Henri Nouwen Wounded Healer

I enjoy reading Sojourners, it's stated mission: "to inspire hope and action by articulating the biblical call to racial and social justice, life and peace, and environmental stewardship."
Even though I live in the UK I find much of the magazine just as relevant here as it is across the Atlantic.
Each month editor-in-chief Jim Wallis writes a feature under the heading "Hearts and Minds." Real change in the world requires changes in our hearts and minds, something I have written about quite a bit over the years here and in my books. I therefore particularly appreciated Jim's article in the January 2016 edition which I have just received: Lessons from a Wounded Healer. And the Wounded Healer is of course the late Henri Nouwen, that great Catholic spiritual writer who became such a best seller with his wonderful book of the same name: The Wounded Healer.
As Jim points out, Henri certainly didn't have his life sorted. He had a history of spiritual struggle, which has been used to inspire us all in the rich legacy of his books. A very thoughtful article from Jim concludes that:

Henri Nouwen's life was an example for us all in how to encounter and incorporate both spirituality and social justice into our lives and work. 

In fact it was reading a biography of Henri Nouwen while I was on holiday a few years back which inspired me to research the concept of the Wounded Healer in greater depth and to try to consider how we might apply the archetype to all aspects of our daily lives, whether in our economy or our healthcare, our environmental issues or our creativity, our worship or our communities.
It took a very long time to research and write. I may not have got it all right, but it has certainly hit the right spot with many. And at the same time it was a cathartic experience, knowing that like me Henri had struggled with his own mental and spiritual condition - and his books were extremely helpful to me.
In a world of doom and gloom where there seem to be so many intractable problems I believe there is great hope to be found in applying the principles of the empathy and spirituality and humility of the wounded healer into our lives, whoever we are, whatever we do in our work and leisure lives. Thank you Jim Wallis and Sojourners for bringing this to the forefront of our minds again.
  
 Sojourners
Healing This Wounded Earth - inspired by Henri Nouwen and the Wounded Healer

The iconic monolithic rock hewn church of Bet Giyorgis (St George) visited on my recent memorable trip to the wonderful Ethiopia - written about in detail in my other blog Ethiopia - in search of the Ark of the Covenant

Leaving no Change Behind

We worry at the moment about the world's fiscal problems
...of course we do. But…"to fix our broken world we need more than profits. We need prophets - faithful, fearless people, willing to invest in social change through prophetic proclamation in word and deed." This is the message of Brad R. Braxton, founding senior pastor of The Open Church, a cross cultural, radically inclusive congregation in Baltimore, in an important article he has written "Leave no Change Behind" in the August 2012 edition of Sojourners: a Christian magazine dedicated to Faith in Action for Social Change. Braxton's article is really directed at the preacher, but there are lessons for us all in this message.

Responsibility for the changes needed in this world must start from the bottom up, from ourselves. And for this to happen, Braxton urges us to be concerned about the "balances in our moral accounts, lest insufficient funds lead to bankruptcy of our souls and foreclosure on the common good."

What did you do for Lent?

I take the US Christian magazine, Sojourners, edited by Jim Wallis, and was taken by this guest commentary and story - Doing Nothing for Lent - contributed on their blog by Cathleen Falsani. **

She starts off with octogenarian Presbyterian pastor Eugene Peterson who in A Long Obedience writes:

"We are surrounded by a way of life in which betterment is understood as expansion, as acquisition, as fame. Everyone wants to get more – to be on top – no matter what it is the top of that’s admired. There’s nothing recent about the temptation. It’s the oldest sin in the book. The one that got Adam tossed out of the garden and Lucifer tossed out of heaven. What is new about it is the general admiration and approval it receives."

Falsani goes on to tell the story of Peterson, who after a lifetime - 30 years - of a very busy life serving his church, has moved back to his native Western Montana and
has cultivated with his family and with great intention, a simple life. They live in a beautiful place, eat locally, cook their own food, have conversations that linger for hours with friends around the meal table. "They read good books by writers and poets whom they find inspiring. They keep their life (and their calendar) uncluttered. They pray. They keep a Sabbath. They walk in the woods and they listen. They listen to the rustle of the leaves, the cry of a hawk, the wind, and the still small voice of God. They listen to the silence."

Peterson learnt this first in his church - after months and years of frenetic activity, setting goals, raising funds, establishing projects, he learnt to "just be" with his congregation, learn from them, be content with them.

