Moses the Migrant

Once upon a time, long ago, in a place far from here, a familiar story unfolded. In this place there was a Ruler and this Ruler’s land was inhabited by people of varying ethnicity. There were those who named themselves “the People” and there were those named “the Others.” The Others were a strong-bodied people who worked hard, bore children and established themselves in the land. In fact, they became so abundant, that the People began to fear they would be overrun by the Others. The fear was so great that the Ruler began to look at the Others as invaders, though they had lived amongst the people for generations. They had, in fact, lived amongst the People so long that the Ruler—who was not a diligent student of history—had forgotten, or perhaps never learned that the Others had actually been invited to the land by a ruler from the past. They had helped sustain the land during a time of need. Now, they were not perceived as an asset but a threat.

In one version of this story, the Ruler is called Pharaoh; the People, Egyptians; the Others, Hebrew. Pharaoh responded to the Hebrew threat by summoning their midwives. “When you are preparing to deliver the babies of Hebrew women,” he commanded them, “you must abort them as they are being born.” The women did not argue. They also did not obey. Noticing that Hebrew babies continued to be born, Pharaoh summoned the midwives once again, “how is it that I continue to see my land overrun by newborn Hebrews?” he demanded. The clever women played helpless, “These Hebrew women, they are so hardy and energetic, they give birth before we even arrive in their homes!” Though the midwives civil disobedience delayed deaths, it did not prevent them. In his desperation, Pharaoh ordered that all male children be killed, even after being born.

Perhaps there were many families whose love and ingenuity compelled them to find ways to preserve the lives of their children. Ancient texts direct our attention to one particular family. And isn’t it often the way that our best education about broad truths comes through a narrow focus, from an individual encounter? The family was of the Levite clan. Though she already had two children, the mother of this family was struck by the beauty of her new child, a son, and she could not bear to see him lose his life even if that meant she could not share in that life with him. This child’s mother and father and brother and sister conspired together. They crafted a basket, carefully waterproofed and padded it. They placed within it this child, one of many born in the land but to them a unique marvel and mystery of creation to whom their hearts were bound. Reverently, with prayers and petitions, they placed the baby-filled basket in the river and hoped for salvation. His sister, Miriam, followed the flow of the river from the bank.

Almost of another world, another daughter ventured along the river bank. Pharaoh’s daughter, she shared the same land with Miriam and the other Hebrew daughters and sons, but knew little of their life. She lived life in a bubble of security. Even now, as she ventured to cool herself in the water of the Nile, a band of attendants followed around her; their presence both an irritation and an expectation, for she knew no life but a sheltered one. Immersing herself in the water this daughter heard a cry. She saw the unusual craft and could guess at its cargo—but how could this be? “Go fetch that basket,” she commanded an attendant. And her attendant obeyed. Opening the lid of the basket, Pharaoh’s daughter caught the spell of wonder that had been laid in the basket with this baby. She recognized love in him and wanted to share it. “I’m going to adopt him,” she said. And she named him Moses.

I imagine this encounter affecting the daughter of Pharaoh not only with compassion, but with curiosity. How did it come to be that this child was set afloat? Perhaps she learned more about the policies directed toward the people inhabiting the land she lived within. I noticed that when Moses grew to adulthood, there were still Hebrew people of his generation—they were not destroyed. Can it be that Pharaoh’s commandment was rescinded? I wonder if that had anything to do with his daughter finding her heart captivated by one Hebrew that led her to advocate, if even in only one small way, for the lives of his people. I wonder if the thought of each Hebrew baby’s death tore at her as though it were the murder of her own child?

The timelessness of this story occurred to me in a new way as I revisited it this week. Experience has a way of tinting the lens through which we look at the world. Where I stand in my interior landscape effects the perspective I have of the exterior, even when I am unaware. This time I was aware that I was reading with a mind toward the immigrants that share the land where I live. Aware that whatever people group we come from, we were all sojourners once. “My people” were primarily Dutch and Irish, welcomed when extra hands were needed, rejected when we became too many and were no longer seen as a resource but as burden on resources that were limited. A threat to familiar ways of being and looking and sounding. I thought of the South and Central American migrants who I’d never given much mind to until I encountered their belongings, abandoned during their troubled sojourn in the Sonoran Desert; until I met them, broken on the border.

