be possible to identify many other examples from the Liturgy which indicate the centrality of peace to Orthodox views of both worship and salvation. It is enough, however, to note that in the liturgical center of our faith, we pray for a peace characterized by justice for all nations and peoples, including those with political and military power as well as those who suffer from the abuse of such power. We pray for God’s peace and blessing upon all the peoples of the world in the circumstances they face. We look forward to the fulfillment of this peace in the reign of God, a peace the Church already experiences in the Liturgy.
The peace we seek is not removed from the challenges posed by nationalism, weapons of mass destruction, the scarcity of natural resources, and the many other geopolitical and ideological causes of conflict among peoples and nations. To separate God’s peace from these challenges would be to succumb to an almost Gnostic temptation to escape the creaturely realities of life in God’s world for a salvation that concerns only a privileged few who somehow rise above it. As Father John Chryssavgis has noted, “Christians ought to show an interest in, and zeal for, the fundamental needs of people, and not despise them from the heights of their spirituality. There can be no justification for those who find a way of sitting comfortably on the cross as if in an armchair. The life of a Christian is lived out on a cross in a creative tension between the world as we have it now and the world as we hope and pray for it.”
The peace of Christ cannot be identified with any political arrangement or social order. Jesus Christ is our peace, our salvation, our healing, our fulfillment and our transformation as we become partakers of the Divine Nature and share by grace in the Divine Energies of the Holy Trinity. Theosis is a dynamic process of sharing more fully in the eternal life, blessedness, and peace of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. We participate in Christ’s healing and divinization of our humanity in His Body, the Church, by the power of the Holy Spirit. Through ongoing ascetical struggle and the nourishment of the Holy Mysteries, we grow in the peace of our Lord and His Kingdom.
St. Justin Martyr taught that all who use reason are, in a sense, Christians, for the Word of God is the source of all truth. Whenever we see harmony, justice, forgiveness, respect for human dignity, generosity, and care for the weak in the common life of humanity of, we witness a blessing of the Lord and catch a glimpse of the peace of Christ. Orthodox Christians should work for and welcome even broken and obscure manifestations of “just peace” which fall short of the fullness of the eschatological Kingdom of God.
In the Divine Liturgy, we pray for such mundane matters as good weather, the well-being of travelers and the salvation of captives, our deliverance from danger and necessity, and for the peace of the whole world. These petitions indicate that there is no dimension of creation for which God’s blessing and peace are irrelevant. If we see no connection between Christ’s peace and our response to present social conditions, we will find ourselves wondering why we pray for peace and blessing upon people who suffer from violence and injustice in the world as we know it. If the “peace from above” has no relationship at all to present wars, such as those in Iraq and Afghanistan, it is hard to see why Orthodox would involve themselves in any way in contemporary political and social debates.
In the account of the last judgment in the 25th chapter of St. Matthew’s gospel, Jesus Christ identified Himself with the most miserable of human beings. The righteous in the parable were rewarded for caring for the Lord in “the least of these my brethren,” even though they did not know that they were thereby serving Jesus. Surely, those who bring even a small measure of peace to suffering human beings today also serve Him in some way. Those who pray “for the peace from above and the salvation of our souls” must accept the challenges of working for a more just peace for the living icons of Christ in the less than ideal situations in which they find themselves. If we do not, we risk identifying ourselves with those condemned for ignoring the sufferings of Jesus in their wretched neighbors.
Advocates of just peacemaking seek to discover methods of peacemaking that can make a difference in the “real world” and are in accord with the Gospel for example, supporting cooperative conflict resolution, nonviolent direct action, sustainable economic growth, the development of grassroots peacemaking groups, a reduction of offensive weapons, acknowledgment of responsibility for injustice, and seeking forgiveness.
This approach calls for a variety of social, political, and international institutions to be proactive in building a world in which the causes of violence are mitigated. It is not an idealistic or utopian movement that dreams of a peace so far removed from the lives of peoples and nations that we cannot imagine how it will be achieved or sustained.
This perspective does not necessarily rule out the use of military force, either as an intervention to protect human rights or in national self-defense, but it would place the use of force within the larger context of sustaining a peace based upon justice, rather than within the moral trajectory of the just war. There is a preference in this school of thought for multinational discernment as to when the responsibility to protect a population from grave harm should be invoked, as well as for “collective, multilateral intervention” to guard against “self-interested interventions thinly cloaked in humanitarianism.” Such an approach addresses a weakness identified by Fr. Stanley Harakas in just-war theory, the tendency to rationalize “that ‘our side’ is always justified, thus allowing the legitimization of military exploits, precisely and paradoxically as it seeks to reduce the excesses of war.”
Advocates of “just peace” do not, however, envision simply an internationalist interpretation of just-war theory. A representative collection of essays by scholars in this field includes nine chapters on nonviolent practices that foster peace and only one that focuses on a multinational responsibility for military intervention. [Just Peacemaking, Glen Stassen, ed., The Pilgrim Press, 2008]
Since we pray for peace for the whole world and everyone in it, and uphold our Lord’s love and forgiveness as the ultimate example of how to respond to evil and to our enemies, Orthodox Christians should find much common ground with the proponents of the “just peace.” Surely, our faith calls us to give far more attention to the question of how to establish and maintain peaceful and just societies than it does to justify, or even tolerate, any instance of war.
Fr. Harakas appeals to the doctrine of “synergy” to emphasize the obligation of Orthodox to cooperate with the work of others in bringing peace, and especially in addressing the economic and social injustices that often amount to “the real causes of war.” He calls Orthodox to “organize ourselves in realistic, practical, and down-to-earth projects for social renewal. Where there is less pain, less suffering, where there is less hunger, the likeliness of war is lessened.” In taking such action, we are to manifest “the theology of the transfiguration” as we help others and ourselves see more clearly the spiritual significance of these projects for peace. Fr. Chryssavgis agrees that “we can and must look to the real causes of war which are to be found in the economic and social injustices abounding in our world” [and] respond to them in a spiritually responsible way.
This stance also places the possible use of military force to maintain peace in its proper context. Questions of the necessity of war find their setting in the moral trajectory of establishing, at least imperfectly, the peace for which we pray and in protecting vulnerable populations. Fr. John McGuckin places Canon 13 of St. Basil the Great in precisely such a context, arguing that he responded with oikonomia to soldiers defending “Christian borders from the ravages of pagan marauders” for “passive non-involvement betrays the Christian family (especially its weaker members who cannot defend themselves but need others to help them) to the ravages of men without heart or conscience to restrain them.” In this context, “a limited and adequate response … will restrict the bloodshed to a necessary minimum,” even as repentance is required for soldiers who kill.
His Eminence Metropolitan George of Mount Lebanon strikes a similar note of realism about the Byzantines, for “The Empire, though it was becoming Christianized, could not simply abolish the army. The Empire was not yet the Kingdom of God. It had to defend itself against the barbarians.” The Empire could not avoid defensive wars; the acceptance of the necessity of such wars indicated that “pacifism as a theory was no longer known in the Christian East.”
I find it more fitting to say that Orthodoxy does not have so much a theory on pacifism, just-war, or the crusade as we have a dynamic commitment to the praxis of peace. In every dimension of life, we are called to embody the way of Christ as fully as we can in the circumstances that we face: to forgive enemies; to work for the reconciliation of those who have become estranged; to overcome the divisions of race, nationality, and class; to care for the poor; to live in harmony with others; and to use the created goods of the world for the benefit of all. Our advocacy for peace must not stop with praying the litanies of the Liturgy. We may pray these petitions with integrity only if we offer ourselves as instruments for God’s peace in the world, only if we live them out in relation to the challenges to peace that exist among peoples and nations.
In this context, the Church may at times tolerate war as a lesser evil, a tragic necessity for the defense of justice and the preservation of the imperfect, yet still imperative, peace that is possible among the nations and peoples of the world in given situations. But even the use of force to protect people from genocide falls short of the fullness of the peace of Christ, for such projects involve soldiers in the work of death and open them to the terrible passions inevitably inflamed by war. Soldiers who shed blood, even in the most humanitarian military intervention, stand in need of the spiritual therapy of repentance. Still, such military interventions may be necessary practical steps for building a peace that protects the weak from aggression and abuse.
In this light, we recall that St. Basil’s Canon 13 is not an abstract theoretical statement on the morality of warfare. Instead, it concerns the restoration to full participation in the sacramental life of the Church of those who have killed in war. It is a pastoral statement on the appropriate guidance given to those whose souls have been damaged by doing what was necessary to protect their fellow Christians and subjects from destruction. Patriarch Polyeuktos used the canon in the tenth century to reject an imperial appeal to recognize as saints Byzantine soldiers who died in battle. Not an abstract theoretical statement, this application of the canon responded to a challenge to the Church’s stance on the spiritual significance of warfare. For even a necessary war is not a crusade; the imperfect peace sustained by war is not identified with the peace of the Kingdom. And canon law continues to prohibit clergy and monastics from serving in the military, holding government office, and shedding blood.
Orthodoxy does not present the world with abstract theories of pacifism, just war, or the crusade. Instead, it calls the members of the Church to work for the practical realization of a peace based on justice for all the peoples of the world. This dynamic practice of peace is the true pacifism which is incumbent upon all those who pray “for the peace from above and the salvation of our souls.” Orthodox Christians have a moral imperative to support practices and structures that build a “just peace” in the world as we know it, even though this peace falls short of the fullness of God’s eschatological reign.
While military intervention may be tragically necessary to sustain a just peace in given circumstances, such uses of force fall short of normative Christ-like ways of responding to evil. An advantage of “just peacemaking” over just-war theory is that it places discussion of any possible use of force within the moral trajectory of sustaining peace rather than within that of justifying war. The advocates of “just peace” give much greater attention to nonviolent practices that sustain peace than to discourse about the morality of war. The same should be true of the Orthodox peace witness. Though the historical distinctions between pacifism, the crusade, and just-war theory remain quite relevant for many other Christian bodies, none of them fits perfectly with Orthodoxy.
Perhaps that lack of fit is an indication that the Church’s prayer, witness, and work are not fundamentally about war, but about a peace which is not yet fully present in this world. The “peace from above and the salvation of our souls” are not yet wholly realized. In a corrupt world in which most peoples and nations do not intentionally seek the peace of Christ, even some wars are opaque works of peace. Orthodox Christians should place far greater stress, however, on nonviolent practices that help to sustain peaceful societies, reconcile enemies, and prevent wars and other conflicts. In doing so, we will bear witness to a peace that is not of this world, but which at the same time is the only true answer to the world’s strife.
Fr. Philip LeMasters is professor of religion and director of the Honors Program at McMurry University in Abilene, Texas. A priest of the Antiochian Orthodox Archdiocese, he serves at St. Luke Orthodox Church in Abilene. He is the author of The Goodness of God’s Creation (Regina Orthodox Press).

source: http://www.incommunion.org/2010/01/29/make-peace-not-war/

Peacemaking as mission

2010-04-30T08:53:00.002-04:00

by Jim Forest
The Beatitudes include the words, “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called children of God.” Christ himself bears witness to what peacemaking looks like. He sought out both those who were drawn to him and were threatened by him. We see his love of enemies in his readiness to respond to the appeal of a Roman officer to heal his servant. We see it again is his appeal on the cross to forgive those who were responsible for his execution. After his resurrection, he greets his followers with the words, “Peace be with you.”
Yet in our time the word “peace” is often a suspect word, used by governments and advocates of war as a kind of cosmetic slogan: war presented as a means of peacemaking. But the word “peace” has also been abused by peace movements, which often turn out not to be very peaceably inclined when it comes, for example, to the unborn. All too often, peace groups have turned a blind eye to suffering and violence when it was being carried out by countries, or for purposes with which they sympathized. It isn’t only governments that have double-standards.
How then might an Orthodox Christian define “peace” and “peacemaking”?
Metropolitan Kallistos Ware has suggested “healing” is the best synonym. “Healing means wholeness,” he said at the Orthodox Peace Fellowship retreat he led in France several years ago. “I am broken and fragmented. Healing means a recovery of unity. Let us each think that I cannot bring peace and unity to the world unless I am at peace and unity with myself. ‘Acquire the spirit of peace,’ says Saint Seraphim of Sarov, ‘and thousands around you will find salvation.’ If I don’t have the spirit of peace within myself, if I am inwardly divided, I shall spread that division around me to others. Great divisions in the world between nations and states spring from many divisions within the human heart of each one of us.”
One of the best ways to better understand peacemaking is to study the lives of the saints. We see in them the countless forms that the healing occasioned by peacemaking can take witnesses far too diverse for peace to be compressed into an ideological or political system.
Consider just two of the physician saints of the early Church, Saints Cosmas and Damian, and the important role they played in the conversion of the Roman Empire to Christianity. It is significant that the first Christian church in Rome that was established in the city center, on the grounds of the Forum rather than near the edge, was dedicated to Saints Cosmas and Damian. They were brothers who, following their conversion, became unmercenary physicians doctors who cared for the ill without any payment. According to legend, their rule against accepting any reward was so strict that there was a brief period when one brother refused to speak to the other because he had accepted an apple from the family of one of those whom he had aided.
Their day-by-day merciful deeds proclaimed both Christ’s compassion for those who are sick and suffering and also, in their refusal of money, the fact that wealth gives no one advanced placement to enter the kingdom of God. Their lives proclaimed their love of enemies, for they were as eager to serve those who persecuted Christians as they were to assist their fellow believers. Like others who shared their faith, they refused to defend themselves when they became targets of persecution. Dying as martyrs, they gave witness to Christ’s death and resurrection. No wonder so significant a church, placed in the heart of Rome, bears their names. These two physicians, who eagerly served others without fee, not only healed and consoled many, but also helped convert them to Christ.
Similar examples are given in our own day in many places. I think especially of the witness being given by the Orthodox Church in Albania.
Albania is Europe’s poorest and, in many ways, most damaged country. No regime in recent centuries has been so thorough in its attempt to completely stamp out every trace of religious life. During the Communist period, every place of worship was closed and either destroyed or turned to other uses. Ironically, many churches became armories, thus turning plowshares into swords. Even to make the sign of the cross, to dye an egg red as Pascha, or to hang an icon on the wall was seen as a criminal act during those long years of suffering. In 1991, of the 440 Orthodox clergy who had served the Church 60 years, only 22 were still alive. All were old and frail, and some were close to death.
Yet once the Communist political order began to collapse, the Church began to rise from the ruins. Under the leadership of missionary-minded Archbishop Anastasios, liturgical life resumed with astonishing speed. “Many times in the first months the Liturgy was conducted out of doors as no indoor place of worship was available,” he recalls, “but preferably in a place where a church formerly existed.”
At the very same time, healing services to others began, no matter what their faith or lack of faith or attitude regarding Christianity. At first the work was improvisational, then strengthened by the introduction of church-sponsored structures of health care, education (both religious and secular) and environmental repair. All this was done under the umbrella of Diaconal Agapes ( Service of Love )officially launched as a Church department by Archbishop Anastasios in 1992. So many non-believers have been served by the Church that Archbishop Anastasios is occasionally called the Archbishop of Tirana and All Atheists (rather than All Albania).
“I am everyone’s archbishop,” he told me a few years ago. “For us each person is a brother or sister. The Church is not just for itself. It is for all the people. As we say at the altar during each Liturgy, it is done ‘on behalf of all and for all.’ We pray ‘for those who hate us and for those who love us.’ Thus we cannot have enemies. How could we? If others want to see us as enemies, it is their choice, but we do not consider others as enemies. We refuse to punish those who punished us. Always remember that at the Last Judgment we are judged for loving Him, or failing to love Him, in the least person. The message is clear. Our salvation depends upon respect for the other, respect for otherness. This is the deep meaning of the Parable of the Good Samaritan we see not how someone is our neighbor, but how someone becomes our neighbor. It’s a process. We also see in the parable how we are rescued by the other. What is the theological understanding of the other? It is trying to see how the radiation of the Son of God occurs in this or that place, in this or that culture. This is much more than mere diplomacy. We must keep our authenticity as Christians while seeing how the rays of the Son of Righteousness pass through another person, another culture. Only then can we bring something special.”
Part of the missionary witness of the Church in Albania is to set an example of forgiveness. “This begins within the Church in the way we respond to those who denied or betrayed the Church, in the Communist period,” Anastasios explains. “I have often been asked, what do we do when such people want to rejoin the Church after having been apostates? Our response must be to forgive and receive them back, not to turn anyone away. Following the fall of communism, the first church we opened in Berat has an inscription above the central door which says, ‘Whoever comes to me, I will not cast away’.”
Forgiveness finds further expression in the Church’s willingness to meet with and even cooperate with those who once sought to eradicate religion from Albanian life. “We not only believe it possible that hardened atheists can change, we have seen it happen. In each person there is the possibility of conversion. In fact each person in the Church has experienced conversion. If such a thing can happen in my life, surely it can happen in the lives of others. But this partly depends on how I as a Christian meet others, including my enemies, and how I respond to them.”
In a country that is part of the Moslem world, Christian witness means refusing to demonize Muslims, the religion that, in the pre-Communist time, was dominant in Albania. Archbishop Anastasios never overlooks opportunities to meet with Muslims, whether leaders or unlettered individuals. I recall one poor man in the latter category who timidly approached the Archbishop at a place where we had stopped for lunch. “I am not baptized,” the man said. “I am a Moslem. But will you bless me?” The man received not only an ardent blessing, but was reminded by Anastasios that he too was a bearer of the image of God.
Archbishop Anastasios might have retired years ago from his missionary labors, yet he carries on, giving daily witness to Christ’s love not only for the baptized, but for one and all, “those who love us and those who hate us.” One result has been the steady enlargement of the Christian community in Albania.
But what about myself? How, in my time and place, can I better witness to Christ’s peace? What are the areas of brokenness in my own life and in the lives of people I am close to? What I can I do to overcome, with God’s help, my own fractiousness? My own greed and vanity? The fears that imprison me? Are there things that I do and say that feed the fires of enmity? Do I admit my own sins, or am I always justifying whatever I do? Are there people I refuse to forgive?
Parish life is often marked by conflict and division. Am I a peacemaker in my own parish? Am I someone who is looking for common ground? Do I help to repair damaged relationships? Do I turn a deaf ear to gossip? Do I belong to one of several bickering camps within my parish?
“Community” life is rarely peaceful. Neighbors are often at odds with neighbors. While Christians are urged by Christ not to resort to courts in resolving conflict, in practice Christians are just as likely as atheists to be found glaring at each other across courtrooms. Am I too carried along by the currents that have created a society able to employ so many lawyers? Am I open to mediation when there are inter-personal or community issues that require resolution?
Consider the world as a whole from ancient times to the present moment. History seems mainly to be a record of almost continuous warfare human beings killing each other and destroying all that makes life possible. In the early Church the refusal of Christians to take part in war was something of a scandal to the pagan world. It surprises us to hear of saints who were, in today’s terminology, conscientious objectors. Today it’s hard to imagine that killing in war was a matter that could, centuries ago, result in lengthy periods of repentance and exclusion from the sacramental mysteries. Indeed our canons still bar anyone from serving at the altar who has killed another human being for any reason. But when it comes to the laity, it seems we rarely even wonder whether killing in war might be an issue worth thinking about long and hard. We are not even surprised at the spectacle of Christians killing each other simply because of their separation by national borders. Am I satisfied that I have thought deeply enough about war in the light of the Gospel and the witness of the saints? Are there ways in which I might contribute to preventing wars or hastening their end? Do I pray daily for peace? Does my life bear witness to my prayers?
The basic question is: To what extent does my life reveal or hide the light and peace of Christ? To what extent am I bearing witness to the kingdom of God?
Jim Forest is international secretary of the Orthodox Peace Fellowship. His books include Ladder of the Beatitudes, The Road to Emmaus: Pilgrimage as a Way of Life, and The Resurrection of the Church in Albania.

source: http://www.incommunion.org/2010/01/29/peacemaking-as-mission/

Independent Lens | GARBAGE DREAMS | Trailer | PBS

2010-04-25T08:51:00.000-04:00

Email Your Senators-Extend Unemployment & Health Care Benefits

2010-03-25T11:56:00.002-04:00

E-mail Your Senators Today:
Extend Unemployment & Health Care Benefits

On Tuesday President Obama signed the historic health care reform bill. David Leonhardt wrote <http://salsa.democracyinaction.org/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=OIyxEYwUOFKDiNpKyfRLSobrghIjwO9H> in the New York Times, "The bill that President Obama signed on Tuesday is the federal government's biggest attack on economic inequality since inequality began rising more than three decades ago."

Yet we still face massive long-term unemployment, and once again unemployed workers face the loss of their lifeline for survival. The February stop-gap measure <http://salsa.democracyinaction.org/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=FzJImlYgreXg2adhcyBxDIbrghIjwO9H> of federal extensions of unemployment insurance and subsidies for COBRA health care are set to expire on April 5 unless the Senate acts this week. Most Republicans and Democrats agree this extension is needed. But the Senate will spend this entire week debating additional health care measures passed by the House, and then go on a two-week recess. The Senate must pass the extension by unanimous consent now, or it won't get to a vote until after workers have lost their benefits.

Click here <http://salsa.democracyinaction.org/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=eyeACDDyze7S%2BIXetyrc4obrghIjwO9H> to take action now!

Sikhs Regain Right To Wear Turbans In U.S. Army : NPR

2010-03-24T18:18:00.000-04:00

Sikhs Regain Right To Wear Turbans In U.S. Army : NPR: "U.S. Army Capt. Tejdeep Singh Rattan is making history.

This week, Rattan, who is an American Sikh, completed his nine-week basic officer training course at Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio, Texas — making him the first American Sikh officer in the U.S. Army in more than 25 years"

Heads Up: Prayer Warriors and Sarah Palin Are Organizing Spiritual Warfare to Take Over America | Investigations | AlterNet

2010-03-24T18:05:00.000-04:00

Heads Up: Prayer Warriors and Sarah Palin Are Organizing Spiritual Warfare to Take Over America | Investigations | AlterNet: "Imagine a religious movement that makes geographic maps of where demons reside and claims among its adherents the Republican Party's most recent vice presidential nominee and whose leaders have presided over prayer sessions (one aimed at putting the kibosh on health-care reform) with a host of leading GOP figures."

Sharing the Wealth: The Church as Biblical Model for Public Policy

2010-03-11T13:55:00.001-05:00

by Ronald J. Sider

Ronald J. Sider is president of Evangelicals for Social Action and a professor of theology at Eastern Baptist Theological Seminary. This article appeared in the Christian Century June 8-15, 1977, p. 560. Copyright by the Christian Century Foundation and used by permission. Current articles and subscription information can be found at www.christiancentury.org. This material was prepared for Religion Online by Ted & Winnie Brock.

What is the biblical view of God’s will for economic relations among his people? For an answer, we shall look at the jubilee passage in Leviticus, at the new community of Jesus’ disciples, at the first church in Jerusalem, and at the Pauline collection.

Text:

To ask government to legislate what the church cannot persuade its members to live is a tragic absurdity. That the church has tried to do precisely this is one of the most glaring weaknesses of its commendable, sometimes costly involvement in social action in the past two decades.

Mennonite theologian John Howard Yoder tells of a meeting of church leaders held in an embattled Chicago suburb in the ‘60s. Blacks were marching to demand an end to de facto housing segregation. Wanting to help, the clergy met to devise a strategy for bringing pressure on the city’s business and political leadership to yield to black demands. After listening for an hour or so to various economic and political schemes, Yoder raised a question. Were not the bank presidents and the mayor active church members? They were, the clergy agreed but they were puzzled at Yoder’s irrelevant query. It was not at all obvious to those concerned clergy that the church must first demonstrate in its common life together what it calls on secular society to embody in public policy.

In danger of repeating the same mistake is today’s movement of concern among church people for world hunger and injustice in the international economic order. Economic relationships in our Lord’s worldwide body today constitute a desecration of his body and blood. Only as groups of believers in North America and Europe dare to incarnate in their life together what the Bible teaches about economic relationships among the people of God do they have any right to demand that leaders in Washington or Westminster shape a new world economic order.

Leviticus 25 is one of the most radical texts in all Holy Writ. Every 50 years, God said, he wanted all land to return to the original owners -- without compensation. Physical handicaps, death of a breadwinner, or less natural ability might bring some people to become poorer than others. But God did not want such disadvantages to lead to greater and greater extremes of wealth and poverty among his people. Hence a means was prescribed to equalize land ownership every 50 years (Lev. 24:10-24).

Before and after the year of jubilee, land could be ‘bought” or ‘sold.” But since Yahweh was the owner (v. 23), what the buyer actually purchased was a specific number of harvests, not the land itself (v. 16). And woe betide the person who tried to make a killing by demanding what the market would bear rather than a just price for the intervening harvests from the date of purchase to the next jubilee (vv. 16-17). Yahweh is Lord -- even of economics. No hint here of some sacred law of supply and demand, a law independent of biblical ethics and the lordship of Yahweh. The people of God submit to Yahweh’s lordship, and he demands structures that foster economic justice among his people.

Unfortunately, we do not know whether the people of Israel ever practiced the year of jubilee. The absence of references to jubilee in the historical books of the Old Testament suggests that it may never have been implemented. Nevertheless, Leviticus 25 challenges us as a part of canonical truth.

Jesus’ Sharing Community

Jesus walked the roads and footpaths of Galilee announcing the startling news that the long-expected kingdom of peace and righteousness was at hand. Economic relationships in the new community of his followers were a powerful sign confirming this awesome announcement.

The Hebrew prophets had inspired the hope of a future messianic kingdom of peace, righteousness and justice. The essence of the good news which Jesus proclaimed was that the expected kingdom had come. Certainly Jesus disappointed popular Jewish expectations. He did not recruit an army to drive out the Roman oppressors. But neither did he remain alone as an isolated, individualistic prophet. He called and trained disciples. He established a visible community of people joined together by their loyalty to him as Lord. His new community began to live the values of the promised kingdom which was already breaking into the present. As a result, all relationships -- even economic ones -- were transformed in the community of Jesus’ followers.

Jesus and his disciples shared a common purse administered by Judas, who bought provisions and gave to the poor at Jesus’ direction (John 12:6, 19:29). This new community of sharing did not end with Jesus and the Twelve, for it included a number of women whom Jesus had healed. Traveling with Jesus and the disciples, Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Susanna “and many others . . . provided for them out of their means” (Luke 8: 1-3).

From this perspective, some of Jesus’ words gain new meaning and power. Consider Jesus’ advice to the rich young man in this context:

When Jesus asked the rich young man to sell his goods and give to the poor, he did not say, “Become destitute and friendless.” Rather, he said, “Come, follow me” (Matt. 19:21). In other words, he invited him to join a community of sharing and love, where his security would not be based on individual property holdings, but on openness to the Spirit and on the loving care of new-found brothers and sisters [Richard K. Taylor, Economics and the Gospel (United Church Press, 1973), p.21].

