September 15, 2019 Dr. Ray
Washington Post, June 25, 2019:
CBP officials have said that Border Patrol stations, designed to hold adult immigrants for short periods, are neither safe nor appropriate places to house unaccompanied children for long stretches. CBP officials said this week that after HHS was able to take only 250 children from Clint, they had transferred the remaining ones out of the facility, placing some in a tent camp in El Paso, before rotating them back to Clint on Tuesday.
Meditation
Though we gather now on the heels of another week in which
we have work to do, grass to cut, bills to pay,
not to mention the fact that the dog has to be walked,
the kitty litter has to be changed,
the laundry folded, and the email is piling up.
Still, we resolve in this week that we will be mindful of the fact
that our very planet’s ability to sustain human life is being challenged
by the continued use of fossil fuels,
that nuclear weapons are being controlled
by sociopaths and emotional children,
that refugees from poverty and war
are meeting with hostility all the world over,
and that women everywhere still earn significantly less than men.
We actively choose to be aware that there are millions
in crowded and unsafe prisons and jails in America,
that income disparity continues to plunge more and more
working families into poverty.
We will not forget that millions remain without access to healthcare
not to mention higher education,
or an expectation of a pension income.
By sheer force of will,
we will not forget those who are discriminated against
Because of race, religion, nation of origin, language,
sexual orientation, or class.
Tearfully, we remember the tens of thousands
who are likely to die this year,
from drug addiction or senseless gun violence.
With broken hearts, we will lift up the plight of thousands of children
who have been separated from their families at our southern border,
and caged in over-crowded and unsafe detention camps.
We hold in our hearts the transgender men and women
who face the threat of violence every time they present
outwardly who they know themselves
to be inwardly . . . or even when they have to just use the restroom.
We will not fail to consider all those who now sit on death row,
both the guilty and the innocent,
who await the time when they will be murdered
by our government.
Though we cannot be the solution to
all of these forms of human suffering,
we acknowledge that indifference is not the answer.
It was 2007. Our nation had been led by what we then thought was the worst president in American history into two illegal wars and even though Al Gore had presented a number of Inconvenient Truth(s) to the world about our decaying planetary environment, almost nothing was being done about it. Edgar’s book recognized the growing irrelevance of the mainstream church that was still devoted to answering difficult theological questions that no one was asking while ignoring the issues that really matter.
He proposed that the church might have a renewal of relevance if it could let the old ways of being church die and invest ourselves in a new way of being church, concerned with these issues: the environment, war, terrorism and the divide of the world’s great faiths and cultures, and the eradication of poverty.
Against all odds, here in this very deeply red, conservative little city in the midst of America’s fly over territory, we did start a church based on this model; abandoning the old religious emphasis on other worldly concerns and investing ourselves in ethics. Months later, America elected her first black president and the conversation about this short list of ethical concerns seemed to be finding a place in the sun.
But folks, you know this, social progress almost never comes in a straight line and it never happens quickly or easily. The status quo is very powerful. It is almost like physics, a body at rest tends to stay at rest. What we often despised about the way that church used to be was all of the talk about love while tacitly approving of war. We talked about the sacred earth while plundering it. We grieved the deaths of victims of gun violence but what we offered in response was our sincere thoughts and prayers. We lionized Martin Luther King, Jr. while passively adjusting ourselves to the prevailing racism and poverty of our society with only symbolic gestures of protest.
Let me illustrate: I used to know a minister when I lived in Kentucky who told people that he had studied at Cambridge. I was curious, so one day I caught him at a meeting where I could ask him about this experience. It turns out that he was never enrolled as a student at Cambridge. He didn’t earn a degree there. He didn’t even audit a class there. He went to England on vacation, visited the campus of Cambridge and read some stuff in the library there. He was embarrassed to have graduated from a Bible college in Kentucky, so he told people that he had studied at Cambridge . . . even though it was just for a couple of days.