Now they people my thoughts and influence my reflections. I have been reading Steinbeck’s account of his journey across America with his dog Charley. There I found that his reflection on the Bad Lands stirred in me reflections similar to those that had been awakened by a tale from ancient Egypt. Once upon a time, not long ago, very close to home…Steinbeck’s experience of the Bad Lands brought back my memories of the contradictory nature of the desert in Arizona that divides the United States and Mexico. Such a monster in the day, so majestic in the evenings. Though I tried to describe it, he says it better:

…the late afternoon changed everything. As the sun angled…the cliffs and sculptured hills and ravines lost their burned and dreadful look and glowed with yellow and rich brown and a hundred variations of red and silver gray, all picked out by streaks of coal black…once stopped I was caught, trapped in color and dazzled by the clarity of the light. Against the descending sun the battlements were dark and clean-lined, while to the east, where the uninhibited light poured slantwise, the strange landscape shouted with color. And the night, far from being frightful, was lovely beyond thought, for the stars were close, and although there was no moon the starlight made a silver glow in the sky. The air cut the nostrils with dry frost…this is one of the few place I have ever seen where the night was friendlier than the day (Travels with Charley, pg. 120).

I found it confounding, trying to reconcile the splendor of the evenings with the treacherous conditions of the day. Similarly, I find it confounding trying to reconcile the juxtaposition of beauty and cruelty in people when we choose, sometimes so arbitrarily who will be bequeathed with our favor, and who will be subject to our wrath. Unlike Moses, the rulers of this land don’t directly threaten migrants with death, but with deportation. Though, considering the hundreds of deaths that occur each year in the desert by those restricted, or returning after being sent back—considering how separation of mothers from children and husbands from wives causes life to leak out from rent hearts—the difference between death and deportation becomes blurry at best.

Who will be the fairytale-type princess in this version of the story? Who will be the unlikely one that bridges the gap between the outcast people and the obstinate ruler? “Encounter” seems to me to be the magic word that breaks the spell of blindness. I think of my own life’s experience; I began to care when my senses and feelings were engaged. I cared about the migrants because I walked their trails and heard their stories. I cared about men in Guantanamo who I’d barely given a second thought to because I saw their picture and heard their stories and read their poems. I was touched by our common humanity. Their pain hurt me. If those of us who are sheltered by the rulers of the land could learn the stories of those who are persecuted, if we would take a few steps beyond our comfort zone, perhaps their cries could stir our heart like the cries of a baby in a basket. Perhaps, if we wade in the water, God will trouble us toward compassion and we will learn the abundance of an interwoven life.

Afterglow from the farm

Today I am dizzy and seem to have done nothing. Do you ever have the empty distracted feeling that comes after some experience of total clarity or connection? Yesterday was that day for me when the very sunshine meant utterance direct from God, and the light was everywhere bringing depth and color to all things. I could lay in the catch and swing of the hammock and serenely stare into the green oak leaves and the breeze was my companion soft and caressing.

Today I am checked out in the background as present as I can be. But I wish it were yesterday on the farm again and I were again walking the perimeter for the first time. I would sit down and seem floating on the landscape watching the white shirts bend over the vegetable crop. Or amazed I would want to see the bees in slow motion to track where each buzzes off or back from and I would again want to shrink and squeeze into that hive in curiosity to meet the queen.

My senses seem dull today, off like a faucet, but while there on the land every pore was open wide. I pruned the tomato like a feisty toddler and I mulched the green onion like she were my grandmother. The hay I held crept into my body and possessed me and now I am dry. And wanting.

Ordinary

On a stroll down F street I tasted flat doctor pepper. I said to myself, Isn’t it interesting? I looked at my thumb hooked into a Burger King paper pint cup and saw no fizz but could complain to no one because this seemed my lot. I had discovered this idle cup five sixths full on a cement ledge of a University Museum and after holding it with my inserted retractable thumb for half a block I determined that sugar water could be invigorating. Though flat it had purpose. I wondered about a mentor soccer coach who used to always shake out the carbonation from a can of pop before he gave it to his kid. This sugar water would be practical, if not unhealthy.