Jesus invited the rich young man to share in a new kind of security -- the joyful common life of the new kingdom.

Jesus’ words in Mark 10:29-30 have long puzzled me: “Truly, I say to you, there is no one who has left house or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or lands, for my sake and for the gospel, who will not receive a hundredfold now in this time, houses and brothers and sisters and mothers and children and lands, with persecutions, and in the age to come eternal life” (emphasis added; see also Matt. 6:25-33). To me, Jesus’ promise used to seem at least a trifle naïve. But his words come alive with new meaning when they are read in the context of the new community of his followers. Jesus inaugurated a new social order -- a new kingdom of faithful followers who were to share unlimited liability for one another.

In that kind of community, there would truly be genuine economic security. One would indeed receive 100 times more loving brothers and sisters than before. The economic resources available in difficult times would be compounded. In fact, all the resources of the entire community of obedient disciples would be available to anyone in need. To be sure, that kind of unselfish, sharing life style would challenge surrounding society so pointedly that there would be persecutions. But even in the most desperate days, the promise would not be empty. Even if persecution led to death, children of martyred parents would receive new mothers and fathers in the community of believers. In the community of the redeemed, all relationships are being transformed. The common purse shared by Jesus and his first followers vividly demonstrates that Jesus repeated and deepened the old covenant’s call for transformed economic relationships among God’s people.

The Jerusalem Church

However embarrassing it may be to some today, the massive economic sharing of the earliest Christian church is indisputable (see, for example, Acts 2:43-47, 4:32-37, 5-1-11, 6:1-7). Whenever anyone was in need, all shared. Giving surplus income to the needy was not enough. The Jerusalem Christians regularly dipped into capital reserves, selling property to aid those in need. God’s promise to Israel that faithful obedience would eliminate poverty among his people (Deut. 15:4) came true in the new church:

“There was not a needy person among them, for as many as were possessors of lands or houses sold them . . . and distribution was made to each as any had need” (Acts 4:34-35).

Two millennia later, the texts still throb with the first Christian community’s joy and excitement. They ate meals together “with glad and generous hearts” (Acts 2:46). They experienced an exciting unity as all sensed they “were of one heart and soul” (Acts 4:32). They were not isolated individuals struggling alone to follow Jesus. A new community transforming all areas of life became a joyful reality. The earliest Jerusalem Christians experienced such oneness in Christ that they promptly undertook extensive economic sharing.

What was the precise nature of the Jerusalem Christians’ costly koinonia? They did not insist on absolute economic equality. Nor did they abolish private property. Sharing was voluntary, not compulsory. But love for brothers and sisters was so overwhelming that many freely abandoned legal claims to private possessions. “ No one said that any of the things which he possessed was his own” (Acts 4:32). That does not mean that everyone donated everything, but whenever there was need, believers regularly sold lands and houses to aid the needy.

The essence of these transformed economic relationships in the Jerusalem church is unlimited liability and total availability. The sharing was not superficial or occasional. Regularly and repeatedly (as the imperfect tense of the verbs in the relevant passage of Scripture suggests) the believers sold possessions and goods and distributed them to all, as any had need” (Acts 4:35). The needs of the sister or brother were decisive. In the new messianic community of Jesus’ first followers after Pentecost, God was redeeming all relationships. The result was unconditional economic liability for and total financial availability to the other brothers and sisters in Christ. The first Christians dared to give concrete, visible expression to the oneness of all believers.

Whatever the beauty and appeal of such a picture, however, was it not a vision that quickly faded? Many people believe so. But the Pauline collection proves exactly the contrary.

The Pauline Collection

Paul broadened the vision of economic sharing among the people of God in a dramatic way. He devoted a great deal of time to raising money for Jewish Christians among gentile congregations. In the process, he broadened intrachurch assistance into interchurch sharing among all the scattered congregations of believers. Furthermore, with Peter and Paul, biblical religion moved beyond one ethnic group and became a universal, multiethnic faith. Paul’s collection for Jews from gentiles demonstrates that the oneness of the new body of believers entails dramatic economic sharing across ethnic and geographical lines.

For several years, Paul gave much time and energy to his great collection for the Jerusalem church. He discussed his concern in several letters, and he arranged for the collection in the churches of Macedonia, Galatia, Asia, Corinth, Ephesus and probably elsewhere.

Paul knew he faced certain danger and possible death, but he still insisted on personally accompanying the offering for the Jerusalem church (Acts 21:4, 10-14; Rom. 15:31). Out of his passionate commitment to economic sharing with brothers and sisters came his final arrest and martyrdom. Yet he had a deep conviction that this financial symbol of Christian unity mattered far more than even his life. His understanding of Christian koinonia -- an extremely important concept in Paul’s theology -- is central in his discussion of the collection.

The word koinonia means fellowship with, or participation in, something or someone. Believers enjoy fellowship with the Lord Jesus (I Cor. 1:9). Experiencing the koinonia of Jesus means having his righteousness imputed to us. It also entails sharing in the self-sacrificing, cross-bearing life he lived (Phil. 3:8-10). Nowhere is the Christian’s fellowship with Christ experienced more powerfully than in the Eucharist, where the believer is drawn into a participation (koinonia) in the mystery of the cross: The cup of blessing which we bless, is it not a participation in the blood of Christ? The bread which we break, is it not a participation in the body of Christ?” (I Cor. 10:16)

Paul’s immediate inference -- in the very next verse -- is that koinonia with Christ inevitably involves koinonia with all the members of his body. “Because there is one bread, we who are many are one body, for we all partake of the one bread” (v. 17). As he taught in Ephesians 2, Christ’s death for Jew and gentile, male and female, has broken down all ethnic, cultural and sexual divisions. In Christ there is one new person, one new body of believers. When the brothers and sisters share the one bread and the common cup in the Lord’s Supper, they symbolize and actualize their participation in the one body of Christ.

That is why the class divisions at Corinth so horrified Paul. Wealthy Christians, apparently, were feasting at the eucharistic celebrations while poor believers went hungry. Paul angrily denied that they were eating the Lord’s body and blood because they did not discern his body (vv. 27-29). By this Paul meant that they failed to realize that their membership in the one body of Christ was infinitely more important than the class or ethnic differences which divided them. One brings judgment on oneself if one does not perceive that eucharistic fellowship with Christ is totally incompatible with living a practical denial of that unity of all believers in his body. As long as one Christian anywhere in the world is hungry, the eucharistic celebration of all Christians everywhere is incomplete.

For Paul, this intimate fellowship in the body of Christ had concrete economic implications. Paul used precisely this word koinonia to designate financial sharing among believers. Sometimes he employed the word as a virtual synonym for “collection.” he spoke of the liberality of the fellowship that the Corinthians’ generous offering would demonstrate (II Cor. 9:13). He employed the same language to report the Macedonian Christians’ offering for Jerusalem (Rom. 15:26).

Paul’s guideline for what sharing should be in the body of believers is startling: “I do not mean that others should be eased and you burdened, but that as a matter of equality your abundance at the present time should supply their want, so that their abundance may supply your want, that there may be equality” (II Cor. 8:13-14; emphasis added). To support his principle, Paul quoted from the biblical story of the manna: “As it is written, ‘He who gathered much had nothing over, and he who gathered little had no lack’ ” (v. 15). It may indeed seem startling to rich Christians in the northern hemisphere, but Paul -- in guiding the Corinthians in their giving -- clearly enunciated the principle of economic equality among the worldwide people of God.

Pattern for Today’s Church

However interesting it may be, what relevance does the economic sharing at Jerusalem and Corinth have for the contemporary church?

Certainly the church today need not slavishly imitate every detail of the life of the early church depicted in Acts. But that does not mean that we can simply dismiss the economic sharing described in Acts and the Pauline letters.

Over and over again God specifically commanded his people to live together in community in such a way that they would avoid extremes of wealth and poverty -- that is the point of the Old Testament legislation on the jubilee and sabbatical years, on tithing, gleaning and loans. Jesus, our only perfect model, shared a common purse with the new community of his disciples. The first church in Jerusalem and Paul in his collection were implementing what the Old Testament and Jesus had commanded.

The powerful evangelistic impact of the economic sharing at Jerusalem indicates that God approved and blessed the practice. When Scripture calls for transformed economic relations among God’s people in some places, and describes God’s blessing on his people as they implement these commands in other places, then we can be sure that we have discovered a normative pattern for the church today.

What is striking, in fact, is the fundamental continuity of biblical teaching on this point. Paul’s collection was simply an application of the basic principle of the jubilee. The mechanism, of course, was different because God’s people were now a multiethnic body living in different lands. But the principle was the same. Since the Greeks at Corinth were now part of the people of God, they were to share with the poor Jewish Christians at Jerusalem -- that there might be equality!

Living the Biblical Model

What does the biblical teaching on economic relationships among God’s people mean for Christians striving for a new international economic order in our own time?

Central to any Christian strategy on world hunger must be a radical call for the church to be the church. As was noted at the beginning, one of the most glaring weaknesses of church social action in the past few decades has been its too exclusive focus on political solutions. In effect, church leaders tried to persuade government to legislate what they could not persuade their church members to live. And politicians quickly sensed that the daring resolutions and the frequent Washington delegations represented generals without troops. Only if the body of Christ is already beginning to live a radically new model of economic sharing will our demand for political change have integrity and impact.

We must confess the tragic sinfulness of present economic relationships in the worldwide body of Christ. While our brothers and sisters in the Third World ache for lack of minimal health care, minimal education, even just enough food to escape starvation, Christians in the northern hemisphere grow richer each year -- like the Corinthian Christians who feasted without sharing their food with the poor members of the church (I Cor. 11:20-29). Like them we fail today to discern the reality of Christ’s body. U.S. Christians spent $5.7 billion on new church construction alone in the six years from 1967 to 1972. Would we go on building lavish church plants if members of our own congregations were starving? Do we not flatly contradict Paul’s instructions to the early churches if we live as though African or Latin American members of his body are less a part of us than the members of our home congregations?

But what concretely might a wholehearted recognition of the oneness of Christ’s body mean? It would mean a massive discipling process in the churches, so that individual Christians would start living more simple life styles. Shouldn’t it be the norm, rather than the exception, for Christians to be involved in small weekly fellowship/worship/action groups where mutual discipling is a regular practice? Where Christians can, for example, evaluate each other’s income-tax returns and family budgets, discuss major purchases, and gently nudge each other toward life styles more in keeping with their worship of a God who sides with the poor?

Churches, likewise, would need to adopt more simple corporate life styles. Virtually all church construction today is unnecessary. At least three large congregations could easily share every church building if one group would worship on Saturday evening, another Sunday morning, and a third on Sunday evening. The heart of each congregation might be in small discipling groups, such as I have described, meeting in homes. Significantly simpler personal and ecclesiastical life styles would make assistance for economic development possible on an astonishingly increased scale. A small denomination of 50,000 members could by itself establish two new agencies the size of Church World Service, or two new Mennonite Central Committees, or one new World Vision. The Church of the Nazarene (with half a million members) could start 20 new agencies the size of Church World Service. The United Methodists (with 9.9 million members) could establish 400 new Church World Services!

Nor am I calling for poverty. In 1974 the median income of U.S. families was $12,836. Charitable donations to “religion” normally run at about 3 per cent ($385). Were a family of five to spend $10,000 of its total income on itself, it would have to cut out many luxuries, but it would still have a comfortable life style that would appear aristocratic to all but a tiny fraction of the world’s people. That leaves $2,451 extra per family available for ending poverty (those with incomes above the median could give more and those below, less). Assuming five-member families, a church with 50,000 members would have at least 10,000 family groups that could give $24,510,000. The cash disbursements of Church World Service in 1974 were about $11.5 million; MCC’s, $9 million; World Vision’s, about $20 million.

Now I do not mean to suggest that I expect this to happen, or that if a simpler life style were widely accepted all the newly available funds ought to go toward fighting poverty. What the figures are meant to demonstrate is that if Christians dared to change the ways they live, their increased giving could make a significant difference. In fact, a mere 10 million Christians in the U.S. could annually provide tile total $5 billion in foreign funds needed by developing countries, according to the 1974 World Food Congress, for investment in rural agricultural development. In 1974, 32 per cent of all U.S. economic aid to developing countries came from private contributions. If even one-fourth of all U.S. Christians had been following the formula spelled out above, the percentage of private contributions would have jumped drastically.

Daring to Live What We Ask

No one is naïve enough to suppose that vastly increased aid from U.S. churches -- to both church and nonchurch groups in developing countries -- could proceed without problems. Certainly there would need to be strenuous efforts to avoid paternalism and prevent dependency. Long-term development and self-sufficiency would be tile goal. Obviously there would be difficulties; but the Third World church leaders I have talked with insist that these obstacles could be overcome far more easily than can our unwillingness to share.

The emphasis placed here on simpler personal and ecclesiastical life styles is by no means intended to belittle the importance of changing public policy. (Note, however, that living the new model would deeply affect the U.S. economy; and the powerful example of sharing could also profoundly influence the thinking and life style of non-Christians.) Certainly we should strengthen organizations like Bread for the World. Certainly we should work politically to demand costly concessions from Washington in international forums working to reshape the International Monetary Fund, as well as new policy in trade negotiations on tariffs, commodity agreements and the like. Certainly we must ask whether far more sweeping structural changes are necessary. However, our attempt to restructure secular society will possess integrity only if our personal life styles -- and our corporate ecclesiastical practices in local congregations, in regions and denominations, and in the worldwide body of Christians demonstrate that we are already daring to live what we ask Washington to legislate.

A radical call to repentance so that the church becomes the church must be central to Christian strategies for reducing world hunger and restructuring international economic relationships. The church is the most universal body in the world today. It has the opportunity to live a new corporate model of economic sharing at a desperate moment in world history. If even one-quarter of the Christians in the northern hemisphere had the courage to live the biblical vision of economic equality, the governments of our dangerously divided global village might also be persuaded to legislate the sweeping changes needed to avert disaster.

source: http://www.religion-online.org/showarticle.asp?title=1166

How the Early Church Practiced Charity

2010-03-11T13:33:00.000-05:00

Upon receiving the Nobel Peace Prize, former president Jimmy Carter remarked that the "growing gap between the rich and poor" is the most elemental problem facing the world economy. But the gap between the rich and the poor is also a very old problem. Princeton historian Peter Brown takes up this issue of care for the poor as it was practiced in the fourth and fifth centuries of the Christian era.

As usual, Brown combines erudition with an elegant style and makes his argument readily accessible. His concern with the social location of poverty is part of his larger effort to understand the character of Christianity as it negotiated its place in a still durable classical culture. The interface of classical and Christian culture has its obvious pivot point in Augustine, of whom Brown has written a classic study

Brown begins by contrasting classical and Christian notions of care for society. In the former, euergesia (to do good) was a practice of the wealthy, who contributed to the well-being of society. Their giving was a much-celebrated civic virtue. But their contributions were given to an undifferentiated cultural system that made no social distinctions on the basis of need. Consequently, the poor were never visible.

Christians, on the other hand -- and especially bishops -- were charged to be "lovers of the poor," a category that comprised both those poor in fact ("deep poverty") and those who lived under the constant threat of poverty ("shallow poverty"). Such care constituted a major change in "social imagination," Brown says. "In a sense, it was the Christian bishops who invented the poor. They rose to leadership in late Roman society by bringing the poor into ever-sharper focus."

Brown does not oversimplify or sentimentalize the bishops’ achievement. He observes that with the conversion of Constantine, which made Christianity the official religion of the empire, bishops were invested with social significance and huge financial resources, and were obligated to give evidence of a responsible use of this entitlement. "The clergy could be called to account by the state if they failed to make use of their privileges for the benefit of the poor." As a consequence, the bishops funded hospitals and houses of care that were concerned especially with the poor.

Brown observes that the main body of the church was made up of "middling persons" who were not wealthy but who made modest but steady contributions to the church’s support of the poor. This means of funding was quite a contrast to the classical pattern of the wealthy giving large gifts. The church also had to make an effort to support and sustain this "middling" constituency, which itself was always under the threat of falling into poverty.

The sustained effort to care for the poor that came to characterize the church is derived, Brown suggests, from "an ancient Near Eastern model of justice" mediated through the church’s liturgical use of the Old Testament. The Old Testament tradition accented the legitimate "cry" of the poor that elicited a response of "justice" from the powerful.

Brown appeals particularly to the word play of Isaiah 5:7: the monumental clarity and poetic elegance of the juxtaposition of the term z’daqah, "the cry," with its remedy, ze ‘aqah, "justice." This was not lost on the great Hebraist, Saint Jerome. The movement from "cry" to "justice" conveyed a~ ethos of justice -- firm, paternal and mercifully swift -- that appealed to many humble late Roman people who found themselves living in a postclassical world in which Old Testament conditions reigned.

"I would suggest that an almost subliminal reception of the Hebrew Bible, through the chanting of the Psalms and through the solemn injunctions of the bishop in connection with the episcopalis audientia, came to offer a meaning to the word pauper very different from the ‘pauperized’ image of the merely ‘economic’ poor. The pauper was a person with a claim upon the great. As with the poor of Israel, those who used the court of the bishop and attended his church also expected to call upon him, in time of need, for justice and protection," Brown writes.

As the bishops developed ways to make this concern front and center in the church, a passion for the poor began to "seep out of the churches" into the horizons and practices of the empire. The language of cry-justice "added a novel tincture to the language of public relations. It became a language that was increasingly found to be apposite to describe the quality of the relation of the emperor to his subjects, and of the weak to the powerful." Thus over time the advocacy of the church began to redefine relationships between the wealthy and the poor, the powerful and the powerless, well beyond the confines of the church.

In his final chapter Brown observes that the growing appreciation of the legitimacy of the cry of the poor created a social awareness that the powerful were obligated to provide justice and protection for the poor. Through the work of the bishops the poor were given a voice that created "an advocacy revolution" and eventually a "culture of criticism." Brown observes that "the squeaky wheel gets the grease." Through the church, the neediest were given permission to squeak!

This rhetorical revolution not only redefined the relationship of the rich and the poor, it also redefined the relationship of the believer to God. God could be addressed with urgent petitions as a matter of right.

Brown delighted this reviewer with his appreciation of the Psalter and would delight any right-minded Calvinist with his appreciation of Karl Barth’s statement in Church Dogmatics IV, 2: as a poor man, writes Barth, Christ "shares as such the strange destiny which falls on God in His people and the world -- to be the One who is ignored and forgotten and despised and discounted by men.

Brown finishes with a remarkable discussion of the Christology of Nestorius and Cyril of Alexandria in their effort to sort out both the distance and solidarity between the Father and Son by comparing it to the distance between God and believer and between rich and poor. The accent is upon solidarity. Brown argues that the rhetorical revolution that legitimated the cry of the needy transformed all relationships away from earlier modes in which the poor were mute and invisible.

The church still has a chance to employ such rhetoric in a technological society that wants to deny a voice to all those who live "outside the program." Brown does not make any "contemporary extrapolation" from his study, and we should not expect a disciplined historian to do so. In his final two sentences, however, he recognizes the contemporary urgency that is intrinsic to his argument: "The hope of solidarity itself, and the recognition of its attendant burdens, still weighs upon us today It has remained a fragile aspiration, as much in need of condensation into symbolic forms of requisite density and imaginative power as it ever was in the fourth, fifth, and sixth centuries of the Common Era."

Of course, the interface of Christianity with classical culture is very different from the church’s interface with the current U.S. economic-military hegemony and the shameless power of the market to damage human communities. Yet the parallels are suggestive enough that we might consider the accomplishment of those ancient bishops as instructive for the contemporary church.

Those who champion an undifferentiated "market society" shrilly shout "class war" if one suggests that the poor are a distinct social presence. If the poor can remain unrecognized, then no special effort on their behalf is required. I imagine that the practitioners of the old civic virtue of euergesia thought the same thing. But the Christian bishops, fed by the rhetoric of the Psalter, insisted upon a differentiation that denied the illusion of social cohesion.

The contemporary church has important allies in its attentiveness to the poor -- allies like Derek Bok, who in The Trouble with Government gives us statistics that make the plight of the poor inescapably vivid. He reminds us, for example, that "5.3 million households in 1995 consisted of ‘very low-income renters’ who received no federal housing assistance and either lived in severely substandard housing or paid half or more of their reported income for rent." Or like Lewis H. Lapham, who in the December 2002 issue of Harper’s points out that the "grotesque maldistribution of the country’s wealth over the last 30 years has brought forth a class system fully outfitted with the traditional accessories of complacence, stupidity and pride."

Most poignantly, in her report on her firsthand experience with systemic poverty, Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, Barbara Ehrenreich makes us see "poverty as acute distress: The lunch that consists of Doritos or hot dog rolls, leading to faintness before the end of the shift. The ‘home’ that is also a car or a van. The illness or injury that must be ‘worked through,’ with gritted teeth, because there’s no sick pay or health insurance and the loss of one day’s pay will mean no groceries for the next."

Ehrenreich writes that the appropriate emotional response to systemic poverty "is shame -- shame at our own dependency, in this case, on the underpaid labor of others. When someone works for less pay than she can live on -- when, for example, she goes hungry so that you can eat more cheaply and conveniently -- then she has made a great sacrifice for you, she has made you a gift of some part of her abilities, her health and her life. The ‘working poor,’ as they are approvingly termed, are in fact the major philanthropists of our society."

In addition to paying attention to such allies, the church can also follow the lead of the ancient bishops by accomplishing a revolution in rhetoric. In a linguistically flat technological society the church can return to the "mother tongue" of scriptural poetry and prayer, through which we learn to hear the cry of the needy and to understand that they must receive justice. To do so requires liberals to quit speaking and reasoning like social scientists. It requires conservatives to quit appealing to philosophic certitudes. It invites conservatives and liberals together to reembrace the dangerous rhetoric of covenantal interaction.

For all of the new imperial social entitlements they received, the ancient bishops -- even with mixed motives -- insisted on being who they were: teachers of the gospel. They could not and did not evade the imaginative alternative of gospel truth. And they demonstrated how the primal language of the church could perform as a public language.

source: http://www.religion-online.org/showarticle.asp?title=2700

2010-03-08T12:10:00.000-05:00

Open Mic Night and Community Supper - Friday March 12th

2010-03-08T10:19:00.001-05:00

Have you written a new poem? Just learned to play the guitar? Have a band
looking for a place to play? Looking for an evening of entertainment and
fun? This Friday the place for you is the Mor Gregorios Community Center and
their Open Mic Night.

Everyone is invited to the Mor Gregorios Community Center¹s next Open Mic
Night, Friday, March 12, starting at 7:00 PM. The Community Center will
also host a free supper of homemade soup and more starting at 6:00 PM. It
is an evening of food, entertainment, fun, and friends and neighbors.

All levels are invited to perform from beginners to advance. Poets,
jugglers, musicians, singers, comedians are all invited. If your talent is
just listening and having fun, you are encouraged to attend. The Open Mic
starts at 7:00 pm in the Great Room. You do not need a talent to attend and
be entertained. If your talent is listening, you are also invited. The
evening¹s entertainment is free.

The center¹s computer center will also be open that evening.

The Mor Gregorios Community Center is located at 1000 South Michigan Street,
Plymouth, Indiana. The center is located in the white A-frame building on
the corner of Oak Hill and Michigan streets across from the Webster
Elementary School.

For more information, you can call the center at 574-540-2048, or by email
at monastery@synesius.com

Extend unemployment benefits: Call your Senators now

2010-03-02T16:11:00.001-05:00

As people of faith, we are called to lift up our voices and take action on behalf for those who suffer from injustice.

In this time of economic crisis <http://salsa.democracyinaction.org/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=79JfQinv329Agvvy5bgty8zgg2spZQ2Y> , millions of our family members, friends, neighbors and members of our congregations face unbelievable hardships. Hunger, homelessness, foreclosures, loss of health care--and loss of hope--face many who want to work but can't find jobs. While some say the recession is ending, it will not end for working families, as the U.S. undergoes a jobless recovery <http://salsa.democracyinaction.org/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=48BRa%2Bk1eQBVSWPtFDuIsczgg2spZQ2Y> . Millions have been unemployed for extended periods of time, and unemployment compensation and subsidies to allow unemployed workers to retain health coverage under the COBRA program have been a lifeline between hardship and ruin.

Senator Jim Bunning (R-KY) is engaging in a one-man filibuster <http://salsa.democracyinaction.org/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=7TkStrUzPZMjS9PHEL2kUczgg2spZQ2Y> to block extension of unemployment insurance and subsidized COBRA benefits. Legislation allowing states to provide extended benefits expired at the beginning of March. As many as 1.2 million workers will run out of unemployment and COBRA benefits this month if an emergency extension is not passed by Congress.

Every senator has the responsibility to make sure that the Unemployment Insurance and COBRA programs get back up and running as quickly as possible.

Call your two senators now. Call the Capitol switchboard (202-224-3121) today and ask them to transfer you to your two senators.

Tell them they must take action. We cannot let the unemployed and their families fall through the cracks because of one senator's grandstanding effort in his final year of service. Tell your senators to stop the games and communicate to their party's leadership that they need to extend these programs through the end of the year, and that it needs to happen as quickly as possible. Each week of delay means that over 200,000 more workers will lose their benefits.

Please forward this e-mail to your friends, family and colleagues. Please e-mail <mailto:tsmukler@iwj.org?subject=I%20called%20my%20senators%20to%20ask%20them%20to%20extend%20unemployment%20and%20COBRA> me to let me know what the response was when you called.

In Peace and Justice,

Ted Smukler
Public Policy Director
Interfaith Worker Justice

Call your Senators today to extend unemployment and health care benefits!

2010-02-28T15:46:00.001-05:00

Call your Senators today to extend unemployment and health care benefits!

Last night, Sen. Jim Bunning (R-KY) blocked the Senate from voting to extend Unemployment Insurance and COBRA subsidies for 30 days for unemployed workers. Today, Sen. Jon Kyl's (R-AZ) office is telling people that they are holding up the extension as leverage to permanently weaken the federal estate tax, and further enrich America's wealthiest families.

There are no words to describe this unconscionable behavior. Apparently, to at least Jon Kyl, the financial peril of 1.2 million workers and their families is less important than the desire of dead millionaires who want to pay no taxes. How will we continue to pay for such important parts of the social safety net if we keep decreasing the estate tax and move toward repealing it ?

Interfaith Worker Justice supports the extension of these benefits for all of 2010 so that this doesn't need to keep coming up for a vote. But given the economic crisis and the vast number of workers who have been unemployed for extended times, the first step must be the immediate passage of the 30-day extension.

Call Senator Harry Reid (D-NV), the Majority Leader in the Senate, today. Ask him to file for cloture on the 30-day extension of unemployment and COBRA benefits and to keep the Senate in session all weekend if that's what it takes to get it done.

Sen. Reid's phone number is 202-224-3542.

