On May 23, Charletta and I will be leaving Chicago for a year’s sojourn in California. As I sit down to share this with you, I realize that most of my writing on this blog is opinion or analytical. And I usually only post photos on my blog for The Mennonite. It’s rare that I write about developments in my life. But this one is too big not to mention.

Some of you may remember my post, “In the garden after the rain in California,” from more than a year ago. That trip began a discernment process for Charletta and me on whether to move to live and work with Ched Myers and Elaine Enns. They live in Oak View, Calif., a small town on the edge of Los Padres National Forest and 70 miles west (and a bit north) of Los Angeles. To the right is the view of the mountains in the National Forest from their house.

During our year in California, I will continue in my work with Christian Peacemaker Teams (CPT), web design and photography. Charletta will work with Ched and Elaine as part of Bartimaeus Cooperative Ministries, part time in their office and part time as a counselor with the Peace and Justice Academy in Pasadena. The year will also be a space of discernment about what’s next for the two of us.

Photos from California

I’ve paired photos from last year’s trips with my thoughts about what I’m looking forward to in this new place.

Water, mountains and trees

Here Ched describes how water has carved smooth channels in the rock over millenia and how close these features have come to being destroyed.

One of the things I realized on last year’s trip was that Ched and Elaine are really serious about loving their watershed. I’ve written here before about the idea that, “You can’t save what you don’t love, and you can’t love what you don’t know.” But I have a long way to go in figuring out what it means to actually live this out. Ched and Elaine are further along that journey. We’re looking forward to learning from them.

They also took us to see two massive oak trees that have been there for hundreds of years. We shared a time of prayer and reflection with other visitors beneath the vast branches of this tree.

This is the view out Ched and Elaine’s window of snow capped mountains in the distance. Living near mountains like this will be a completely new experience for me. I grew up in the rolling hills of Lancaster County, Pa., and moved from there to the flat Midwest in Goshen, Ind., and then Chicago. London, England had a few hills, but no mountains. I’m looking forward to spending time with a different topography.

This image for me is about wide open spaces. Since I left Goshen in 2003, I’ve lived in cities of millions and millions of people. Living in a small town of 4,000 people will be a very different experience.

Hospitality

From the minute we walked in the door, Ched and Elaine welcomed us with avocado omelet, potatoes and fresh orange juice from their orange tree. Hospitality is a central part of their ministry and who they are. During the two weeks we were there, they hosted 14 different people (including us). We have warm memories of the role of hospitality from our time at the London Mennonite Centre and understand how it can foster cross-pollination between communities and movements. We hope to support them as this part of their work grows.

The Pacific

My trip in March was my first real interactions with the Pacific Ocean. I look forward to getting to know the people, animals, plants and fish of the world’s biggest ocean. I love exploration. That was always my favorite part of the adventure games I played as a kid. I remember how much fun it was in England to see the world from a new angle and bringing my camera with me.

I’m also looking forward to watching sunsets over the ocean. During my time in Chicago, I’ve only made it up early enough for sunrise a handful of times. Sunsets should be a little easier to fit in to my sleeping patterns.

New communities of Christians working for peace and justice

As part of my work with CPT, I’m looking forward to connecting with communities up and down the West coast, in a similar vein to the work I did with the Anabaptist Network in the UK. I know that there are Anabaptist communities and others committed to radical peacemaking and challenging the politics of empire. I look forward to learning from them and growing in my vocation.

Ched and Elaine host three Bartimaeus Institutes each year studying a variety of themes. Three days after we arrive, their week-long summer institute will focus on the theme “Rooting Faith: Theology and Practices of Bioregional Discipleship.” What a wonderful way to start out in a new place!

Finally, I look forward to meeting readers of this blog who live in the Southwest and on the West Coast. Please drop me an email up if you are in the Los Angeles area and would like to meet up or if you are in the Southwest or West Coast and would like to host me to talk about Christian Peacemaker Teams in your community. I can be reached at timn@cpt.org

The next year will bring with it a lot of new moments and discoveries. I look forward to sharing them with you here.

The last speaker to be announced was Paulette Moore, one of the leaders of Occupy Harrisonburg. Moore is a documentary film maker, a professor at EMU and one of the writers at the Occupy Harrisonburg blog. She’s been involved with the group since the beginning.

"We definitely started out with the use of the word [Occupy] as an appropriation and a creative theological reinterpretation," said Brian Gumm, one of the two organizers of the conference. "Before Paulette was on the schedule, we didn’t have explicit references to the movement itself. So by adding Paulette’s voice and the experience of the local movement here, we can make that connection explicity and have a more robust, multi-voiced conversation about Occupy."

Gumm described some of the ways in which he and co-organizer, Aaron Kauffman, played with appropriating and re-interpreting the word: "How do we Occupy the world faithfully as Christians?" and "There’s a way in which the Kingdom of God is increasingly Occupying us."

It’s clear that presenters will be working with the concept of Occupy in a variety of ways. Isaac S. Villegas is interested in the political and economic dimensions of the movement. "The Occupy movement has become viral, jumping from city to city, country to country. This conference in Harrisonburg shows how Occupy can’t be restricted to a place, a territory." said Villegas, who is pastor at Chapel Hill Mennonite Fellowship, "People on the streets have set in motion a movement that is now occupying our Christian discourse, occupying our minds, and hopefully shifting our attention to the injustice of economic systems that redistribute the wealth in our communities for the benefit of a few."

Villegas quotes from Augustine of Hippo, as quoted by 16th century Anabaptist: "A Christian is a distributor… not a lord; and by divine right all things should be in common."

"The Occupy movement is all about what counts as common, as belonging to the all of us, which resonates with some parts of our story as Anabaptists," said Villegas. Villegas teaches classes in prisons with Project TURN, a New Monasticism-related initiative.

The conference will also reflect on the distinctive Anabaptist responses to violence and empire.

"I’m looking forward to a sharing with other Christians with an Anabaptist imagination committed to a lived faith," said Janna Bowmans, PHD student at the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies. "In particular I’m interested in exploring how armed groups and the international community might be ‘converted’ by the outward shape of faith community witness in situations of armed conflict."

Bowman spent eight years working in Colombia with JUSTAPAZ, a ministry of the Mennonite Church of Colombia.

Nekeisha Alexis-Baker is is the co-founder of Jesus Radicals and is an anti-racist organizer within the Mennonite church. In a recent article on the site, Alexis-Baker wrote, "I believe in being discerning and critical, dissecting and challenging. I believe in holding our sacred cows, including all our movements, ideas, practices and even Web sites, up to a critical and illuminating light that pushes us and others to go deeper into the work of resisting interpersonal, social, ecological, economic, systemic and other evil."

Chris Haw is one of the founders of Camden House, one of the seminal communities of the New Monasticism movement (see this 2005 Christianity Today article for more) and co-author of Jesus for President

Gumm explaiend that they have structured the conference around emerging leaders in the Mennonite church and the broader Anabaptist movement. He described it as"a big tent Anabaptist conversation" include Haw, a Catholic who has been inspired by John Howard Yoder. The formal respondents to the plenary session are Mennonite elders and mentors. For the three keynotes the formal respondents are EMU professors: Peter Dula, chair of Bible and religion department; Mark Thiessen Nation, professor of theology at EMS; and Carl Stauffer, assistant professor at the Center for Justice and Peacebuilding at EMU. Two local pastors will form a listening committee for the conference and will reflect back a synthesis of what they heard in the final worship.

For those who can’t attend, Gumm said there would be blogs and possibly podcasts sharing content from the conference.

Occupy Movement’s American Spring

The weekend leading up to the first day of spring saw the beginning of the Occupy movement’s "American Spring." On March 17, the six month anniversary of the start of Occupy Wall Street, hundreds gathered in Zucotti park for a celebration in the afternoon and evening and then were met by an aggressive police response. Occupy activist Max Berger describes the scene for the Huffington Post. A video from the Associated Press is a brief window in the police attacks on protesters and their response:

I can’t help seeing a shift in tone in the woman yelling at the end of the video (while being held back by other protesters). She expresses an anger and frustration that has grown over the past six months as the Occupy movement has watched police move in with clubs and pepper spray time after time, in city after city.

I remember the friendliness towards police in Occupy Chicago in the first few weeks in October. They saw the police as part of the 99 percent. But the tune has gradually shifted as they’ve seen their friends and fellow activists abused by police. This weekend’s attacks by police in New York, St. Louis and Los Angeles will likely set the tone for a series of Occupy rallies over the coming weeks, including the Chicago Spring on April 7.