How do we gain trauma mastery? One way seems to be by developing our self-awareness to the degree that we see ourselves without judgment. One practice recommended by Laura Lipsky in Trauma Stewardship: A Guide to Caring for Ourselves as we care for Others is to develop the habit of asking ourselves one simple question: Isn’t it interesting? Meanwhile the Catholic Church marks ordinary time tomorrow with a passage from the Gospel of Matthew: “Even all the hairs of your head are counted.” Hmm. Oh!

And William Hazlitt penned an essay in 1823. Didn’t know that myself until today. I appreciate Norton Anthology so much more now for informing me of this important datum. This Hazlitt fellow was big stuff in his day when he wrote this essay called

My First Acquaintance with Poets. He went on a long walk with Cooleridge twenty-five years earlier, in January 1798, and wrote this by no means pedestrian account in reflection, actually, about how Cooleridge had backslid from his former radicalism.

Isn’t great what you can learn by picking up an abandoned Starbucks cup and following it from whence it came. Lying to the barista in his face, I gained entry into the café for a $0.54 cent refill. I sat down with the Norton uncritically, just noticing my lie: Isn’t it interesting?

Hazlitt also wrote a sublime piece of piled quotations called On Gusto. If I had never seen a Titian painting in Madrid I doubt it could have been so flattering. Sad, I just remembered how the pixel versions taken by my buddy Bernie were one night robbed when we slept out in a Barcelona park despite his having clutched it like a teddy. Gypsy theft in them parks is mighty usual, the Catalan cop seemed to say.

St. Teresa of Avila wrote "Wherever God is, there is Heaven." In The Saints Guide to Happiness Robert Ellsberg suggests that her spirit sought out from the ordinary the memento dei, an awareness of God cultivated at all times and all circumstances. Isn't it...?

I posed as a curious George to ask the Indian couple where little India was. The lady started walking away and said “What you want we don’t know.” Hmm. Oh! Maybe she was Pakistani. Anyway, I didn’t get a chance to ask why the man took a picture of her there at the corner of Ridge and Devon. Was the gas station exceptional?

The rain hasn’t fallen since Friday, eight times twenty four hours ago, and still in the street along Devon a binge of water hasn’t drained. Between two cars floats an article from the Metropolis paper featuring summer films at the park; a subtitle calls out a few goodies from among the rest, or "the pedestrian". There was a familiar photo too. Like an image come together in a dark room, the Spielberg frame most endearing to me as a kid had not yet dissolved: there E.T. still rose into the moon, peddled higher and higher.

And isn’t it interesting, I thought, seeing a sticker saying “This meter remains as a courtesy to bikers.”

Why I write for this blog.

Because I know you and you know me.

Because here is a space where we collect hope.

Because here an ugly body is beautiful.

Because we can speak of God as she, and as Uighur.

Because I cannot be silent.

Because on the 4^th of July brothers are indefinitely detained.

Because…

Something has to be done to correct history. Our friendship ought to mean something real enough to one day become common sense. Don’t you agree that if we can begin to invest in each other emotionally, or have the courage to think with each other boldly, out loud, that we can become founders of the future?

No, a plague has not fallen on our two houses-God and Creation. One day, history will absolve the crisis of despair and ecological devastation. I am more convinced of this having finished Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace.

Tolstoy elevates the role of writer into the chair of historian in his account of the Franco-Russian wars of the 19^th century. Only the great writer, he argues convincingly, is the one who can convey the most of an event without speaking about it. To do this, he employs three aristocratic families and fourteen hundred pages full of perspectives.

He may be turgid in his philosophical sections, but the repetition does have an awakening affect on the reader as he weaves in the further strands of narrative. For instance, as I relived the invasion of Moscow, I could grasp better the view of an Iraqi in the midst of Operation Freedom. Tolstoy’s account of Pierre’s rescue of a girl from a fire brought back how the Baghdad archives were ransacked, the purity of truth pillaged. His subsequent capture and witnessing of an execution by fire squad has triggered my conscientious objection to extrajudicial killings by drone warfare. A novelist does have the power to produce such awakenings as no mere scientist of history can.