Then call your two Senators. Tell them that we must pass the 30-day extension of unemployment insurance and COBRA benefits. Tell them that we must not allow some senators to hold unemployed workers, their families, and their communities hostage, and they must do the right thing and pass the extension.

Call the Capitol switchboard (202-224-3121) today or Monday and ask them to transfer you to your two Senators.

In Peace and Justice,

Ted Smukler
Public Policy Director
Interfaith Worker Justice

Faithful Reform in Health Care

2010-02-28T15:38:00.000-05:00

Faithful Reform in Health Care
The Faithful Reform in Health Care blog was created to provide a space where people of faith may share their perspectives on how religious values inform conversation about health care reform. It will not be the reflections of just one person, but of numerous writers who believe that voices of faith have an important place in public discourse. The blog postings represent the thinking of the person doing the writing, not necessarily the beliefs and practices of all members of the coalition.

Because there are numerous online opportunities to debate the particulars of health care policy, the discussion on this blog will be limited to how our faith values connect to the broad policy options and possibilities that lie before us.

Readers are invited and encouraged to offer comments on the blog postings. However, comments will be “moderated” before they are posted for two reasons. First, we want to keep the content focused on the values which our sacred teachings and traditions bring to the issue at hand. And second, we want to ensure that the tone of the blog remains respectful of the diverse perspectives of all in the faith community, even in the midst of disagreement.

Why is health care reform so difficult?

2010-02-28T15:36:00.001-05:00

~ by Rev. Linda Hanna Walling, Faithful Reform in Health Care

Yes, we were the first to talk about it! Well, maybe not THE first, but pretty close in recent history. In our desire to encourage values-based dialogue among people of faith, Faithful Reform in Health Care has offered insights into our century-long struggle over health care for all. Our Seeking Justice in Health Care Guide, workshops, PowerPoints, and adult study materials, have helped thousands of people understand why health care reform is so contentious. Now, in the wake of the Health Care Summit, the columnists and pundits are answering the same question we addressed long ago: Why is health care reform so difficult? Our answers are framed as five challenges, hoping that they are not a permanent indictment on our ability to move forward.

Challenge #1 - Moral Vision. The underlying challenge is the absence of a strongly articulated moral vision. Do we want a health care future that includes everyone and works well for all of us — or not? Without a clear answer to that question, reform efforts remain locked in conflict over competing views of who we are as a nation and where our responsibilities lie in caring for those who live here.

Over the years, we have accepted a collective moral responsibility for our most vulnerable populations — those with the lowest incomes, our elderly, our veterans, and our Native American and indigenous populations. The crisis facing us now is what to do about the 123 persons who die unnecessarily each day, and the millions more who risk that possibility, for lack of health insurance.

While most members of Congress would likely profess a commitment to health care for all, the lack of a national moral vision becomes evident as proposals are developed. Deliberations are informed by questions that focus on how much money is saved or what industry is protected, rather than on those who are left out as a result of the negotiations. Whether our goal is everybody in (or just some people) impacts how all other questions are answered and how challenges are overcome.

Challenge #2 - Access or Costs. Is our goal to improve access inspite of costs, or to restrain the growth of costs by reducing access and/or quality? Historically and currently, because these goals are often seen as contradictory, legislative efforts usually have polarized around one or the other. And because we don’t start with a commitment to include everyone, we argue over just how many/few more can be covered, and at what cost. If money were no object, increasing access would be much less troublesome. But resources, though abundant, are finite, which means we have to practice faithful stewardship in using them. The difficulty lies in how to distribute these resources equitably and in how to determine who will bear the burden for controlling the costs.

In spite of the politics that might suggest otherwise, the truth is that successful reform will encompass both goals: improving access and containing costs while maintaining a high quality of care. Neither goal can be fully achieved by itself; comprehensive reform will be impossible without a commitment to both. All other industrialized democracies have found ways meet both goals, and so must the United States.

Challenge #3 - Marketplace or Government. The moral dilemma informs differing perspectives around the relative roles of competition and regulation. Are human needs better served by markets, individual ownership, competition and profits, or by governments and laws that guarantee access and a fair distribution of costs and services?

Extreme ideologies in our country have failed to recognize that modern health care systems actually exist somewhere between unfettered free markets and complete government responsibility. A system that consumes one-seventh of our economy yet fails millions of us would benefit from both increased public accountability to protect the common good and improved private initiatives to encourage quality, innovation, and efficiency in covering 300 million people. The most reasonable voices for reform understand the need for partnerships among all sectors to make this system work. The attempts by both sides to polarize the debate must be transformed into expectations that lawmakers will find solutions that demonstrate a creative mix of effective government regulation and fair market incentives.

Challenge #4 – Political Partisanship. The three previous challenges and how legislators respond to them feed the political partisanship that paralyzes our efforts to achieve major reform. In spite of an initial goal to make health care reform bipartisan, the decline in cooperation between the two major political parties has limited their willingness to seek consensus for the common good. In spite of broad and deep public support for reform, and in spite of numerous bipartisan agreements and compromises in the bills, legislators continue to fall into the usual and comfortable circles of partisanship. Party loyalty helps guarantee upward mobility, leadership and membership on key committees, funding for upcoming electoral bids, and campaign contributions from powerful stakeholders.

Ultimately, it will be dialogue around shared values, rather than debate over competing ideologies, that will lead to the possibility of transforming the public concience and creating the legislative priorities for successful and sustainable reform.

Challenge #5 – Economic Self-interest of Key Players. Almost everyone in the United States would benefit from health care reform. Some groups — low-middle income workers, persons with pre-existing medical conditions, the uninsured, racial and ethnic minorities, people living in under-served areas — stand to gain a lot. But a number of well-financed, tightly organized health care industries and trade associations fear what they could lose. In spite of concessions to keep them engaged as supporters, in the end, they are now using their influence and affluence to derail reform.

As long as the discussion is dominated by those who fear the loss of their profits, the rest who have so much more to lose will continue to be crushed by the inequities and injustice of U.S. health care. Ultimately, strong public demands for change, coupled with substantial campaign finance reform, will be needed to promote the common good as a benefit to everyone’s self-interest and to prevent special interests from blocking progress.

Living into Our Health Care Future. Good people with good hearts and moral grounding sit on both sides of the aisle in Congress, seemingly unable to recognize the value in one another’s perspectives. In spite of agreement that health care is a people, not partisan, issue, the ideologies embedded in a two-party system make differences appear to be insurmountable.

Faith communities, however, with members representing the full spectrum of political views, are uniquely positioned to create the opportunities for dialogue and collaboration. In fact, in these moments, it is our calling to help move the debate surrounding health care reform from what is politically prudent or economically feasible to dialogue which embraces compassion and justice and the common good. It is our task to transform these challenges into opportunities for moving forward by identifying the shared values that bridge the partisan differences.

In doing such work, it is in hopeful expectation that we will touch the hearts and minds of the American people so that together we may envision a health care future that fully embraces health, wholeness, and human dignity. It is in transforming our collective conscience on the issue of health care that we eventually will make comprehensive, compassionate and sustainable reform a reality.

source: http://faithfulreform.wordpress.com/2010/02/27/why-is-health-care-reform-so-difficult/

The States Need an Unemployment Insurance Extension

2010-02-25T17:25:00.001-05:00

Though the Senate reached cloture on a jobs bill yesterday afternoon, they still have yet to vote on extending unemployment insurance. As we’ve said ad infinitum, with the latest extension ending February 28, a million job-seekers could lose their benefits in March alone.

NELP points to what that means for the states. For instance,

* In California, 201,274 jobless workers will lose state or federal benefits in March without an extension. By June, the number will have risen to 855,529.

* In Florida, 105,016 jobless workers will lose state or federal benefits in March without an extension. By June, the number will have risen to 415, 714.

* In Indiana, 38,360 jobless workers will lose state or federal benefits in March without an extension. By June, the number will have risen to 160,279.

* In Massachusetts, 36,781 jobless workers will lose state or federal benefits in March without an extension. By June, the number will have risen to 153,089.

* In Maine, 4,016 jobless workers will lose state or federal benefits in March without an extension. By June, the number will have risen to 18,592.

* In Michigan, 61,990 jobless workers will lose state or federal benefits in March without an extension. By June, the number will have risen to 225,708.

* In Virginia, 21,761 jobless workers will lose state or federal benefits in March without an extension. By June, the number will have risen to 91,002.

* In Wisconsin, 27,269 jobless workers will lose state or federal benefits in March without an extension. By June, the number will have risen to 127,093.

And don’t forget that every dollar of unemployment benefits spent results in $1.69 of economic stimulus in the community.

Now, we’re hearing, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has indicated that, rather than the 15-day extension being discussed yesterday, they’ll be voting on a 30-day extension. Gosh, thanks, Sen. Reid, but we’d really rather have an extension to the end of 2010. Otherwise, the Senate will be clogged up voting on this very basic, necessary issue every month or every three months, millions will continue to live in uncertainty, and the Senate will be even less likely to move forward.

So please, call your senators. Urge them to vote for an unemployment insurance extension—and let them know that these 15- and 30-day half-measures are inadequate. As they struggle to find work in an economy in which there are 6.4 workers for every single job opening, America’s job-seekers need to know that their meager insurance against disaster is guaranteed for more than 30 days at a time.
Talking Points

* 26 million Americans are unemployed or don’t have the full-time work they need to support their families.
* Up to 800,000 jobs will be lost nationwide if benefits are not extended through the end of 2010.
* Every $1 of unemployment insurance benefits that is spent results in $1.69 in economic stimulus in the community.

source: http://www.workingamerica.org/blog/2010/02/23/the-states-need-an-unemployment-insurance-extension/

Kyl Threatens To Block Unemployment Benefits To Push Tax Cut For Multi-Millionaires

2010-02-25T17:19:00.000-05:00

Yesterday, I asked whether or not Senate Republicans would help expedite the process of extending unemployment benefits that are set to expire at the end of the month, since the last time that an extension was considered, the GOP blocked it for weeks with non-related amendments, before the bill ultimately passed by an overwhelming 98-0 vote.

Well, it seems like at least one Republican is not, in fact, going to ensure that unemployed workers keep their benefits without first trying to cut taxes for the heirs of multi-millionaires:

On Wednesday, a top Republican leader said a deal on the bill would depend on working out the fate of the expired estate tax…Minority Whip Jon Kyl, R-Ariz., said that Republicans will block consideration of the new bill unless they get “a path forward fairly soon” on the estate tax.

“I will insist on an agreement on how to proceed [on the estate tax], if we’re going to have unanimous consent on how to proceed with any of these subsequent bills,” said Kyl.

This is a fairly shocking admission of priorities. 1.1 million workers are scheduled to have their unemployment benefits expire in the next month, with 2.7 million on track to lose them by April, while unemployment is still at 9.7 percent and there are six unemployed workers for every job opening. 6.3 million Americans have been unemployed for six months or longer, which is the most since the government began keeping track in 1948 and “more than double the toll in the next-worst period, in the early 1980s.” Yet Kyl is willing to hold unemployment benefits hostage in order to fashion a tax cut for heirs of the very wealthiest estates.

Due to a Bush-era budgeting gimmick, the estate tax is currently expired, but it is set to come back in 2011 at the Clinton-era level, which Kyl has an intense interest in preventing. His proposal to slash the estate tax rate and increase its exemption would cost $250 billion over ten years, with 99 percent of the benefit going to the heirs of multi-millionaires. Under 2009 law, only 0.2 percent of estates are subject to the estate tax at all.

And it’s partially Kyl’s fault that the expiration happened at all. Back in December, Democrats tried to put in place a temporary extension that would have prevented the tax’s expiration. But Kyl, along with Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), blocked it in order to advocate for repealing the tax entirely.

source: http://wonkroom.thinkprogress.org/2010/02/25/kyl-estate-tax-ui/

Interfaith Worker Justice - Unemployment and the Economic Crisis Toolkit

2010-02-25T16:33:00.000-05:00

Interfaith Worker Justice - Unemployment and the Economic Crisis Toolkit

Who Is Blocking Emergency Jobless Aid Extension? « Main Street

2010-02-25T16:32:00.000-05:00

Who Is Blocking Emergency Jobless Aid Extension? « Main Street: "According to Reuters, attempts by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) to move an emergency unemployment aid extension in the Senate are being thwarted:

Reid had hoped to quickly pass a short-term extension of unemployment benefits for more than a million people to ensure they are not terminated at the end of February, but Republican Senator Jim Bunning blocked it.

Policy advocates on Capitol Hill this morning confirmed that Sen. Bunning (R-KY) is currently holding up an emergency measure to extend the expanded federal support for unemployment insurance and COBRA subsidies set to expire in three days."

Daily Kos: State of the Nation

2010-02-25T16:31:00.001-05:00

Daily Kos: State of the Nation: "“I will insist on an agreement on how to proceed [on the estate tax], if we’re going to have unanimous consent on how to proceed with any of these subsequent bills,” said Kyl."

Who Is Blocking Emergency Jobless Aid Extension? « Main Street

2010-02-25T16:31:00.000-05:00

Who Is Blocking Emergency Jobless Aid Extension? « Main Street

Call your Senators today to extend unemployment and health care benefits!

2010-02-25T15:51:00.000-05:00

                                          Last night, Sen. Jim Bunning (R-KY) blocked <http://salsa.democracyinaction.org/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=qa0msdTFrrKEJBnK%2BE6BtI7OyLFbUR02> the Senate from voting to extend Unemployment Insurance and COBRA subsidies for 30 days for unemployed workers. Today, Sen. Jon Kyl's (R-AZ) office is telling people that they are holding up <http://salsa.democracyinaction.org/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=%2B6iDiCC%2F8UQ5lFAgcerCMI7OyLFbUR02> the extension as leverage to permanently weaken the federal estate tax, and further enrich America's wealthiest families.

There are no words to describe this unconscionable behavior. Apparently, to at least Jon Kyl, the financial peril of 1.2 million workers and their families is less important than the desire of dead millionaires who want to pay no taxes. How will we continue to pay for such important parts of the social safety net if we keep decreasing the estate tax                                     and move toward repealing it    ?

Interfaith Worker Justice supports the extension of these benefits for all of 2010 so that this doesn't need to keep coming up for a vote. But given the economic crisis <http://salsa.democracyinaction.org/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=lqccH1mJv7U%2FHZ42sv%2Fc2h71OI2t0XfV> and the vast number of workers who have been unemployed for extended times, the first step must be the immediate passage of the 30-day extension.

Call Senator Harry Reid (D-NV), the Majority Leader in the Senate, today. Ask him to file for cloture on the 30-day extension of unemployment and COBRA benefits and to keep the Senate in session all weekend if that's what it takes to get it done.

Sen. Reid's phone number is 202-224-3542.

Then call your two Senators. Tell them that we must pass the 30-day extension of unemployment insurance and COBRA benefits. Tell them that we must not allow some senators to hold unemployed workers, their families, and their communities hostage, and they must do the right thing and pass the extension.

Call the Capitol switchboard (202-224-3121) today or Monday and ask them to transfer you to your two Senators.

In Peace and Justice,

Ted Smukler
Public Policy Director
Interfaith Worker Justice

Soxcial justice and Christian living

2010-02-15T20:51:00.000-05:00

In 1963, Martin Luther King who wholeheartedly fought against social injustice quoted Amos 5: 24 in his most famous speech "I have a dream" saying: "But let judgment roll down like waters, and righteousness like a mighty stream." What did he really mean by that?

Justice and righteousness

It has been said: "When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why the poor have no food, they call me a communist.". the tension is there between those who focus more on evangelism often to the neglect of social need such as feeding the hungry and seeking freedom and justice for the oppressed, and those who seek to change the world with socio-political actions.
Your duty as Christian is to both, evangelize and improve your society. Justice is actually central to faith living. The prophet Micah sums up the entire issue with few words: "He has shown you, O man, what is good. And what does the Lord require of you but to do justice and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God?" (Micah 6: 8).
The Bible is actually full of details about the way in which justice is to be practiced by the community. For instance, the law delivered by Muses after his meeting with God on the mountain includes a great deal about just actions (Exodus 23: 1-13). There are laws about fair business practices (Exodus 22: 25-27 or Leviticus 19: 11-37), legal justice (Exodus 22: 25-27, Leviticus 25, Deuteronomy 15: 1-4). Special care is given to strangers and sojourners (Exodus 23: 9). Special care is also given to those who are voiceless and on the margins of society, the orphan and widows (Deuteronomy 10: 17-19).

Justice for creation

The bible does not focus on God-man relationship only. It actually includes the whole of creation. We mostly remember God's covenant with humanity and neglect God's covenant with creation that was made with Noah after the flood. Our relationship to God's creation must be a righteous one based on respect and justice. Thus despite long held views of exploitation to the contrary (based in part on the exhortation to "have dominion" over the earth in Genesis 1: 26-28), we are to exercise justice in our relationship to the land (Psalm 37: 1-29, Jeremiah 7: 1-15).

Justice and worship

Most people misunderstand the concept of prayer. They think that going to Church for worship is a time of relaxation. This is not the case, God uses prayer to challenge us and face us with our dark-side. God challenges us to stand against hunger, homelessness, exploitation of the poor and the needy, you name it. This was the case at the time of Amos. People, in his time were prosperous but spiritually declining. God refused them saying:
"I hate, I despise your feast days, and I will not delight in your solemn assemblies. Though you offer Me burnt offerings and your food offerings, I will not be pleased. Nor will I regard the peace offerings of your fat animals. Take the noise of your songs away from Me; for I will not hear the melody of your stringed instruments. But let judgment roll down like waters, and righteousness like a mighty stream." Amos 5: 21-24
After Israel returned from Exile, they disputed the issue of fasting. So, God sent them the prophet Zakariah to inform them the following:
“This is what the Lord Almighty says: ‘Administer true justice; show mercy and compassion to one another. Do not oppress the widow or the fatherless, the alien or the poor. In your hearts do not think evil of each other.’
“But they stubbornly refused to pay attention; stubbornly they turned their backs and stopped up their ears. They made their hearts as hard as flint and would not listen to the law or to the words that the Lord Almighty had sent by his Spirit through the earlier prophets. So the Lord Almighty was very angry.
“‘When I called, they did not listen; so when they called, I would not listen,’ says the Lord Almighty. ‘I scattered them with a whirlwind among all the nations, where they were strangers. The land was left so desolate behind them that no one could come or go. This is how they made the pleasant land desolate.’” Zechariah 7:8-14
This is what God in Isaiah had already said: “Is not this the kind of fasting I have chosen: to loose the chains of injustice and untie the cords of the yoke, to set the oppressed free and break every yoke?” (Isaiah 58:6).
What was true in ancient Israel is still true today. You have an opportunity here to do something you can not do in heaven, that is, to share the gospel and serve the people in need. So, social Justice and Christian living are inseparable. We need to be passionate and loving, truly concerned about our fellow human beings. St. Paul says: "Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit, but in humility consider others better than yourselves. Each of you should look not only to your own interests, but also to the interests of others” (Philippians 2:3-4).

God of Justice

One of the most important verses in the bible with regard to justice is this: “Yet the Lord longs to be gracious to you; he rises to show you compassion. For the Lord is a God of justice. Blessed are all who wait for him!” (Isaiah 30:18). So, the Lord is a God of justice and whoever does justice is of God. God is so passionate about justice:
"The Lord loves righteousness and justice; the earth is full of his unfailing love" (Psalm 33:5). "Righteousness and justice are the foundation of your throne; love and faithfulness go before you" (Psalm 89:14). "The works of his hands are faithful and just; all his precepts are trustworthy" (Psalm 111:7). "Many seek an audience with a ruler, but it is from the Lord that man gets justice" (Proverbs 29:26). “For I, the Lord, love justice; I hate robbery and iniquity” (Isaiah 61:8).
Justice was also a concern for Jesus. He wanted to transcend social, racial and economic barriers in his ministry. He spoke about the Good Samaritan (Luke 10: 25-27). Dr. Kenneth Boa says: "In Jesus’ story of the Good Samaritan, we encounter three distinct philosophies of life. The thieves selfishly say, “What’s yours is mine.” The clergymen, with dreadful justification, say, “What’s mine is mine.” The despised Samaritan surprisingly says, “What’s mine is yours.” He alone is worthy of being called “good,” because he alone models the character and nature of God. It’s not just a matter of what he does, but what he is."

God's promise for the just people

There has been so many living saints who truly loved to evangelize the world and do justice to their fellow human beings. St. Ephrem the Syrian (303-373 AD) in ancient Christianity is remembered for his vital role in helping the poor. He actually helped alleviate the rigors of the famine of winter 372-73 by distributing food and money to the stricken and helping the poor.
the bible promises those who follow the example of St. Ephrem: "If you walk in My statutes and keep My commandments and do them, then I will give you rain in due season, and the land shall yield her increase, and the trees of the field shall yield their fruit. And your threshing shall reach to the vintage, and the vintage shall reach to the sowing time. And you shall eat your bread to the full, and dwell in your land safely. And I will give peace in the land, and you shall lie down and none shall make you afraid. … I will have respect to you, and make you fruitful, and multiply you, and establish My covenant with you. And I will set My tabernacle among you. And My soul shall not abhor you. And I will walk among you and will be your God, and you shall be My people." (Leviticus 26: 3-12)
Those who live justly and faithfully will be blessed. This blessing continues in the New Testament as well. In Matthew 25: 31-46, we read in the famous sheep and goats parable of Jesus that those who will receive God's blessing are those who have served the hungry, the thirsty, the stranger, the naked, the sick, the prisoner, the "least of these".

Prayer

Dear Lord, I dare to call you my Father because you made me your son through Jesus. I thank you for showing me the truth about how to live a just life: in serving others and helping them to know you better. Give me the courage Lord to sacrifice some of my time, money, and rest for those in need. I ask you to help me to make my thoughts, words and actions according to your will. So that I may praise you with all of my being. I make this prayer through Christ our Lord. Amen

source: http://syriacbiblestudy.blogspot.com/2009/06/in-1963-martin-luther-king-who.html

The New Monastic and the Old Monk

2010-02-15T12:41:00.000-05:00

The New Monastic and the Old Monk: "When it comes to charity, Christians are often content to give to the poor, but do not question unjust structures and systems of oppression embedded in society. Yet the Word of God will have us go beyond charity, that is, if we understand charity only in terms of giving. The Bible and the Greek Fathers understand charity to extend to social justice as well. As our reading from Isaiah for the first Monday in Lent (Is. 1:1-20) clearly demonstrates, our Lord calls us to do social justice: 'seek justice, correct oppression; defend the fatherless, plead for the widow. (verse 17).' In this passage from Isaiah, the Lord criticizes the worship of Israel, because their worship is meaningless if they do practice justice. In the same way, it is not enough for us to attend Divine Liturgy and to abstain from meat and dairy during lent, if we neglect love of neighbor and tolerate social injustice."

Take Action: TrueMajority.org

2010-02-10T17:20:00.000-05:00

Take Action: TrueMajority.org: "Nearly 10 percent of Americans are out of work. But unless Congress acts soon, unemployment insurance will expire for millions of out-of-work Americans at the end of this month. Without those checks, millions of our neighbors could slip into hunger and homelessness, and our economy could slip even further into recession."

We can make a difference in the lives of our friends and neighbors, and are called to do so by God. You can make a difference. Follow the link and discover how you can make this difference. One hundred percent of the folks served by the Mor Gregorios Community Center are about to loss their unemployment check. There are no jobs. But you can give them hope.

Mor Gregorios Community Center Continues to Provide Free Help and Free Lunch

2010-01-29T13:18:00.001-05:00

Free Help with Unemployment and Free Lunch

The Mor Gregorios Community Center continues to provide help for individuals
with their unemployment claims. Using the center¹s computers, individuals
can file their unemployment claims and weekly unemployment reports, as well
as receive other worked related help.

Since the first of this year, the center has seen an increase in the number
of people seeking help. Last week, the Indiana Department of Workforce
Development announced that Indiana¹s unemployment rate had increased to 9.9
percent. This has also meant increased numbers at the Mor Gregorios
Community Center.

The Mor Gregorios Community Center provides free help to individuals in
Marshall, Starke, Fulton, and other surrounding counties. Volunteers trained
by the Indiana Department of Workforce Development on how to file
unemployment claims and weekly reports provide the assistance. The DWD also
provided the center with computers for the program. Other computers were
provided by Ancilla College. The center is one of the several community and
faith based organizations, which have partnered with Workforce Development.

On Sunday, lunch is provided to all using the services. And every day there
is coffee and support and help. Lunch is served on other days as well.

According to the Center¹s director, Father Theodosius Walker, ³Work is an
expression of our dignity and our involvement in God¹s creation. In this
time of economic crisis, as more and more people are losing their jobs, it
is harder for them to express this dignity. It is also harder for them to
pay their bills, provide shelter for their families, and generally make ends
meet.²

To file unemployment claims in Indiana, claimants must file online. Many
people lack the computer skills and computers to do so. Some find access at
friend¹s homes and libraries. But, more are turning to the Mor Gregorios
Community Center¹s employment program. For those who lack any computer
skills, volunteers help individuals actually filing their claims. The center
also helps individuals prepare resumes and file for jibs online.
Interviewing skills are also taught and practiced. There is also an
employment support group. The groups and the volunteers also help in any
way needed to provide practical job skills, career information, education,
technology, and support and mentoring to participants. The program supports
the pursuit of work and fair wages.

In addition to the employment program, the Mor Gregorios Community also
provides several other public programs. Some of these programs include the
following:

* Recovery Program: 12-Step classes and small groups for those with
additions, hurts, hang-ups, and other problems. Individual and pastoral and
spiritual guidance and direction are also available.
* Re-Entry Program: Working with recently released inmates from jail and
prison, helping them become productive citizens.
* Information and Referral: Case management. Provides information and
referral for emergency assistance to other agencies and programs.
* Community Development: Help with community outreach, mentoring, and
community development.

Father Theodosius said that, ³The early Christians, because of their faith
and experience of God¹s love, were able to perceive one another as brethren.
In their view, those on the margins of society (the poor, the widows, the
orphans, and the strangers) were the scale by which the justice of the whole
society was weighted. We can make a difference in the lives of your friends
and neighbors, and are called to do so by God.²

All Mor Gregorios Community Center¹s programs are open to all people.
Participants do not need to be Christians. The programs are open for those
of faith and of no faith. Everyone qualifies for the programs offered. All
programs seek to be supportive, respectful, and are always confidential.

The hours of the Mor Gregorios Community Center are as follows:
* Sunday 12:00 noon until 4:00 pm with free lunch served
* Monday 10:00 am until 4:00 pm
* Tuesday 10:00 am until 4:00 pm
* Wednesday 10:00 am until 4:00 pm
* Thursday 10:00 am until 4:00 pm
* Friday by appointment
* Saturday closed

The Mor Gregorios Community Center is located at 1000 South Michigan Street,
in the white A-Frame building on the corner of Oak Hill and Michigan
Streets, across from the Webster Elementary School, in Plymouth, Indiana.
Their telephone number is (574) 540-2048.