That sounds kind of pathetic, until you think about some of what the church has done in the face of the world’s great ethical challenges. In the face of the breakdown in our global ecology, we’re being asked to stop using plastic straws and to wash our clothes in cold water. And you know what, we should conserve energy by washing our clothes in cold water and we should try to avoid using single use plastic anything, but if we are not going to stop burning coal, and pumping oil and natural gas out of the ground to power our cars and heat our homes, then putting your paper, aluminum cans, and glass bottles in a recycling bin 
will mean nothing at all. It is like outlawing vaping while doing nothing about the sale of assault rifles and handguns. We can save four or five lives a year if we get rid of vaping but in light of the 40,000 who will die from gun fire, that hypocrisy just doesn’t seem relevant. And like plastic straws, recycling, and washing our clothes in cold water, we ought to get rid of vaping, but not until we get rid of assault rifles and hand guns.
I think that Bob Edgar’s book was a good start, especially where we were a dozen years ago. But things have changed, and the progress of previous generations is at risk and we have a whole new set of social evils about which we have good reason to be deeply concerned. The stakes are high.
You don’t have to have a Hollywood imagination to see several potential scenarios of conflicts with nuclear-armed, unstable states that could lead to a globally lethal nuclear war.
And it is no exaggeration to list the United States of America, the most nuclear-armed nation, as being rather more unstable than ever before. John Kennedy managed to thread the needle during the Cuban missile crisis and prevented nuclear war fifty years ago, but is there anyone, Republican, Democrat, or Independent, who believes that if Donald Trump had been president on that day that there would still be a human civilization on earth? We have been lucky for 50 years of the nuclear age, but much of that luck involves having had educated, experienced, and qualified people in charge of the nuclear football. That, sadly, is no longer the case in the United States.
As to the environment, we are already passed the tipping point for massive sea level rises. I may be able to safely retire in Florida someday. Maybe even my daughter could too. But if she has children, most of Florida will be under water by the time they reach retirement age, no matter what we do to stem the tide of global climate change. Horrible things are going to happen over the next century. The only question is whether we can arrest the speed and the degree of the damage.
But even if we can through science and statesmanship avoid global destruction through war or environmental collapse, our nation has a laundry list of ills, most of which are traceable to the conflict between democracy and capitalism. Democracy, as a form of government, and capitalism, as an economic system, can and often have, work together to strengthen the other. However, what we have seen in our lifetimes is what Naomi Klein calls “a naked corporate takeover, one many decades in the making.” (No is Not Enough, p. 4) Capitalist interests are no longer simply trying to influence the government, they have taken charge and are sitting in the seats of government power, turning our democracy into an oligarchy, just as Aristotle warned could happen in his 2500 year old book on politics.
It is not the sanity and concern for the welfare of the public that has prevented the United States from joining the rest of the western world in offering universal health care to all of our citizens, or from becoming one of the growing number of western democracies that offer tuition-free higher education to their entire population. It is the profit-motivated corporate control over our government that has prevented these and similar things.
We have 2.5 million people in prison and more than 9 million on parole, many times more than any other nation in the world per capita, not because our residents are more evil or because we have a much more dangerous criminal element, but because our prison system is controlled by for-profit interest that reduce the employment pool by creating virtual slave labor camps, while funding jobs, construction, and supply contracts to corporations. We have a million human beings living in cages for no rational reason other than the transfer of wealth from the taxpayers to corporations. This is a moral travesty that should keep all of us awake at night, though it never seems to come to the front of our awareness until one of our own family members gets sacrificed to the system.
In the last year, we have become aware of an insidious program of indefinitely holding undocumented immigrants in concentration camps, nearly 100,000 in all, about 30,000 of whom are children. The government is being billed $750 a day for each of these people but the for-profit concentration camps say that they cannot afford to provide soap, blankets, or tooth brushes without more funding.
This obvious corruption is frequently reported in the news, but it hardly makes a ripple in public reaction because we have become inured to moral outrage in America.