Tolstoy aims to bring the reader into not the experience but into the reality of God. To do so, he repairs on the notion of a history of consequences made by a hero. All the masses must consent for the will of the hero to be made plain, and all the circumstances and all the relationships must align with the purpose of all the people. He gives a stencil analogy of how God only allows to be the purposeful:

…just as in stencil-work one figure or another is sketched, not because the colours are laid on this side or in that way, but because on the figure cut out in stencil, colours are laid on all sides.1365

By God’s design we have hero’s and heroine’s of history. I agree that Tolstoy should be considered a hero because he contributes hope to my world view. His character Natasha suffers a painful loss after nursing a dying fiancé for several weeks. All has gone numb within her when the family receives news of her young brother’s death. Her mother is stricken with heartbreak and Natasha finds a way to console her:

“A spiritual wound that comes from a rending of the spirit is like a physical wound, and after it has healed externally, and the torn edges are scarred over, yet, strange to say, like a deep physical injury, it only heals inwardly by the force of life pushing up from within.

“So Natasha’s wound healed. She believed that her life was over. But suddenly her love for her mother showed her that the essence of her life—love—was still alive within her. Love was awakened, and life waked with it.” 1230, War and Peace

Natasha could be said to be in recovery from vicarious trauma, a topic we will address Friday at the White Rose Roundtable. Her wound may be invisible but the suffering is deeply real, all but eclipsing her ability to love. I know that I personally am indebted to the compassion of this Kairos community for supporting me through my imprisonment. Even as I adjust back into life at the White Rose I have hope of being present to each of you. Realistically, becoming fully present to you will take some time and I count on your patience with me. Finally, I write for this blog because I feel safe to share, and because when I am out of character you correct me with love.

War and Peace increases my conviction that our two houses—God and Creation—do not suffer the fate of a plague. For Tolstoy reminds us that love will wake within us. Though I see about me ecological devastation and beg forgiveness for despairing, the essence of my life pulses with longing for the wholeness meant to be. Tolstoy corrects the idea that history itself is the active agent of change, instead widening the aperture of our outlook to include understanding of God at work. In history, the pattern of God’s will does become apparent. If sometimes it is to much for me to imagine that we masses co-create the destined Ecosystem of God, then sensing beyond what I can see affords me hope. When I see Rehema and Bethany playing in our backyard, I buy into the prophet Jeremiah’s vision of a new heaven and a new earth. Rehema celebrates her birthday Saturday, allelujah!

For reflection:

1) The book Trauma Stewardship: An Everyday Guide to Caring for Self While Caring for Others presents a test applicable for the kairos community:

“Identify the members of your microculture. To what degree do they nurture hopefulness, accountability, and integrity? Think about whether you could use stronger role models in any of these areas.” 187 Trauma Stewardship

2) How do you consume hope on a daily basis?

“All the lives this place

has had, I have. I eat

my history day by day.”

--From History by Wendell Berry

ugly body

orange over me

upon still solemn sidewalk

silent under black

My breathing quickens.

the truth is too tight:

innocent men are confined

tortured to death

human-inflected trauma

in the name of national security

The cells of my eyes water what my heart holds.

my love, Jesus, tortured by thorns, nails, cross

laments stab while questions weigh on a helpless body

centuries later the crowds still scream crucify

My bones grind and stiffness sets into sore feet and knees.

prayers are uttered into Mary’s ear, as she knows

secrets of torture techniques told

“feels like drowning two hundred times.”

“hanging by wrists for hours, no sleep.”

“humiliation.”

“dogs.”

“darkness.”

“orders.”

My body shudders with shame.

trying to yell NO the over-used too-old sign bares challenge:

let it close, it needs to end.

sorrow looks through cloth pores

there, no dignity

here, fashions rush by wasting fast food, texting into cellular phones

ignoring the pain of the ugly orange body

I don’t understand.

This is the poem that floated through me when I wore a orange jumpsuit and black hood for the first time. I wore the ugly outfit at a vigil in Chicago on June 23rd as an act of solidarity.

Conversations with Thomas Merton

Written by Chris Spicer, with quotes from Thomas Merton provided courtesy of Mike Brennen:


Dear Mike:

How about a dialogue through some of his quotes:

Peace demands the most heroic labor and the most difficult sacrifice. It demands greater heroism than war. It demands greater fidelity to the truth and a much more perfect purity of conscience.
Thomas Merton
Tom, I like that…the most heroic labor…the most difficult sacrifice. Of course peace takes labor and of course it takes sacrifice, but we all know that peace itself does not labor or sacrifice. Peace itself is GOD and in GOD’s time peace reigns. But fine, we have time and thank God we have Jesus Christ, who of course did labor and did sacrifice.