Found somewhere near Father Abrahams birthplace (unexploded), 2004. Photo by Dennis Maust

Tim: In the article in Studio Potter you talk about the period where you were building “protest-oriented pieces.” Can you say more about this?

Dennis: During the lead up to the latest Iraq war and during the early stages of the war, I was looking a lot at historic Iraqi pots and thinking about the tremendous loss of the antiquities when the U.S. troops first went in and didn’t protect the museums. So I was thinking about both the loss of antiquities and the human loss. And I was doing this series of pieces that were based loosely on historical Middle Easter forms and that particular piece seemed to be a bomb canister form, so I thought about where Abraham was born and the thought that something of this sort may have been found unexploded as a bomb canister. It’s about the loss and the danger and the cost of this war. I wanted to have people look at it as something that could have been found.

T: It’s interesting for me to think about that piece alongside the work that my Christian Peacemaker Team colleagues did in that same time period documenting these large piles of unexploded ordinance that were just abandoned and not really disposed of. I remember hearing about a show that you did where at the opening, you began breaking the pieces one by one.

D: The Father Abraham piece was actually in that show.

T: But it remained unexploded?

D: Yes (laughs). At that show, in March 2004, I talked about my Mennonite tradition and non-resistant pacifism and that I feel that its important that when you see something happen you don’t agree with that you don’t just sit back, but that you speak out. So I was talking about the need to speak out and make it known how you feel.

Rather than simply observe how people understood what I was saying, I wanted to illustrate with an action so I reached down behind the sculpture stand and pulled out garbage bag and covered my piece with it I then took my hammer and smashed it in front of everyone. I then said, “Was that okay?” It was my piece, it didn’t belong to anyone else. I didn’t get a whole lot of reaction. So I got another bag and I walked over to another room (the show was in two rooms in the Lancaster Museum of Art). So people followed me into the other room and I put the bag on another piece. I was getting ready to raise my hammer against the second piece when my pastor, Barry Kreider, intervened and stood in between me and the piece.

I didn’t know what to do, because I didn’t expect that. I expected someone to say something. But Barry just stood there. And there was no way I was going to reach around the piece and smash it.

I just hugged Barry and said “You really understood. You saved my piece.” I didn’t go farther and say, “You placed yourself in danger by putting yourself between the agressor” or anything like that. That would have made the message a little clearer to the audience. My plan was to break at least three until I saw whether I got a reaction until someone would say, “Don’t do this.” The third piece I was going to break was “House of Prayer” which was a mosque looking form. I think most people understood. I hope they did.

T : This moves into performance art in some ways.

D: Yes, it’s probably the only time I’ve tried something like that. I’ve thought numerous times before this of doing something physical at an opening that would give a little more drama to the event. I’ve thought that just having the work covered and unveiled one by one may be a way of focusing the opening audience’s attention to each piece at a time.

Dennis Maust working in his studio. Photo by Tim Nafziger.

D: Can you tell me more about the story behind the museum being concerned about you using a black garbage bag to cover the piece.

D: I talked to the musem director before hand and told her this is what I’m thinking of doing. And she said, I’m going to have to talk to the board about this. Because they had a performance piece a few years ago where something went wrong where a guy nearly accidentally hung himself. So they wanted to know everything ahead of time. So they were the ones who asked me to cover things with plastic and said I would use a clear garbage bag. They were concerned about the connection with Abu Graib.

T: And Why do you think they were so concerned about that connection?

D: I think they knew how conservative Lancaster is. I assumed they were more concerned with it being misunderstood and that using a normal garbage bag would have lent some unintended meaning to the thing. Maybe I was more timid than I should have been by just accepting that as their prerogative.

Second Wave Mennonite artist-hood

Tim: There’s Chaim Potek’s image of the artist always in tension with the religious community. And certainly there’s plenty of stories of Mennonite artists and writers struggling in the Mennonite church to be taken seriously or to have their work seen as valid. But when I hear you talking about your work, it sounds like you’ve largely felt comfortable with your identity as a Mennonite. Is that accurate?

D: While it took a while to think of myself as an artist, my home congregation, Park View Mennonite, Harrisonburg, Va., always gave me encouragement and seemed to validate most of what I did as an artist.

T: So in some ways you were a second generation artist, with the first generation doing the work of carving out space for it.

D: Yeah, my Dad, Earl Maust, was involved in issues of whether the piano or other instruments could be used in the music department at Eastern Mennonite Univeristy. The art department wasn’t developed until much later and I was one of the first art department majors. We really didn’t have issues like those from five or 10 years before.

Crazy Quilt and Patchwork

Three legged mugs by Dennis Maust

T: In your article, you use the image of patchwork and crazy quilt to describe your artistic vision. It strikes me that one of the artistic streams that has alwasy been accepted among Mennonites is quilting.

D: The piece I did that’s in the EMU campus center was certainly using the quilt as an acceptable art form and was a basis for that piece. It’s called Metamorphosis. But in the “Living the Patchwork” article, I’m really referring to the life I’ve lived here, which is a combination of various parts, not necessarily all related to my art. So yes, the quilt as an acceptable art form, was part of my understanding of something that was OK to do.

T: You also talk about this idea of different motifs from your travels and I got the sense of those coming together as a patchwork as well.

D: I do combine those in individual works. I use the motifs not in any kind of political commentary about the way they are put together, but I like that they are a part of my experiencec, varied though it may be. The fact that I’m putting motifs together from various parts of the world [see example in Untitled pot below] is simply an indication of the way our world is interconnected and because of contemporary communication our experience of multiple cultures is so much greater than it was.

Untitled Pot

T: It’s interesting that you define that you define that not as political commentery.

D: You’re saying its actually political commentary of another sort. Yeah, you’re probably right. But the way I use the various cultural motifs together is not intended to be a political statement. But maybe the fact that I do it that way is.

[We were joined by Rachel Hess, Dennis’s wife]

Rachel: So putting Africa with South America isn’t a political statement.

D: Yeah, so on that platter in there. It’s combining motifs from four corners of the world. Well, that could be a statement in itself. But its not a conscious statement in my mind. It’s not an overt thing. I haven’t named it in a way that would refer to it. I think it becomes political when I name it.

Rachel: I don’t think naming it is the only way it becomes political.

T: So the Father Abraham piece would be made very overtly political by its naming.

D: Yes, the name in that case confirmed the image I had.

T: I think this brings up some interesting questions about the act of creating art and both the unconscious and conscious acts of creating art. You talk about the importance of serendipity to you: enjoying the way an unexpected crack or break can enhance the art. How does your interaction with your audience impact your intentionality or consciousness about the layers of meaning? What’s it like when you have an audience who sees things that you didn’t intend?

D: It’s not very often that you find that out. I think at that opening where I did the dramatic action, I was concerned that my message might not be appreciated. The title of the Exhibit was “Messages” and I had some pieces that had Arabic calligraphy on them that were phrases from Hafiz’s poetry. He was from the Middle East and he wrote poetry that spoke to me. And so I had a friend write it out in Arabic script for me and I simply copied it unto the pieces. I wanted someone who read Arabic to understand some of my intent.

T: And so that would be another language that wouldn’t be for an English only speaker?

D: There were titles that alluded to the sentiment of the poetry. I think I had on the card a translation of the poetry. So for example, the piece “Friends Forever” and the line of poetry said in the womb we played footsy together. Before we were born we became friends. But it was to indicate how strong a tie we have regardless of circumstances.

If someone understands a work differently than I intended, I’m not worried about that. If they recieve something of meaning that relates to their understanding and their experience, I think that’s a good thing. I don’t feel like my work has ever been so misunderstood that its done some kind of harm.

T: You talked about in Tanzania being in the middle of a cultre that was post-colonial. Can you say more about what you observed and how that impacted your work?

D: It seemed a culture of mistrust existed, understandably, around foreign aid etc. Unfortunately that meant the organization we worked for rejected money and programs that would have allowed us to benefit more producer groups.

T: Can you say more about that work?

D: We were working with an organization call Amka (Swahili word for “wake up”) that was aiding small craft cooperatives and craft producing businesses.

T: So you would go around and talk with artisans and talk with them about how their work might be recived?

D: Yes, and how their work would be used and perceived.

T: So what’s next for you in the coming years?

D: I am hoping my work begins to merge my interest in pattern with more of my current Lancaster county visual vocabulary which includes my garden and the landscape of my life here as opposed to past life and travels to other parts of the world.

“Congregation”, 2012. Installation at Mennonite Church USA building in Elkhart. Photo by Dennis Maust

Bonus: My photos from last summer of Dennis’ firing his pots includes one of him working with a three legged mug and what appear to be parts of “Congregation” before firing.