The Mor Gregorios Community is under an allegiance with the Syriac Orthodox
Church lead by His Holiness Ignatius Zakka I Iwas and the Catholicose of
India, His Beatitude Baselios Thomas I. Their bishop is Archbishop John
Cassian Lewis of Columbus, Ohio. The executive director is Father
Theodosius Walker.

For more information, please contact Father Theodosius at (574) 540-2048, or
by email at monastery@synesius.com.

Worker centers: Organizing communities at the edge of the dream (EPI briefing paper)

2010-01-28T14:43:00.000-05:00

Worker centers: Organizing communities at the edge of the dream (EPI briefing paper)

Building a Workers' Center

2010-01-28T14:41:00.000-05:00

Workers' centers have sprung up around the country in a variety of ways.

But they have all begun with some very basic first steps that include: contacting and developing relationships with local religious institutions (Where workers worship); building partnerships with local labor and employment attorneys (That can serve on steering committees, advise workers and donate $ to the center); building partnerships with labor enforcement agencies, such as Department of Labor, EEOC and OSHA (That can enforce complaints); and organized labor (that can help organize workers and donate $ to the center). Once these four basic foundations have been laid, the leaders in the project must decide how and when the center will open. Below are some of the most common models that have been used:

1.The Study -- Workers and academics partner to produce a study outlining the sweatshop working conditions in that community, workplace or sector of the industry. This study is made public at a press event in which there is also an announcement that a workers' center will be opened to address the problems outlined in the study. The study should use scientific methodology, but should primarily be a tool to reach out to workers and build a leadership team for the workers' center.

Some centers that were started in this manner:
Madison Workers' Rights Center
Restaurant Opportunities Center

2.The Community Coalition - In this model, religious leaders, workers and others in the community interested in starting a workers' center create a coalition of organizations on the ground who work with the target population. This coalition might include social service agencies, community organizing groups, religious institutions and employment attorneys. These organizations then create a strategic plan for the creation of the workers' center. Key leaders from each of the organizations form a steering committee that leads the creation of the workers' center.

Some centers that were started in this manner:
Cincinnati Interfaith Workers' Center
Houston Interfaith Worker Justice Center

3.The Workers' Rights Manual - Community leaders and workers produce a manual (or other education materials) that outlines the rights of all workers in their workplaces. An outreach plan is then devised in which the manual is distributed to the target population.

Some centers that were started in this manner:
Chicago Worker Rights Center
Western North Carolina Workers Center

Worker self-determination is a central principle of the IWJ Workers' Center Network, so regardless of which path people in your community choose, the key decision-making body of the workers' center should always be composed of workers or at least have a majority of workers.

source: http://www.iwj.org/index.cfm/building-a-workers-center

Interfaith Worker Justice - Unemployment and the Economic Crisis Toolkit

2010-01-28T14:38:00.000-05:00

Interfaith Worker Justice - Unemployment and the Economic Crisis Toolkit

Standing with the Unemployed

2010-01-28T14:37:00.001-05:00

Jobs: The Number One Priority in 2010

My sister and nearly half her co-workers lost their jobs this year at a progressive faith-based nonprofit organization. She had worked there for 15 years. No family has gone untouched by the economic crisis. Tens of millions of our brothers and sisters have lost their jobs and many millions more have lost health care benefits, had their hours and wages slashed, or fear that they will lose their jobs. Communities that were already devastated with plant closures and the loss of good manufacturing jobs have been hit harder than others. Unemployment rates are disastrous for people of color, young workers, and veterans.

In last night's State of the Union address, President Obama called jobs the number one priority for 2010. He noted that more than seven million jobs have been lost in the U.S. over the past two years.

The President and Congress cannot solve this crisis unless we all stand up together. Yes, we need to extend unemployment benefits and subsidies for COBRA health insurance purchase for unemployed workers. We need to pass a strong jobs bill that will help create sustainable jobs at living wages, and we need assistance targeted to hardest-hit communities. But as people of faith, we need to go beyond this to promote a full employment economy with good jobs that can support our families.

Interfaith Worker Justice has created a congregational toolkit on unemployment and the economic crisis (the first link on our resource page for Unemployment and the Economic Crisis <http://salsa.democracyinaction.org/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=ZOaLyhcPG2vAax%2FbM%2BsSEc7XpDK%2BaGQy> ). It includes a refection on the spiritual meaning of the crisis, worship resources, and a guide to your rights following job loss that includes information about final paychecks, unemployment compensation, avoiding foreclosure, and health insurance. The toolkit also includes action steps that congregations can take, including a guide to setting up congregational support groups and jobs clubs, and ideas for how congregations can raise the prophetic and religious voice and take action in the public policy arena.

Encouraged always by our faith, we can work together to ensure that all people have access to good jobs, living wages, and healthcare. Now is the time to raise our hearts and our voices as people of faith. Now is the time to stand with the unemployed in solidarity and hope, sustained by our commitment to building a future where everyone has the opportunity to work with dignity and respect.

JoeOnTheMove.com

2010-01-20T13:04:00.000-05:00

JoeOnTheMove.com
Low cost calling cards for deployed servicemen and women. Check out the site. Let us know what you think. If you have other resources for deployed service men and women to use, please let us know so that we can list them as well.

The new greatest generation

2010-01-13T19:35:00.001-05:00

"My grandfather's generation is always called the 'greatest generation,' " says Army Capt. Jason Adler, 33, commander of Charlie Company, where Martin is one of his platoon leaders. "I disagree. It's these men here who go to war three or four times and continue to do what's asked of them, when others refuse."

Army Staff Sgt. Bobby Martin Jr. has been fighting insurgents in Iraq or Afhanistan longer than the entire three years the Korean War lasted.

At age 34 and finishing a fourth combat tour, he has seen five of his men killed since 2003. Four died this year, including two on Martin's birthday in May. Thirty-eight cumulative months in combat have left him with bad knees, aching shins and recurring headaches from a roadside blast, ailments he hides from his soldiers.

Out of earshot of his troops, Martin concedes, "This is a lot of wear and tear."

American soldiers of the 21st century are quietly making history, serving in combat longer than almost any U.S. soldiers in the nation's past, military historians say.

For many, the fighting seems without end, a fatalism increasingly shared by most Americans. A USA TODAY/Gallup Poll conducted late last week found that 67% believe the U.S. will constantly have combat troops fighting somewhere in the world for at least the next 20 years.

BEHIND THE NUMBERS: Troop deaths in Afghanistan, Iraq

HELMAND: Taliban defeated in province, general says

IRAQ: First combat death seen in 43 days

POLL: Narrow majority support Obama's Afghan plan

President Obama is sending 30,000 more troops here, expanding a war that by the end of 2010 will be the nation's longest.

The cycles of combat have been so long and so frequent that nearly 13,000 soldiers now have spent three to four cumulative years at war in Iraq or Afghanistan, according to Army records. About 500 GIs have spent more than four years in combat, the Army says.

"Undoubtedly this is unprecedented," says Stephen Maxner, a military historian and director of the Vietnam Center and Archive in Lubbock, Texas.

He says small numbers of soldiers volunteered for multiple tours in Vietnam, but the vast majority served single, year-long deployments in that longest of American wars.

"My grandfather's generation is always called the 'greatest generation,' " says Army Capt. Jason Adler, 33, commander of Charlie Company, where Martin is one of his platoon leaders. "I disagree. It's these men here who go to war three or four times and continue to do what's asked of them, when others refuse."

Fewer than two in 10 soldiers on their first or second combat deployment showed signs of mental illness or reported marital problems, according to battlefield research in Afghanistan completed last year. The rate increased to three in 10 soldiers for those on a third or fourth deployment.

Leaders such as Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Gen. George Casey, the Army chief of staff, acknowledge the increasing stress on the military.

Suicides are at record levels. The divorce rate among enlisted soldiers has steadily increased during the war years. Rates of mental health and prescription drug abuse are on the rise.

With a growing number of injured or wounded soldiers, painkillers are now the most abused drug in the Army. One in four GIs admit to illicitly using narcotic medication during a 12-month period, according to a 2008 Pentagon health survey.

"It speaks pretty well to the fortitude of these folks that they just keep coming back for more," says James Willbanks, director of military history at the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College, Fort Leavenworth, Kan. "But it's difficult to watch, because it's really hard on them, and very, very difficult on the families."

Martin finished his fourth combat tour and rejoined his family on Dec. 31. In the years away at war, Martin missed the birth of his son, Bobby Martin III, 3, in 2006, and has been away for two-thirds of the child's life.

Spc. Shamont Simpson, 28, is another soldier in Charlie Company completing a fourth deployment. He has racked up 42 months, rivaling the 45 months it took the United States to fight World War II or the 48 months the Civil War lasted. Simpson says he barely knows his 7-year-old son, Stefon, from a first marriage.

Both soldiers serve with the 3rd Brigade Combat Team of the 10th Mountain Division out of Fort Drum, N.Y. The division's 1st Brigade Combat Team, about 3,500, deploys to Afghanistan this spring with 20 soldiers on a fifth combat tour and five beginning a sixth deployment, says Staff Sgt. John Queen, a brigade spokesman.

"(I'm) just tired," Simpson says. "Physically tired, mentally tired."

The increasing toll

Without a clear indication of when the USA will once again be at peace, Army research shows that the strain on soldiers can otherwise be eased with extended breaks between deployments. The longer soldiers rest, the better they endure.

When time at home stretches to two years, morale increases and cases of mental illness decline, the research shows.

"(But) it's a very tough trade-off to make," says Army Col. Carl Castro, a psychologist, "between fulfilling operational missions and giving soldiers time to recover."

The Army's aim is to allow two years of recovery for every year in combat. Given the current pace of war, however, it will be a "couple of more years" before that goal is met, says Adm. Michael Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. For those in the infantry, who do so much of the fighting, a return to combat often comes within a year.

Meanwhile, soldiers must return to war again and again because the size of the nation's all-volunteer force is limited, Army leaders say. In the past, the government could grow the Army quickly through conscription, allowing the burden of war to be shared by more people.

"It's quite unusual, the inequality," says Christopher Hamner, a military historian at George Mason University in Fairfax, Va. "You've got the vast majority of the American military-aged population that is being asked to do virtually nothing in these two conflicts. And then a very small percentage is being asked to shoulder enormous burdens."

This leaves many soldiers suspicious that other GIs are avoiding combat duty.

"I feel some guys are hiding. Some guys don't want to go. And I think that the people around them just take care of them," says Martin, whose first two combat tours in Iraq were with the Marine Corps before he joined the Army. "(For) us on the line, it's hard to get an assignment to get out."

"The big Army," says Simpson, "they got you in a unit that deploys, they'd rather keep you there then bring somebody in who hasn't."

While there is a need to keep combat-experienced troops in the field, Army commanders say no one is allowed to avoid war duty.

"Every day, we are out there working to identify and to move non-deploying soldiers into deploying formations," says Army Col. Jon Finke, director of the office that manages enlisted assignments.

For the past six years, the percentage of soldiers at any given moment who have not gone to war has held steady at about 32% of the Army, says Louis Henkel, deputy director of the management office.

However, Army records show that when the service accounts for soldiers in training, preparing to deploy, serving overseas in places such as South Korea, in poor health or assigned as drill sergeants or recruiters, there are fewer than 15,000 who can be tapped to fill in for the combat veterans.

These are soldiers who work at the Pentagon and elsewhere, and only a few hundred of those are infantry, says Lt. Col. Douglas DeLancey, who supervises infantry assignments. Most are medical, aviation or military intelligence personnel, Army statistics show.

"We absolutely believe the numbers (available to fill in overseas) are small," Finke says.

The result is that many requests for a break from combat, such as those Martin and Simpson made after their third deployments, are turned down.

The Army has asked the RAND Corp., an independent think tank with ties to the military, to study the issue and find better ways to spell weary war veterans, says Joe Dougherty, a RAND spokesman.

Keeping troops focused

Comparing the soldiers experience for long and hard fighting in different wars is "an imperfect calculus," says Don Wright, a historian and research chief at the Army's Combat Studies Institute. Combat in Iraq and Afghanistan is not as consistently intense as other major American wars, historians say.

But the strain of long and repeated exposures to combat is what makes these current wars historically unique, they say.

"What is exceptional ... is the repeated deployments," says Pulitzer Prize-winning Civil War historian James McPherson.

He says the average Civil War tour of duty was about 2½ years, with small numbers serving for the duration.

"These (current deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan) may take a greater physical and psychological toll than a single deployment, even if the latter is longer," McPherson says.

For the young recruits pouring into the Army and shipping off to combat for the first time, however, these veterans guide the way. The young soldiers of Martin's platoon see him as a disciplinarian whose stern voice keeps them centered during an ambush or when a roadside bomb explodes.

"He's going to be calm so you yourself are not going to panic," says Spc. Don Ezra Plemons, the platoon medic.

"He never wavers. He doesn't show that he's hurt. ... He's always a leader," says Staff Sgt. Kenneth Brook, the company medic, who seeks out Martin for counseling when the stress gets hard.

Simpson has a similar reputation. When a renegade Afghan National Army soldier opened fire with an AK-47 on Oct. 2, killing two American GIs and wounding three, Simpson was first on the scene and moved rapidly to staunch the bleeding of a mortally wounded sergeant.

Pfc. James Radovich, 21, was right behind him, marveling at Simpson's composure and focus amid the blood and chaos.

"He was very calm doing what he had to do. ... He had it under control," Radovich says. "Anything he would say, I would do without hesitation."

But families of both men, weary of the long absences, say the Army needs to relax its grip on these men.

"You keep planning for him to come home," says Joyce Sellars, of her son, Shamont, "and he comes home once, and he comes home twice and he comes home the third time. And you wonder, Lord is this (next) time, the time I'm not going to see my child again."

"It's like, when is this going to end?" his wife Faith Martin says.

It may be soon. Martin has finally been promised a training assignment to Fort Shelby in Mississippi and a period away from war.

"We need this time to work on us and our family," says his wife.

Simpson is guardedly optimistic that he, too, will step out the cycle of combat for a while. So far, he says, "I've got pretty good feedback."

source: http://www.usatoday.com/news/military/2010-01-12-four-army-war-tours_N.htm

Army wives with deployed husbands suffer higher mental health issues

2010-01-13T19:31:00.000-05:00

Wives of soldiers sent to war suffered significantly higher rates of mental health issues than those whose husbands stayed home, according to the largest study ever done on the emotional impact of war on Army wives.

Those rates were higher among wives whose husband deployed longer than 11 months, according to findings that will be published Thursday in the New England Journal of Medicine.

For example, wives of soldiers deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan between one and 11 months had an 18% higher rate of suffering from depression than those whose husbands did not go to war, the study shows. When soldiers were deployed 11 months or longer, their wives had a 24% higher rate of suffering from depression.

The study looked at more than 250,000 Army wives, of which two-thirds had husbands who fought in Iraq and Afghanistan between 2003 and 2006.

"Mental health effects of current operations are extending beyond soldiers and into their immediate families," the study concludes.

"There's a very clear relationship between deployment and these mental health diagnoses in these women," said Alyssa Mansfield, an epidemiologist with RTI International, a non-profit research organization, and lead author on the study. "We find that these women are experiencing greater mental health problems and there's a need for services for them."

The study shows again "that when a servicemember deploys, the entire family deploys," said Air Force Maj. April Cunningham, a Pentagon spokeswoman.

She identified several programs designed to help families including Military OneSource, a hotline — 800-342-9647 — and Web-based program that provides counseling.

The study likely underestimates the mental impact of deployments on wives, Cunningham and Mansfield said, in part because of the continuing stigma within the military about seeking mental health care.

"We know there's a stigma," Deborah Mullen, wife of Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Adm. Michael Mullen, said at a suicide conference Wednesday. "Spouses tell me all the time that they would like to get mental health assistance, but they really believe — as incorrect as this is … that if they seek help, that it will have a negative impact on their spouse's military career."

The results of the Journal study reflect findings in a RAND Corp. study of military children, said Joyce Raezer, director of the National Military Family Association, which sponsored the study. Children of deployed parents suffer more emotional issues, particularly if separations are long or the parent at home is troubled, says the study, which was published last month.

"What worries me (is that) … kids do worse when Mom does worse," Raezer said. "So if spouses are more likely to need mental health services as deployment times increase, than their kids are more at risk."

Researchers in the Journal study identified how many additional cases of mental health diagnoses among wives were generated by the deployments of their husbands, findings which they said could help the Pentagon budget for additional mental health resources for families.

"What they should take away from this is that we may need to devote more services for the prevention of some of these problems," Mansfield said.

source: http://www.usatoday.com/news/health/2010-01-13-Army-wives_N.htm

Open Mike Night at the Mor Gregorios Community Center

2010-01-13T12:04:00.001-05:00

The next Open Mike night at the Mor Gregorios Community Center will be Friday, February 5, 2010. Any one with a strange or an ordinary talent is invited to attend and perform. Poets, jugglers, musicians, singers, comedians are all invited. The Open Mike starts at 7:00 pm in the Great Room. You do not need a talent to attend and be entertained. If your talent is listening, you are also invited. The evening’s entertainment is free.

Refreshments will be available and those coming early are invited to join us in some awesome homemade soup in the Trapeza of the Cave.

The center’s computer center will also be open that evening.

The Mor Gregorios Community Center is located at 1000 South Michigan Street, Plymouth, Indiana. The center is located in the white A-frame building on the corner of Oak Hill and Michigan streets across from the Webster Elementary School.

For more information, you can call the center at 574-540-2048, or by email at monastery@synesius.com

REFLECTIONS ON THE MARCH FOR LIFE 2008

2010-01-11T10:48:00.001-05:00

By Rev. Fr. David G. Subu The Veil February 2008, reprinted in Solia: The Herald March 2008
This year I again attended the annual March for Life on the Mall, on January 22nd. It was very heartening to see so many people, a “multitude that could not be counted.” Estimates range over 100,000 marchers. Maybe double even that, and I wouldn’t be surprised. I could see neither a beginning nor an end to the crowd anywhere.
What was also beautiful was the vast number of young people, teens and college students, which perhaps made up at least half the group. I’m encouraged by them because they are learning early on and in greater and greater number that abortion is no real choice at all, but a systematic failure of society to provide for and protect its most vulnerable, both children and parents. They understand that this choice is pushed upon them by a culture that does not really wish to face the consequences of its own sinfulness, a society that does not want to deal with their “little problem,” and provide real alternatives.
Perhaps they are so much more aware now than my generation was at that age because now it is no longer a theoretical debate on the ethics of the issue. Now we have the stark reality of 43 million+ abortions effected in this nation alone, countless men and women wounded, “aborted” mothers and fathers who now know the truth, who have felt the pain and hopelessness of their “choice,” and aren’t afraid to talk about it. Instead of building generations of responsible, ethical young adults, we’ve actually increased their irresponsibility, immorality, and irreverence for life. And many of them, in the innocence of youth, are disgusted with us for it. Good for them!
I was also humbled by our small Orthodox contingent, miniscule in comparison to the Roman Catholic juggernaut that dominates the pro-life movement. I was bemused by what they must all think when our all-too-small cadre of bishops get up on the stage in their impressive black robes and kamilavki (hats) like some medieval clerical Mafiosi. We cannot compete with the fire of the AME pastor, the salt of the Brooklyn Rabbi Levin, the masses of the Catholics, and the blare of the contemporary Christian singers. But I am glad we are there, as foolish as we seem and sometimes even feel. But I also wish more of us were there.
You know that I, as your priest, in comparison to some, do not make many political pronouncements. It is not because I am not convinced or convicted of any ideals, but rather perhaps because I respect that each of you may or may not be as well. I consider carefully my position as your pastor. While I know for myself, I am a pro-lifer, and that pretty much certain positions are a deal-breaker for my being able to vote for certain candidates, I would never tell you that you cannot consider yourself a Christian because of your political views or whom you wish to vote for.
None of those who serve have clean hands, and even our most pro-life leaders often make unsavory compromises. I always remember St. Constantine the Great, who nevertheless because of the duties of state and the moral burden of his actions as ruler, chose to forestall baptism until the end of his life. Yet he is a saint. For these reasons I am unashamed to confess that I am a diehard independent, and that my vote will always have to be earned. I encourage you all to approach things the same way!
At the same time, I refuse to be told that a priest should keep his nose out of things, and that his job is only to teach spiritual things, and leave the earthly to the rest. I would not be much of a shepherd if, when I saw the wolves and the snakes bearing down, I didn’t stop and stand and warn all of you, the flock entrusted to me.
So I offer my reflections to you in the hopes of inspiring a bit of a pro-life worldview in you, that you might hold accountable not only those whom our country elects to office but also yourself in all the ways of your conduct. To be truly pro-life is not just about those for whom we vote, though it really cannot be separated from it.
To be pro-life is to hold an entire worldview that sees life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness as gifts from our Creator to be cherished and protected for all. It means taking some personal responsibility to create a more compassionate and, yes, Christian world in which sinners can find forgiveness and assistance in healing from abortion, also supporting our terrified and unprepared mothers and fathers (for whether they know it or not, this what they are as soon as conception occurs) so that they do not commit to abortion and live for fear.
It also means defending the elderly and the infirm, the terminally ill, the disabled, and children not just with lips but with loving presence, visitation, acts of charity performed with hands and hugs and smiles and not just checkbooks. It means being able to accept the sin in our own families and not trying to make our children appear as above the reality of pre-marital indiscretions. Remembering that 25% or so of abortions are for married women past their early 20’s, we need to give the encouragement to our peers be pro-family and even pro-big-family, being mindful of what is happening in Europe where birth rates have declined so much that western civilization has with them.
Let us stand up for some “truth in advertising.” Let us not allow any politicians to tell us that they can be against the ban on partial birth abortion “because there was no exception for the health of the mother,” when we already know that there is no medically necessary instance in which this horrific procedure occurs. Let’s call pandering to the abortion industry and its powerful lobby for what it is.
Let us also stop the lie that being against embryonic stem cell research and human cloning is callous and insensitive to those with incurable disease, when not a single effective treatment has come out of that type of research for 20 years—compared with hundreds to arise from the use of more stable and perfectly ethical research with adult stem cells. (Follow the money and you’ll see what it’s really about.)
Let us stop the lie that being pro-choice helps our nation’s poor black families, for African-Americans babies are aborted twice as often as others, and the community has actually disintegrated farther since Roe v. Wade. Let’s instead see some real welfare reform and some real immigration enforcement so there can be stable jobs and stable families in those hurting communities.
Let us stop the abhorrent, eugenic lie that aborting children with disorders like Down’s syndrome is doing them some kind of favor, and that somehow, the very rare situations like these justify keeping abortion legal on demand during all nine months of pregnancy in all 50 states.
Let us stop turning a blind eye when our government makes deals with other nations whose pro-life and human rights records are even more grievous than ours in the name of diplomacy and making America strong. Only one power can make any nation stand. If we renounce Him, we are lost. The crass and callous spirit of our age that fuels the abortion industry has equal representation on both sides of the aisle, just as it is equally present in us if we do not repent now and change our world from the inside out.
To be pro-life means a lot more than for whom you vote. It also means what you stand for and what you expect from yourself, your family, your community, your nation. I hope all of you will consider rethinking your worldview, whether conservative or liberal or otherwise in politics, and start making a difference, so that eventually, there will be no more need for a March for Life.

Did Christianity Cause the Crash?

2010-01-05T13:08:00.000-05:00

America’s mainstream religious denominations used to teach the faithful that they would be rewarded in the afterlife. But over the past generation, a different strain of Christian faith has proliferated—one that promises to make believers rich in the here and now. Known as the prosperity gospel, and claiming tens of millions of adherents, it fosters risk-taking and intense material optimism. It pumped air into the housing bubble. And one year into the worst downturn since the Depression, it’s still going strong.

by Hanna Rosin

Did Christianity Cause the Crash?

Image credit: Mark Peterson/Redux

Like the ambitions of many immigrants who attend services there, Casa del Padre’s success can be measured by upgrades in real estate. The mostly Latino church, in Charlottesville, Virginia, has moved from the pastor’s basement, where it was founded in 2001, to a rented warehouse across the street from a small mercado five years later, to a middle-class suburban street last year, where the pastor now rents space from a lovely old Baptist church that can’t otherwise fill its pews. Every Sunday, the parishioners drive slowly into the parking lot, never parking on the sidewalk or grass—“because Americanos don’t do that,” one told me—and file quietly into church. Some drive newly leased SUVs, others old work trucks with paint buckets still in the bed. The pastor, Fernando Garay, arrives last and parks in front, his dark-blue Mercedes Benz always freshly washed, the hubcaps polished enough to reflect his wingtips.

It can be hard to get used to how much Garay talks about money in church, one loyal parishioner, Billy Gonzales, told me one recent Sunday on the steps out front. Back in Mexico, Gonzales’s pastor talked only about “Jesus and heaven and being good.” But Garay talks about jobs and houses and making good money, which eventually came to make sense to Gonzales: money is “really important,” and besides, “we love the money in Jesus Christ’s name! Jesus loved money too!” That Sunday, Garay was preaching a variation on his usual theme, about how prosperity and abundance unerringly find true believers. “It doesn’t matter what country you’re from, what degree you have, or what money you have in the bank,” Garay said. “You don’t have to say, ‘God, bless my business. Bless my bank account.’ The blessings will come! The blessings are looking for you! God will take care of you. God will not let you be without a house!”

Pastor Garay, 48, is short and stocky, with thick black hair combed back. In his off hours, he looks like a contented tourist, in his printed Hawaiian shirts or bright guayaberas. But he preaches with a ferocity that taps into his youth as a cocaine dealer with a knife in his back pocket. “Fight the attack of the devil on my finances! Fight him! We declare financial blessings! Financial miracles this week, NOW NOW NOW!” he preached that Sunday. “More work! Better work! The best finances!” Gonzales shook and paced as the pastor spoke, eventually leaving his wife and three kids in the family section to join the single men toward the front, many of whom were jumping, raising their Bibles, and weeping. On the altar sat some anointing oils, alongside the keys to the Mercedes Benz.

Later, D’andry Then, a trim, pretty real-estate agent and one of the church founders, stood up to give her testimony. Business had not been good of late, and “you know, Monday I have to pay this, and Tuesday I have to pay that.” Then, just that morning, “Jesus gave me $1,000.” She didn’t explain whether the gift came in the form of a real-estate commission or a tax refund or a stuffed envelope left at her door. The story hung somewhere between metaphor and a literal image of barefoot Jesus handing her a pile of cash. No one in the church seemed the least bit surprised by the story, and certainly no one expressed doubt. “If you have financial pressure on you, and you don’t know where the next payment is coming from, don’t pay any attention to that!” she continued. “Don’t get discouraged! Jesus is the answer.”