So Brother Matthew locked the gate behind me, and I was enclosed in the four walls of my new freedom.
Thomas Merton
Ha, that’s cute Tom. Confined but unconfined, it reminds me of a sermon of paradoxes by the great preacher Augustine who, reflecting on the birth of Christ issued a litany of them such as “He who was wise, was wisely silent.” The image of the gate behind and the freedom ahead, and the riddle of four walls with assumed floor and ceiling—calls to mind a style of knowing by koans, used in formation by some Buddhists in training. Early Christians sought by way of the teaching of paradox to open the mind of the neophyte to imagine a God who died, Jesus Christ.


Solitude is not something you must hope for in the future. Rather, it is a deepening of the present, and unless you look for it in the present you will never find it.
Thomas Merton

Said well, Tom. Except, in what ways does the deepening manifest? If as you say solitude is not something…future? So if solitude is as infinite as you suggest, then, gosh, solitude is something more than experience. Not personal, not mine to know. Tom, are you suggesting that solitude is, what, an icon of GOD? Like looking at an icon disposes oneself to receive God’s revelation, so then may God, in one before solitude, reveal God-self. Fortunately, solitude is different than lonliness isn’t it? In solitude we are accompanied by God.

The beginning of love is to let those we love be perfectly themselves, and not to twist them to fit our own image. Otherwise we love only the reflection of ourselves we find in them.
Thomas Merton

Said another, the beginning of love is forgiveness. Tom, let’s say I let another be—as they are. Oh! But I want to reach out and touch, influence, and God help me, because if I’m so desperate I’ll seek to impose my will emotionally or otherwise. Who reminds us of the desperate act most—the lust after woman had by the human. Down a rib, he craved it back—to fit. I agree Tom, that in making another to fit our own image, we play as God.

The biggest human temptation is to settle for too little.
Thomas Merton

Now Tom, you’re beginning to sound a bit mythopoetic. Over and against dramatic being stands the rational self-conscious being. For being is real and in proportion to being we get bigger than our britches not by settling for too little, but by presuming we created too little. It’s our self-disgust that becomes the obversion of pride, when we think of ourselves inadequate images of God—that’s settling to the soil, dust to dust.


The first step toward finding God, Who is Truth, is to discover the truth about myself: and if I have been in error, this first step to truth is the discovery of my error.
Thomas Merton

Tom, absolutely. To recognize one false belief, just one! This will aid one to persuade ones will. And as the will reverts from a counterposition toward the true position, a process has begun, one of willingness to take into account reason, to expand one’s horizon and eventually to decide to believe and one day to consummate true belief in action!


The tighter you squeeze, the less you have.
Thomas Merton

One formula puts it thusly: be, act, have. And is God close fisted? Even Job, in prayer, remained steadfast with his grip of God’s hand, and in his doubt he preserved enough faith to credit God another chance, to recommit, to extend himself once more in a covenantal grasp.


The very contradictions in my life are in some ways signs of God's mercy to me.
Thomas Merton

Mercy. Mercy! Uncle!! Remember the codeword to get out of a headlock? When we can’t go on, what better prayer to show faith.

The whole idea of compassion is based on a keen awareness of the interdependence of all these living beings, which are all part of one another, and all involved in one another.
Thomas Merton

Tom, I’m not interested in the idea of compassion. Talk to me. You speak of basis. Now, I totally get—estoy de acuerdo mi hermano—that bit of interdependence. I’m an authority of belief, not an authority of knowledge. I am reliant on the heritage of those who have discovered God in their midst, loving, acting with compassion, recognizing the stranger as Jesus Christ. The heritage of their discoveries of the unrestricted presence of God has formed the basis of my belief. And then, by a miracle of physics—it’s my turn. Who is my neighbor? Tom, he’s a federal inmate sitting beside me in this halfway house and he’s searching on Bing web “Chicago café rental rates”. He’s left to take an incoming call. From whom? To whom does he belong?