Charletta and I decided to drive home to Iowa to be with her family that night. Not long after we arrived, Mick’s wife Julie died of her injuries. Charletta and her mother attended a tear-filled church service at Kalona Mennonite. Afterwards, we sat down to eat lunch with Gary and Sylvia. Afterwards we sat together in the living room for awhile. It wasn’t dramatic. It was just a space to be with one another. That evening, we drove back to Chicago.

This past Thursday, Feb. 9, I was sitting in my office at Christian Peacemaker Teams when my colleague walked up and told me that Claire Evans had passed away. Five weeks ago Claire was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. Two weeks ago those of us in the CPT Chicago office gathered around her bed to say good bye as she moved to Lansing, Mich., to be with her sister and enter Hospice care. Now she is gone.

Claire and I worked on the same floor of our office in CPT Chicago where she coordinated all our delegations. When I came in in the morning, I’d walk past her desk. Claire was a fellow reader. She and I would compare notes on novels we’d read and make recommendations to each other. She also carried with her many stories of CPT’s journey over the last 13 years. She was also part of a small community that deeply shaped my practices around undoing racism through our weekly office meetings over nearly three and a half years. She was never afraid to offer a thoughtful challenge or noticing.

After we heard the news, those of us in the Chicago office gathered together in the CPT training center with a candle and Claire’s photo. We sang and prayed together. Others cried, but I found myself unable to. Somehow, my body resists even when I know I badly need to. This was only the latest of many such moments in the past few weeks as we sat with Claire. My struggle to cry left knotted and uneasy.

That evening I left for the weekend to be with my brother. He didn’t know Claire, so our time together only briefly touched on her death. Nonetheless, we spent nearly all our time together over the three days: walking, talking, running, cooking, eating, taking photos, gaming and playing with the dog. He and his housemates were a presence for me in the way Charletta and I tried to be for her parents. Without knowing it, they walked with me through my disquiet. And the knot has begun to unravel.

So perhaps we can learn something from the ancient tradition of the wake, in which mourners sit with one another long into the night to eat cake and tell stories and play games. More important than cards or flowers or even words, the greatest gift we can offer one another is simply our presence.

These photos are all from my walk last night at sunset with Jonathan, David and Tilde (the dog).

As we think about what it means to be an ally and look at the continuing legacy of white supremacist Christianity, the Beattitudes in Matthew and Luke have a lot to offer us.

Too often, when we read differing version of Jesus’ words in different gospels, we try to ignore them. But I think these two passages speak deeply to beautiful, complimentary truths about the movement that Jesus invites us into.

In short, the beatitudes in Matthew focus on spiritual and emotional virtues: poor in spirit, mourning, meekness, thirsting for righteousness, mercy, pureness of heart, peacemaking and the being persecuted for righteousness.

As I grew up learning these, I thought of these as things I do on my own. It was up to me, as an individual, with God’s help to be merciful, pure in heart and meek. It might be hard, but it was fundamentally a personal struggle that God and I worked on.

It’s easy for us to look at the beatitudes and say, as the Bishop of London did, “This is just a spiritual thing. Jesus wasn’t concerned with people’s economic or political well being. All he cared about was their spiritual virtues.”

But let’s take a closer look at the Luke passage:

Looking at his disciples, he said:

“Blessed are you who are poor,

for yours is the kingdom of God.

21 Blessed are you who hunger now,

for you will be satisfied.

Blessed are you who weep now,

for you will laugh.

22 Blessed are you when people hate you,

when they exclude you and insult you

and reject your name as evil,

because of the Son of Man.

23 “Rejoice in that day and leap for joy, because great is your reward in heaven. For that is how their ancestors treated the prophets.

24 “But woe to you who are rich,

for you have already received your comfort.

25 Woe to you who are well fed now,

for you will go hungry.

Woe to you who laugh now,

for you will mourn and weep.

26 Woe to you when everyone speaks well of you,

for that is how their ancestors treated the false prophets.

In short, blessed are the poor, the hungry, the weeping, the hated. Woe to the rich, well fed, those who laugh and those of high status. With the possible exception of mourning and laughing, these are all the material conditions that the Bishop of London was so sure Christianity wasn’t concerned with.

Jesus was very consciously countering the message of shame that the poor, hungry, hated and excluded people experienced in his day. They weren’t that much different from who is shamed and who is honored today. In 2 Enoch, a Jewish book written around the time of Jesus, we get a pretty long list of who society honored:

2 Enoch 42:2

As one year is more honourable than another, so is one man more honourable than another, some for great possessions, some for wisdom of heart, some for particular intellect, some for cunning, one for silence of lip, another for cleanliness, one for strength, another for comeliness, one for youth, another for sharp wit, one for shape of body, another for sensibility, let it be heard everywhere, but there is none better than he who fears God, he shall be more glorious in time to come

It’s the rich, the smart, the strong, the attractive (that’s what comeliness means), the witty and those with nice “shape of body.” Sound familiar? These are still things that our society values.

These are the norms that Jesus is turning upside down. Because we’ve heard the beatitudes so often, they don’t have the surprise impact they did back then.

Jesus isn’t just making a one time declaration here. This isn’t a fix-it-and-forget-it moment. This is the beginning of the Sermon on the Mount, which is a foundational text of his ministry. In both the Matthew and the Luke texts, it’s specifically addressed to his disciples:

Matthew 5:1-2:

1 Now when Jesus saw the crowds, he went up on a mountainside and sat down. His disciples came to him, 2 and he began to teach them.

Luke 6:20:

20 Looking at his disciples, he said: “Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God.

This is what Jesus is inviting his disciples: the absurd, radical, crazy, foolish work of turning the world upside down. This is what he was talking about in the great commission when he said,

“Therefore go and make disciples of all nations,” (Matthew 28:19)

And he was clear what the consequences would be. That’s what he was talking about when he said, “Take up your cross.” James Cone points out that the cross then was like the lynching tree. As I pointed out last week, they had a shared goal of controlling the oppressed. So Jesus could just as well have said, “Take up your lynching tree” and follow me.

What does this really mean practically? I come back to to the term “Becoming an Ally” when thinking about practice. I believe that it’s one way we can join Jesus in turning things upside down. I’m just going to focus on one aspect of that:

Listening with Humility

I said that the Matthew and Luke beatitudes are complimentary and this is where that becomes really important. Just as a slave-holding Christianity focuses exclusively on a spiritualized Jesus, we can get too focused on the Luke version and ignore the beatitudes as recorded by Matthew. Let’s look at the first one in particular:

Blessed are the poor in spirit for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven

It’s about humility. About submitting ourselves to God and to each other. This is absolutely critical when trying to be an ally. If I decide I’m going to stand with the oppressed and turn the world upside down, I can get into a world of trouble if I’m not submitting myself to those oppressed people. If I don’t know how to listen with humility.

I’ll be really honest. I know this is important, because it’s something I’m bad at. I really want to be the white hero swooping in to save the day like in Dancing with Wolves and Avatar. I like to think I understand racism and I’ve sorted it all out.

I struggle to be honest with myself and other when I fall short, when I screw up, when I let my prejudice show. I don’t like feeling ashamed. I really don’t want to think about these things.

In his Ted Talk “How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Discussing Race” (embedded below) Jay Smooth, an anti-racist activist, puts it this way: “When you believe that you must be perfect in order to be good, it makes you averse to recognizing your own inevitable imperfections and that lets them stagnate and grow.”

Sounds complicated, right? Smooth calls racial issues “a dance partner that’s designed to trip us up.”

Smooth uses the metaphor of tonsils. Getting rid of your racial prejudice is not like having your tonsils taken out. Racial prejudice isn’t like that. If someone suggests that something you did or said was prejudiced or racist, you can’t say, “No, I had my prejudice removed back in 2005 when I did that one training.”

Jay Smooth suggests a different way to talk about racism. When someone comes up to us and says, “You have something stuck in your teeth,” we feel a moment of embarrassment and then we set about the unpleasant task of digging it out.

That’s how I need to work at responding, as a white person, when a person of color challenges me on my racism. A moment of shame and then move on to digging it out.

The goal in listening with humility is for talking about racial prejudice to be more like dental hygiene. We don’t say, “What do you mean, I have something stuck in my teeth? That can’t be! I’m a clean person.”

So “listening in humility” is like this: It means that when someone calls you on something they thought was prejudiced, don’t jump immediately to defensiveness. You almost certainly didn’t intend it, but 400 years of white supremacy don’t go away overnight. I as a white person am soaked and marinated in it.