America’s churches always reflect shifts in the broader culture, and Casa del Padre is no exception. The message that Jesus blesses believers with riches first showed up in the postwar years, at a time when Americans began to believe that greater comfort could be accessible to everyone, not just the landed class. But it really took off during the boom years of the 1990s, and has continued to spread ever since. This stitched-together, homegrown theology, known as the prosperity gospel, is not a clearly defined denomination, but a strain of belief that runs through the Pentecostal Church and a surprising number of mainstream evangelical churches, with varying degrees of intensity. In Garay’s church, God is the “Owner of All the Silver and Gold,” and with enough faith, any believer can access the inheritance. Money is not the dull stuff of hourly wages and bank-account statements, but a magical substance that comes as a gift from above. Even in these hard times, it is discouraged, in such churches, to fall into despair about the things you cannot afford. “Instead of saying ‘I’m poor,’ say ‘I’m rich,’” Garay’s wife, Hazael, told me one day. “The word of God will manifest itself in reality.”

Many explanations have been offered for the housing bubble and subsequent crash: interest rates were too low; regulation failed; rising real-estate prices induced a sort of temporary insanity in America’s middle class. But there is one explanation that speaks to a lasting and fundamental shift in American culture—a shift in the American conception of divine Providence and its relationship to wealth.

In his book Something for Nothing, Jackson Lears describes two starkly different manifestations of the American dream, each intertwined with religious faith. The traditional Protestant hero is a self-made man. He is disciplined and hardworking, and believes that his “success comes through careful cultivation of (implicitly Protestant) virtues in cooperation with a Providential plan.” The hero of the second American narrative is a kind of gambling man—a “speculative confidence man,” Lears calls him, who prefers “risky ventures in real estate,” and a more “fluid, mobile democracy.” The self-made man imagines a coherent universe where earthly rewards match merits. The confidence man lives in a culture of chance, with “grace as a kind of spiritual luck, a free gift from God.” The Gilded Age launched the myth of the self-made man, as the Rockefellers and other powerful men in the pews connected their wealth to their own virtue. In these boom-and-crash years, the more reckless alter ego dominates. In his book, Lears quotes a reverend named Jeffrey Black, who sounds remarkably like Garay: “The whole hope of a human being is that somehow, in spite of the things I’ve done wrong, there will be an episode when grace and fate shower down on me and an unearned blessing will come to me—that I’ll be the one.”

I had come to Charlottesville to learn more about this second strain of the American dream—one that’s been ascendant for a generation or more. I wanted to try to piece together the connection between the gospel and today’s economic reality, and to see whether “prosperity” could possibly still seem enticing, or even plausible, in this distinctly unprosperous moment. (Very much so, as it turns out.) Charlottesville may not be the heartland of the prosperity gospel, which is most prevalent in the Sun Belt—where many of the country’s foreclosure hot spots also lie. And Garay preaches an unusually pure version of the gospel. Still, the particulars of both Garay and his congregation are revealing.

Among Latinos the prosperity gospel has been spreading rapidly. In a recent Pew survey, 73 percent of all religious Latinos in the United States agreed with the statement: “God will grant financial success to all believers who have enough faith.” For a generation of poor and striving Latino immigrants, the gospel seems to offer a road map to affluence and modern living. Garay’s church is comprised mostly of first-generation immigrants. More than others I’ve visited, it echoes back a highly distilled, unself-conscious version of the current thinking on what it means to live the American dream.

One other thing makes Garay’s church a compelling case study. From 2001 to 2007, while he was building his church, Garay was also a loan officer at two different mortgage companies. He was hired explicitly to reach out to the city’s growing Latino community, and Latinos, as it happened, were disproportionately likely to take out the sort of risky loans that later led to so many foreclosures. To many of his parishioners, Garay was not just a spiritual adviser, but a financial one as well.

Many of the terms and concepts used by prosperity preachers today date back to Oral Roberts, a poor farmer’s son turned Pentecostal preacher. Garay grew up watching Roberts on television and considers him a hero; he hopes to send all three of his children to Oral Roberts University, in Tulsa, Oklahoma. In the late 1940s, Roberts claimed his Bible flipped open to the Third Epistle of John, verse 2: “Beloved, I wish above all things that thou mayest prosper and be in health. Even as thy soul prospereth.” Soon Roberts developed his famous concept of seed faith, still popular today. If people would donate money to his ministry, a “seed” offered to God, he’d say, then God would multiply it a hundredfold. Eventually, Roberts retreated into a life that revolved around private jets and country clubs.

Roberts’s fame had faded by the late 1980s, and prosperity preaching briefly imploded soon after. We all remember Tammy Faye Bakker and her mascara tears, along with her husband, Jim, and his various scandals. They took their place in a procession of slick, showy faith healers on Christian television who ultimately succumbed to earthly temptation.

But since that time, the movement has made itself over, moving out of the fringe and into the upwardly mobile megachurch class. In the past decade, it has produced about a dozen celebrity pastors, who show up at White House events, on secular radio, and as guests on major TV talk shows. Kirbyjon Caldwell, a Methodist megapastor in Houston and a purveyor of the prosperity gospel, gave the benediction at both of George W. Bush’s inaugurals. Instead of shiny robes or gaudy jewelry, these preachers wear Italian suits and modest wedding bands. Instead of screaming and sweating, they smile broadly and speak in soothing, therapeutic terms. But their message is essentially the same. “Every day, you’re going to live that abundant life!” preaches Joel Osteen, a best-selling author, the nation’s most popular TV preacher, and the pastor of Lakewood Church, in Houston, the country’s largest church by far.

Among mainstream, nondenominational megachurches, where much of American religious life takes place, “prosperity is proliferating” rapidly, says Kate Bowler, a doctoral candidate at Duke University and an expert in the gospel. Few, if any, of these churches have prosperity in their title or mission statement, but Bowler has analyzed their sermons and teachings. Of the nation’s 12 largest churches, she says, three are prosperity—Osteen’s, which dwarfs all the other megachurches; Tommy Barnett’s, in Phoenix; and T. D. Jakes’s, in Dallas. In second-tier churches—those with about 5,000 members—the prosperity gospel dominates. Overall, Bowler classifies 50 of the largest 260 churches in the U.S. as prosperity. The doctrine has become popular with Americans of every background and ethnicity; overall, Pew found that 66 percent of all Pentecostals and 43 percent of “other Christians”—a category comprising roughly half of all respondents—believe that wealth will be granted to the faithful. It’s an upbeat theology, argues Barbara Ehrenreich in her new book, Bright-Sided, that has much in common with the kind of “positive thinking” that has come to dominate America’s boardrooms and, indeed, its entire culture.

On the cover of his 4 million-copy best seller from 2004, Your Best Life Now, Joel Osteen looks like a recent college grad who just got hired by Goldman Sachs and can’t believe his good luck. His hair is full, his teeth are bright, his suit is polished but not flashy; he looks like a guy who would more likely shake your hand than cast out your demons. Osteen took over his father’s church in 1999. He had little preaching experience, although he’d managed the television ministry for years. The church grew quickly, as Osteen packaged himself to appeal to the broadest audience possible. In his books and sermons, Osteen quotes very little scripture, opting instead to tell uplifting personal anecdotes. He avoids controversy, and rarely appears on Christian TV. In a popular YouTube clip, he declines to confirm Larry King’s suggestion that only those who believe in Jesus will go to heaven.

Video: Watch a clip from Joel Osteen’s Larry King appearance

Osteen is often derided as Christianity Lite, but he is more like Positivity Extreme. “Cast down anything negative, any thought that brings fear, worry, doubt, or unbelief,” he urges. “Your attitude should be: ‘I refuse to go backward. I am going forward with God. I am going to be the person he wants me to be. I’m going to fulfill my destiny.’” Telling yourself you are poor, or broke, or stuck in a dead-end job is a form of sin and “invites more negativity into your life,” he writes. Instead, you have to “program your mind for success,” wake up every morning and tell yourself, “God is guiding and directing my steps.” The advice is exactly like the message of The Secret, or any number of American self-help blockbusters that edge toward magical thinking, except that the religious context adds another dimension.

Your Best Life Now, which has fueled a TV show that Osteen claims is now seen in 200 million homes worldwide, opens with a story of a man on vacation in Hawaii. He was “a good man who had achieved a modest measure of success, but he was coasting along, thinking that he’d already reached his limits.” While sightseeing, he and his wife admired a gorgeous house on a hill. “I can’t even imagine living in a place like that,” he said. For this bit of self-deprecation and modesty, Osteen pities the man: “His own thoughts and attitudes,” he writes, “were condemning him to mediocrity,” or what is known in the gospel as the “defeated life.”

A few pages later comes the corrective, the model of a “victor” and not a “victim.” Osteen and his wife, Victoria, are walking around their neighborhood in Houston when they pass a beautiful house being built. “Most of the other homes around us were one-story, ranch-style homes that were forty to fifty years old, but this house was a large two-story home, with high ceilings and oversized windows,” he writes. “It was a lovely, inspiring place.” Victoria desperately wanted a house “just like it,” but Joel was worried about how stretched they already were. “Thinking of our bank account and my income at the time, it seemed impossible to me,” he writes. But this, of course, is an example of ungodly, negative thinking. With her unwavering faith, Victoria wouldn’t let it drop. Soon she convinced Joel and then he, too, started to believe that “God could bring it to pass.” There is no explanation of how they came to own such a house—whether Osteen worked hard to grow his ministry or got rich from his TV show or received an inheritance from his father’s estate. In this story they are standing in for an average middle-class couple who set their sights on a bigger house and believed, despite all the financial evidence, that God would bestow it upon them, like a gift. And he did.

Theologically, the prosperity gospel has always infuriated many mainstream evangelical pastors. Rick Warren, whose book The Purpose Driven Life outsold Osteen’s, told Time, “This idea that God wants everybody to be wealthy? There is a word for that: baloney. It’s creating a false idol. You don’t measure your self-worth by your net worth. I can show you millions of faithful followers of Christ who live in poverty. Why isn’t everyone in the church a millionaire?” In 2005, a group of African American pastors met to denounce prosperity megapreachers for promoting a Jesus who is more like a “cosmic bellhop,” as one pastor put it, than the engaged Jesus of the civil-rights era who looked after the poor.

More recently, critics have begun to argue that the prosperity gospel, echoed in churches across the country, might have played a part in the economic collapse. In 2008, in the online magazine Religion Dispatches, Jonathan Walton, a professor of religious studies at the University of California at Riverside, warned:

Narratives of how “God blessed me with my first house despite my credit” were common … Sermons declaring “It’s your season of overflow” supplanted messages of economic sobriety and disinterested sacrifice. Yet as folks were testifying about “what God can do,” little attention was paid to a predatory subprime-mortgage industry, relaxed credit standards, or the dangers of using one’s home equity as an ATM.

In 2004, Walton was researching a book about black televangelists. “I would hear consistent testimonies about how ‘once I was renting and now God let me own my own home,’ or ‘I was afraid of the loan officer, but God directed him to ignore my bad credit and blessed me with my first home,’” he says. “This trope was so common in these churches that I just became immune to it. Only later did I connect it to this disaster.”

Demographically, the growth of the prosperity gospel tracks fairly closely to the pattern of foreclosure hot spots. Both spread in two particular kinds of communities—the exurban middle class and the urban poor. Many newer prosperity churches popped up around fringe suburban developments built in the 1990s and 2000s, says Walton. These are precisely the kinds of neighborhoods that have been decimated by foreclosures, according to Eric Halperin, of the Center for Responsible Lending.

Zooming out a bit, Kate Bowler found that most new prosperity-gospel churches were built along the Sun Belt, particularly in California, Florida, and Arizona—all areas that were hard-hit by the mortgage crisis. Bowler, who, like Walton, was researching a book, spent a lot of time attending the “financial empowerment” seminars that are common at prosperity churches. Advisers would pay lip service to “sound financial practices,” she recalls, but overall they would send the opposite message: posters advertising the seminars featured big houses in the background, and the parking spots closest to the church were reserved for luxury cars.

Nationally, the prosperity gospel has spread exponentially among African American and Latino congregations. This is also the other distinct pattern of foreclosures. “Hyper-segregated” urban communities were the worst off, says Halperin. Reliable data on foreclosures by race are not publicly available, but mortgages are tracked by both race and loan type, and subprime loans have tended to correspond to foreclosures. During the boom, roughly 40 percent of all loans going to Latinos nationwide were subprime loans; Latinos and African Americans were 28 percent and 37 percent more likely, respectively, to receive a higher-rate subprime loan than whites.

In June, the Supreme Court ruled that state attorneys general had the authority to sue national banks for predatory lending. Even before that ruling, at least 17 lawsuits accusing various banks of treating racial minorities unfairly were already under way. (Bank of America’s Countrywide division—one of the companies Garay worked for—had earlier agreed to pay $8.4 billion in a multistate settlement.) One theme emerging in these suits is how banks teamed up with pastors to win over new customers for subprime loans.

Beth Jacobson is a star witness for the City of Baltimore’s recent suit against Wells Fargo. Jacobson was a top loan officer in the bank’s subprime division for nine years, closing as much as $55 million worth of loans a year. Like many subprime-loan officers, Jacobson had no bank experience before working for Wells Fargo. The subprime officers were drawn from “an utterly different background” than the professional bankers, she told me. She had been running a small paralegal business; her co-workers had been car salespeople, or had worked in telemarketing. They were prized for their ability to hustle on the ground and “look you in the eye when they shook your hand,” she surmised. As a reward for good performance, the bank would sometimes send a Hummer limo to pick up Jacobson for a celebration, she said. She’d arrive at a bar and find all her co-workers drunk and her boss “doing body shots off a waitress.”

The idea of reaching out to churches took off quickly, Jacobson recalls. The branch managers figured pastors had a lot of influence with their parishioners and could give the loan officers credibility and new customers. Jacobson remembers a conference call where sales managers discussed the new strategy. The plan was to send officers to guest-speak at church-sponsored “wealth-building seminars” like the ones Bowler attended, and dazzle the participants with the possibility of a new house. They would tell pastors that for every person who took out a mortgage, $350 would be donated to the church, or to a charity of the parishioner’s choice. “They wouldn’t say, ‘Hey, Mr. Minister. We want to give your people a bunch of subprime loans,” Jacobson told me. “They would say, ‘Your congregants will be homeowners! They will be able to live the American dream!’”

Garay often tells his life story from the pulpit, as an inspiration to the many immigrants in his church, some legal, some not. He grew up an outsider—a citizen by birth, but living a marginal existence in a diverse, working-class neighborhood in Flushing, Queens. His mother left when he was 8, and he was raised mostly by two older brothers; he spent most of his time on the street. “I ate jars of peanut butter for dinner,” he says. The story of how he became a Christian begins in 1989, when he was 28 years old, and involves a large sum of money. He’d been selling drugs in Miami, then started using, and owed some dealers $30,000 that he didn’t have, and they were going to kill him. He was on his mattress one night, in despair, when a picture of Jesus up on his wall “winked at me.” Soon after, he became a born-again Christian, and he told everyone about it. The dealers, he says, then went away. He doesn’t offer much explanation; he just says, “They were after me. They were going to kill me. And then they just backed off.” He credits Jesus.

Garay tried many churches, but they all felt alien and “dead” to him. “That’s not me, sitting quietly and saying ‘Thank you, God.’” Finally he came upon a Pentecostal prosperity church, much like the one he leads now. The church was full of miracles and real emotion, which drew him in, but it also offered practical benefits. The pastor pointed out Bible passages that referred to finances in specific terms, giving him images of wealth he could almost reach out and touch: “Give, and it shall be given to you; good measure, pressed down, and shaken together, and running over”—a passage that’s now often read at Garay’s church during tithing time.

“Then it started happening. It started happening!” He enrolled in a community college and began selling roses from buckets in the backseat of his Honda (“no AC, no radio”). In no time, as he tells it, he had worked himself up to roses in plastic straws, laid neatly across the backseat of his Cadillac, with no water sloshing on the white leather. With this story, Garay hopes to convince his followers that God has a bounty for them, but that to get it they have to take the first step of faith. One analogy he likes to use is a box of gifts in heaven; if you never reach up to get it, then it won’t come down to you. It’s a curious mix of active (a step of faith) and passive (“It started happening!”).

In Garay’s testimony, his life proceeds that way: part hard work, part miracle. He applied himself, eventually got married, and had children. One day, for no reason, he quit his job as a social worker counseling addicted juvenile delinquents. “I almost hit him with a frying pan,” Hazael, his wife, jokes. But the very same day, his mother-in-law walked into the house and said the bank was looking for a bilingual loan officer. He had no experience and had never used a computer. Yet he got the job and within a year was earning six figures. How did that happen? How did it all come together so neatly, one door opening the moment another had closed? When I asked him that, he smiled and pointed up at the sky.

Garay is like a father figure to his parishioners; I met a few who had named their children after him or his wife. Parishioners told me stories about his coming with them to their court hearings, showing them how to buy a phone card or find a good school for their children or, for the more entrepreneurial, invest in a small business. Oral Roberts’s seed-faith concept is the source of much suspicion about prosperity churches; pastors, including Garay, ask their parishioners to give 10 percent of their income to the church. But to Garay, seed faith is the church’s central tenet. The tithe, he says, is tangible proof that a believer has taken the first step toward God. It is the spiritual equivalent of spending three years selling flowers door-to-door. He often tells what’s known as Jesus’ parable of the three servants, from Matthew. A lord gives three of his servants money. Two invest the money and double their profit, and a third hides his in the ground. When the master returns, he declares the third “wicked and lazy” and a “worthless slave,” and casts him into the “outer darkness.” “To receive God’s bounty, you cannot hide your head in the sand,” Garay preaches. “You have to take a leap of faith.”

I asked Garay why his parishioner Billy Gonzales, who earns barely $25,000 and has no money to fix his car, should donate 10 percent of his income. “Because it gives him a new mentality. It teaches him that money can breed more money, that you can have money in your pocket on Saturday morning even though you got paid Friday night. People who support the church week after week have a dedication. Those who just give $5 or $10 here and there, you’ll hear them have the same problems week after week.” Jackson Lears would add another explanation: tithing is like the moment the gambler lays his money down on the table—it “promises at least a fleeting opportunity to contact a realm where hope is alive,” he writes. Without it, there’s only the dull regularity of $2,000 a month and a dead car.

During the boom years, Apostle Garay, as he is known in church, was brasher than he is now. He spoke in very specific terms during church services, promising that a $100 offering would yield a $10,000 return: “This is not my promise. It is God’s promise, and he will make it happen!” he would say.

While it sounds absurd, this kind of message can have a positive influence, according to Tony Tian-Ren Lin, a researcher at the University of Virginia who has made a close study of Latino prosperity gospel congregations over the years. These churches typically take in people who had “been basically dropped into the world from pretty primitive settings”—small towns in Latin America with no electricity or running water and very little educational opportunity. In their new congregation, their pastor slowly walks them through life in the U.S., both inside and outside of church, until they become more confident. “In Mexico, nobody ever told them they could do anything,” says Lin, who was himself raised in Argentina. He finds the message at prosperity churches to be quintessentially American. “They are taught they can do absolutely anything, and it’s God’s will. They become part of the elect, the chosen. They get swept up in the manifest destiny, this idea that God has lifted Americans above everyone else.”

At Casa del Padre, the celebration of consumer culture is quite visible, along with a sense of boundless opportunity. The people in the church, for instance, tend to have very expensive cell phones—never the free ones that come with a calling plan, nor the sort that can be bought cheaply at a convenience store. “They start wanting what’s considered the best and the most technologically advanced in this country,” Lin says. Garay’s church, it seems to me, teaches them that they deserve these things, so they go about getting them, with few resources and infinite adaptability. Before the crash, one group of young men got a $12,000 loan to start a landscaping company; another man bought a $270,000 house. One of the church’s Bible-study leaders, who’d grown up in a remote village in Mexico with an abusive, alcoholic father, had become a very successful contractor by the height of the boom, managing 30 men on multiple jobs and winning contracts to paint luxury subdivisions in the exurbs.

The tenets of the prosperity gospel, and the practical advice that pastors often give their parishioners, help immigrants learn “not just how to survive but how to thrive; not just live paycheck to paycheck but handle money—manage complicated payrolls, invest in equipment,” Lin told me. Along the way, they become assimilated. “While they’re trying to be closer to God, instead they become American,” he says, from their optimism and entrepreneurialism to the very nature of their dreams.

These days, Garay’s message is more subdued than it was at the height of the boom, but not substantially different. In a sermon on Father’s Day, he did not make specific claims of financial returns on investments but instead spoke vaguely about how his congregation’s prospects were “good and going to get better.” After church, I asked Garay about how the gospel was holding up in the recession. It was a hot summer day, and although he had just finished one of his feverish two-hour sermons, he seemed energized rather than drained. “Look,” he said, and rounded his hands as if to indicate a protective shield. “The recession has not hit my church.” He reminded me that when he had asked how many people were out of work, only four people out of about 100 there had raised their hands. But in a church where failure is seen as a kind of sin, it seems credulous at best to expect an honest response to that question. I later met at least one person—Billy Gonzales’s younger brother—who didn’t have a job but hadn’t raised his hand, because he thought he’d “have one lined up soon.”

Garay describes the recession as God’s judgment—for abortion, taking prayer out of school, bikinis on television, “Desperate Housewives, whatever.” But God is also giving us a two-year window to repent, he says. He calculates that we’ve had five years of extreme plenty and now the clock is running out, based on the biblical story of Joseph and the great famine—seven years of plenty followed by seven years of a failed harvest. If we don’t repent, we will experience “misery like we have never known it.” These days, if any parishioners or fellow pastors ask Garay for investment advice, he tells them to wait two years before making a move.

Like much of Garay’s advice, this recommendation is partly grounded in economic reality, and partly drawn from mystical notions about a biblical calendar. “I’m very real,” he once told me. “If you want to eat at Red Lobster, you better have a Red Lobster paycheck, and enough left over to pay your electric bill. But I’ve also seen miracles of God.” Later, during one of our talks over coffee, his wife echoed the sentiment. “If you can’t afford a house, you shouldn’t buy it,” Hazael said, when I asked whether the prosperity gospel might push people to take irresponsible risks. “But if the Lord is telling you to ‘take that first step and I will provide,’ then you have to believe.”

I asked Garay many times about a connection between the mortgage crisis and the gospel, but he does not really see one. From everything he says about his time as a loan officer, it seems he was involved in the kinds of subprime loans that led to so many foreclosures. He was hired in Countrywide’s emerging-markets division, which meant he was expected to target the growing Latino community in the area. Like Beth Jacobson, he had no previous experience, but was valued for his connections and hustle. He makes astute criticisms of the risky loans but, like many former loan officers, he does so with a curious sense of distance, as if he had been just a cog in the machine. Loans got “too easy,” he says. “Mortgages would be $1,500 a month, and that was all [the loan applicants] made in a month,” he recalls, “but they figured they would rent the basement.” He says sometimes he told people the loans were going to kill them, but they would plead, “Please help me, please. I want a house.” Because he was becoming an increasingly prominent pastor at the time, many people who came to see him assumed he was the president of the bank and could protect them, he recalls.

Garay says as far as he knows no one in his church defaulted. But at a bare minimum, some of his parishioners have run into intense financial difficulties, sometimes defaulting soon after leaving the congregation. The man who’d bought the $270,000 house threw a huge housewarming party and invited everyone from church. He gave a weepy testimony about the house God had given him, passing around the title for all to see. At the time, he was working as a handyman, putting up drywall, painting, roofing, and doing other odd jobs. Within three months he had three families living in the three-bedroom house, and he still could not keep up with the payments. After five months, he went into foreclosure and ducked out of the country. Tony Lin is careful—and of course correct—to say that neither immigrants nor Latinos caused the crash; adherents of every stripe exhibited the same sort of magical thinking about finances, as did millions of nonbelievers. Still, he recalls, “I wasn’t very surprised when the whole subprime-mortgage thing blew up. I’m sure a loan officer never said, ‘God wants you to have a house.’ But you’ve already been taught that. Now here comes the loan officer saying, ‘Sign here, and this house will be yours.’ It feels like a gift from God. It’s the perfect fuel for the crisis.”

The guys who’d started the landscaping company also fared badly. They had a pretty good spring and summer in 2007, their first year of operation, and then business started to fall off. In church they kept giving positive testimonies, bragging about their success. But by October, they’d begun selling off their equipment; eventually they lost the business and had to go into hiding. The most interesting part of the story is the epilogue. One of the partners in the group, whom I’ll call Luis, eventually moved to Richmond, and an acquaintance from Casa del Padre told me that he’d recently run into him there. Luis hadn’t been embittered by the experience; he blamed the disaster on the fact that he’d started working on Sundays instead of going to church. Luis asked the man to come visit with some of the parishioners of his new church, to confirm that he had once been a great success. As they talked, he seemed happy and positive. “He wasn’t angry that things didn’t work out. He wasn’t angry at God. He looked back at those days and thought, ‘I can still have everything. Look what God gave me. That was a time when I had it all.’”

By many measures, Billy Gonzales does not have it all. He lives with his wife and three children in a tiny apartment on the back side of a development at the edge of town, where people hang out on the stoop until all hours. He works 45 minutes away and his car has been broken down for three months, and he does not have any money to fix it. Every day at work he is faced with a vision of what he does not have. He works for a man who just built a $4 million house—one of four the man owns. Gonzales’s job is to make sure every wine glass, garden statue, and book is dusted and in its proper place. Yet when I talked to Gonzales he was like a child hearing the ice-cream truck, or a man newly in love. “I’m crazy! Just crazy,” he said, meaning crazy for the Lord, and giving little jumps out of his chair.

I visited Gonzales one evening after he’d had a long day at work; his brother had given him a ride home. Gonzales has a wide, earnest face that can look like a child’s or, if he is tired, like an old man’s. He sat in his favorite squeaky leather chair with his Bible in one hand and a soccer ball at his feet. The sofas in the tiny living room are actually backseats ripped out of cars, with cushions thrown on them. He got the cushions from a man he once shared a trailer with, and they turned out to be infested with cockroaches. As we talked, the roaches crawled across the floor or on the sofas. Gonzales apologized but did not pay them much attention.

He told me he feels pity for his employer. He assumes the man must have been close to God at one point, or at least his family must have been, “because the rich are closer to God.” But now the man has lost his way. He laughs when Gonzales talks to him about Jesus, and he wastes his money, buying $500 birdhouses and hiring Gonzales to clean them.