The monks say: "Stay in your cell. The cell will teach you everything."
Peterson translated this as: ‘Stay in your congregation. Your congregation will teach you everything.’
Falsani re-imagines this adage again as, “Stay in your life. Your life will teach you everything.”
"Feel the rhythms of grace and let God do the doing," she writes.

That's all very well and good - but life isn't like that. And Peterson has had his working life and is no doubt now financially secure from his books and pension and speaking engagements. I don't know for sure - I'm guessing.

Coming home from hearing the maverick priest Matthew Fox speak at Alternatives in St James Church Piccadilly this week, speaking to us about restoring the balance between the sacred masculine and the divine feminine, I looked at all the commuters trying to get home from work - there had been an operating "incident" and trains were chaotic - we were turned off one train destined for Brighton and changed platforms twice to catch a later one. All around me were hundreds of drawn, tired faces, the biggest preoccupation almost certainly on supper and kids and partners and paying mortgages and keeping the job and paying the bills. Clearly nothing on this earth was further from the minds of most if not all those people than "acceptance" and just "being" and finding the spiritual quietness and healing that the world needs.
And yet many of them would surely be so much happier living the simpler life and just "being." How do we get this across to people and how do the bills then get paid?

So my first question is this:
Could any of us personally take up the Peterson challenge?
Should we be reaching out to these harassed working people with a message for a better life?
If so, how? Workshops? Talks? Action groups? And who would come anyway?
Or do we get in touch with those rhythms of grace, spread them out as ripples of hope whilst "just being," and letting God do the doing? And how do we spread this rhythm?
Do we need both approaches?

Satish Kumar became a wandering Jain monk when he was 8, but later left when he felt that he could be of more practical use to a hurting world outside the order. He is famous for his pilgrimages, and for his love of life and nature and as editor of Resurgence and the guiding spirit behind Schumacher College in Devon. But he was always used to having little - and if you have always had little, you have nothing material to miss. It's easier to give up a little than a lot!

Matthew Fox at this Alternatives talk spoke of bringing the sacred back into our lives - in fact he pretty much shared my views, written about in my own book, on the economy, community, education, religion, business, creativity and the natural world - albeit approaching this message from a different perspective and direction. He calls for restoring the balance between yin and yang energy and believes as I do that the education of our children is key here - to bring back spirituality and a sense of the sacred into our schools - to restore poetry and art and creativity and wisdom to their rightful and equal place alongside the acquisition of knowledge. Knowledge is nothing without wisdom, he reminded us.
The aborigines, he told us, look up at the sky and don't talk about galaxies and black holes and ozone layers and satellites and so on. They tell their children that "the stars are the campfires of our ancestors."
I know a teacher who amidst much mockery and cynicism from her colleagues set up a nature table for her young class. And it is a huge success.

So here is another question - can we do anything individually to bring a sense of the sacred back to our children and/or influence this teaching in our schools? Is there scope here for "just being" and letting God do the doing?

Surely God gives us our skills and talents to use in practical ways?
How are we individually going to do this for the sake of the world?
Perhaps nature walks with our children are examples of just "being" whilst God does the work of inspiring in our children the reverence and awe of nature, so that they respect and look after this wonderful creation of which we are a part?

** Author of four non-fiction books, including her latest, Belieber!: Fame, Faith and the Heart of Justin Bieber.

Let's get off the consumer-driven carousel!

Childcare Costs are Forcing Parents to Give Up Work, shouts the headline.
But is that always such a bad thing? Is it so very bad for one parent to stay at home with the children? Is it a good thing that we have built a culture where both parents are expected to work? What happened to the good old-fashioned division of duties between the parents, one to earn the living, the other to look after the home and the children?
Have we been building a society where the parents are so busy with their own work that they don’t bother where their children are or what they are doing when they get home from school?