There was this shadow, this double, this writer who had followed me into the cloister. He rides my shoulders I cannot lose him.
Thomas Merton

Doppleganger, the Holy Ghost, divine muse, inspired Steppenwolf.
Keep connected brother!

We do not exist for ourselves.
Thomas Merton

We do. We exist for ourselves. Who? Listen closer. We listen to our-selves. We are many.


We have to have a deep, patient compassion for the fears of men and irrational mania of those who hate or condemn us.
Thomas Merton

Irrational? It’s to be expected. It’s common sense that we will be hated, despised, persecuted. Our mania is just fine with being condemned.

We have what we seek, it is there all the time, and if we give it time, it will make itself known to us.
Thomas Merton

I couldn’t understand what you mean Tom. All the time in the world, all the resources in the world, and I still don’t get it. I have a harem of hundreds. I am Solomon and I still don’t get it.

On the Smallness of Green Energy

It takes a lot of chutzpah to quote E.F. Schumacher in an editorial that claims nuclear and fossil fuels have “smaller footprints” than renewable energy. Yet, Robert Bryce apparently thought he get away with it by referencing “small is beautiful” as a central theme in his June 7, 2011 op-ed in the New York Times entitled “Gas is Greener.”

A little background: Schumacher was among the first economists to make the argument for an economy based on renewable resources. In his book Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered (1973), chapter 4 (part 2) is titled "Nuclear Energy-- Salvation or Damnation?" If Mr. Bryce had read the book, he would know that Mr. Schumacher emphatically concludes the latter, by referring to a nuclear economy as "a transgression against life itself."

This abuse of Schumacher, and its implications are embarrassingly irresponsible. It would be like quoting Gandhi in an article applauding the merits of sweatshop labor for poverty alleviation.

The California Renewable Portfolio Standard (RPS) does not require “energy sprawl.” California’s largest utilities get roughly 18% of their energy from renewable sources already. In order to get 33% renewable sources, one approach would be to start by reducing consumption by focusing on energy efficiency without building any new power plants. Californians could also add small-scale distributed de-centralized wind and solar on rooftops and in backyards (Schumacher would approve) without even touching the desert habitat that Mr. Bryce is so concerned about. In fact, Californians have connected more than 3,000 MW of rooftop solar panels since 2006.

Meanwhile, Mr. Bryce’s estimates for the land impact of wind farms ignores the fact that individual turbines occupy less than an acre, and that 95% of land in a wind farm can continue under its present use after the project is constructed, unlike land dedicated to conventional energy technologies.

Speaking of "energy sprawl," Mr. Bryce doesn't seem concerned with the Appalachian wasteland desecrated by mountaintop removal coal mining, the extraterrestrial landscape of Northern Alberta's Althabasca tar sands, Wyoming's coal strip mines, the Marcellus shale watershed in New York and Pennsylvania where tap water is now flammable due to irresponsible drilling for natural gas, or the Pacific coast of (you guessed it) CALIFORNIA where dairy cows now contain trace elements of nuclear radiation from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear meltdown.

The concern of "energy sprawl" may lead Mr. Bryce to ask what it might be like to live next door to another kind of power plant... he could start by asking our neighbors in Pilsen, 42 of whom died prematurely in 2010 due to the emissions of ComEd's Fisk and Crawford power plants.

This editorial should be seen for what it is: a shameless defense of status quo energy consumption and short-sighted economics in direct opposition to the overwhelming majority of public opinion which favors renewable energy development, especially wind and solar.

For what it's worth, I'd be happy to send Mr. Bryce my copy of Small is Beautiful so he can understand how Schumacher actually feels about comparing fossil fuels to renewable energy:

“The essential difference between non-renewable fuels like coal and oil on the one hand, and renewable fuels like wood and water-power on the other cannot be simply overlooked. Non-renewable goods must be used only if they are indispensable, and then only with the greatest care and the most meticulous concern for conservation. To use them heedlessly or extravagantly is an act of violence…”

Perhaps Mr. Bryce actually believes that all American power plants are indeed “indispensable” and the USA’s insatiable appetite for fossil fuels is not “extravagant.” Nevertheless, in an economy that runs on 92% fossil fuels and nuclear power Mr. Bryce has the audacity to claim that these energy sources are somehow smaller and therefore “greener” than the wind and the sun.