This act, in and of itself, is a blessing. Being listened to and taken seriously is a way of honoring someone.

This is just one specific part of the concept of becoming an ally. But its something that everyone can do. And it chips away at the legacy of white supremacist Christianity that Dr. King spent his life fighting.

It may seem simple, but I think if we could talk about racism like we can talk about dental hygiene, we can bring together the wisdom of both Matthew’s and Luke’s beatitudes, and we can be stronger as the body of the Christ that God calls us to be.

Here’s the video of Jay Smooth. I highly recommend it:

P.S. If you’re within driving distance of Philadelphia and want to go deeper with these themes, I highly recommend the upcoming Damascus Road Anti-racism Analysis training in Philadelphia on February 24-26.

Here’s another video:

P.S. We didn’t actually getting around to the technical work of taking the site down. Sorry about that.

MLK day is day when we appropiately focus a lot on the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s Christianity and the prophetic witness of the movement he led against racism and white supremacy.

We sometimes forget that most of the white people who Dr. King challenged were Christians. I think it is as important for me as a white person to understand the faith of the segregationists as it is to understand Dr. King’s faith. This is one way I can do my work and understand whiteness in the work of anti-racism.

Let’s start by taking one step back and looking at slaveholder Christianity. Specifically, the faith of white Christians who owned African-American slaves here in the United States. I’ll be drawing heavily on the first chapter of The Black Christ by Kelly Brown Douglas. You can read the whole chapter here.

Christian slaveholders were known to be crueler to their slaves then non-Christians. In chapter 10 of Frederick Douglass’s autobiography, The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass he wrote:

Were I to be again reduced to the chains of slavery, next to that enslavement, I should regard being the slave of a religious master the greatest calamity that could befall me. For of all slaveholders with whom I have ever met, religious slaveholders are the worst. I have ever found them the meanest and basest, the most cruel and cowardly, of all others. It was my unhappy lot not only to belong to a religious slaveholder, but to live in a community of such religionists. Very near Mr. Freeland lived the Rev. Daniel Weeden, and in the same neighborhood lived the Rev. Rigby Hopkins. These were members and ministers in the Reformed Methodist Church.

What’s going on here? Why in the world are Christians worse slave holders than non-Christians? Now it may be tempting for us today to say, “Oh, they weren’t really Christians,” but I’m afraid that’s too easy an out. Their Christian tradition still shapes our tradition today.

African-American theologian Kelly Brown Douglas points out two characteristics of slave-holding Christianity:

First, after a person is converted to belief in Jesus as Christ, his or her salvation is automatic… this freed many slaveholders to do whatever they deemed necessary to keep their slaves under control.

…

Second, because Jesus ministry is ignored, his liberating actions do not become a standard for Christian actions… The Christian feels no obligation to treat others, especially the oppressed, the way Jesus treated them. Again, enslavers are free to be as cruel as they want towards a slave, while being assured salvation.
(Black Christ, p. 18-19)

In other words, in order to integrate their faith with their owning of slaves, slave owners spiritualized Jesus. White supremacist Christianity has nothing to do with your material conditions. Brown-Douglas quotes the Edmund Gibson, Bishop of London in the 18th century, laying it out very clearly:

The Freedom which Christianity gives, is a Freedom from the Bondage of Sin and Satan, and from the Dominion of Men’s Lust and Passions and inordinate Desires; but as to their outward Condition, whatever that was before, whether bond or free, their being baptized and becoming Christians, makes no matter of Change in it.

The Bishop was quoted in this Proslavery Petition, November 10, 1785 to the General Assembly of Virginia from the “Free Inhabitants of Halifax County.”

Unfortunately, these values didn’t go away at the end of the civil war. Between 1919 and 1939, according to Robert Moats Miller, white people in the United States “hung, shot, burned, gouged, flogged, drowned, impaled, dismembered, garroted, and blowtorched” to to death more than 500 black people in lynchings. (from the The Protestant Churches and Lynching, 1919-1939, The Journal of Negro History, pp. 118-131)

This lynching happened In Marion, Indiana in 1930, two hours from where I grew up in Goshen. 2,000 people participated in this lynching. The names of the black men in this photo are Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith. A third man, James Cameron escaped at the last minute and lived until 2006.

Because of how disturbing the images of Thomas and Abram are, we often miss the smiling faces of the white people in these images:

What is behind these smiles? A presentation by Dr. Joy DeGruy first drew my attention to these smiling faces and during a presentation she did at the annual White Privilege Conference in 2010. She pointed out the deep sickness of white supremacy and it’s symptom of dehumanization of black and white people that made these smiles possible.

It might be easy for us to say, “Oh, those people weren’t Christians.” But that’s too easy. Yes, these are sinners, but so are we. Walter White was an anti-lynching activist and president of the NAACP during this period. He said: “It is exceedingly doubtful that lynching could possibly exist under any religion than Christianity” - (quoted in Amy Louise Wood, “Lynching and Spectacle” , p. 50)

This lynching happened In Omaha, Nebraska in 1919. And 4,000 people participated in the riot aimed at lynching this man, Will Brown. The riot is chronicled in harrowing hour by hour detail on Wikipedia.

Again we have the smiling faces.

Dr. James Cone in his presentation, “Strange Fruit: The Cross and the Lynching Tree” (video here) points out that these weren’t just random acts of violence. Rather, they worked like Crucifixions. Crucifixions were set up to keep Roman slaves and poor people from political revolt. In the same way, lynchings were meant to keep black people in their place: that is subject to white control and oppression.

30 years later this same bigotry was on display in reaction to the lunch counter sit ins. This photos is from the a 1963 sit in at a Woolworth lunch counter in Jackson, Mississippi.

While overt bigotry like this is not acceptable today in the way it was then, but that sickness behind those white smiles at the lynching do not go away so easily. They haven’t disappeared as cleanly as we would like to believe.

For example, In the 5 years I’ve lived here near the corner of Pratt and Ashland, it’s become really clear how disrespected the black and Latino kids who hang out on this corner are. I’ve seen police officers call them animals. When I suggested to the officer that this wasn’t appropriate, he told me I didn’t really know them. While this officer happened to be more honest than most, it becomes pretty clear that this is the view held by most officers.

Four years ago, I wrote here about watching an officer sit in hiscar and watch as two black kids fought each other. When I asked him why, he said he was worried they’d grab his gun. Would he have acted the same way if I as a white person were being attacked? This officer was smart enough not to wear his racism on his leave, but the results are the same.

It would be easy for me to see this problem as one limited to jaded police officers who have been soaked in the racist atmosphere of the Chicago Police department. But unfortunately, the problem goes deeper than that. Indeed it such a critical issue, that Mennonite Church USA had anti-racism as one of its four vision and goals from 2000-2010.

We in the US Church today, need to consider slaveholder and segregationist Christianity as we read the bible. Next week I’ll share about how this lens affects how I read the Beatitudes and some practical things ways it helps me to think about how I can be an ally to oppressed people.

The movie is a slice of day-to-day life for Ceasefire staff, known as Violence Interrupters. From the summer of 2009 through the spring of 2010, we watch Ameena Matthews, Cobe Williams and Eddie Bocanegra as they seek to personally engage with victims and perpetrators and, perhaps most importantly, victims and their friends on the edge of becoming perpetrators.

All three of the interrupters have a personal history of involvement with gangs and violence themselves. They understand what’s going on for the kids and young adults (age 14-25), but they also have credibility. Ameena is the daugher of Jeff Fort, a high profile gang leader, and she made her own name for herself. Cobe and Eddie both served prison time. At one point at a staff meeting, a Ceasefire leaders says there is "500 years of jail represented here, that’s a lot of wisdom."

As someone who has spent my whole life in the Mennonite Church and many years with Christian Peacemaker Teams, The Interrupters is an introduction to peacemaking done in a very different way.

This movie does not explicitly talk much about systemic issues like racism or economic injustice, but all but one of the Ceasefire leaders featured are men and women of color confronting violence in a language and style that is their own, not imposed or borrowed. This is not mediation done Sunday school style. My wife Charletta describes it this way:

"By matching the intensity of words and anger, they validate the experience of pain and trauma, yet urge youth not to respond with violence. In the heat of the moment, they plead with victims not to retaliate or they will end up in jail, maybe dead. Let it rest, walk away, what’s done is done, where does violence get you?"

The principles of restorative justice are on display. There’s a scene where a 17-year -old boy who has spent two years in jail goes back to apologize to the people in the barber shop he robbed. One of the women who was there when he robbed them tells the ex-robber exactly how painful and traumatic that moment was for her and her family over the last three years. The pain and anger are not glossed over. In fact they add credibility to the redemptive moment.