Now I know that modern parents can have a tough time bringing up their children, and I know that there are special problems for single-parent families. Of course we should have good social and economic policies that support single mums or dads in their task. And I understand that there are some very real hardships with parents struggling to make ends meet. But what about the two parent family, surely an ideal we should strive towards. Childcare costs in the UK are supposedly some of the most expensive in the world. When combined with cuts this year to certain State Benefits that were designed to help parents get back to work, many are now finding that they simply cannot afford to work anymore – hence the headline. And America is way behind most other wealthy countries in the provision of paid maternity and paternity leave for parents. In addition parents often find that they have to both work to afford health insurance for the children. The absence of readily affordable healthcare is a real problem for many families. The CHIP, or Child Health Insurance Program, gives free health insurance for children up to a certain level of income, but that level is woefully low. This link between healthcare and wages needs to be broken.
But I would submit that one important reason why many families have both parents out at work is that they find themselves on the consumer driven carousel that is twenty-first century life, and they cannot find a way to step off. Children are bombarded with images of the material world. The marketing media cynically exploits them, practically as soon as they are aware of their surroundings. As a result we have more and more material possessions, we buy bigger houses to accommodate it all, we saddle ourselves with mortgages that stretch us to the limits and we then shop at cheap hypermarkets for the lower prices. ‘…American parents buy into a false definition of need that leaves them addicted to a two-income lifestyle and robs children of family life. These parents are not bad, selfish, or greedy. They are simply doing what most people are doing, going along with the prevailing tide of cultural expectations.’ (Duncan Collum, Danny and Polly, Taking Back Our Kids, Sojourners Magazine, January 2006, Vol. 35, No. 1, pp. 12-19).
And because we are out at work to fund all these things we are not on hand at home to protect our children from these influences.
The normal working week in most of Europe is less than 40 hours. In Sweden and the Netherlands, dual-earner couples with children average two fewer workdays per week than do U.S. couples.
Isn’t it time we valued our families and our children more?

I believe that in many instances mothers would far rather be at home with their children in those early formative years. I really didn’t want to return to work and leave my babies at home with childcare, but like so many others I was driven by education and a career to think I could ‘have it all’. I believe that in our hearts we all want more quality time to spend with our children, to be involved in more local activities as a family, rather than ferrying our kids off to expensive entertainments all the time while we get on with our work! It has even been reported that many parents no longer have the time or energy to pursue that most wonderfully rewarding of pursuits, reading the bedtime story.
Early in 2009 and again in 2010 we had rather more snow in the UK than we are used to. It pretty much ground the country to a standstill for several days. But among the moans and wails about no gritting lorries on the streets, roads impassable and schools closed, one city man honestly admitted that for the first time in his life he was forced to stay at home with the family, spent two days making snowmen and tobogganing with them and loved every minute of it. There is certainly nothing wrong with that.
We need policies that support the parent and the child together, not policies that encourage us to go back to work as soon as possible after having our children. We want time to play with our families.
And that will be good for our communities, ourselves and the world!

Kick a Puppy, get a Mean Dog. More on looting and rioting

"Kick a puppy and you get a mean dog," the expression goes. Sure. What we need more than anything else in the aftermath of these latest lootings and riots on the streets of English cities is to ask ourselves why the puppies feel kicked - why they are growing up to be mean dogs.
And, somewhat controversially, David Cameron UK Prime Minister has now asked for advice from Bill Bratton former head of the New York Police Department. In Bratton's first two years at that post, reports of serious crime dropped 27%. And Mr Bratton is no stranger to UK policing, having teamed up with British officers at other times over the past 20 years.
According to Sky News, "In 2009, the Queen awarded him the honorary title of Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire. Mr Bratton, who is now a security expert, left the Los Angeles police force in 2009 after significantly lowering the crime rate." So he clearly has wide ranging and valuable experience. Yes our UK police are wonderful, but what is wrong with having the humility to also ask others for advice.

In his ‘Call to Renewal’ Keynote Address to a Sojourners conference in 2006, Barack Obama reminded the audience ‘the problems of poverty and racism, the uninsured and the unemployed, are not simply technical problems in search of the perfect ten point plan. They are rooted in both societal indifference and individual callousness - in the imperfections of man. Solving these problems will require changes in government policy; it will also require changes in hearts and minds.’

Simone Weil once said: ‘A hurtful act is the transference to others of the degradation which we bear in ourselves.’ Or as Barack Obama has described this in our twenty first century world, in an address to a Sojourners conference in 2006: ‘When a gang-banger shoots indiscriminately into a crowd because he feels somebody disrespected him, we have a problem of morality; there's a hole in that young man's heart; a hole that government programs alone cannot fix.’

So we need to dig deep into all our resources to try to understand this current crisis.

For anyone who wants to explore this further, and wants to make their own contribution to help society heal what is wrong at its roots, I now unashamedly recommend my own book - the result of much research into this and other contemporary world issues. There is a whole chapter on Community, how it is formed and why it becomes broken, how we are failing our youth, the need for education and healing, etc. all brought together with the wisdom of renowned thinkers and leaders past and present and with lots of suggested resources for further action on both sides of The Pond.