Our nation is cursed with a paucity of jobs that pay a living wage, and the crumbling of our middle class is sending economic shockwaves around the globe. Our low wages pour gasoline on the chronic fires of poverty everywhere. Corporate exploitation of poor nations, combined with militarily enforced stability, is, in turn, the cause of terrorism in Europe, Africa, the Americas, the Middle East, and Australia. Regional wars create the refugee crisis and strain the tolerance of stable nations for welcoming strangers into their midst.
In the face of all of these crises, for a church devoted to ethics, preaching has become rather exhausting, for me to write about these things and for you to keep hearing about it all. During our time of passing the peace a few weeks ago, one of our very dear members took the opportunity of having just a few seconds in the aisle to speak to me and she said, “With so much bad going on in the world, it sure would be nice to hear a happy sermon.” I get that, I really do. And I have since tried to take a break from the constant drum beat of talks on ethics to sometimes turn my attention to more pastoral or personal concerns.
There is such a thing as compassion fatigue. How can any of us be concerned about all of these issues simultaneously without going totally insane? How can I be worried about opioid addiction, kids in cages, lead in the water supply, mass murders, a broken justice system, a small continent of floating plastics in the ocean, poverty, war, and domestic violence, when I still have to cut the grass, fold the laundry, pay the bills, clean the toilets, weed the garden, wash the car, and take out the garbage?
Is it any wonder that there are those who brag about no longer watching the news? And though we wish they wouldn’t, don’t we understand why people have stopped going to church, they don’t go to vote, and they don’t volunteer with charities. How do we keep from being morally defeated and just giving up? This is what I know for sure: when I feel isolated, I just can’t muster the energy to care about all of this stuff. Survival seems like about all that I can handle.
care about violence against transgender people in my own community and the suddenly homeless in the Bahamas in the wake of Hurricane Dorian.
Though America has been a beacon of freedom and opportunity for hundreds of millions of people through our brief history, we have never achieved the greatness that we are capable of. We never have quite made it to that goal of being the shining city on the hill, the truly great society that our patriotic songs and movies portray. Through the ingenuity of science, and if we could harness the united will of our diverse nation, we could bring an end to poverty, open the doors of our universities, and transform our military might into a renewable energy rescue mission to save the planet, making the part that remains above sea level safe for human habitation. We could care for our sick, give equal wages to men and women, pay everyone a living wage, and reduce our imprisoned population to a fraction of what it is now. Many of these ideals would not even be hard to accomplish, if we could swing the pendulum of power from capitalism to democracy and shift the momentum away from creating a super-rich ruling class to creating a civilized world.
All governments rule by the consent of the governed. We have a long history of having our consent manipulated out of us through fear and propaganda. So we consented to slavery, unjust wars, economic and racial segregation, the exploitation of the poor, and oppressive gender and sexual norms. The task at hand is for us, as a people, to rise up and say, “That government doesn’t get my consent anymore.”
David and I, along with a handful of other contributors, are trying to write a book, not about a better church but about a Great Society. The number of concerns we are addressing dwarfs Bob Edgars’ important work in Middle Church. David and I meet every Thursday to talk about this project and other things while, when the weather allows, we take a long walk.
Recently, David asked me if there was anything I could say to help him find the energy and drive to keep working on it. Thinking about these things is taxing, emotionally and physically. There are times when I miss being more invested in church potluck dinners and devotional Bible studies. The world didn’t seem so frightening back then. But I choose to be engaged in the real world and to devote my time to real issues, no matter how tiresome that can be. But I can’t do it alone. Without friendship, without some sincere love, without a community, without connection, I’m toast.
Friendships can be fragile, marriages can fall apart, in fact most of them do. Even within the faith community, people can get their nose out of joint in ego battles and go full bore sociopath. Still, when I feel isolated, I want to give up. When I feel connected to others, I want to forge ahead. These are not easy times, but as my favorite British philosopher, John Lennon, said: I get by with a little help from my friends.