The theory behind Ceasefire is that violence spreads like an epidemic. Just like society used to see tuberculosis or plague victims themselves as the problem, today we usually individualize violence. Instead, Ceasefire treats violence as we would an epidemic: by stopping the spread. They identify the spread of violence as a two step process:

1. The grievance. It might be that someone disrespected you, or looked at your girlfriend. Or maybe they called the cops on you. Or maybe they killed your friend.
2. Violent retaliation. This is addressing the grievance by fighting the person or pulling a gun and shooting. "If you don’t retaliate, people will just walk all over you," one girl in the film says. Violence is defense of your honor.

This means that a lot of the work of Violence Interrupters is relationship building with those most at risk, those who have been most exposed to violence and are on the edge of retaliation. But in some cases, there isn’t time for that. The camera is present for a number of bloodied heads and one attempted stabbing in which Ameena intervenes. We also follow Tio Hardiman, director for Ceasefire in Illinois, as he visits an Interrupter shot when he approached two men fighting.

The Interrupters is an important reminder for Mennonites that we don’t have the corner on peacemaking. We have a lot to learn from Ameena, Cobe, Eddie and all the other Violence Interrupters out there. See when the movie coming to your city or arrange your own screening.

Photo Caption: Violence interrupter Cobe Williams and Lil’ Mikey, Photo by Aaron Wickenden/Courtesy of Kartemquin Films

This month Malcom Gladwell had an article in the New Yorker looking at the legacy of Steve Jobs. His central thesis is that Jobs’ gift was not originality, but rather tweaking: the ability to take the inventions of others and refine and improve them dramatically. Gladwell points out that the iPod came out 5 years after the first digital music players and the iPhone more than a decade after the first smart phones hit the market.

Gladwell is building on the work of economists Ralf Meisenzahl and Joel Mokyr who used this lens to look at the industrial revolution in Britain. For example, they point out the importance of the many engineers who improved on Samuel Crompton’s original invention of the spinning mule. These “tweakers” dramatically improving its productivity through minor changes.

Likewise, Gladwell says, “Jobs’ sensibility was editorial, not inventive. His gift lay in taking what was in front of him—the tablet with stylus—and ruthlessly refining it.” Gladwell makes his point with many episodes from Walter Isaacson’s biography of Jobs. Job’s particular way of tweaking made him very difficult to get along with, even as he was dying of cancer:

At one point, the pulmonologist tried to put a mask over his face when he was deeply sedated… Jobs ripped it off and mumbled that he hated the design and refused to wear it. Though barely able to speak, he ordered them to bring five different options for the mask and he would pick a design he liked. . . . He also hated the oxygen monitor they put on his finger. He told them it was ugly and too complex.

Many of the other stories in the article highlight this prideful and brittle tendencies that seem inseparable from Jobs’ gift for tweaking and editing.

Getting to the Point

So now you may be wondering: what’s happened to Tim? What in the world can Mennonites learn from this ultra-wealthy baron of consumer electronics? This man whose sweatshops in China drove eighteen workers to suicide in 14 days. Whose embrace of planned obsolescence has clogged our landfills with billions of gadgets and toxic batteries. Whose walled garden threatens the commons of the internet? Not to mention the hubristic embrace of technological progress that undergirds this all.

In short, I think there are two lessons to learn, one positive and one negative:

1. We can learn from Jobs the value of tweaks and innovations of the original Anabaptist innovations.
2. We can learn from Jobs how not to force others into our box the way Apple has.

Mennonites are proud of being the first ones on the block (at least in Europe) to pull off adult baptism, pacifism and the other Anabaptist distinctives, sometimes too proud. This summer I co-led a seminar with Mark Van Steenwyk at the Mennonite convention in Pittsburgh. He shared the experience of his community in joining Mennonite Chruch USA. While recognizing the richness of the Mennonite tradition, he was frustrated by the pressure he felt to assimilate into “Mennonite-dom”. He challenged Mennonites to “hold our Anabaptist story with open hands as we network, work with, and learn from others who have their own Anabaptist stories.”

Unfortunately, when Mennonites see innovators outside our community we often label them “Anabaptist camp followers” and judge them by their ability to assimilate into our institutions and Mennonite sub-culture, what we’ll call Mennonitedom. Like Jobs we offer them our way or the highway.

Vincent Harding

The best way to understand this pattern is to look at one example in more depth. Vincent Harding is an innovator who took Anabaptist principles in new directions that Mennonites were not prepared for. In From Fort Peachtree to Atlanta: The Mennonite Story Sarah Kehrberg describes how Harding, already a Mennonite pastor, and his wife Rosemary were invited by Mennonite Central Committee to move to Atlanta, George in October 1961 to organize “Mennonite House” an experiment in integration and reconciliation. Mennonite voluntary service director Edgar Stoesz compared the civil rights struggle to World War II, in which Mennonites didn’t participate, but showed up afterwards to clean up. Mennonites “decline to participate in the interracial conflict but seek rather to bring reconciliation and goodwill.”

Kehrberg quotes Harding’s significant tweak to this tradition:

Early on he wrote,”We need somehow to move away from the passivity suggested by our dependence on the phrase ‘nonresistance,’ to a new sense of involvement and participation implied in the term ‘peacemakers.’” He recognized that this meant risk and the danger of “finding ourselves with strange bedfellows (perhaps on a prison floor), or of making common cause with those whose ultimate convictions are not exactly the same as our own.”

In his article, Moving Beyond Charisma in Civil Rights Scholarship:Vincent Harding’s Sojourn with the Mennonites, 1958-1966, Tobin Miller Shearer poignantly describes the Harding’s struggle to be heard through the veil of Mennonite passive-aggressiveness in a meeting with the General Conference Board of Christian Service in December 4, 1963:

Harding pled with his fellow Mennonites to speak to him directly, to even get “angry as hell” with him. He admitted to being angry that Mennonites played “games with this issue so often.” That anger then turned into biting critique as he lamented that God had to bring about change through the Supreme Court, the Communist Manifesto and the NAACP rather than the church. In the depth of his lament, he asked his cobelievers to become the “front light” to the world rather than the “rear light.”

By 1966, Harding had given up on Mennonites, but fortunately his vision of active, prophetic Christian challenge to racism was welcome elsewhere. In 1967, Martin Luther King turned to Harding to write the draft of his pivotal sermon to Riverside church in which he took a strong public stand against the Vietname war. 44 years later, the words of the speech are still a lodestone for the movement for peace and justice in the US:

When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.

Today, Harding continues to challenge Christians around the world to become involved in the struggle for nonviolent social change to build the beloved community. Last summer I saw him speak at the Wild Goose Festival in North Carolina. His authority, wisdom and warmth are remarkable.

Widening the Circle: Experiments in Christian Discipleship* tells the story of Harding and Van Steenwyk and many other tweakers who have interacted with Mennonites and the Anabaptist tradition over the last five decades. I hope that we can humbly listen to and learn from these voices over the next half century.

*Full Disclosure: I have a chapter about Christian Peacemaker Teams in the book.

Photo by Tim Nafziger

Crossposted from As of Yet Untitled

It’s been a month since I wrote a piece on Young Anabaptist Radicals about my experience of visiting Occupy Chicago. It was three days after they had started camping in front of the Federal Reserve of Chicago and 10 days after Occupy Wall Street (OWS) kicked off in New York. At the time, I wrote with a mix of enthusiasm and skepticism. The visit gave me a glimpse into the sense of possibility that I remember from watching the Seattle protests but also a dose of skepticism bordering on cynicism. What could such a small group of people really do?

A month later, the answer seems clear: plenty. It still seems miraculous in many ways. While announcing the death of apathy and despair in the United States (as Michael Moore did at Occupy Oakland on Friday) is probably premature, the OWS movement has gone a long way towards tearing down the barriers that prevent so many of us from working together for change.

I’d like to share a few observations building on the framework that Steve Kryss developed in his article for the Mennonite Weekly Review. He named these parallels between the OWS movement and the Anabaptist movement that sprung up across cities in Europe nearly 500 years ago:

The Anabaptist movement emerged largely among the young. It moved through the urban contexts of educated Europeans without clarity but with a clear bent toward justice for the poor.

It emerged in and around the Peasant Revolts, which threatened established governments and religious perspectives. The radical Anabaptists were sympathetic to those whose lives were controlled by overlords.

Early Anabaptism was a movement of conversing, addressing powers and protesting. It was met with ridicule and with sympathy. There were dialogues and diatribes.