Gonzales was once lost too. He came from a big family in Guatemala so poor “that the poor people would call us poor.” For a while after he came to the U.S., he sent money home, but then like many of his friends he lost the rhythm of work. Instead, he was snorting cocaine and getting drunk four nights a week. “I hated Americans. I hated them,” he said, and I had trouble believing him, given his now-innocent, open demeanor. He says that back then, he spent most of his days fantasizing about killing his brother-in-law, whom he hated for no reason he can remember. His conversion came two years ago, in the form of a sudden vision like Garay’s. One night, in a drugged-out haze, he saw a polished, shimmery stone. He later realized it was a jewel, one of the many treasures in God’s vast storehouse, destined for him. Eventually he made his way to Garay, whom he now calls his father.

When I mentioned Gonzales to Garay, the pastor praised him as a model congregant. Indeed, by any standard Gonzales is an admirable man. He is 24, married, works hard, and limits his extracurricular activities to Bible study and soccer. It took me a few visits to realize that two of the three small children in the house are not his. He married a woman with two sons and takes care of them. They call him Papa and he reads to them at night and speaks to them gently, exactly the way he speaks to his own baby son. He has every reason to be frustrated with his circumstances, but I never once saw him express anything but delight. The gospel obviously grounds Gonzales in a very concrete way. But I can also see how, one day, it might send him floating into the air.

“I want to buy a house,” he confessed to me one evening this summer. It turned out his lease was almost up, and he needed to move in the fall. “Not a small one but a really huge one, a nice one. With six bedrooms and a kitchen and living room. I know, it’s crazy! But nothing is impossible! God, you saved my life,” he said, no longer speaking to me. “You saved my life, and now you will give me a gift. Now I’m crazy!” Last I heard, he and Garay were house-hunting together.

A year or so after the crash, there are signs of a new sobriety—higher savings rates, for example, and a reduction in conspicuous spending. But it’s hard to imagine Americans reverting to frugality the way, say, the Japanese did during the “lost decade” after their economy crashed. If by stereotype the Japanese are savers, then Americans are consumers, and ever hopeful. Already, countless “entrepreneurs” are finding a silver lining in the mortgage crisis, buying up foreclosed lots—often sight unseen, based on Web listings alone—in desolate parts of Cleveland and Phoenix and other places where abandoned houses can sometimes be had for a few thousand dollars or less. The buyers pay these bargain-basement prices eagerly, in the belief that the houses must be great deals, when they are just as likely to be overtaken by mold, or have every one of their doors and windows missing and the roof caving in. In America there is always a next play, another opportunity, an “unearned blessing” that can make up for a lifetime of disappointment.

It is not all that surprising that the prosperity gospel persists despite its obvious failure to pay off. Much of popular religion these days is characterized by a vast gap between aspirations and reality. Few of Sarah Palin’s religious compatriots were shocked by her messy family life, because they’ve grown used to the paradoxes; some of the most socially conservative evangelical churches also have extremely high rates of teenage pregnancies, out-of-wedlock births, and divorce. As Garay likes to say, “What you have is nothing compared to what you will have.” The unpleasant reality—an inadequate paycheck, a pregnant daughter, a recession—is invisible. It’s your ability to see beyond such things, your willing blindness to even the most hopeless-seeming circumstances, that makes you a certain kind of modern Christian, and a 21st-century American.

There is the kind of hope that President Obama talks about, and that Clinton did before him—steady, uplifting, assured. And there is Garay’s kind of hope, which perhaps for many people better reflects the reality of their lives. Garay’s is a faith that, for all its seeming confidence, hints at desperation, at circumstances gone so far wrong that they can only be made right by a sudden, unexpected jackpot.

Once, I asked Garay how you would know for certain if God had told you to buy a house, and he answered like a roulette dealer. “Ten Christians will say that God told them to buy a house. In nine of the cases, it will go bad. The 10th one is the real Christian.” And the other nine? “For them, there’s always another house.”

source: http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200912/rosin-prosperity-gospel

Consumerism and Prosperity Gospel

2010-01-05T09:14:00.001-05:00

One of the greatest sources of evil in our world is the combination of Consumerism and the Prosperity Gospel of Evangelical Protestantism.

Health Care Reform and That Socialist Frank Capra: Mr. Smith Won't Shut Up

2010-01-05T08:57:00.001-05:00

Watching "It's a Wonderful Life" has been a Christmas tradition since the 1970s. Hard to believe that today's beloved classic was a flop when it premiered in 1946.

It was even reported to the FBI as Communist propaganda. Ironic, since director Frank Capra said he made the movie to "combat a modern trend toward atheism."

But it's another Frank Capra film starring Jimmy Stewart that comes to mind now, with all the talk of health care reform and potential filibusters, followed by the Senate vote on Christmas Eve.

The HR 3590 Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, as it's known in the Senate, contains 2074 pages and clocks in at a shade over 20 pounds.

The bill is posted online, but when a document the size of a bread box gets introduced and passed in a matter of weeks, one has to wonder how many Senators actually read the bill.

In one memorable scene of Capra's "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington," junior senator (and unwitting pawn in a graft scheme) Jefferson Smith suggests that maybe he should read the bills before voting on them.

"The bills?" says an incredulous Senator Paine, played by Claude Rains. "These bills are put together by legal minds after long study. I can't understand half of them myself, and I used to be a lawyer."

Forget it, he tells Smith. "When the time comes, I'll advise you how to vote."

Yes, it might be a good idea to "read the bill" if the health care law is as revolutionary as they say it is.

Or, we could just go by what the experts tell us. On Christmas Day, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman weighed in with a Christmas parable:

Indulge me while I tell you a story – a near-future version of Charles Dickens's "A Christmas Carol." It begins with sad news: Young Timothy Cratchit, a.k.a. Tiny Tim, is sick. And his treatment will cost far more than his parents can pay out of pocket. Fortunately, our story is set in 2014, and the Cratchits have health insurance.

Some of Krugman's readers weren't buying it. Like this one.

Unfortunately, it's not 2014, it's 2010. And it would probably be great if Tiny Tim could hold out for another four years. But if we are going to be true to he story, Tiny Tim will be gone for two or three years before he is covered.

Good point. And here's another.

Apart from the technical problem of senate rules that has patently paralyzed our decision-making, the egregious, shameless imprint of corporate interests -- Eisenhower, if he were to deliver his farewell today, would have most certainly cited the medical-industrial complex -- has so thoroughly perverted our democracy that it is no longer recognizable as such. We have, without even realizing it, embraced a form of feudalism where the castles whose gates are emblazoned with names like Pfizer, Medtronic and Aetna, the moats are fluffy piles of money, and the knights in shining suits their lawyers and lobbyists.

The most significant reply to Krugman, brought to the top of the heap by recommendations of fellow readers, was this one.

Above all, please call on Harry Reid to pass the public option by a simple majority vote using reconciliation. The whole reform bill cannot be passed using reconciliation, but the public option can be passed that way separately. Unless Reid stops pretending that he needs 60 votes to pass the public option, he should be removed as majority leader. According to several reports, Rahm Emanuel went to Reid's office and put very strong WH pressure on him not to try to twist Liebermans's arm or otherwise seriously try to get him to change his vote. Emanuel virtually forced Reid to cave in to Lieberman without a fight, and now the president and Reid are trying to float the false narrative that 60 votes are needed to pass the public option.

I'm no procedural expert, but Politics Daily's Jill Lawrence wrote about the reconciliation scenario months ago.

I thought former senator George S. McGovern had lost his mind when, back in September, he suggested that we just make Medicare universal.

What seems missing in the current battle is a single proposal that everyone can understand and that does not lend itself to demagoguery. If we want comprehensive health care for all our citizens, we can achieve it with a single sentence: Congress hereby extends Medicare to all Americans.

Oh really, I thought. Maybe I'll ask Congress to make world peace while they're at it.

Today, in light of the devolving health care debate, McGovern looks like a genius.

In "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington," Smith had to rely on the "Boy Rangers" back home to get the truth out. The Washington press corps, according to the film, was made up of cynics, hacks and shills. Not surprisingly, when the film opened in 1939, the press hated it.

So did politicians. Alben W. Barkley, the Senate Majority Leader, called the film "silly and stupid," and said it "makes the Senate look like a bunch of crooks." Just like "It's a Wonderful Life,'' the film was labeled anti-American and pro-Communist. One journalist thought Washington should pass a law empowering theater owners to boycott films that "were not in the best interest of our country."

Touchy bunch, weren't they?

HR 3590's proponents say (quoting Voltaire): Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good. We can always fix the law later, like we did with Social Security and Medicare.

But there's one flaw in that argument. When was Social Security ever anything but a government program? When was Medicare ever without a public option? The law of 1965 created a public option.

You could argue that's the whole reason for government programs anyway. Government steps in when private industry turns away, and it's easy to see why private companies would not be falling all over each other in the stampede to offer health insurance to sick, elderly people of limited means.

We don't have a Jimmy Stewart or a Jean Arthur leading the charge. But we still have a country. We still have a Constitution. And thanks to the Internet, we have thousands of Boy Rangers who refuse to shut up.

"You think I'm licked. You all think I'm licked. Well, I'm not licked. And I'm going to stay right here and fight for this lost cause."

Mr. Smith, you took the words right out of their mouths.

source: http://www.politicsdaily.com/2009/12/26/health-care-reform-and-that-socialist-frank-capra-mr-smith-won/

Why Would Any Non-Psychopath Dance on Deborah Howell's Grave?

2010-01-05T08:48:00.002-05:00

Among the many things I do not understand – the appeal of the Coen brothers*, for instance, and the whole adventure known as mathematics – the impulse to append a "Woohoo, you're dead!" comment to an online obituary looms large today. Why? Well, since you ask, on Saturday we ran a story about the death of Deborah Howell, a retired newspaperwoman who had a great career and was killed in a traffic accident in New Zealand, where she was on a long-planned vacation with her husband.

Last night, I wandered into our comment section, as I often do, to get a sense of who is reading and what they are thinking. Bad move, though, because anger is contagious, and what I found in those comments, in response to Carl Cannon's nicely-done appreciation of Howell, made me want to spit. There were some lovely tributes, both from folks who had known her and others who had not, but had still been moved to send her family condolences – you know, the way feeling people do.

But there was also a shocking number of comments to the effect that since Howell was in the news business, she must have been a lefty, so how fabulous she'd been killed. There was joshing speculation about whether she'd been driving a hybrid, a joke about how liberals walking in lockstep really ought to be more careful, and a couple of cracks about how Republicans were sure to be blamed. "One less of those anti-US types to deal with," said one of several celebratory rejoinders from readers who by their own account had five minutes earlier never even heard of Deborah Howell.

We can't pretend this sort of thing is limited to one or other corner, either; Matt Lewis wrote here about how news of Rush Limbaugh's chest pains had similarly gladdened some tiny liberal hearts, and our obit of Irving Kristol provoked disquieting comments, too.

So, what to make of this? Assuming we are not becoming a nation of psychopaths, are we trading our humanity for a little negative attention? Do people just not think before they type? Or, even if they don't really mean such meanness, do they not worry that someone who reads it might?

Part of the problem, I think, is the way in which outrageous and hateful speech is rewarded here and now: Ann Coulter outdoes herself yet again? Well give that woman a book contract – and can we get her on the "Today" show? Or there's comedian Wanda Sykes, invited to sit by the president and first lady at the White House Correspondent's Association dinner, joking about hoping Limbaugh's kidneys fail.

The relatively small differences between Republicans and Democrats – infinitesimal compared to the differences between political parties in other countries – are not only exaggerated but made to seem catastrophic, mostly because demonizing the political other is good for business if you're a political performance artist or a fund-raiser. Because unless the other side is characterized as a threat to life as we know it, who's gonna pony up?

Howell herself wrote about just the kind of irrational and destructive political rage I'm talking about. As ombudsman for the Washington Post in '06, she erroneously wrote that convicted lobbyist Jack Abramoff had donated to both political parties instead of only to Republicans. It was an honest mistake, but readers assumed she could only have written such a thing in the service of conservative ideology:

"Nothing in my 50-year career prepared me for the thousands of flaming e-mails I got last week over my last column,'' she wrote in response, "e-mails so abusive and many so obscene that part of The Post's Web site was shut down. . . . I have a tough hide and a few curse words (which I use frequently) are not going to hurt my feelings. But it is profoundly distressing if political discourse has sunk to a level where abusive name-calling and the crudest of sexual language are the norm, where facts have no place in an argument. This unbounded, unreasoning rage is not going to help this newspaper, this country or democracy.''

Amen, sister. To readers who think it is their God-given right to throw rocks on our site, under the cowardly cover of anonymity, think again; this is a business, and some modicum of civility is our version of "no shirt, no shoes, no service.'' It is also something more, and in our imperfect way, we are trying our best to give all sides their fair shake, and to make this one place where those who might not agree on the issues can at least, we hope, agree not to wish one another harm. And to those who are constantly threatening to take their clicks and go elsewhere when their more pungent, "Pls. die soon" comments are deleted, I say: Promises, promises. This is really not the site for you.

source: http://www.politicsdaily.com/2010/01/04/why-would-any-non-psychopath-want-to-dance-on-deborah-howells-g/

Cruelty In Obituary Comments Shocks Editor

January 4, 2010

Listen to the Story

Talk of the Nation

[17 min 5 sec]

Read Melinda Henneberger's Politics Daily Piece, "Why Would Any Non-Psychopath Dance On Deborah Howell's Grave?"

text sizeA A A

January 4, 2010

A long-time journalist was killed in an accident, and in the comments on her obituary, a small but vocal minority cheered. Melinda Henneberger, editor-in-chief of Politics Daily, wonders whether we are trading our humanity for a little negative attention.

source: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=122221208

What Does Medicare Cost?

2010-01-04T15:22:00.001-05:00

There are some set costs for Medicare, but also some variations. Medicare Part A is free, but you'll need to pay a deductible for hospital stays. You'll also need to pay monthly premiums for Parts B and D coverage. And there are exceptions for all the various Medicare plans, so make sure you do your research or talk to someone who can help.

An Orthodox Christian in a Postmodern World: CHRISTIAN COMMUNISM: The Church Fathers on Wealth, Poverty, Social Justice, Charity & Communitarianism (A Blog Remix)

2010-01-04T09:24:00.000-05:00

An Orthodox Christian in a Postmodern World: CHRISTIAN COMMUNISM: The Church Fathers on Wealth, Poverty, Social Justice, Charity & Communitarianism (A Blog Remix)

Bourgeois Life and the Orthodox Mind: The Importance of the Prophets

2010-01-01T23:08:00.000-05:00

“The Day of Yahweh shall be darkness, not light,” as the prophet Amos says to the unfaithful Israelites who “whored after other/foreign gods.” He, as all the prophets, condemns in harsh terms the smug pseudo-religious of his day who believe themselves to be righteous while behaving like pagans. Zephaniah writes on the same topic, “That day is a day of wrath, a day of trouble and distress, a day of waste and desolation, a day of darkness and gloom, a day of cloud and thick darkness, a day of trumpet and alarm. . . .for he will make an end, a terrible end.” In other words, those who seek the “coming of Christ” to take them in the “rapture” are in for a surprise; God will destroy them, their ideology and their bourgeois institutions.

The institutions of bourgeois capitalism are incompatible, at their root, with the life of Orthodox Christianity. This is the central point of the prophets for modern times. The substance of “modernism” among the half-converted Orthodox in America is a basic secularism, the reduction of the truths of Orthodoxy to the injunction to “be good,” and a marked refusal to permit the truths of the faith to penetrate the very recesses of life except in the most facile ways. And yet, that too, is incompatible with Orthodoxy. “Goodness” and “holiness” are two different things, often conflicting with one another. St. John the Baptist, Jeremiah and Elijah were holy, but not good by “middle class standards of then and now. They were harsh, judgmental, condemnatory, violent, and uncompromising: illiberal in every degree. They were condemned by their own faithless generation and either exiled, murdered or otherwise maltreated. Orthodox can expect little more, as Christ himself promises.

The Prophet Jeremiah

Few read the Old Testament any more. This is no accident. New Calendar clergy refuse to have anything to do with it, for it brings Christ into his social and religious context, a context, without which, makes nonsense out of Christ’s sayings. Christ, in other words, makes no sense without his Old Testament context, one which he took for granted. The Old Testament is the moral, social, political and economic basis of Christianity, while the New Testament revolves around Christ’s identification with the Father, and the building of the church around this fact. Christ’s mission was based around this identification, but, in addition, included specific dispensations from the Old Law, but not a rejection of it in its entirety (which, of course, would include the 10 commandments). A firm knowledge of the Old Testament, therefore, is absolutely necessary for an understanding of Christ.

One of the reasons why the semi-converted refuse to read the Old Testament is the prophets, the true models of Orthodox manhood in modern times, differ in every conceivable way from the life of bourgeois modernity. These men were revolutionaries, and refused to accept the continuing compromise between Baalism and Yahwehism. Of course, the ideas behind the fertility rites of Baalism are identical to modernity and its institutions. And it is around this nexus–the idea of Baalism being the manipulation of natural forces for the benefit of the elite–that the prophets wrote and acted. In other words, moderns cannot accept the Old Testament without rejecting their own lifestyle.

The prophets were everything that middle-class modernity condemns. They were loners, uncompromising in their rhetoric, uncaring for their own safety, uncaring about financial or social prestige, in a word, “irrational” by both Baalist and modernist standards. While many in the new calendar parishes of Orthodoxy are satisfied with being “good,” defined exclusively in negative terms, e.g. we are not murderers, counterfeiters, bootleggers, child beaters, and therefore, we are “good,” the true Orthodox struggle for holiness. The True Orthodox, however, must fight to become holy, and to do that, we must always have the example of the inspired prophets in mind, flee from the middle class and its ideology, and struggle in asceticism according to our strength.

Back in 1952, a book was published called The Relevance of the Prophets, by R.B.Y. Scott, professor at the United Theological College in Montreal, and it is a book that it worth its weight in gold. This book lays out the social and economic context for the prophets and their condemnation of the Israelite social order, which, ipso facto, is the critical economic vision of Christianity. What is striking is that the context is identical to modern America. He writes,

The unity and integrity of [Israelite] society were strained in the transition from mobility to permanent settlement, from a simple to a more complex culture, from small kinship groups to the large political society comprising many of non-Israelite blood; from a mainly pastoral economy to one predominantly agricultural and commercial, from a property system where possessions were held in common (or in trust) to a system of private ownership where wealth gave power to the individual, and stratified society. Most notable of all was the incompatibility of the ethics of Mosaic Yahwism with the institutions of the Canaanite religion (161).

The institutions of Baalism are perennial, in that they represent nature in its lowest form, a series of “blind” forces to be manipulated by the individual for private profit. This is the basis of modern economics and modern science. As Israel, and modern societies, became settled and wealthy (in the aggregate), the institutions of Baalism became more and more attractive, for they promised only success in their world. As modern Orthodox go from church to the stock broker or lawyer, the Israelite went from his ancestral shrine to that of Baal, asking for favors according to their ruling passion: sex, money, power, reputation. Sometimes, as Scott lays out, the shrine to Yahweh and Baal were identical in content, and almost impossible to differentiate. Sometimes, Baal was called “Yahweh,” and Yahweh was worshiped according to Canaanite rites. Because the worship of Baal dealt with fertility issues, the institution of the temple prostitute became important and a source of wealth for the pagan priesthood. Hence the phrase, “whoring after foreign gods,” a phrase so common to the prophets. As modernist Orthodox believe that the god of the Catholics and Muslims is the “same” as their god, the identical problem of conceptual confusion exists in the Old Testament, and is roundly condemned by the prophets, who, with a few exceptions, remain unread.

The Baalim, actually a title, meaning “Over-lord” (in the sense of “property owner”) and was common to all fertility gods and goddesses, demanded sacrifice. But the meaning, and its modern consequences, have been covered over by academic mystification and pious clerical verbiage. The sacrifice of children existed as a means of securing success, as in America, where abortion is a sacrifice to secure personal success and “career advancement.” The technophilia of Baalism itself demands sacrifice, as seen in America, where the advent of the automobile and the superhighway has led to an estimated 1.2 million deaths per year worldwide, about the size of the population of Nebraska. But because of the benefits it brings to the population, this huge sacrifice is tolerated and deemed “unavoidable.” In other words, the form of sacrifice has changed from one that was ritualized (as in Canaan), to one that is merely a “part of social life” as in modern America. As the prophet Zephaniah writes, "At that time I will punish those who are at ease. . . and their possessions shall be plunder and their houses a desolation, neither their silver or gold can save them" (1:12-13).

Consistently, the True Israelite (of whom the True Orthodox are direct spiritual descendants) was continually at war, judgmental and uncompromising, against this whoring and perversion of Yahwehism, and its conceptual and material confusion with Baalism. Pure Yahwehism was a nationalist, (basically) egalitarian and communal religion of spiritual cleansing and worship, while Baalism was merely a form of control over nature for personal gain. There was to be no compromising with this, according to the prophets, no matter what the authorities and “smart money” said about it. Scott writes,

The Canaanite civilization imitated that of the great powers of the Nile valley and Mesopotamia; it was particularly influenced by commercialism of its immediate neighbor Phoenicia. It was an urban centered, power-organized commercial and agricultural society, under despotic monarchies, sustained by the sanctions of a polytheistic nature religion. . . .the prophets quarrel with their social order was that it did not enshrine and sustain the human and social values integral to Yahwism, but on their contrary destroyed them. (166-7)

In modern times, both “power ideologies” liberalism and conservatism, serve the Baalim, in that the “conservatives” attempt to bracket economic justice into the mystification of the “free market” (itself almost a divine force, a sort of Baal in its own right), while the “liberals” seek the destruction of family bonds for the “liberation of the individual,” with abortion and child neglect as its “acceptable sacrifice.” As always, the church, then remains alone, isolated in a heterodox and alien land, while being forced to see most of its clerics and elite go “a-whoring” with some fashionable ideology or party. The parallel here is unmistakable, and the sin is horrid in its implications.

The prophets, as always, did not merely write their condemnations. They, quite literally, to use a modern phrase, “got in the face” of the ruling class and condemned them in the most shocking and sharp terms imaginable. They spat on “middle class prudence” and moderation. They were possessed by the spirit of Yahweh, and were thus motivated to throw all caution by the wayside as a result. What does that mean for us? And why is no one asking? The prophets were hated by the world, or that worship of power, respectability and money so dear to our modern ecumenists at their lavishly funded “conferences” and “seminars.” Amos says (3:10) that what is “respectable” actually turns out to be robbery with violence, speaking of the yuppies of his day. So when this writer discovered (and was the first to report) that the OCA was taking money from corporate America to promote ecumenism, this writer merely sought to imitate the rhetoric of Amos. The people and the ruling classes, chafing at the constant rhetorical harassment of the prophets, either imprisoned or murdered these holy ones. Micah says, “Her [Israel’s] rulers give decision for a bribe, and her priests give instruction at a price, her prophets practice divination for cash.” And likewise Hosea, “There is no truth, no kindness, no knowledge of God in the land [of Israel]; cursing, lying, murder, theft, adultery break out, and crime follows crime.”

Scott writes further,

The monarchy and the royal, establishment, the temple priesthoods with all its paraphernalia of their cult services, the cities and palaces which are the outward and visible sign of wealth and power, the judges and the elders who had betrayed their trust, the army boastful of its prowess–each will be struck down in a way appropriate to rebuke its pride. The arrogance of power and possession is most hateful in the eyes of Yahweh, for it is the mark of a spirit of individuals and society which neither fears God or has any regard for man.

Modern Orthodox compartmentalize their lives, and, in a literal sense, it then lacks integrity. Their economic life is separate from their religious life, partially due to self interest, partially due to ignorance of prophetic and ascetic teaching. Ultimately the modernist is a secular individual, but might have a certain respect for the church and its institutions. Orthodoxy is integral in that is unifies all elements of life under the guidance fo the Spirit. And it is this disconnect that unifies the criticism of all the prophets. Keep in mind also that there were “official” prophets who took money from the temple treasury, and, of course, merely spoke what the ruling classes wanted to hear. These false prophets were also a major target of the true, as the former regularly “prophesied” success and prosperity for the kingdom, while the true prophets harshly denounced the evils of this proto-capitalist society, claiming that its injustice will destroy it.

There is no substantial difference between the worship of Baal in Israel (regardless of the name the Baal was given), and the disguised sacrifices to “Over-lord” in America. What are the facts here? The prophets denounced economic inequality, or, more accurately, the stratification of society between the poor masses and the wealthy few, and this wealthy few, in order to safeguard their wealth, turned to the fertility cults. In America, the bottom 40% of workers control a mere 0.2% of national wealth, while the top 5% control almost 60% of the national income. The prophets denounced adultery. In America, according to polls in the late 1990s, between 60% and 70% of men cheat on their wives. Interestingly, the Journal of Family Psychology in its 2001 offerings, showed “Individuals earning $75,000 or more per year are more than 1.5 times more likely to have had an affair as those earning less than $30,000 per year.” In other words, adultry is a passtime of the wealthy. The prophets condemned fornication; in America, a poll from the Pew organization showed only about 35% of Americans believed fornication to be “morally wrong.”

Passion knows no limits, both in the sense that passion is never satisfied, power is only the means for more power, as well as the more psychologically significant notion that passions melt into one another. Passions, or the internal drives to become “a part” of this lower world of particulars, have more similarities than differences. Morally speaking, there is little difference between the passion for power over labor, power over citizens, and the sexual passion for domination over the opposite sex. For this reason, the Regime finances socially liberal organizations as well as “free market” ones, for the passion for gain in this market differs in no significant manner from the passion for pleasures on, shall we say, a more personal arena. Which means, in prophetic language, that the Regime’s sentence has been pronounced.

Scott writes, in dealing with the distinctions between the worship of God and that of Over-lord in this way: “Yahwism was concerned with the welfare of the people as a whole and with distribution in terms of justice and kindness, while the emphasis on Baalism was upon maximum production and the accumulation of private wealth.” (176) It must be understood, however, given the above, that “the nation is the people, constituted as such by the covenant and characterized by the social ethic ‘written in’ to the covenant.” As true Orthodox, we are the covenant people, therefore, we represent the “remnant” characterized by both Isaiah and Zephaniah as precisely those animated by the words of the prophets, and typified by what the middle classes would call “fanaticism,” or, in more congenial terms, those who refuse to compromise with the Regime because it is the “prudent” thing to do. The remnant is hated by the world, and this hatred can be found in the bourgeois media, webpages and books. We will be harassed and assaulted, most of all by the clergy who seem to be loved by the world, who go from success to success, and are quite comfortable with the “ways of things.” God promises, however, without exception through the entire prophetic corpus, that such people will burn, and their world will be destroyed.

