Vote Out Poverty

I am here in D.C. attending a Pentecost Conference whose theme is to Vote out Poverty. Our country has so degraded the idea that poverty is a real issue, that whenever someone speaks aobut eliminating poverty they are considered a bleeding heart liberal or simply out of touch with reality. This week I discovered, or at least heard the inspiring words of faith leaders fromaround the country, that no matter what they call it we will march on towards the elmination of poverty. The US Catholic Bishops have declared that their agenda will be guided by a vision to cut those living in poverty in half over the next ten years.

The agenda of this conference was to begin to put poverty back on the national agenda of our politicians. Not only were their speakers about the work being done around the country, there was a nationally televised forum on Faith, politics and poverty and we marched to capitol hill before we lobbied our representatives. The three bills the Vote out Poverty campaign is pushing are: SCHIP(comprehensive Childrens health care for the nearly 15 million children living in poverty 9 million without healthcare), the farm bill(a bill the size of a phone book containing iniatives from food stamps and WIC to commodity subsidies. The campaign is promoting the move that money should be taken from the subsidies(which hurt farmers here and abroad) into the food stamp program which currently only provides families with a $1 a meal, as well as increasing the minimum required income to include the elderly who earn too much to qualify but after paying for perscriptions are left with little to nothing for food.) Third a comprehensive and just Immigration bill. The debate over wether letting immigrants into the country is more harmful than good focuses simply on a zero-sum view of the issue. There is a just way to negotiate laws which will protect workers, their families and "american" interrests.

To learn more about these issues and the Vote Out Poverty Campaign please visit the Sojourners website www.sojo.net

Jesus said as you do unto the lest of these you do unto me I think he meant that in a country where the lest of these are imprisioned in a racist, unjust system of beauraucracy that ensures chronicly underbudgeted schools, healthcare programs, food programs and programs that keep families together Jesus meant that we should not only provide what we can as individual people of faith but that justice must roll down like an ever flowing stream. We must change the tide of justice in this country to include the left behind and the kept out.

May God annoint us all to come into relationship with our brothers and sisters around us so that we may all rise up together.

A New approach

I am going to try a new approach to this Blog thing. After speaking with some people last night we commiserated about the fact that we spend so much time trying to make each post amazing that there are huge gaps of time between each post. So I am going to follow the method I forced myself into in 10th grade when success in algebra seemed so elusive. Keep it simple( stupid) KISS. I am definitly going to try it this way. From now on some blogs may be the masterpieces I so love but many will simply be the daily observations of the world around me.
So here we go...

Sell your Cleverness and buy bewilderment. ~Rumi

This is in response to Rose Marie Berger's Article in the most recent Sojourners issue. I would invite everyone to read it. The article is about the bewilderment that we so often associate with a negative state of displacement. However her contention is that this state of displacement "is not momentary confusion or uncertainty. It is to become fundamentally displaced. Trauma may bring it on—illness or the death of a parent, companion, or child. Prolonged spiritual practice may bring it on. Accumulated, unattended sorrow may bring it on."

Reading her entire article, which I linked at right, continues on to reflect on how various spiritual teachers have meditated on bewilderment as a moment when all of your possibilities are revealed to you and while it can be terrifying it is one step closer to being completely at ease with the will of God.

Rose Marie Berger explained the sensation like this, "Every once in a while, one becomes profoundly and spiritually bewildered. In the midst of shaping the sandcastle of your life—adding little rooms and windows with a variety of views—you suddenly scoop a little too deep, and brittle-cold sea water rushes in. It covers everything. It dulls all of your neat shovel-cut edges. Glancing up from the quotidian architecture of your life, you confront the awful expanse of the sea: its green water, its endless horizon."

She goes on to quote writers from Merton to Rumi in all their explanations of the unexplainable. Azima Melina Kolin responded to the question of what bewilderment is with this, "In my experience, it is a state I have glimpsed in retreats when the senses are shut (if you are lucky to succeed in doing so) and the mind is redundant, lost."

With Kolin's response I was reminded of several moments but one moment in particular occurred one evening on a mountain top during my employment with Sierra Service Project. We had been going to this same spot every Thursday for the each weeks spiritual meditation moment with the week's set of teenagers. I had of course participated each week and taken the moment to take in the view of the valley below as well as to savor the moments of quiet alone. It was probably the fifth week when suddenly, almost as suddenly as the sea water invades sand castles, I found my mind empty of everything. Not a single voice was present in my mind. In fact it was, well the best way to describe it is with bewilderment. I remember being astonished that their were no voices at all. None that I could even conjour. In that moment I couldn't even remember what they sounded like.

I thought perhaps it was a God moment, but I also contemplated that perhaps I had not had enough sleep all summer and the weeks were almost past. I thought Of Teresa of Avila who would say to her students when they would come to her with a revelation, or God moment, that they should go eat and sleep and see if the moment was still present before making any claims.

This moment on the mountain was gone just as quickly as it arrived. But it was a profound moment which I long to return to. I know now from meditating on similar moments that they are not sustainable. In Berger's article she quotes Azima,"'"It is very difficult for us to experience such bewilderment in our normal consciousness, but the experience is of wonder and immense joy, freedom from self. It is wonderful, and not sustainable. It is a state of grace that I suppose anyone can taste at any time if ... graced."

Have you ever experienced a moment where everything is possible and nothing is possible, where you are so completely blank that everything paints you? I think that when you are in this state of bewilderment you are so completely a part of God and since God is everything at once and nothing at the same once, you are able to be completely at ease with the bewilderment. However, I think that since I didn't have the knowledge of these moments that I let them pass without truly knowing their power to change my life towards God.

Please share your moments of bewilderment. I would love to read and hear about them, then perhaps when we all experience them in the brief moments perhaps we can be better prepared to step into the nothingness of God's presence.