I notice three other parallels with early Anabaptism that inspire me:

Everyone is a leader/no leaders

The focus of the Occupy movement is on everyone as leaders. It doesn’t sound too far from the emphasis that the Anabaptists places on everyone reading scripture for themselves. We look back on Anabaptists and pick out leaders like Menno Simons, but it’s easy to forget that he wasn’t on the scene at all until 1535, more than 10 years into the movement. It was hardly a leaderless movement, but compared to the contemporary hierarchies of princes and bishops, it was radically egalitarian and grass-roots.

I can’t help but contrast the OWS movement to the Obama campaign which rode the hope and change into the ground as a branding and marketing slogan. As one stood blissfully in Grant Park on the night of the election, I woke up the next morning to find that we’d swapped one president for another while the empire remained. For Obama, the “audacity of hope” meant one leader and 13 million people on an email list. For OWS, there’s an opportunity to be more than a follower. More on this in the section on process below

Persistence and growth in the face of persecution

In the last week, there’s been a series of police crackdowns across the country on Occupy camps, the most visible of which has been the attack on Occupy Oakland by police with tear gas, flash bang grenades and rubber bullets. Scott Olsen was badly hurt. But police harassment began more than a month ago with Anthony Bologna’s mace attacks on protesters. The following weekend, on Oct. 1, more than 700 Occupy Wall Street protesters were arrested on the Brooklyn Bridge.

Like many nonviolent movements, these incidences have mostly served to bolster and grow the movement. But this growth is not without the blood, sweat and tears of those who have spent weeks sleeping in tents or less. On Saturday evening I saw Joe, one of the young men that I photographed on my first visit to Occupy Chicago. He told me a little about what it was like to have been there for 30 days and to deal with all the ins and outs. It’s not easy.

On Saturday evening, I walked and talked with Barb, a 60 year old woman who had fallen behind the rest of the marchers through downtown. She told me that she’s been waiting for decades for people to stand up against corporate greed. She talked about watching the news when she was in seventh grade and hearing that president Kennedy was assassinated. And then Martin Luther King. And then Bobby Kennedy. For her, the message was clear:If you stand up for what is right, you’ll get killed. But the courage of Joe and the Occupy Chicago movement to stand up for justice had brought her downtown on a cold October evening to march through the loop with her sign.

Focus on Process

In our interview last week, one of the lines that struck me most was from Robert Smith, a young man who had just been at Occupy Wall Street over a weekend. He said, "It’s clear that it’s more important to have everyone’s voice and everyone involved than to move forward." This was a line that he could have said cynically, but he delivered it with a real sense of wonder and joy.

Two days after talking with Robert, I went down to Occupy Chicago and sat in on my first General Assembly (GA), the daily decision-making body for the movement. This is the space where proposals are made, discussed and voted on (they need a nine-tenth majority to pass). Working committees also report back from their work and share announcements on upcoming events. For me, these meetings are the never center of the body of Occupy Chicago. It’s here where everyone can (and does) have a voice, but also where a remarkable culture around the rules of good process (stay on topic, keep it short) has developed. It’s a hard thing to describe in words. If you have the chance, I highly recommend a visit for yourself.

Along with its surface-level decision-making function, the GA also plays an important role in building ownership of decisions (and the OWS movement as a whole). When people are part of making a decision, it has much more meaning to them. It’s the means justifying the ends more than the other way around.

It is this commitment to process that takes the idea of everyone as leaders and finds a way to put it into practice. I believe it is also what created a sense of unity and cohesion through arrests and persecution. Like Anabaptists who met in caves, each Occupy city movement is developing a stronger self-identity each hour they spend deliberating on how to maintain their nonviolent discipline in the face of police brutality.

There’s still a part of me, as there was a month ago, that wonders if this movement will flame out and die. But little by little, the persistence and the process focus of this movement is drawing me in. And as I invest myself more and more in Occupy Chicago, I find the flame of real, authentic hope growing.

On a rainy Monday morning I found them still enthusiastically yelling slogans up through the vast canyon walls shaped on one side by the Chicago Board of Trade building and the Reserve bank on the other. Here’s a slideshow of the photos I took:

Click the full screen button in the lower right hand corner for best viewing.

I’m still pondering this Occupy Together movement. It’s easy for me to get excited about people standing up to corporations, but I also am conscious of the dynamic that Jonathan Matthew Smucker highlights in this thoughtful article. In short, questions the tactic of Occupy Wall Street and points out its lack of focus on context, organizing and leadership. His description of the movement that came out of the Seattle protests in 1999 ring true to my experience:

If your big introduction to collective action is a moment like November 30 in Seattle, it’s quite understandable, however mistaken, to try exclusively to replicate such magic. It’s like arriving at a farm during the harvest. Wow, all this delicious food is everywhere, and all you have to do is pluck it from the vine! You just want to keep harvesting and harvesting — why would anyone try anything else?! That the harvest was only possible through planting, watering, and diligent tending (including weeding!) escapes your notice. And this isn’t entirely your fault; if the farm had more resources, your elders would be taking the time to give you a better orientation.

On the other hand, I know how powerful apathy is. If the Occupy Together movement can crack that shell wide open, who knows what is possible?

And then of course there is the wild card of Anonymous who claims to have identified the police offer responsible for macing the women in this video:

It seems to me that Anonymous throws a significant unknown disruptive factor into the mix that Smucker may not have accounted for since there isn’t a clear historical precedent. In the protests after Seattle, police officers operated with impunity. That impunity may be crumbling.

“Revolution is fun, wage slavery is boring.” the young man at the Reserve bank yesterday yelled. I found myself feeling the generation gap as I pondered this slogan, but I admit there’s also part of me that hopes they will yell loud enough to wake us all up.

This weekend has seen the death of 10 people in two different crashes at air shows. My own experience at the Chicago Air and Water show this summer has had me reflecting on this cultural phenomenon and its importance to U.S. patriots. If you want to skip the philosophical background, you can jump to the Thunderbirds as Evangelists section below.

This summer I read the Happiness Hypothesis by Jonathan Haidt. I’ve found his lens of the five moral foundation theory to be a quite useful framework over the last few years for understanding liberal and conservative morality. In this book he looks at the things that make for happiness, drawing on ancient religious texts as well as the philosophical traditions juxtaposed with modern science and changing views of human psychology.

Haidt, a Jewish atheist, also looks at the emotions and sense experienced in conjunction with our sense of the divine, a sentiment closely linked with that of purity. Divinity and purity are contrasted with those things that are disgusting and unclean. This is a vocabulary that is familiar to Christians from the Levitical purity codes all the way through Revelation.

Haidt also relates this moral spectrum to a specific human emotion: that of transcendent awe, which Haidth describes thusly:

Awe: "A person percieves something vast (usually physically vast, but sometimes conceptually vast, such as a grand theory; or socially vast, such as great fame or power); and the vast thing cannot be accommodated by the person’s existing mental structures… By stopping people and making them receptive, awe created an opening for change, and this is why awe plays a role in most stories of religious conversion. (p. 203)

Haidt points out that this sense of awe is often connected with our religious belief. It got me thinking about the way this works in the United States with patriotism and our adoration of the flag and other symbols of the United States.

Thunderbirds as Evangelists

Last month I walked my bike through the Chicago Air and Water show on my way home along the shore of Lake Michigan. I’ve heard about these gatherings all of my life, but I’d never experienced one. I knew that these shows were popular places for showing off the military’s coolest toys and recruiting new soldiers and that there were lots of cool tricks with planes.

As I walked, I watched the impressive rolls and twists of the stunt pilots flying over-head. However the moment that seared itself into my imagination came after I had stopped looking at the sky and was walking out of the main area of the show. Suddenly, I heard a massively load roar nd glanced up to see four F-16 fighter jets in tight formation flying by at hundreds of miles an hour. It felt like there were just a hundred yards or so away out over Lake Michigan.

In that moment, I gained a new insight into the role that these shows play in the civil religion of the United States. I felt that sense of awe that Haidt describes as I experienced something outside my existing mental structure. While I theoretically understood what I was witnessing, it was quite another thing to hear, see and feel that raw power and speed so close.

These four F-16 fighter jets are appropriately called the Thunderbirds and they tour the world together performing at air shows. As I pondered what I had seen, I came to think of them as evangelists for the religion of U.S. empire–astounding and invoking worshipful fear in those who see them in Turkey, Romania, Finland and Bulgario. If I, having grown up in the United States, find myself in awe of these planes, how much more so those from other countries? But evangelism is not just important outside the United States. The planes also tour all the U.S. states and Puerto Rico.