Dr. Scott gives us, without realizing it, a real definition of the ecumenical mentality: “With the conquest of Canaan, Israel confronted in turn the nature worship of Baal temples and the conglomerate civilization of the land. Gradually, a new synthesis was achieved, in which Yahweh was worshiped after the fashion of a Canaanite god, and no longer exclusively” (181). Therefore, there is no real disconnect between the Baalist worship of money and material forces (fetishized into money), and the notion that “we all worship the same God,” the favorite mantra of the Regime. Further, Dr Scott also, again unwillingly, provides the definition of the Old Calendar resistance, again within a prophetic context:

That clarity and emphasis is the result of a fierce struggle against submergence by the nature-religion and civilization of Canaan. The champions of Yahwehism were forced to clarify for themselves and for their people what it was that made Israel’s own religion infinitely superior to the worship of the nature deities, and why religion was indispensable to the nation’s heritage and spiritual mission. (181-2)

The modernist Orthodox, very often, are not conscious hypocrites. They do, however, maintain religion and ethics in separate compartments, and as such, are incapable of distinguishing good from evil. Many New Calendarists (i.e. modernists) truly believe they are worshiping God, and truly want to follow the tradition. It remains however, that only 1 out of a thousand have any idea what this actually entails.

On of the great targets of prophetic wrath was the commercial city of Tyre. Tyre combined the “ethic” of New York, renaissance Florence, Novgorod, and Archer-Daniels-Midland in one neat package. Its god, of course, was a fertility god, one beloved by Satanists today, Moloch (sometimes spelled Melkart), the Devourer of Children. Israel began to consciously imitate this group of talented and technophilic seafarers, leading to the extreme and harsh condemnations by Elijah. Elijah’s problem was that, for many, the “simple faithful” could not distinguish Yahweh from Moloch, just as today, the modernist cannot distinguish Yahweh from Allah. Elijah, again in a major slap in the face to middle class prudence, was forced to call down fire from heaven to kill the priests of the Tyranian cult. And it might be noted that the reason why God commanded the Israelites to “kill all in the land” when they first came to Canaan was to completely extirpate the commercial city fo the Baalists, hence removing the temptation for the power hungry. Of course, this was not done, and the Israelites began “marrying those who worship foreign gods” both in a physical and spiritual sense. Ezra, of course, in reconstituting the temple many years later, will harshly condemn mixed marriages.

Even a quick reading of the prophetic texts will show that Yahweh demanded that the capitalist, international trading empires did not merely need to be rebuked and “argued with,” but were to be wiped out. It was this mentality that led to the worship of money and power, and provided the legal context to live within the “blind” nature of social forces and power. This becomes fetishized into the fertility gods who demand sacrifice for their services. It is very easy for those who take their religion and history for granted to begin to “learn from” the Baalists and begin to imitate their ways. The relative poverty of the Yahweists lead to an insecurity complex, leading, of course, to the ecumenical mentality that finds “common ground” between Yahweh and Moloch. In the case of the Orthodox church, a small and comparatively weak presence in America seek the “acceptance” of the heterodox by being invited to their conferences and seminars, smiling and shaking hands with the well-funded heretics, and “learning from them.” Soon, the now fallen Orthodox leadership receive grants from the major corporate financiers of the World Council of Churches, and the “professors of theology” are giving lectures to major theological seminars worldwide. They have achieved the acceptance they have always desired, though at a price. Christ says of these people, “Beware of the Scribes, who love to walk in long robes, and be saluted in the marketplace, and sit in the first chairs, in the synagogues, and have the highest place at suppers. . .” (Mark, 12:38-39) How did the prophets, therefore, clarify the nature of the worship of God? Scott gives a preliminary answer: “Its object is not the securing of physical vitality, power and protection, but the maintenance of a relationship with God which has as its primary consequence the people’s spiritual and moral vitality. It expresses submission to the divine will rather than man’s effort to obtain he objects of his desire. . .It does not alter the facts and conditions of man’s existence, but it enables him to face them in confidence and hope” (196-7). Which, to be more crude, means that God is not the cosmic vending machine as his devotees like to think of him.

In sum, the modern world is based on the essence of Baalism: the belief in epistemological nominalism, the manipulation of natural forces for personal gain (which, it might be added, includes both magic and science), the justification of radical class stratification, legalism and litigiousness, ecumenical religion, individualism (the necessary consequence of nominalism), “republican government,” centralization of political and financial power, the continued sacrifice of lives in the name of “progress,” the fetishization of commodities, deceit, secret societies, moral compartmentalization and luxury. This is the Enlightenment at its essence, which means it was merely a “renaissance” of ancient fertility paganism, though fetishized as progress and/or science.

source: http://www.rusjournal.com/ot.html

Capitalism - An Evolutionary Dead End

2010-01-01T15:08:00.000-05:00

The capitalist system that has evolved over the past five hundred years represents a test of our capacity for self-awareness and imagination. The system that brought us unparalleled material abundance has also directly caused massive degradation of our natural and human ecology. Our challenge at this moment is to recognize the threat posed by our own behavior and counter it decisively. The alternative is mass starvation and widespread upheaval that will leave our race decimated and our natural environment beyond repair for thousands of years. That we are failing this test is undeniable.

Science means nothing to the ruling powers when it comes into conflict with capital's demand for endless expansion. What the left fails to understand is that we love our illusions more than life itself. Only a religious revolution that restores (or perhaps initiates) the worship of truth can restore us to sanity. This "religion" applies to materialists and spiritualists equally.

From the viewpoint of human welfare, it is more important to destroy capitalism than it is to stave off the ecological crisis that is now upon us. As long as the spirit of capitalism endures, we will dodge or suffer one major crisis after another until we realize that capitalism thrives on catastrophe and finds its greatest profit opportunities precisely in the midst of it. Those struggling in the battle against climate change should take John Bellamy Foster's words very seriously, "Indeed, from the standpoint of capital accumulation, global warming and desertification are blessings in disguise, increasing the prospects of expanding private riches." - John Bellamy Foster and Brett Clark, "The Paradox of Wealth: Capitalism and Ecological Destruction", Monthly Review, November 2009.

Until this sickness in the human spirit is healed, there can be no solution to the ecological crisis. For that is precisely what capitalism is - a spiritual sickness that has latched onto the human soul devouring its life and producing material trivia that can never satisfy real human need and isn't really intended to. Capitalism is far from a neutral economic system. In the words of Joel Kovel, "From this standpoint there appears a greater 'ecological crisis,' of which the particular insults to ecosystems are elements. This has further implications. For human beings are part of nature, however ill-at-ease we may be with the role. There is therefore a human ecology as well as an ecology of forests and lakes. It follows that the larger ecological crisis would be generated by, and extend deeply into, an ecologically pathological society. Regarding the matter from this angle provided a more generous view. No longer trapped in a narrow economic determinism, one could see capital as much more than a simple material arrangement, but as something cancerous lodged in the human spirit, produced by, and producer of, the capitalist economy. It takes shape as a queer beast altogether, more a whole way of being than anything else." - Joel Kovel, "The Enemy of Nature", p. xii

It is as an entire way of being that capitalism must be opposed. Those who wonder why the ruling elite seem so little concerned with impending ecological catastrophe should pause to consider how little concerned they were (and still are) with preventing nuclear holocaust, the decimation of entire races during WWII, the enslavement and starvation of the continent of Africa, and many other tragedies for ordinary human beings. While we tend to see the floods and desertification caused by global warming as evils to be avoided by any means necessary, they see them quite differently. For them, these are outstanding opportunities to increase profit margins and accelerate the growth of capital. Who cares if the planet is destroyed, as long as the zeros continue to repeat?

source: http://nonviolentjesus.blogspot.com/2009/11/capitalism-evolutionary-dead-end.html

Living The Little Mandate

2009-12-31T22:57:00.001-05:00

by Catherine Doherty

I've been meditating on The Little Mandate. As I behold how many people are here and as I marvel at God's goodness to me and to all of us, this is how I see the Mandate, in my heart and soul.

Arise — go!

Have we arisen? Or are we just sitting or lying down or leaning against the wall? Simply staying where we are, without moving? This ‘arise and go’ is constant, challenging, profound; it is both heavy and light. It is the voice of God calling to us. We can plug our ears. We can plead sickness. We can plead ignorance. We can plead sinfulness, anything. Unlike Abraham, we're unconsciously afraid to arise and go without knowing where we're going. God doesn't say where to go, only “to the poor, “ but for that he might as well name the whole of the earth.

It demands of us a constant growth in faith, day by day, hour by hour. Once I have arisen and gone, following this voice that echoes in my heart, I can't stop and sit down. I may be tempted to, by any situation that is painful and difficult, in which I feel a failure or cannot face. But all the time God says, “Arise and go."

Sell all you possess.
Give it directly, personally to the poor.

What does that mean to us? It is deeply spiritual, though it has physical incarnations. Sell your desires that possess you, or that you possess: desire for comfort, privacy. that glass of beer, that better mattress. I'm speaking of the little things. That desire that your house always be in order, in the sense of having staff that are congenial to you, with whom you can relate, that make life easy for you.

All these desires must be sold in some kind of unknown market place, or perhaps just dropped, given up as a gift for someone. A desire is a precious thing to give away. It turns into a gem that you can give to God to put in a crown for somebody, somewhere.

The Mandate says “give personally,” so it must be done with great love. Our heart becomes a cup or chalice lifted and given to the poor and to each other. Strangely enough, as we give to each other we give to the whole world. Our heart is like two open hands in which are all our desires. When we give away those which are not in tune with God's desires, we give wealth to others.

Take up My cross (their cross) and follow Me.

My cross is the people I live with and I am their cross. I also have the broad work of taking up the cross of my brother, whoever he is. We all have our own cross, we are cross bearers. But especially in our context of today we must take up the cross of others.

We say to ourselves, “My own cross is heavy, why should I take Kathy's or Bob's cross? I've got enough of my own to carry.” But until we take up each other's cross, the turbulence in our family or community will increase. For besides our natural turbulence of emotion, human weakness and sinfulness, there will enter another: that of the evil one who is always turbulent. Then we really lose our way.

Going to the poor...

That's simple. Our calling is to the poor, both those materially poor and the poor rich, but the first poor that we should go to is one another in our own family. It's the poor serving the poor, in regard to ourselves.

Then comes the phrase that haunted me for years and still does. Intellectually I understand it, but spiritually it has always been a very difficult thing.

...being one with them, one with Me.

These two parts of one sentence are so big that I don't think ten lifetimes can probe them, for they have a million aspects. There is, for instance, the aspect of being physically poor like we are in some of our missions or were when we started: identifying physically with the poor among whom we live.

The poverty in other places is different: people may have running water and so forth. Yet there's a depth to our identifying with them, too. We must come to a total lack of fear of the other and to a total surrender to the other's way of doing things.

At first this nearly kills many people emotionally: eating a different kind of food, all the physical identification. How difficult it is for some, right in our midst, to identify with the other, in deep charity. At moments it's still difficult for me, 52 years later, to identify with the American and Canadian.

Identification is difficult but precious. It involves doing violence to yourself. Yet Scripture says that “heaven is taken by violence” to oneself. To identify oneself with the other is to love him beyond words, a total giving of oneself in truth.

I think it is in this total giving of self that our priesthood of the laity is confirmed. We are a priestly people, we lay people. This is where Christ lays his hands on us or anoints us with the oil of his love. In his extraordinary, mysterious way, he enters into us, the laity.

Once we have identified with each other through love and through emptying ourselves, then we can begin to say, “I live not, Christ lives in me.” Then the priesthood of the laity is confirmed. For when he lives in us in this manner, it is the High Priest who makes us priests. It is not symbolic, it is reality, a reality of faith.

But in order to do this identification, one must prepare. it's almost like a sacrament; and one prepares himself for the priesthood, or marriage, or even confession, the sacrament of the sick or baptism. There is always a time of preparation. To bring the priesthood of the laity to fruition, there is a novitiate of love that really empties us so that we can become one with Christ.

Little — be always little! Be simple, poor, childlike.

When I apply these words to our present situation, I find something that I cannot explain to myself, except of course in the eternal answer of our own inner poverty.

It is when we cease to be little that a given community or family ‘blows up.’ A little child, when something happens that frightens him, simply runs to his father or mother and holds their hand, and all is well. The bogey man disappears. The big dog, which is really about the size of a tiny Pekingese but frightens the child, ceases to frighten him.

I get irritated and miserable when I don't run to my Father nor remember that I'm little. It happens when I don't say Abba, Father God, but rather, “Now Katie, you are a pretty brilliant dame. You've known this Apostolate for 39 years. You can solve this problem by yourself.”

However if I run to my Father and take his hand and cry “Abba” and become very small, realizing that I can solve nothing, let alone the problem of a house or a person, then the big dog, the size of mountains in Switzerland, suddenly becomes the size of a Pekingese.

My Father solved the problem because I approached it with childlikeness instead of in the pride of my intellect, my knowledge of a given situation. People say, “You're an expert on community, on the lay apostolate. “ Am I? Or is God the Expert in me?

Being little, poor, childlike, will solve every problem. So you have a terrible problem in your house: remember you're poor. Don't be ashamed to be a failure. If the Son of God saved us by ‘a failure,’ can't we save our little worlds, yours and mine, by a failure too? I've been a failure so many times! I thank God for showing me that I am poor, as his Little Mandate tells us to be.

By permitting me to be irritated or whatever, God in his kindness has once more reminded me, “Now Katie, don't think you have all the answers, see how poor you are. Be childlike.” It's so simple. If we approached each other this way, our problems would be fewer and smaller.

Preach the Gospel with your life — without compromise!
Listen to the Spirit. He will lead you.

"Preach the Gospel” doesn't mean that we be great preachers of Sacred Scripture, or scholars. It simply means that we live it. Here is our greatest difficulty. I speak for myself. Christ said, “Love your enemies and pray for those who hurt you.”

There is absolutely nothing in this world that Christ has not touched simply by saying, “Love God, love your neighbour and each other.” Everything is subject to the immense Gospel of the love of God, who became one of us. Love did that. Out of the little country of Palestine, most of it arid and desert, came light and a solution to every problem from now until the parousia.

But we close our ears to the Gospel. Because, indeed, it calls us to empty ourselves until there is nothing left of ourselves. For us to walk around in the world for awhile feeling empty is devastating emotionally! It's only after a little while that we perceive that Christ is filling us. It's a sort of death. Those of us who in God's grace have experienced that for a moment, know that the price of preaching the Gospel is terribly high, intensely high.

Yet into these difficulties comes joy. They seem hard and they are. The cross of Christ was hard and so is our life. Yet suddenly, through the goodness of our Father, we're given the Spirit. He enters into our family with a song, with the words of the Father which come to us through his Son. The Holy Spirit has the capacity to crack those words open and to make pleasurable what seemed intolerable.

Suddenly the painful process of growing in faith, emptying oneself, carrying each other's crosses and identifying with the other is lifted up like a song. Into the ears of our soul come words of the Holy Spirit, that Word of Fire who illuminates and warms. The words of that Wind pick us up and bring us right to the mountaintop without touching the ground. Instead of angels, he himself carries us lest we fall or hurt our feet.

If we listen to the Spirit, then all things mentioned up to this point become an adventure and full of light. Strength is given us beyond our imagination, provided we are open to the Wind and the Fire.

Do little things exceedingly well for love of Me.

In the reality of daily living we do little things constantly. But how about the little things of the Spirit: that one step farther, that true smile that comes from the depth of your heart and not only from your lips? When you are numb with tiredness and your body wants only to sit, and suddenly in the crowd you see a sad person, how about that one little touch?

The inner power of the Spirit makes you get up and extend your hand to that person and say, “Good night, sleep well, I will really pray for you. I know without ‘knowing,’ that you are sad.” Suddenly the face of that other person lights up. Then when you get home, don't forget to “do little things well for love of Me.” Don't forget to pray, if only a little: “Lord, I don't know her name, but you know her name. Cheer her.” Then you can go to sleep.

That's very little, but it too has to be done well. This Mandate is not only physical; that is to say it's not only that I must arise. It's deeply spiritual, regarding the hidden life of the Spirit.

The Little Mandate is like a misty horizon that under the sun or the fire of the Spirit, extends in depth. Each one of those words calls you until the end of your life. Only when you are laid into the grave will you know the dimension of the road and the country you have travelled. It's much bigger than the distance between earth and moon, in fact it's infinite.

Love... love... love, never counting the cost.

I barely dare to touch that because, speaking for myself, I have counted the cost very often. As God knows, I have cried out, “Lord, that is impossible!” To love means to surrender to every situation, no matter how horrible and impossible. To love means to surrender to every person, no matter how terrible or obnoxious. It means to stand naked with the naked crucified Christ in the market place where people may spit at you or push you.

But doing this has the power to make the other surrender to God. Our love, when it is without counting the cost, leads the other toward God. Our love makes straight the paths of the Lord. I wouldn't think of it as a bulldozer because I don't like machines and I don't think it is as easy as manning a bulldozer!

It's making straight the paths of the Lord with our bare hands and bare feet, sometimes through brambles. Torn and broken, we still keep moving so that other people can follow this little path without being scratched. No matter what the price, we make a road to Christ for the other. It's life in the Spirit.

There can be no self-pity in the person who makes straight the way of the Lord. No matter how hard it is to love and love and love again, always the Fire and the Wind are there, so you resolutely enter the brambles. Then after you've made about six steps, or perhaps only three, a tremendous Wind comes like a tornado and — whoosh! there are no brambles, for they are torn from the path. All God asks is an act of faith made with love and he will do the rest.

When our heart is open to that Gospel we must preach, a shadow falls over us: Someone Else is walking beside us. Faith brings Christ right next to us. As we surrender to “Love without counting the cost,” immediately we see Golgotha. We hear, “I thirst!” and we understand what love is. Dimly, that is, for who can understand God?

Go into the marketplace and stay with Me. Pray, fast.

What is the marketplace? Is it the secular city? Is it the factual market place, that is to say the urban inner city? Is it suburbia where all the supermarkets are? No. The marketplace is simply the soul of man. It is the place where man trades his soul either to God or to the devil or to the ‘in between,’ with indifference, tepidity and complacency.

We must deal with the tepid in that supermarket of the spiritual world. We might be called to trade with offal, with leftovers from big restaurants of the devil, with any kind of refuse in that market place of souls. Perhaps I exaggerate, perhaps my Russian symbolism gets the best of me!

But when you get into the mire of this terrible tepidity, which is really like liquid refuse around you, you clean it up and, believe it or not, you can trade it in to the factory that makes fertilizer. It takes a little doing to carry such wastes from some place to the factory! That's the moment when you want to turn away, spiritually, psychologically and physically. You say, “Lord, this is impossible.”

He replies, “Now is the moment when you have to pray and fast.” For this calls for a revolution. It is truly impossible unless we are armed with the strength of the Lord which comes through prayer and fasting. I have no other remedy for tepidity, indifference, what we used to call the Sunday Catholic. Little ‘nitty-gritty’ sins and the absence of any kind of love or understanding, is what I call the offal.

source: http://www.madonnahouse.org/mandate/living.html

The Little Mandate

2009-12-31T22:55:00.000-05:00

Arise — go! Sell all you possess. Give it directly, personally to the poor. Take up My cross (their cross) and follow Me, going to the poor, being poor, being one with them, one with Me.

Little — be always little! Be simple, poor, childlike.

Preach the Gospel with your life — without compromise! Listen to the Spirit. He will lead you.

Do little things exceedingly well for love of Me.

Love... love... love, never counting the cost.

Go into the marketplace and stay with Me. Pray, fast. Pray always, fast.

Be hidden. Be a light to your neighbour’s feet. Go without fear into the depth of men’s hearts. I shall be with you.

Pray always. I will be your rest.
source: http://www.madonnahouse.org/mandate/index.html

Peasant Commune in Russia

2009-12-31T22:42:00.000-05:00

The institution of the peasant commune in prerevolutionary Russia is one of the world’s unique institutions; and also one that is almost unknown. As Americans continue to work long hours for comparatively less pay, continue to see unions disappear and see any kind of job security dissipate, maybe it is time to look at other models of economic organization.

It need not be said that the commune, for American historiography, is derided. This is largely for one important reason: the architects of liberalism and capitalism in Russia were the elite; the elite political and economic forces. For them, the commune was an irritant, a set of protections that permitted the average peasant a great deal of protection against exploitation. the destruction of the commune then, was absolutely necessary for the Russian neo-Jacobins to impose constitutional capitalism on Royal Russia.

In the commune, the church calendar was the primary medium for telling time. This meant that the work year was short, for the calendar of traditional Christianity saw four fast periods as well as dozens of major feasts, whether local, national or pan-Orthodox. One of the main reasons the liberal bourgeois in Russia hated the commune was that it sanctioned the traditional agrarian practice of only working about 2/3 of the year. The rest was made up in fasting, feasting and cultural pursuits. Therefore, the protections, immunities and traditions of communal life were absolutely incompatible with capitalism, “constitutionalism” and liberalism.

A powerful and seminal article by Boris Mironov, “The Russian Peasant Commune After the Reforms of the 1860s” (Slavic Review, Vol. 44, No. 3 [Fall 1985]), is extremely important for the understanding of the peasant commune. Its significance lies in the fact that it takes its data from the survey of 816 communes between 1878 and 1880, sponsored by the Russian Geographical Society and the Russian Free Economic Society. Its results were astounding, and largely supported the claims of the pro-agrarian and pro-monarchist elements in Russia, then and now. The average peasant had it better in Russia than likely anywhere else in Europe. This data proves it.

It is important to keep in mind the structure of the Imperial Russian state around the middle of the 19th century. The tsar’s power was limited to foreign policy and general taxation. He, of course, was the chief spokesman for the nation and the defender of the Orthodox Church. However, at the agrarian level, where 90 percent of the population lived, royal authority was virtually invisible. The peasant commune was the only relevant authority the peasant had to deal with. Therefore, it is accurate to say that Russia was not a single, unitary state, but rather a collection of thousands of independent agrarian republics, held together by rather weak cords to the central monarchy. Prof. Charles Sarolea, who visited Russia regularly, wrote in the 1925 issue of The English Review:

On closer examination we find the [Imperial] Russian state was a vast federation of 50,000 small peasant republics each busy with its own affairs, obedient to its own laws and even possessing its own tribunals of starotsas (elders). The Russian state was not undemocratic, on the contrary, if anything, there was too much democracy.

What makes the peasant commune such a unique institution is the power it had. Each commune was a completely selfcontained unit, answering to no other authority than its own body of elected elders. All police functions were discharged by the communal authorities. All legal matters were dealt with by the same. Any damage to property, any criminal offense whatsoever, was dealt with at the communal level. All public works were also within the jurisdiction of the commune. It maintained stores of grain during famines and assisted poorer members who suffered during the lean months of the spring. It controlled the cultural life of the people as well as all education. It even built its own parish churches and trained many of the rural clergy. The commune maintained all schools and hospitals. In short, it was absolute.

The state’s interest in this was clear. For the commune to be self governing, yet still loyal to the monarchy, it was necessary for it to be completely independent of the state. Mironov writes, “The government did not risk appointing its own people, who would have been independent of the peasant, to official positions in the commune; that would have been too expensive and ineffective at the same time.” (445)

However, to make sure any village executive (specifically its chief executive) was loyal, he could be removed by the royal-appointed district governor. This, however, rarely occurred, largely because irritating the peasants, the great bastion of loyalty in the country, would not be in the interests of the royal state. Mironov continues in this vein:

If, however, one analyzes how these officials actually functioned, it is clear that the government did not reach its goal: elected officials did not stand above the commune but operated under its authority, and all administrative and police measures in the commune were taken only with the consent of the village assembly. Only very rarely did elected officials become a hostile authority standing above the peasantry: they had to be periodically reelected, had no significant privileges, did not break their ties with the peasantry (elected officials were freed from taxes and other obligations, except those in kind, and continued to perform all forms of peasant labor), remained under the control of public opinion of the village (and in the event of malfeasance faced the threat of retribution), and shared the common interest of the peasants, not the interests of the state. As a rule the elected officials acted as the defenders of the commune, as petitioners and organizers. Frequently they emerged as leaders of peasant disorders despite the threat of harsh punishment. (445-6)

Many liberal Russia scholars might counter this by claiming that the elected village heads were required, after the 1860s, to faithfully carry out the will of the district authorities. However, though this is true, it was also true that no decree of the district authorities had validity in the commune unless it was approved by the village assembly.

According to the data collected by the Russian Geographic Society, the Russian peasant assembly consisted of all male heads of household. Decisions were not finalized until unanimity was reached, or, as Mironov has said, disagreement was brought to a level of silent sulking, which, at this level, was considered agreement. It is important to note, therefore, that each peasant had a specific stake in communal affairs as well as a corresponding voice. Any specific peasant, therefore, could not afford to be alienated from the community, as all decisions could be vetoed even by a relatively small group of disgruntled peasants.

In her “The Russian Peasant Family in the Second Half of the 19th Century” (Russian Studies in History, vol. 38, No. 2,[fall 1999]), Svetlana S. Kriukova sheds some more light on the structure of the family in the peasant commune. Though this article is not nearly as rigorous as Mironov’s (and is geographically limited to the black soil region), it is still very useful.

Because all legislation needed to pass the communal assembly, which was a function of direct democracy, the family became a far more important institution than the modern bourgeois understand. The structure of the peasant family was headed by the oldest male, though a woman would have that title if she was unmarried and her sons were also unmarried (39). The wife dealt with domestic affairs and supervised the female members of the house. The wife had substantial authority in ordering marriages and the timetables concerning various economic projects. The family acted as sort of a mini-commune. It was rational for the male to cast the deciding vote. However, a “mistress of the house,” that is, the mother of the wife, had relatively equal authority with the husband. Generally, disagreements within the family were solved by any elderly living within the neighborhood (41). But, regardless of who made the final decision, all functions of the household ultimately were under the scrutiny of the commune. Interestingly, the communal structure (at least in southern Russia) invented an innovation called “women’s weeks,” which were times during the year where the females of the household would be released from family or communal obligations in order to work purely for themselves. This was done both to raise more money and goods for dowries as well as provide the women in question with sufficient resources for old age or infirmity. (45)

This, in many respects, was to maintain domestic solvency, for the assignment of tax duties made it imperative that each household maintained a proper standard of living. If the head of household was a drunk, or was incapable of keeping the family money properly, he was publicly berated by the communal authorities, often beaten and, in many cases, deprived of his status as head of household. It is clear that those who developed bad reputations as head of household either reformed quickly or lost their status. Many wound up in the army, with the commune then resuming care for the family until the minor male children came of age.

Those members of the family incapable of working, such as the elderly, the mentally ill, crippled or sick, were guaranteed support. Whatever the family could not provide was provided by the commune. The communal courts rearranged debts and taxes, as well as the more important area of land allotment, for those families who dealt with sick or invalid members. No one was permitted to enter severe poverty.

If the state desperately needed the communes to pass certain forms of legislation, they were in no position to force the matter on them. Russian peasants are rebellious; they are fanatical traditionalists, the worst threat to any bureaucracy. The state, then, would resort to every sort of preaching and begging of the village males and elders in general to get things passed, largely in the realm of taxation. But even here, only the commune was capable of assessing tax burdens according to the ability to pay. The royal state, allegedly absolute, had no clue how much money each peasant was making or how wealthy any commune might be. All taxing decisions therefore, were made by elected elders and the assembly.

The commune, through its assembly and elected elders, decided on a periodic land redistribution, where peasant families with many children were granted more, while those with fewer were granted less. The point of work for the communal peasantry was to reach a balance, to maintain a standard of living that could provide all objective needs of the family itself. Profit was unknown, distrusted and, even until the revolution, scorned. Need was the key, and all forms of exploitation were condemned not only by law, but also by the common law of communal custom.

The communal system was based around basic subsistence agriculture as well as the periodic redistribution of land, tax duties and public works. All of this was done within the village assembly in respect to the state, the informal structure of older men in the village who exercised quite a bit of moral authority (men retired at 60 and all dues were forgiven at this time) and the elected executives. This constitutional structure permitted the wealthier peasants to pay the dues of the poorer, which was considered a moral obligation taken from Byzantine times. Poorer households were maintained in lean times largely due to the communal virtue of charity, a virtue maintained not necessarily by law, but by the strong hand of communal custom, which, if it might be said, was actually the basis of the constitution of any commune. In other words, if such ancient virtues were violated, it was not uncommon for severe punishments to me meted out by the people as a whole. Chronic violations were usually punished by banishment or, if the criminal was of the proper age, induction into the army.

As Mironov reports, one of the astonishing and revisionist aspects of communal life as the 19th century began to draw to a close was its amazing vitality. It is common in the Russian history literature in English to paint a picture of the oppressed peasants chafing at the commune (when they mention it at all), waiting to escape to take advantage of the money economy. This is nothing more than bourgeois, Whig history.

There is every reason to believe that the peasantry looked upon the bourgeois with disdain, as well as their competitive money economy. When the reforms of Petr Stolypin made it easier for peasants to remove themselves from the commune and enter the bourgeois economy, very few actually did. According to the data, by the end of the 19th century, almost 90 percent of peasants were functioning within the communal structure. By Stolypin’s reforms in 1905-06, “only an insignificant number of peasants found an alternative to the commune in trade, industry or in the sale of their labor. As in the past, the great majority placed their hopes for a better life in the commune and a new agrarian reform. . . .” (464) This shows, without question, that the peasantry had no use for the liberal capitalist parties, Westernizers or Western socialists. It was the commune that maintained the peasant’s loyalty to tradition and the tsar. It was only those at the extremes of the communal structure who actually left the community for the city. Those who became wealthy and sought even more wealth moved away, and those extremely poor who, for whatever reason, could not function were the two elements that left, but these never amounted to more than 4 or 5 percent. Those that were criminal, slow or just plain uncooperative were inducted into the army, where the famous harsh discipline in the pre-Bolshevik Russian infantry would solve those problems.

The peasant commune is likely one of the greatest supporters of family liberty devised. But its superiority to Western models exists not merely in the results of such organization, but also because it was not “devised.” It was perfected over 1,000 years of often hard experience. The communal structure, the tightly organized extended family and the traditional peasant love for communal and family liberty kept the state at bay right up until the revolution. The destruction of the communes, naturally, came immediately under Lenin’s rule.

The dishonest “radicals” saw the communes as a threat. Many Russian populists (narodniks), such as Alexander Herzen, believed the communal system to be the means whereby a native Russian socialism would challenge the Western, Marxist brand. However, for these liberals, the communal structure was to be completely denuded of traditional culture and became largely a dependency of the new state. All that the socialists said they wanted had already been part of peasant life for a millennium, but the socialists simply lied as to what they wanted.

They sought a non-Christian, secular state run by urban elites who treated communes as departments of state. Ultimately, this is largely the reason the Bolsheviks liquidated large segments of the peasantry. Comparisons of the peasant communal system and modern socialism are pedestrian. They have nothing in common. This is why the Russian New Men of the 20th century ultimately destroyed the commune while publicly professing devotion to it. The commune was a Christian anarchist collective, based around ethnic tradition, the church and the extended family, all interacting on the level of basic equality.

Anarchists sounded ridiculous to the peasantry largely because their secular ideas, to be imposed by force, already existed, and where the virtues of charity and mutual self-government not only existed, but were part of the traditional mindset of the peasantry. The catch was, however, that their new society was to be run by them, on secular and materialist principles with the state, of course, being all-powerful. Peasants then would be truly goyim, mere chattel, at the service of the New Men.

source: http://www.rusjournal.com/commune.html

Thoughts on Forming a Self Sufficient Orthodox Community

2009-12-31T20:40:00.001-05:00

As I was going through some old correspondence I found this short
mission statement I wrote as an exploration of Orthodox Community.
The date I have for this places it in 1999, ten years ago! I think
there is a good point or two in there, but there are a few areas where
I could have been more clear or have now updated my opinion. Keep in
mind this is from the pen (keyboard) of a 21 year-old fresh convert to
Orthodoxy.

Thoughts on forming a Self Sufficient Orthodox Community

I hope to help establish a group of Eastern Orthodox families and
individuals who want to have more participation in the daily life of
the Church as well as living in harmony with the abundance of creation
the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit have given to mankind. To
this purpose, more concrete goals include having a cycle of daily
services, producing as many of our own resources as possible (while
also replenishing said sources) in the areas of food, construction
materials, etc., and to establish a system of economy where both
people who have outside means of income (writers, independently
affluent, telecommuter, etc) and people who want to their work to be
on the community in farming or cottage industries can be accomodated.

The inspiration for such a group comes from many diverse sources;
monastic communities in the Orthodox tradition, small rural villages
that were a norm for most people until the rise of the 20th century,
and Intentional (artificially created) Communities such as Co-housing
or the oft-easily dismissed communes. The focus of the group will be
to live in a community of Orthodox people who share their lives in a
way that is not seen very often in Western society outside of
relatively few villages and monasteries. In this, each participant
will be able to minimize or maximize their involvement as they see
fit, from a retired businessman who just wants a house in the country
near a parish and fellow Orthodox to occasionally communicate with, to
a young husband and wife that want to raise their children in a small
village where worship and morals are the norm, to high school
graduates who want to experience life on their own where they are in a
community of caring people to help develop talents and interests while
earning their keep on the farm or cottage industry.

This would not be a commune in its most popular definition, a group of
income sharing people who live in multi-family dwellings and are
encouraged to follow their own personal beliefs or "gods" as long as
they do not intefere with the good of the commune. Rather, except for
potentially a dormitory style residence for single young adults or
others who would prefer such a living space, the group would mostly
consist of houses spaced as close or as far apart as desired in order
to give each family or person their own private space with community
shared buildings(chapel, library, garage, etc). Make no mistake about
it, this is a type of lifestyle that can be most intrusive sometimes,
where being in such close proximity can sew as much division as
cooperation. But, any type of lifestyle whether urban, suburban,
rural, etc., has its own limitations and virtues.

Initially, such a group would start the bare essentials: a chapel,
dwellings, outbuildings, necessary plumbing, etc. Later, depending on
the size and intentions of the group, a part of the land could be
given to a group of monastics who would receive free land, their share
in the farm, and able hands in return for their spiritual guidance and
prayer, a school could be established for the children being raised on
the premises, a retreat center for families and individuals, or any
number of other ministries and activities could be accomplished.

In many attempts to form such groups in the secular community,
emphasis is put on living in a Utopian community patterned of such
ideas as in the B.F. Skinner novel Walden Two. While each of the
group's plans has merit, their goals are such that they must be self-
fulfilling, that is, paradise will be achieved by humans who
consciously group together knowledge, labor, finances, etc. to
collectively build a "heaven on Earth." Such a mentality is foreign to
the Orthodox mindset, and is to be avoided. We must realize that
everything we are and everything that is exists for the purpose of
glorifying God and being in communion with Him. There will be many
falls, not only physical or material problems, but also those
instances where pride can plant its lethal seeds, i.e., "Look at the
accomplishments that *I* have made, etc." One must be on guard for
such at all times, for the success of the group, yes, but more
importantly for the salvation of our souls.

source: http://groups.google.com/group/orthodoxcommune/browse_thread/thread/4c627a5acab51802/49cc7b0501257cab#49cc7b0501257cab

Angelrage - For the Least of My Brothers

2009-12-31T14:19:00.001-05:00

UNOFFICIAL music video for Angelrage's song, For the Least of My Brothers, from our upcoming eponymous CD.
The haunting song is about an encounter with a homeless man who turns out to be Jesus Christ. The band wrote the track in honor of Pastor Bob Beeman in an effort to raise public awareness of the growing problem of homelessness in America, and across the globe. Please watch the video and visit the sites listed at the end to learn how you can help.

For the Least of My Brothers

As I was walking by a man on the street said to me
Please my brother could you spare me some change
He smelled of hard times and pain
On the street in the rain on I walked until he called me by name he said

Can you lend a hand
Dont turn away
Now Im talking to you
Dont you know but for the grace of God, youd walk there too

He was so grateful that it pierced me right through as I gave this wretched stranger all the little I had
I never felt so poor
Wished I could do something more and as I forced myself to look away again he said

Can you lend a hand
Dont turn away
Now Im talking to you
Dont you know but for the grace of God, youd walk there too

Why do my children lack
I gave the skin off my back
Do you not hear their cries
How can you leave them to die

I left there shaken and later that night
as I lay awake convicted there in my warm bed
I wondered how hed fare in the cold world out there and still I hear him calling my name he says

Can you lend a hand
Dont turn away
Now Im talking to you
Dont you know but for the grace of God, youd walk there too

For the least of my brothers could you show them some love
For the least of my brothers up in Heaven above
Sweet child, dont you understand everything that you do for them
You do for me

For the least of my brothers
For the least of my brothers
For the least of my brothers
I sent you

The Man

2009-12-30T14:28:00.000-05:00

The MAN is one who sees other’s weakness, but has no sympathy for them.
The MAN is one who uses other’s weaknesses for their own benefit.
The MAN is one who abuses the trust granted by the weak.
The MAN is the destroyer of the hope of the hopeless.
The MAN is the creator of perpetual poverty.
The MAN is stingy with all of his resources.
The MAN sees poverty as a reason to blame the poor.
The MAN judges without mercy.

The Man will be destroyed by Jesus. Soon.

source: http://clicktherevolution.blogspot.com/2005/12/man.html

Prayer for peace

2009-12-30T13:54:00.000-05:00

by Paulos Mar Geegorios

Dear Lord and Creator of Mankind,
forgive our foolish ways.
Drop your still dews of quietness
till all our striving ceases.
Take from our souls the stress and strain
and let us confess the beauty of your peace!
Breathe through the heats of our desire
your coolness and your balm!
Let sense be dumb, let flesh retire
Speak through the earthquake, wind and fire,
O still small voice of calm!
Restore the peace of world
In the mercy let justice triumph!
Swords into ploughshares
Missiles into fertilizer
May wars terrorism cease
And the days of peace begin!
Blessed be the Lord our God
He has promised, he will fulfill
Strife shall cease, Peace will come
Justice shall reign, joy will overflow.
This terrorism, wars and battles between
ourselves first start precisely in the desires
fighting inside our own selves. We want
something we haven’t got it, so we are
prepared to kill. We have an ambition that
we cannot satisfy, so we fight to get our way
by force. Why do we not have what we want?
Because we don’t pray for it; when we pray
and don’t get it is because we have not prayed
properly, we have prayed for something in
order to indulge our own desires!
Into your hands, O! Lord of all, we commend
ourselves, take us, break us if need be, then
make us anew that in you we may be
healed restored and united! Reach us your
spirit that may guide our thoughts and direct
our wills! Grant us wisdom to know
what is right and power to do what is good!
Come, Holy Spirit, come
Come as the fire and burn
Come as the wind, and cleanse
Come as the rain, and soothe
Come as the light and reveal
Convict, convert, comfort
Consecrate us to do your will.
O! Thou that are manifest, be Thou manifest to us:
From the unreal lead us to Real,
From darkness lead us to Light,
From death lead us to Immortality!
And now committing ourselves along with the
whole of humanity into your loving hands, we would
sum up our aspirations in the prayer saying:
Thy Will Be Done!

source: http://paulosmargregorios.info/Prayers.htm

Christmas homily excerpts from Oscar Romero

2009-12-29T15:41:00.000-05:00

by m

With Christ, God has injected himself into history. With the birth of Christ, God’s reign is now inaugurated in human time. On this night, as we Christians have done every year for twenty centuries, we recall that God’s reign is now in this world and that Christ has inaugurated the fullness of time. His birth attests that God is now marching with us in history, that we do not go alone, and that our aspiration for peace, for justice, for the reign of divine law, for something holy, is far from earth’s realities. We can hope for it, not because we humans are able to construct that realm of happiness which God’s holy words proclaim, but because the builder of a reign of justice, of love, and of peace is already in the midst of us. (December 25, 1977)

No one can celebrate a genuine Christmas without being truly poor. The self-sufficient, the proud, those who, because they have everything, look down on others, whose who have no need even of God—for them there will be no Christmas. Only the poor, the hungry, those who need someone to come on their behalf, will have that someone. That someone is God, Emmanuel, God-with-us. Without poverty of spirit there can be no abundance of God. (December 24, 1978)

We must not seek the child Jesus in the pretty figures of our Christmas cribs. We must seek him among the undernourished children who have gone to bed tonight without eating, among the poor newsboys who will sleep covered with newspapers in doorways. (December 24, 1979)

[From James Brockman, ed. The Church is All of You: Thoughts of Archbishop Oscar Romero (Minneapolis: Winston Press, 1984)]

source: http://catholicanarchy.org/?p=1353#more-1353

The good Christian and the poor

2009-12-29T14:26:00.001-05:00

Once there was a good Christian man who was wealthy. He would read his Bible daily, praise God every Sunday and he treated his family well. Every day he would walk to his office from his house.

One day, as he was walking to his office, he saw a man in disheveled, dirty clothes, holding a sign which said, "Homeless—anything will help." The disheveled man looked, pleading with the Christian with his eyes. The Christian turned his head, saying to himself, "He needs to get a job instead of bothering good people on the street." The next day the Christian saw a filthy woman holding a sign which said, "Pregnant and homeless, please help." She asked him, "Could you spare a few dollars so I could get a motel room," he replied, "Isn’t there a shelter you could go to?" And he passed her by. The next day the Christian saw a man with brown skin sitting on the sidewalk with one leg missing. The man asked with a deep accent, "Could you please assist me in any way?" The Christian became upset with all of these interruptions of his pleasant morning meditation, and he yelled, "Can’t you people just leave me alone? Why don’t you just go back where you came from?"

As he walked into his office on that third day, the Christian had a heart attack and died. The angels picked him up and delivered him immediately (or so it seemed to him) to the Father for judgment. The Father looked down at him and said, "This week you have been tested. I sent you three of my angels, to see how you would respond to them. I have brought them here to witness to your action." The first angel, no longer disheveled, but wearing white robes said, "This Christian refused to help me." The second angel, no longer dirty, said, "He told me to find a shelter, but offered no help." The third angel, with his leg fully intact, said, "This Christian told me to go back where I came from. So I am here. He refused to help me." The Father looked at the man and judged: "You have done evil to your brothers and sisters. I gave you many blessings, and you refused to help those in need. You will be punished eternally."

As the enforcement officers came to take the Christian away, he called to the Father, "But Lord, Lord—what about my family? Shouldn’t they be given a chance? Please send one of these angels to them to explain to them their sin so they can repent." The Father replied, "Do they not read my Word daily? If they ignore the one who has been risen from the dead, they will not listen to an angel."

source: http://clicktherevolution.blogspot.com/2005/12/good-christian-and-poor.html

What is wrong with our culture?

2009-12-29T13:48:00.001-05:00

by Paulos Mor Gregorios

At the close of the Millennium, one realises with remorse that Christians have not always managed to be the light of the World or the Salt of the Earth, as our Lord wanted us to be. Especially in the last two or three centuries, when Western Civilisation with a supposedly Judaeo-Christian heritage, became the major shaping influence in the life of the human race; human culture has not only not become more Christ-like, but has in fact become increasingly more demonic and anti-human.

War not only persists in spite of talk about living in a global village. Local wars become more numerous and in some cases most inhumanly technological. Nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction, made possible by our dramatic advances in science-technology, mock us by refusing to go away, even after the so called Cold War is supposedly over. The horrendous arms trade which feeds wars and helps the oppressors of humanity to exploit them as well, becomes the backbone of many economies.

The baleful cry of the victims of global and national injustice reached a crescendo in the Seventies, only soon to be stifled by other legitimate cries for human rights, for women’s rights and for a healthy life-environment. In the midst of this clash of cries, there descended upon humanity that appalling shroud of a “Single Market Global Economy”, taking away all hope from the oppressed and the poor, gripping them in the vicious iron-vise of near-permanent exploitation by the technologically and militarily more powerful sub-sections of the human race.

Our civilisation has gone sour. It breeds morbid death and mindless violence in such frightening measures. It destroys basic human relations, undermines trust and faith among humans. The family, the ground and matrix of all good human relations, gets increasingly abused, despised and rejected. Gratification, money and power become the most sought after values. Empty talk about “Value Education” and refurbishing old values gets us nowhere.

And Yet, we remain blind to what has really gone wrong. What is at the root of our civilisation is a fundamental denial of the Transcendent as the central element in Culture. In the 18th and 19th centuries Europe decided to throw God out of all that matters -- from education, from healing, from civil governance and from the communication media. Human autonomy, with unaided Human Reason as its principal instrument, was enthroned in place of the Transcendent. And we are reaping the harvest.

Some aspects of this issue are raised in the papers about Gospel and Culture. We hope it starts a discussion.

source: http://paulosmargregorios.info/English%20Articles/Editorials/what_is_wrong_with_our_culture_editorial.htm

To serve and not to be served

2009-12-28T13:45:00.001-05:00

PAULOS MAR GREGORIOS

“Then the mother of the Sons of Zebedee approached him along with her two sons, doing reverence to him and asking something from him. Jesus asked her: “What do you want? “She says to him: “Please say that these two sons of mine will be seated one on your right hand and the other on your left hand, in your kingdom.” Jesus responding said to them: “You do not realize what you are asking for. Are you capable of drinking the cup which I am about to drink?” They answer: “We are able.” Jesus says to them: “Of course you will drink my cup; but to be seated at my right and my left — that is not for me to grant; it is reserved for those for whom my Father has prepared those places.”
The ten other apostles were quite annoyed with the two brothers. So Jesus called all of them to him and said: “You know that the rulers of the nations like to lord it over the people and their leaders like to show off their power over other people. It should not be so with your people. But whoever wants to be great amongst you, let that person be a servant of the others. And if one wants to be the chief, let that person be your slave; just as the Son of Man did not come to be served, but on the contrary to serve and to give his life as the price of redemption for many others.” Matt. 20:20-28 (free but faithful translation)

The context of the sons of Zebedee episode is in Matthew 20:17-19, and the parable which precedes is of the house-holder who paid the same wages to those who worked all day from sunrise to sunset, to others who came to work at 9.00 a.m., to yet others who were hired at noon, to some who started at 3 p.m. and even to those who worked only for one hour from 5 p.m. (Matt. 20:1-16). It ends with the curiously unjust principle that God can do with God’s kingdom what God likes. The implication is that God’s justice does not follow the principles we usually attribute to our concept of justice.

The parable of the kingdom ends with two statements difficult to exegete: Friend, I am not unjust to you. Our contract was for one denarius. Take what is yours by contract and go. But it is my will that I will give to these last ones the same one denarius I give you. Am I not free to give what I want to give out of my own? Are you jealous about my being good to these people? Thus the last will be first and the first will be last (20:13b-16).

It is important to remember this. God’s justice follows principles quite different from ours.

It is also important that after having narrated this parable, so offensive to our sense of justice, Jesus was about to “go up” to Jerusalem for the great act of diakonia — that of laying down his life for others. Jesus calls the Twelve aside by themselves and discloses to them: Look, we are going up to Jerusalem. There the Son of Man will he betrayed and handed over to the high priests and law professors; they will condemn him to death, and will again betray and hand him over lo the gentiles, to be mocked, to be whipped and finally to be crucified; on the third day he will be resurrected (Matt. 20:18-19),

Then comes the mother of John and James to plead for special privileges of power, authority and glory for her two sons. She has accepted the requirement that the way to the kingdom was through the cross, at least for the Son of Man, the Messiah. She believed that the Lord Jesus would rise from the dead to rule over Israel. She and her sons were prepared to pay the price, that of drinking the Messiah’s cup of suffering with him. She and they accept the Messiah as the crucified and risen Lord. And one of them, John, is the beloved disciple, a special favorite of our Lord’s. But she was being fair to her two sons, that both of them should have positions of special privilege, honor and power. She does not want to show any favoritism to one of her sons, as Jesus did. In fact Jesus did something quite special for that one son, the “disciple whom he loved”; Jesus at the cross practically took him away from his own mother and handed him over to Mary the mother of Jesus, and Mary in turn to John (John 19:25-27). John took Mary to his own house (19:27), where she must have lived with John’s mother. It was for this special son and his brother that their mother asked for special privileges. More or less legitimate, isn’t it? At least fairly reasonable. Now, the reaction of the ten other apostles also seems eminently reasonable: “We all know that this young man, John, is a special favorite of the Master. We wouldn’t quite be up to questioning the Master about it. Maybe he wants to groom John to be his successor! Who knows? Anyway they had no business dragging their mother into it; and asking for two special positions — that is too much. What do those guys think the rest of us are — mere suckers? We too have worked hard, faced much, suffered opposition, left our family mid friends to follow the Master, haven’t we?”

So went the discussion among the Ten. It is in this ambience of power-seeking, ambition and jealousy in which all the Twelve are caught up that Jesus drops the bomb: “The Son of Man came to serve, not to be served.”

We need to look at the leadership of the churches and the ecumenical movement to see whether we are really much better than the apostles. “We are all Christians (we say), committed and all that. We could all have made better careers if we had gone into secular jobs and vocations. We have made considerable sacrifice to come and serve the church or the ecumenical movement. We are not struggling for power, mind you. All we are asking for is a little recognition.”

Nothing has been so divisive of the churches as the ambitions, the jealousies, the power struggles among Christian workers and leaders. Quite unconsciously we fall a prey to that perennial temptation of humanity in the world, the desire for power and position, for worldly glory and honor. And so long as that is our basic orientation, the church cannot be united. There can be neither true unity nor genuine community so long as each thinks of his or her own power and position. Humble diakonia is in fact a central principle of the unity of the church.

Matthew 27:55 tells us that the mother of the sons of Zebedee was one of the people who used their own money to serve Jesus. See Luke 8:1-3, where we are told that these women were serving Jesus as well as the needy out of their own wealth.

The mother of Zebedee was thus already engaged in diakonia when she asked Jesus for the special favor of positions of power and glory. Is that temptation still not with us — that in our very serving we seek power and position?

The missionaries of a previous generation were in that situation. They served the people of the mission field sincerely, and in so far as they did that they had a social position, power and prestige which they would not have when they went back to their own people.

The new missionaries of the interchurch aid empire are in a worse situation. Some of them are stationed among the people whom they serve, but most are only periodic visitors. And they are welcomed so warmly and specially by the people who locally handle their hand-cuts. In return for their diakonia they get to sit on the right hand and on the left hand of the powers that be. And if they are not properly received and feted by project-holders, the projects may suffer. There is something radically wrong with that sort of diakonia.

Let me enumerate four necessary conditions of authentic diakonia. Later I hope to show how Jesus Christ is the true deacon, the server, the Son of Man who came to serve and not to be served. I hope the word study will make it clear that the model for Jesus’ messianic ministry itself was the four oracles in Second Isaiah about the Suffering Servant, the ‘ebed-Yahweh. The four necessary conditions of an authentic Christian diakonia are the following:

a) the willingness to suffer with those whom one serves and to give of oneself;

b) humility as opposed to superiority about oneself, and respect as opposed to condescension towards those to be served;

c) not using diakonia as an occasion for domination, privilege and rank;

d) willingness to identify with the served to the point of laying down one’s life for their sake.

a) Authentic diakonia should involve more than the giving of money or goods or services, more than the “sharing” of resources and personnel. It demands taking upon oneself the suffering of others. It demands laying aside the sense of self-sufficiency of the server, in order to feel and take on the sense of helplessness and need experienced by the served. The foreign missionaries of an earlier generation were better placed in this regard than the new interchurch aid and donor agency missionaries. The latter do not live among the people they serve, and only from a distance feel the pinch of the need of the poor. Their representatives in the field — those who handle “projects” and “programs” — are usually much better paid than routine church workers, serve out of their abundance and live lives far removed from that of the poor whom they are to serve.

We need a diaconic structure based in the people of the local church, rather than in the donor agencies or the project-holder networks they have created in their “field”. Only then will the church in the locality be able to exercise its diakonia function, hugely financed from the resources of the local church people, mill largely involving the local Christians themselves suffering with and serving the poor.

The present money-and-project based interchurch aid should thus become more marginal, in order to permit the local church lo exercise its diakonia of suffering with people and giving of oneself.

b) Attitudes are all-important in authentic diakonia. The server must respect the served. If diakonia comes out of attitudes of superiority it generates the most unpleasant and unhealthy reactions from the served. If service makes them feel inferior and dependent, such service cannot be regarded as Christian, for instead of mediating the healing love of Christ, it simply generates resentment and negative feelings of wounded pride. Christian service has no right to anticipate feelings of gratitude or ties of obligation and dependence. The present attitudes create resentment in other cultures, for they force them to sell their dignity for the sake of paltry sums of money that people desperately grab.

c) Diakonia is today often used as a means of domination by creating relations of dependence. Interchurch aid does not quite do what international aid does — namely use aid to capture markets and to exploit people in such a way that many times more than the aid flows back to the aid-giving economy through unjust trade relations. But interchurch aid is used in much the same way as international aid to create “spheres of influence” mid areas of economic, political and cultural domination and dependence. This is particularly true of bilateral interchurch aid, but ecumenical aid is not much different, in so far as it represents aid from a sector of the Western Consortium which dominates and exploits two-third world economies.

d) Willingness to lay down one’s life for the sake of those served seems to be an acid test of authentic Christian diakonia. Al present this seems an extremely remote possibility in the context of international interchurch diakonia. It makes much more sense in the context of the service of a local church to the people around or the people of that nation. Diakonia involves (he element of confronting the oppressors of the people whom one wants to serve. This can hardly be done by international interchurch aid, but can be done more effectively by the churches in a locality mutually supporting and reinforcing each other in the struggle against injustice. At this point outside aid can at times be very counter-productive. If Christ our Lord is the model for authentic diakonia, as we shall see later, then a diakonia which involves no cost to oneself, beyond “sharing money or personnel”, can hardly be authentic.

source: http://paulosmargregorios.info/English%20Articles/To%20Serve.htm

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