The little towns in their squares

light up, as do the scattered

lights of farmyards in the tilting,

fuzzy squares they’re locked in.

 

I balance a Chilian red

on a bumpy flight out to

one of those squares.

 

The West is red too,

after we bump to a

cruising altitude through

clouds threatening snow.

 

I’ve been here before,

but not in this sundown;

in these clouds;

drinking this wine;

in the lines of this poem.

 

Somewhere out there

I’ve been on the last

cool ride in the back

of a truck at evening,

watching a huge moon rise

and knowing this, too,

would be a last.

 

We knew that time would pass;

we knew we, too, would pass;

 

we knew that the land

would not forget us

because it never heard

our cries anyway.

 

We knew it, but

the terrible wrench

of knowing it

 

again and again—

 

the land proved careful

about showing us that,

 

or perhaps even we

might have rebelled.

 

Perhaps even we

might have blown out

our little lights

in the squares

and called it a night

 

with no tomorrow.

 

Land, what would you

have done without

our fierce burning?

 

What would we have done,

without our fierce burning?

 

For now, there is the red.

 

Then, the darkness,

but for the burning.

There’s an old Zen story that does like this:

 

Once there was a great warrior. He had never been defeated, and he continued to win every confrontation into old age. He was known far and wide as the only warrior who had never suffered a defeat.

This of course was a challenge to younger warriors, and one day a young man appeared to challenge the old warrior. He, too, had never suffered defeat. His technique had become famous: he allowed his opponent to make the first move, then exploited that move and always won the day.

Despite the concern of his students, the old warrior consented to join in combat with the young man.

On the day of the battle, the young man walked up to the old warrior and spat in his face. The old man did not move. Then the young man began to hurl insults. This had no affect either. Then the young warrior began to throw dirt and stones at the old warrior. The old warrior stood, impassive.

Finally, exhausted by all his effort, the young warrior bowed to the old warrior, admitting defeat.

After the young man had left, the disciples of the old warrior gathered around him. “Teacher! I would have split that young man’s skull open! How could you allow him to hurl such insults at you?”

The old warrior replied, “Consider this: if someone offers a gift and you will not receive it, to whom does that gift belong?”

 

Nonviolent resistance embraces the techniques of both the old and the young Zen warrior. Like the old teacher, nonviolence does not accept the gift of violence or insults. Like the young warrior, nonviolence provokes a first response, then watches the opponent to see what the first move will be.

On April 12th, 1963, Martin Luther King, Jr. was arrested in Birmingham, Alabama for parading without a license. There wasn’t a great deal of reading material in the jail, but one of the people arrested with King had been allowed to keep a newspaper he had in his pocket. That newspaper contained an editorial written by eight Euro-American Alabama clergy titled “A Call for Unity.”

The editorial began with the premise that, yes, African Americans deserved equality, but—that said—that said equality should be allowed to happen slowly—in the fullness, shall we say, of time. Without hubbub and marches.

King had heard this argument many times—just calm down and let the South change, slowly but surely. He had heard it from Euro-American centrists; he had heard it from within the African American leadership itself.

King began writing a response immediately. He used the bottom of his shoe for a desk. He wrote first on the margins of the newspaper; then on toilet paper; then on scraps provided for him by an African American trusty in the jail.

What he wrote is one of the great documents in US history, up there with the Declaration of Independence and the Gettysburg Address. What he wrote is an argument based on the Unitarian thought of Henry David Thoreau’s masterwork, “Civil Disobedience.”

MLK knew that violence was the nature of racism. But it is also a basic human response to threat. In his letter King says this:

In any nonviolent campaign there are four basic steps:

collection of the facts to determine whether injustices exist;

 negotiation;

 self purification;

 and direct action.

We have gone through all these steps in Birmingham.

 

Besides the moral high ground of nonviolence, King also knew that his cause itself stood for a higher order of morality. In “Civil Disobedience,” Thoreau had asserted, “If I have unjustly wrested a plank from a drowning man, I must restore it to him though I drown myself.”

King was asking for that plank back. He saw the higher moral order, as did Thoreau and  Tolstoy and Gandhi before him. Rather than getting the plank back, the Civil Rights movement got a small concession: I’ll let you hold onto my plank once in a a while, when you’re going down for the third time.

This is the unfinished business of what King started. And the continuing challenge to those who strive for a higher moral order. Still, today, I must restore the plank that I wrestled from a drowning human being. And there are many, many of those.

King’s letter is there still to remind us: “An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law.”

And,

Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny.

 Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.

 

Once I crossed the Sierra Madres

with a bus driver named Arturo

who had one arm

and a stick-shift bus.

 

Sometimes between the

the shift and wheel Arturo’s

good right arm would

pause to make the sign

of the cross toward a portrait

of the Virgin that banged

the windshield from a string.

 

 

 

The lesson here is that

never is a miracle more than

beating the percentages.

 

 

Perhaps Arturo still is

waving down the

twisted camino

at each shrine

along the way.

 

“What’s your hurry?”

always he will ask—

“Do you think you

don’t have time to

find your grave?”

 

 

 

 

As the Community Minister for the Greater New Orleans Unitarian Universalists, I spend a lot of my time immersed in the injustice of layers of oppression. New Orleanians still trying to get back into their homes over 8 years after they were flooded out, transgender women forced to be housed with and often abused by men in prison and in shelters, a football field of wetlands lost in this state every half hour … Each day there’s more. Family diagnosed with chronic diseases, babies born too soon, people die… and.

AND Christmas comes each year in this country, whether you celebrate it or not. While I often find myself in the position of protesting the dominion of the dominant culture, I don’t fight Christmas. I choose to enjoy Christmas. I think that Christmas can be sweetly subversive.

Hey World – people are ill and homeless and jobless and imprisoned and killed! For most of the year, most of the world ignores these hard truths, pretending that the poor are poor because of poor choices instead of acknowledging a system of oppression that radically tilts the playing field towards some –and away from others.

But come Christmas, pretending stops – at least for a moment.   Suddenly we collect coats and toys and feel good stories about providing shelter and hope to families down on their luck.

Suddenly we tell a story about a great leader born in questionable circumstances, sharing his birthday crib with the donkey’s dinner, soon exiled to the immigrant life in Eygpt with his family.

Rumors of premarital sex, poverty, immigration … you name it, the Christmas story goes there…

And tells us – joy to the world. Hope has come.

Let there be peace and kindness and respect among all creation.
It’s a 6th Principle: The Goal of World Community with Peace, Liberty, and Justice for All!

Yes, I know. That’s not exactly how the scriptures or even the carols go.

But I am grateful for the promise of this season…For once a year our deeply embedded cultural story tells the world:
 Children are precious.
 Where you are born should not predict the quality nor the value of your life.
 Women too have the holy within them.
 It matters that we bear witness to each other and to the vast brilliance of the universe.
 Sometimes knowledge needs to bow to intuition.
 Life is a gift, utterly unpredictable, infinitely possible.
 There is hope for change.

And where there is hope, friends, there is joy.  Beloveds, may there be joy for you and your loved ones today and every days.

Thanksgiving American style. The day declared a national holiday for the purpose of giving thanks. Despite the best efforts of those of a theocratic bent, who or what to thank remains open to interpretation.

My thanks goes to the universe that just keeps cranking out good things. As the fifth chapter of the Daodejing puts it,

 

The space between

sky and earth is empty,

like a bellows, moving

 

and moving, and

out comes more.

That’s something to be thankful for. Yet problems begin when all of that “more” between earth and sky begins to get divvied up. And, Thanksgiving being a national holiday, I can’t help thinking of the portion of the universe’s “more” taken by this particular nation and how that “more” is divvied up within our borders. It its harsh realism the Daodejing says,

The universe is neither

“good” nor “evil” outside

of human standards.

 

The universe treats all things

like so many straw dogs.

 

Recent survivors of various weather-related calamities might agree with that. Then there are these next lines:

 

Earthly rulers treat people

like so many straw dogs.

Well, maybe in the China of 400 BCE rulers treated people like so many straw dogs, but here in the US . . .  Oh, wait. There was that government shutdown. There is that sequestration. There is that surveillance. Those drones. Oh, and then there’s work on Thanksgiving. And Black Friday. Rising poverty. Rising hunger. Straw dogs.

For Daoists, the answer is clear: the universe itself has no morality—it is neither good nor evil, and governments almost inevitably act in self-interest without regard to the greater good. It’s not what we learn in school, but evidence indicates another story.

I lost my childhood faith for the “big guy in the sky” when I began to suspect the moral calculus of the universe. When I began to suspect that “good” and “evil” are thoughts only in the human mind.

Does “god,” or does “god” not, decide who gets the cookies? And what is the basis for that judgement? Nation of birth? Social class? Skin tone? Religious affiliation?

Is it a moral act to thank such of deity for choosing me? Or my nation? My social class? My skin tone?

It’s not that I’m not thankful. But I’m not thankful to a deity that would put one child in Switzerland and another in Somalia. Such a deity does not deserve thanks, however mysterious “his” ways might be. And a deity that merely reflects the workings of the bellows of the universe? What’s the point?

Government? Yes, I grew up with those cardboard Pilgrims with their very white faces taped to the classroom windows. I understand what I was supposed to take away. Am I thankful to a government that protects the rapacious while ignoring the basic humanity of most of its citizens? Not so much.

Where might the thanks go? To luck? To fortune? To randomness? To that bellows that just keeps pumping?

Perhaps, finally, all we can do is watch and try as hard as we may to resist cynicism and complicity with the powers of what we human beings view as evil.

Here’s the advice to the Daoist:

Take care of what

is within yourself;

 

the outside will never

stop moving

and moving.

Thankfulness in the face of what we human beings call good and evil must serve as a reminder to think through who and what is dividing up the blessings. Yes, tornados and typhoons sweep away both the good and the bad. The universe treats us all like so many straw dogs. We find ourselves enmeshed in systems of oppression. Our choice is our work against those systems, and how we treat each other.