‘There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root,’ wrote Henry David Thoreau. We all have to start striking at those roots.

A Non Violence Classic

We have recently seen some wonderful examples of the power of non violence - for example the successful liberation of Egypt from the Mubarak regime. I am reminded of Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela and the Dalai Lama, all of whom have preached justice by non violent means.
I subscribe to the Christian magazine Sojourners, Faith in Action for Social Justice, and in the July edition just received have had my attention drawn by a letter from a Tom Ewell of Clinton Washington, to The Power of Non Violence,  written by Richard Gregg in 1934, after the author had spent four years with Gandhi running up to the campaign for Indian independence.
I have found an inexpensive second hand copy, the revised 1959 edition that includes a foreword by Martin Luther King, and look forward to reading it - and will write a review in due course. I am sure, as Tom says, that this has enormous relevance today as all those years ago.

Gandhi and his Seven Deadly Social Sins

Reading my latest edition of Sojourners, I have been reminded of Mahatma Gandhi's Seven Deadly Social Sins:

Politics without principle

Wealth without work

Commerce without morality

Pleasure without conscience

Education without character

Science without humanity

Worship without sacrifice

Think about them. I could write so much more on each of these - and will do over the coming weeks and months. Gandhi was a truly wise man.

The Economy - Where is our compassion? Where is our Empathy?

On 28th January I wrote of our Irrational Behaviors, following the theme of the essay by Ervin Laszlo on “The World’s Health Problem: an Integral Diagnosis” in A New Renaissance – Transforming Science, Spirit and Society. Our Irrational Behavior Number One is that "Millions are suffering from overeating and obesity and a thousand million go hungry."Where, I asked, was our compassion for our fellow humankind? Where is our empathy?

Now I want to move on to Laszlo's Irrational Behavior number 2.

"The wellbeing and possibly the very survival of humanity are in question, but most of us remain occupied or preoccupied with making money and holding on to our privileges."

I love this Greenpeace banner:

When the last tree is cut, the last river poisoned, and the last fish dead, we will discover that we can't eat money...

And here is a thought from Satish Kumar from his classic article “Spiritual Imperative,” in Resurgence 2005.

"This notion of spiritless existence can be described as materialism. All is matter; land, forests, food, water, labour, literature and art are commodities to be bought and sold in the marketplace - the world market, the stockmarket, the so-called free market… Business without spirit, trade without compassion, industry without ecology, finance without fairness, economics without equity can only bring the breakdown of society and destruction of the natural world. Only when spirit and business work together can humanity find coherent purpose."

And here is one of my least favorite quotes:

‘What...[is wealth]…to you?’ the headline asked. ‘It’s being able to tell the world to get lost.’ This was from a series of bank advertisements run some while ago on the management of wealth, and it appeared in the popular glossy weekend media. To accompany this particular advert. there was a picture of a lone and pretty girl cantering away on a lovely white stallion into the beautiful and totally unblemished distance.

How can any single one of us afford to turn our back on the world in this way in any sense. How can any of us ride away to an unblemished horizon while so many basic human rights are not available to so many? That surely diminishes us as human beings. But someone, indeed a team of people, wrote that advertisement.

Where is our compassion? Where is our empathy?

But I see a glimmer of hope in what is coming out of Davos, the little mountain village in Switzerland where once a year corporate CEOs, heads of state, and leaders of nonprofit organizations from around the globe gather to reflect upon the state of the world at the “World Economic Forum." Reporting from Davos, Jim Wallis in an article at the Sojourners site Values from Davos, tells us that whilst in previous years he has struggled to bring the subject of moral values within the economy into the mainstream of discussions, now we are in economic crisis, the values conversations suddenly seem far more relevant. In 2009, he tells us,“there were 17 sessions with the word “values” in the title.” Now new buzz topics are “human flourishing” and “the common good.” And business executives have been telling him that they feel alone in their soul-searching for values, and business ethics professors at some of the country’s leading business schools tell him that their courses are over-subscribed, yet they still feel marginal to the curriculum.
But behaviors created this crisis, and unless values talk leads to changed behaviors, it won’t mean very much, he says. This is so much music to my ears - my own thesis really.
Wallis now finds himself the chair of a new Global Agenda Council on Values, its task to shape what the World Economic Forum is calling the “Moral Economy Dialogue.” This is intended to develop serious tools for personal, organizational, corporate, and national values assessments that focus on changing behaviors.