Of course military displays are not unique to the United States. I imagine stadium performances in North Korea, in which huge masses of people move in unison and create massive tableaus, play a similar role of instilling religious awe in their audience.

This is where faith comes in for me. I believe that in the Bible and in the dissenting Christian tradition we find the seed that subverts the imperial faith based on displays of awesome power. For me, Anabaptism is about exploring Jesus’ subversive challenge to the evangelism of Thunderbirds.

Yesterday was 5 years to the day since my first post here on YAR, a week after Eric opened things up.

I was writing a little over a month after I returned to the United States from two and a half years in the United Kingdom, where Anabaptism was a set of values and relationships rather than a bunch of denominations. I longed for something similar in the US. I first started sending emails out to people about the idea of starting a blog in October 2005, when I was still in England. As I said in my first post:

The people I talked with shared an interest in a space where they could explore Anabaptist values and how they apply to broad areas like economics, war and society and more specific issues like abortion, homosexuality and the “war on terror.” They wanted a space to disagree or agree openly with the church,with society and with each other.

This is attempt to build that space.

I followed those conversation up with this email to the Menno Progressives email list, a sort of precursor to YAR started in 2004 by Michael J. Sharp (and Andy Gingerich I believe) :

What: Young Anabaptist Progressives blog (I’m open to better name suggestions) where anyone who identifies with that label would be welcome to post their thoughts about current events, faith, the church, politics or whatever they think would be interesting.

Why: We’ve discussed on this list the need for a more visible forum for young Mennonites and this blog could be a clear space to do that. This would be an opportunity for us to publish material that will be available to a wider audience.

When I got back to the US, five of us sat down together at the Electric Brew in Goshen, Indiana to talk. Some of the group were freshly back from BikeMovement 2006, a trip across the US that visited Mennonite churches along the way. We were fired up. As I reported 5 years ago:

We talked about three broad questions to explore:
1) What does Anabaptism mean?
2) What are the political implications?
3) What does that mean for how we live?

We also shared a common goal of disagreeing with each other. And laughing together.

Five years less young than I was then, I am still am attracted to the vision we talked about at the Electric Brew, but everyone else from that group moved on from YAR. As have most others who joined in those heady first 3 months after we kicked off. Some have said why here on YAR, some have not. Over time the group of active YAR authors has become more male and more white, although we’ve added at least one regular contributor from outside the US.

Instead of a group to consult with on admin decisions, it’s fallen to me. Sometimes I’ve wondered if it’s worth continuing the blog. But I’m always reminded of a comment by jdaniel a few years back when he said that YAR would still be a good place even if no one posted for months. So I’ve stumbled along, aided hugely by free server space and sysadmin help from my cousin David. I’ve learned to find the balance in moderation between lively debate and trolling. And coming to turns with the fact that one of the the most persistent community member reveled in dancing around that line.

While my vision was always a site that would attract those outside of the Mennonite community, the longest discussions on this site have usually been on posts discussing of internal Mennonite Church USA politics. Our sister sites Jesus Manifesto and Jesus Radicals (now merged) have more effectively attracted Christian radicals outside the Mennonite Church.

Grieving the loss of women’s voices

As Amy pointed out yesterday one clear theme over the last 5 years on YAR is the steady loss of women’s voices on this blog. I’ve noticed this over the last week as I’ve read over past YAR posts.

I’ve stopped asking women why fewer women are active on YAR, because my question has been answered pretty clearly and repeatedly. Katie stated it most strongly three and a half years ago in her post Tired:

But I got tired. I got tired of the same stupid discussions over and over with basically the same person (actually different people, but it started to feel so familiar). I got tired of watching my friends and allies get tired and burned out (sometimes they just got quieter, sometimes they gave up and walked away in frustration), I got tired of having to defend my own existence and belief to straight white men who, as a friend of mine so aptly described it, “come on the blog for a while and do the virtual equivalent of beating their chests and yelling.”*

I’d like to share some quotes from YAR posts by women who have been regular contributors here on over the years. Click on names for a list of their posts on YAR:

Angie Lederach:

Prayer is peacework, yes—but it should also call us into uncomfortable places, committed action—as Emmanuel went on to say: “Faith that is not translated on the ground for social change as we see in the social teaching of the church, has no meaning.” In the context of Northern Ghana, Togo, Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Cote D’Ivoire (all places Emmanuel works), this is a powerful statement. Perhaps it is even a statement of dissent—dissent from a church that refuses to act—whose fear refuses to allow conformity to Christ translate into nonconformity to the world. This is, for me, the challenge in America, where apathy runs high, where the fear of the loss of comfort drowns out the true call of prayer, the true call of Christ. Here, dissent is necessary. (from a comment on Dissent)

Skylark:

I’m torn between the capitalist/elitist and the humanitarian in me. I hear my parents and grandparents in one ear saying they have the right to keep the land they bought and prosper if able. I hear people like YARs in the other ear talking about systems of oppression that keep people down and with little chance to improve their situations. I like the image of the downtrodden trumping over The Man, but I hate it when that image is painted in blood. - (from So about this rich guy I know)

ST:

I am reminded on the necessity to invite anyone and everyone with whatever ethnicity or background (age, sexuality, religion, political persuasion) to participate in the work of healing (and radical positive social change and happiness creation) in our society. There is enough pain to go around. Everyone can have a hand in creating peace.

…

How can we create a new type of culture which benefits all and has the flexible institutions necessary to recognize diverse historic backgrounds, and has sets of values that explain and facilitate that peace and justice we so desire? This is why I’m a transnational radical black feminist and it’s also why I’m a spiritual person. The creation of any society (or even a small community of this sort) will need to embody feminist and spiritual values of safety, ethics, conflict resolution, play, education, politics, and cycle of life understandings.(from Inspirational Lunch

BeccaJayne:

Diesel trucks and busloads in front of us mimic
slowly rolling waves (children have been lost
in the mahogany puddles of rainy season potholes.)
Roads pulse with people, dogs with teats dragging, lines
of goats. We crawl past a slaughterhouse, a Coca Cola factory,
a trailer packed with workers singing
of the Promised Land.

We are some sort of horrible royalty.

After all, we are from America,
that real Promised Land that sent freed slaves here
to start Liberia, also the home of “freedom.” We are tied
to these people outside our car windows
by blood and sweat and quiet
greed. (from Breaking my writer’s block!

Joanna:

In order to bring about this unity based on reconciliation, power imbalances in the church must be named. In Mennonite Church USA we recognize that this means questioning our institutional structures and the ways in which they favor white, Euro-centric styles of leadership over the leadership styles of other groups of people.(a href=”http://young.anabaptistradicals.org/2009/10/10/justice-unity-reflections-on-mennonite-world-conference/”>Justice & Unity: Reflections on Mennonite World Conference

Even as I spent the afternoon pulling together these fragments, I found myself touching the grief I feel in knowing that none of these women write here on YAR anymore. In the last six months, there have only been two posts by women on YAR (Confessions of a white anti-racist and I have Power)

I’ll close some words from a woman who has never written on Young Anabaptist Radicals, though she has been an inspiration to me and many others who grew up in the Mennonite church with questions:

[Paulo] Freire insists that Dialogue is impossible without humility. That is a word that I find both familiar and difficult to use, since traditional injunctions to be humble have at times served to silence the voices of some while protecting the authority of others in the Mennonite community. Nevertheless, I claim the best kind of humility our tradition can teach–the kind symbolized by the physical practice of footwashing, which points as much to the Last Supper as to Mary Magdalene’s daring demonstration of love. (Is it any wonder that she was the first to see Jesus embodied after his death?) This kind of humility is characterized by a commitment to listening to the other and to serving the other. This humility is St. Francis kissing the leper and his plan to speak with the infidel, to perhaps even convert rather than slay him. It is the loving conversation that adds meaning to another’s life and reconciles a fallen individual to the community and to God rather than angering and alienating him. It is antithetical to pride, which ultimately is the belief that individual or communities do not need to consider the perspectives of others in order to understand and define themselves.

What does it look like for the men who are active on this blog to commit to listening to and serving in a way that opens this space for women again?

Photo is “Grasshopper watching Sunrise from Clover with Dew” by Tim Nafziger

I re-imagined the scene as a four player game played against 31 sophisticated AI sprites with a carefully calibrated mix of herd behavior, desire for fresh grass and fear of herders. Throw in lots of movable fences and a mysterious stampede threshold and you’ve got hours of entertainment.

The video is from yesterday. This morning I was too busy chasing sheep to film it.