I quote Wallis: "This is all good news to Klaus Schwab, the founder and executive chairman of Davos who, as a young Swiss economist many years ago, wrote about the need for business to not only take into account the interests of shareholders, but also of the many other stakeholders — including employees, consumers, the poor, the environment, and future generations…That Davos would take these issues very seriously…is good news…But the headline in yesterday’s International Herald Tribune — “The Super-Rich Pull Ever Farther Ahead” — indicated we still have a long way to go. Many of those super-rich are at Davos, and I indicated yesterday that the only people whose lives seem to have got back to “normal” since the financial crisis began are those whose behaviors caused it in the first place. They are back to record profits, while a seminar I attended yesterday showed how dramatic and devastating unemployment still is around the globe — especially for young people.”

Yes there is hope. But we need two things urgently. We need to develop and feel our empathy for our fellow humanity, in everything we do, at all levels. And we need to address what is a basically flawed economy. I will come back to both these needs in future blogs. This is a big subject, but one we cannot ignore any longer.

Oil and BP and the Gulf of Mexico - again

I urge you to read this article on the God's Politics blog - Attention must be Paid, by Jennifer Kottler:

http://blog.sojo.net/2010/08/05/attention-must-be-paid/

Just because the oil leak and BP are out of the news and other items crave our attention, this does not mean that the oil problem has gone away - in spite of what the papers imply; Far from it!

To Change the World - Serendipity again

Yesterday I received my July edition of the Christian magazine Sojourners - Faith in Action for Social Justice. As I opened it the page fell open at an ad for a book that I had not come across to date but which is so close to my own interests, I must read it.
James Davison Hunter is the author; the title, To Change the World: The Irony, Tragedy and Possibility of Christianity in the Late Modern World.
If we hope to heal this wounded earth we need to change our culture. I feel quite sure about this, but my preoccupation is with how we can achieve this? Hunter addresses this complex and vital subject. He looks at the question "how might Christians in the 21st century live in ways that have integrity with their traditions and are more truly transformative?" And he introduces a theology of what he calls "faithful presence"within culture and society.

I am looking forward to reading of his ideas and challenges and will be posting up a review in due course.

But I fear that the wealth of wisdom in books such as this do not reach the population masses - and if the subject matter does hit the popular media it tends to be sensationalized and therefore is dismissed too readily as over the top, scare mongering, unrealistic, whatever. Witness the popular media responses to James Lovelock when he wrote The Revenge of Gaia.

In the same magazine its Chief Executive Officer and Editor-in-Chief Jim Wallis has written an article "Is Christian Ministry Illegal in Arizona? (a quick free registration process is required to access). The answer in short is yes! Arizona's new and harsh enforcement law against undocumented immigrants is forcing Christians to break the law in their ministry of love and neighborliness to all, offered in a spirit of compassion and need rather than with regard to and questioning of an immigrant's status. "Arizona's law is a social and racial sin, and ... should be denounced by people of faith and conscience across the nation, " he writes.

Amen to that.

Monsanto and Haiti and terminator seed

Yesterday the God's Politics Blog in my Blogroll reported the protest by Haitian farmers to the gift by Monsanto Corporation of "conventional hybrid" seed. This seed, the farmers point out, is sterile and the farmers therefore have to buy more seed every year, not being able to harvest their own seed from the first year's crop. This obviously increases the farmers' ongoing costs substantially and traps them into further costs.

The story on Monsanto's own site seems to paint a rosier picture. They say they have donated "conventional hybrid" seeds to Haiti - $4million's worth. That sounds very generous. But is it as generous as it seems?

What exactly is a "conventional" seed? Conventional in my dictionary means following custom or convention - from a customary practice. I suppose if anything is followed for long enough it becomes conventional, but surely that does not necessarily endorse it as a "good thing?" Because hybrid seed cannot be used to breed more seed for the next crop, it has been called Terminator seed.

It seems to me that these seeds donated to Haiti are Terminator seeds by another name. And the Haitian farmers clearly think so too.

But see Monsanto's own take on this. They seem to be congratulating themselves on their generosity. And they remind us that in 1999 they made a commitment " not to commercialize sterile seed technology in food crops." Making a gift of such seed to earthquake-stricken Haiti may not be commercialization but is surely a cynical exploitation? Or am I misunderstanding something?