Cross-posted from As of Yet Untitled

Earlier this month I was talking with my friend Chris about a talk he heard last weekend by Ched Myers on bio-regionalism. One of the key concepts from the presentation was: “You can’t save what you don’t love and you can’t love what you don’t know.” In other words, instead of thinking of abstract ideas like “environmentalism” we need to get to know our own place or “bio-region”.

Ched touches on similar themes in his recent blog post titled with a similar quote: “We Won’t Save Places We Don’t Love…”. He compares the way suburbanites relate to their place to the way farmers and indigenous communities relate to the land they live and work on.

Chris has been working with Christian Peacemaker Team’s local partners in Colombia since August 2008 when he graduated from the first training that I helped with after joining CPT. He pointed out that our local partners are not struggling for abstract concepts like justice or environmentalism. They are fighting for places that they know intimately.

Chris says:

For example, CPT Colombia is accompanying The Southern Bolivar Agricultural-Mining Federation (AGROMISBOL), which is a network of primarily subsistence small-scale miners a throughout the entire Sierra de San Lucas mountain range. A mountain range rich in natural resources such as gold and water. The livelihoods and life-styles of these miners and farmers is in jeopardy because of military and paramilitary efforts to clear the land in order to provide international corporate mining unfettered access to resources.

Of course these communities are concerned about issue based politics such as environmentalism, classism, and the right to an education. But the fundamental core to their resistance is about remaining on the land they know and love. Recently, one member of these communities, spoke to exactly this by telling me, “Look at this paradise that has been given to us. We won’t give up easily and leave this land. Look at the resistance here – they threaten us, cut us, assassinate us but we continue to stay because the riches of this country are for the Colombian people. God has given us this.”

This holds true beyond the Colombia team. In Iraq, much of the teams work has been with families displaced from their homes in the mountainous border region between Iraq and Turkey and Iraq and Iran. The impact of the bombings is tied directly to its impact on their land. One recent release from the team begins with this quote from a village leader: “The tomatoes will be ready in a few days, Yesterday there was bombing on this mountain.”

I’ve already written on this blog about the First Nations community in Ontario that stood up to logging companies who tried to strip their land bare. In Palestine, the community of At-Tuwani has for years nonviolently resisted violent attempts by Israeli settlers to displace them.

Often I find that when I write or talk about peace and justice work, people begin to throw around terms like “leftist ideology”. My conversation with Chris helped me realize that the central desire for CPT partners flows not out of these abstractions but out of a knowledge of and love for a place. It’s also the reason for the endurance and strength of these communities in the face of such immense odds.

We can see the images of bio-regionalism running through the bible, especially in prophetic visions of peace and justice such as Micah 4:3-4:

3 God will judge between many peoples

and will settle disputes for strong nations far and wide.

They will beat their swords into plowshares

and their spears into pruning hooks.

Nation will not take up sword against nation,

nor will they train for war anymore.

4 Every one will sit under their own vine

and under their own fig tree,

and no one will make them afraid,

for God Almighty has spoken.

This image in verse four is not an abstract idea: it is concretely realized in the plants and fruits of Isaiah’s bio-region: the fig tree and the grape vine. God’s vision of shalom is for the whole world, but it is realized in the particulars of our place and our home.

For those of us who have grown up in the suburbs or cities of North America, their is a clear challenge to participate in what Ched calls “re-place-ment”. In our work as Christian Peacemaker Teams our partners invite us into this practice through the witness of their lives and their love for the land God has given them.

I took the photo above at sunset last night on Crazy Rooster Farm, where I’m spending the weekend. It’s an experiment in permaculture (and perhaps re-place-ment) in Wisconsin. Come back next week for more photos

• Not necessarily naked
• Waving at the past, laughing at the present, dancing to the future
• Quilting outside the lines
• Because some quilts are crazier than others
• Forget the Alamo. Remember Münster
• Resurrecting Reformation
• Beware the Amish Pirates

It’s not too late to suggest your own! The poll winner will go in the front page header where it currently says “Beware the Amish Pirates”

Also, think of something interesting to write about on August 31st.

Tottenham High Road by Nicobobinus Some Rights Reserved

Speakers and presenters include: Tony Brown, Rev. Dr. Shanta Premawardhana, Elaine Enns, Ched Myers, Fathiyeh Gainey, Angela Castellanos and Mohammed Salah.

The event will be hosted by Reba Place Church in Evanston, Illinois, USA.

This weekend I was at Laurelville Retreat Center in Mt. Pleasant, Pa., participating in "Renewing the Story: Anabaptism and Mission for Today," a gathering organized by the Anabaptist Missional Project. The Mennonite had an article about this group of young adults a few months ago.

On the first evening of the gathering, founding member Matt Krabill introduced some of the history of the group. They first met together as a group in November 2009 in Harrisonburg, Va.

"We noticed that we were predominantly Anglo, male and seminary students, and that this wasn’t ideal for our goal of being a church in mission and so its something we want to change," said Kraybill, speaking of this first meeting. "We were paralyzed by the fact that we weren’t diverse, but at the same time we didn’t want to not talk."

Anabaptist Missional Project (AMP) has had two regional gatherings since then, as well in Elkhart, Ind., and Lancaster, Pa., respectively. Kraybill also shared a list of issues that have come up through those meetings.

• mass exodus of young adults from rural areas
• widespread nominalism (disaffection and driftedness)
• political polarization
• false dichotomy between peace church and missional church
• waning peace position in some/many churches
• Mennonite identity in light of "newer membership"

Krabill named the importance for the group of offering not only critique but also positive vision for the future of the church. AMP aims to have this conversation about mission from within the church rather than from outside. He also talked about the importance of leadership and Anabaptism in conversation with mission.

AMP has intentionally sought out mentors from an older generation of church leaders. Addressing those who were present, Krabill said, "We need you to speak so we can hear your wisdom and experience."

The resource people especially invited for the weekend were Leonard Dow, pastor of Oxford Circle Mennonite church in Philadelphia, and Mary Thiessen Nation, professor at Eastern Mennonite Seminary in Harrsonbug, Pa., and Palmer Seminary in Philadelphia.

Thiessen Nation spoke on the first evening about the importance of keeping all parts of Jesus life in our view. She cited David Bosch and Dietrich Bonhoeffer on the importance of focusing on the holistic Jesus: incarnation, life and teachings, passion and crucifixion, resurrection, ascension, Pentecost and parousia. She explained how focusing too much on anyone aspect can distort the way we live out our faith.

She also shared about the importance of the fellowship of suffering. She told a story of talking with someone who worked with young adults, and that person said, "We’ll lose them completely if we talk about suffering." Thiessen Nation disagreed strongly with this statement.

During the question and answer time, Thiessen Nation talked about the importance of new generations breaking out of old patterns. "You don’t have to live in reaction to legalism," she said. "As a newer generation you have the freedom to not have your agenda set in reaction to something that isn’t happening anymore."

On Sunday morning, Leonard Dow shared about some of the challenges his congregation has faced. He talked about the difference between "soft caring" of "food, fellowship and fun" and the "hard caring" that comes during times of crisis. These are the times when we need God "tabernacled" in us.

"It is through crisis that community is strengthened," Dow said.

Dow also shared some of his own story of growing up in a working class family in Philadelphia.

"I didn’t know I was poor until I went to Christopher Dock High School," he said.

He shared honestly about the challenges of crossing boundaries of race, class and culture during his time at Christopher Dock in Pa., and then at Eastern Mennonite University. Nevertheless, Dow ultimately found Mennonites to be the only church with a satisfactory theological response to violence.

In the question and answer time, Dow encouraged AMP to avoid the "silo approach" to urban ministry in which leadership of congregations does not reflect those in the pews.

"AMP needs to work with the people who have remained in the city," Dow said, "The sooner you invite the ‘remainers’ into AMP, the better, because there are people of color who are interested."

In a follow up discussion, Mauricio Chenlo, director of church planting for Mennonite Church USA said, "The barriers for white Mennonites are not theological, they are sociological and cultural barriers. The U.S. system is shaped so that you never have to cross barriers unless you want to."

Sunday afternoon was planned based on Open Space Technology in which participants choose the breakout sessions on the spot. Topics included a look at Neo-Anabapist movements, connecting missional churches and peace church and learning from past youth renewal movements such as the Young People’s Conferences.

The gathering concluded on Monday with a closing worship and communion.

I’ve obviously only been able to capture a few pieces of this gathering. If you were there and write up your response, please post the link in the comments.

Here are the other photos I took at the gathering. Click the thumbnail to see the larger version: