Labels: ecology, environment, homelessness, housing, personal bookmarks, renewable energy, sustenance

Labels: ecology, homelessness, housing, personal bookmarks, sustenance, theological sources, USA

Labels: classism, homelessness

Labels: astrophysics, Christianity, christology, classism, homelessness, politics

I support this.


Video here.

Text from here:

It is our duty now to begin to lay the plans and determine the strategy for the winning of a lasting peace and the establishment of an American standard of living higher than ever before known. We cannot be content, no matter how high that general standard of living may be, if some fraction of our people—whether it be one-third or one-fifth or one-tenth—is ill-fed, ill-clothed, ill-housed, and insecure.

This Republic had its beginning, and grew to its present strength, under the protection of certain inalienable political rights—among them the right of free speech, free press, free worship, trial by jury, freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures. They were our rights to life and liberty.

As our nation has grown in size and stature, however—as our industrial economy expanded—these political rights proved inadequate to assure us equality in the pursuit of happiness.

We have come to a clear realization of the fact that true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence. “Necessitous men are not free men.” People who are hungry and out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made.

In our day these economic truths have become accepted as self-evident. We have accepted, so to speak, a second Bill of Rights under which a new basis of security and prosperity can be established for all—regardless of station, race, or creed.

Among these are:

• The right to a useful and remunerative job in the industries or shops or farms or mines of the nation;
• The right to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation;
• The right of every farmer to raise and sell his products at a return which will give him and his family a decent living;
• The right of every businessman, large and small, to trade in an atmosphere of freedom from unfair competition and domination by monopolies at home or abroad;
• The right of every family to a decent home;
• The right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health;
• The right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment;
• The right to a good education.

All of these rights spell security. And after this war is won we must be prepared to move forward, in the implementation of these rights, to new goals of human happiness and well-being.

For unless there is security here at home there cannot be lasting peace in the world.

How I wish the US had pursued these with all its might. I wish it still would.

pax hominibus,agape to all,joel

Labels: anti-oppression, classism, economics, education, equal rights, freedom versus freedom, homelessness, personal bookmarks, politics, sacred texts, theological sources, universal health care, USA

revjd's first 3 challenges to humanity: 1. Unite; 2. Feed, house and clothe all; 3. Terraform th moon

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Labels: anti-oppression, homelessness, pax hominibus/bright shiny future, sci-fi

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I just had a very enlightening talk with the director of Episcopal Community Services here in San Francisco. He blessed me with a lot of knowledge about (among many other things) how their organization works, and some suggestions of what it would take for other groups to start up. He also gave me a brief tour.

During the course of our conversation, he mentioned the National Alliance to End Homelessness, so I want to make sure to add that to my bookmarks, and share it here as well. To be clear, I support ending homelessness, and think its an absolute travesty that there is such an economic disparity in this country/world that there are people who own buildings (through bank foreclosures, etc) which sit empty, but don't even know that they own those buildings, and there are others who literally sleep on the sidewalk. It's a further travesty that creating homes for ALL of the people who are homeless in the US would cost less than $100 billion, which is about as much as the US government spends on war every two months.

I could go on about my thoughts, but I have other work to do today.


pax hominibus,
agape to all,
joel

Labels: classism, homelessness, personal bookmarks, USA

.
A friend asked me some questions on Facebook, and I want to answer them here, so that Facebook doesn't try and claim some weird rights to them, and because I realized that I haven't really blogged on the trinity for some strange reason (but thought I had)....

Here it is:

Hey Joel,

I've been meaning to ask you two questions. Your FB post today lends a third:

If you don't mind,"what does it take to be a Unitarian Universalist minister?","What does it mean to be a UU minister?", and now,"What do you know about the Holy Spirit?".

I hope the evicted fellow you were attempting to help is doing well,


1. What's it take:

• A calling
  
• A decision to answer the call
  
• Successful completion of an M.Div degree: ~3-5 years in seminary (I'm just finishing at sksm.edu)
  
• A one year internship in a parish ministry or community ministry setting
  
• A three month chaplaincy internship
  
• One needs to pass a preliminary and final review board composed of peers (ministers and lay people in the UU movement)
  
• And one needs to read this ever-looming pile of books: https://secure2.uua.org/leaders/leadership/ministerialcredentialing/16224.shtml
  
• Finally, it requires a congregation that sees fit to ordain/bless the minister's ministry

2. To me being a UU minister means that one upholds the 7 unitarian universalist principles, works as a prophetic agent for social justice in multiple arenas, tends to pastoral care needs in a congregation or community, and probably several other things, including sending handwritten "glad you came to visit us" cards to new visitors. :)


3. What do I know about the Holy Spirit? "Knowing" is the realm of epistemology and metaphysics, and in my studies, knowing has turned out to be conflated with believing far too often. As a dyed-in-the-wool universal agnostic who recognizes the ubiquity of metaphor, I come from a school of thought where we must operate within a consensual reality based on reason, extended by faith, whenever truth is impossible to ascertain....

To answer the actual question: from a Unitarian standpoint, I'd say the trinity is a human-made construction of meaning, applied to divinity. As a "Transcendental Trinitarian Unitarian Universalist,"I recognize a model of divinity in which there is a divine whole, undivided into sections. In addition, I also recognize the trinity as a model for understanding the nature of divinity, dividing it into three parts, cognitive handles that may help us grasp the divine in all its complexity and beauty:

Divinity Beyond: Commonly known as "God"--that which is beyond conception, beyond understanding, or even imagination. At one time, we didn't understand the Sun, or the seasons, molecules, or the inside of the human body/mind. As we learn more

Divinity Within: Commonly known as "the Son", but exists within everyone--it involves going deep to find that still small voice of conscience and drive within oneself; and

Divinity Between or Among: Commonly known as the Holy Spirit, which is a connection or glue that holds us together in beloved community--interpersonal communication with a quality more like a caress or kiss than an invasive/phallic communicative endeavor (to put one's words/ideas/psyche into another) or an enveloping/yonic endeavor (to inconsiderately frame another's words/ideas/psyche into one's own structure). I also touch on the Holy Spirit a little in the previous post on John 2.

Those three parts of this trinity can be kind of exemplified by a paper clip turned into a triangle. It's a scalene triangle--the sides aren't all the same length. We're not really sure which side/angle represents the within, beyond, or between. And the edges are curved, meaning there's a little bit of gray-space or overlap between each of the two where they meet. I could elaborate I suppose but I won't. I'm going to bed instead.


4. The evicted fellow is doing pretty crappy actually. He's fully living on the streets now (sleeping on the sidewalk) and took off mid-way through yesterday's Bible Study, leaving his coat and umbrella behind. I had intended to hook him up with some resources, but won't see him again until NEXT Thursday. Unfortunately, he is one of multitudes of people on the streets with mental illness who are unable to participate or navigate within the system--a system which would be nonplussing/stymieing for anyone, really.


lyrics: world wake up today

colors: black, brown, white

mood: long day

chant/prayer/mantra: !!!


pax hominibus,
agape to all,
joel

Labels: heaven on earth, homelessness, inter-faith, mental health issues, Multitheticalism, parousia, theology, writing

No loitering, for birds, or people.

If you click-thru and look closely, you can see the little sharp wiry things to keep the birds from perching on this ledge about ten feet up. On this side of the block in the Tenderloin, there is nothing except this building with its alternating grey and beige stone. No doors, no windows, and a barren sidewalk. And several of these "No loitering" signs.

Labels: homelessness, indifferent corporations, oppression

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I just came across this story about a developer in India who is building and selling condominium apartments for between $7800 and $13,400 each. That's not annual rent. That is the price it costs to purchase and own these units. Here's the simple floorplans, ranging in size from 283 to 465 square feet. This is the same guy who developed and marketed the $2000 car.

According to a study two years ago, there were 744,000 homeless people in the United States. The average price of one of these condominiums is $10,000.

Okay, let's do the math. But first, let's say that apartments like this actually cost a little more to build in the United States. Say it costs twice that, so it's $20,000 per condominium. And let's assume that the number of homeless in the U.S. has tripled with this economic recession/depression, so we have an estimate of roughly 2.5 million homeless now.
And let's assume that not every homeless person is single, and that these apartments are going to be suitable for two people each. That means we divide by two.

DOING THE MATH:

2,500,000 x 20,000 / 2 = ?

25 billion dollars!

For only 25 billion dollars, the United States could have addresses for every homeless person, and a place to lay their head down and call their own. Without home addresses, it's really difficult to get a job, because where will potential employers contact you? This would only help the economy. We spent 700 billion dollars (and much much more) to try and bail out the bankers (who by and large still have homes after screwing us, thank you very much). That is 28 times as much as it would cost to give all of our homeless people homes.

I've already done this math before. This is the second time I've specifically mentioned this here. My thinking this time agrees with my thinking then.

The United States is a sad, sad place if we can't do this. No, it's not that we can't do it. It's that those who control where resources go refuse (or do not have the will) to do it. Guilt and shame, to the highest order of magnitude, rides upon the heads of all those who have the capacity to make this happen but do not. HERE IS A CASE OF THE GOOD SAMARITAN WRIT LARGE, and being "good Sam" in this case doesn't even require these people to spend their own money to make it happen -- only to dedicate a portion of the budget from our commonwealth. Honor and true pride can swell within those who dedicate resources to making this happen, and see it through.

And I realize that I was here talking about the United States, because that is presently the primary domain of my jurisdiction, but this simple mathematics can be extended to everywhere on the planet. If there are 500 million people without homes across this planet, the math works out to 2.5 trillion dollars. A seemingly large sum, but not when you think about it over the long haul, and of the benefits it would provide.


lyrics:
"Feed the babies
Who don't have enough to eat
Shoe the children
With no shoes on their feet
House the people
Livin' in the street
Oh, oh, theres a solution."
From Fly Like an Eagle, by Steve Miller

colors: Brown, as in the new mud huts for everyone. BTW, I hope that these apartments are eco-friendly. For this to be a real solution, they should be as eco-friendly and sustainable as possible.

mood: Hopeful.

chant/prayer/mantra: A place for everybody.


pax hominibus,
agape to all,
joel

PS- Here's an even more affordable housing design, perhaps preferable, and from a company with a true eco-friendly, people-friendly mission statement.

Labels: anti-oppression, changing the prison paradigm, economics, homelessness, interconnected web, paradigm shift, restorative justice, USA

 Here's a story about China investing in surveillance technology, and prototyping it into a network in one city, for further eventual roll-out to the rest of the country. They are spending loads of money to keep track of people who are dissatisfied with the opportunities available, instead of spending those loads of money to create more opportunities. In the process of embracing some type of totalitarian communist capitalism, they've been creating migrant workers by razing villages, and then taking advantage of their migrant status.

From the article:

While migrants can live for decades in big cities like Shenzhen and Guangzhou, their residency remains fixed to the rural community where they were born, a fact encoded on their national ID cards. As one young migrant in Guangzhou put it to me, "The local people want to make money from migrant workers, but they don't want to give them rights. But why are the local people so rich? Because of the migrant workers!"

But its not just limited to China. Waste of resources that could be used toward equalizing economic injustice, and the creation/exploitation of migrant labor seems to be a trend.

I think I previously blogged on the world's tallest building in Dubai, the Burj Dubai, and commented on how amazing it was that they were able to build it for only $2 billion dollars (U.S.). Since then, I've learned that they have a very divided class system there in Dubai, UAE, with about 60% of the population in the city as non-citizens and migrant labors. These migrant labors can be paid and exploited so that the investors can end up with awesome buildings, purchased at a cut-rate. The fact that hundreds of poorly documented day-laborers die constructing these buildings doesn't matter much in this context, since they're expendable and disconnected from their home communities.

In the United States, the whole ambivalence about undocumented immigrants from Mexico and Central America is similar to this. Having an exploitable unempowered labor force allows for less production costs (and potentially cheaper goods) in any industry able to employ undocumented workers without having to pay the going rate, or give them benefits.

In short, we are culpable, even if we don't want to be.

The solution? Change public policy regarding immigration, commerce, and re-create the social welfare network that has been undermined during the last 25 years.

When we see people wandering around, looking for work, begging for work, it becomes an employer's market, encouraging the system to keep people hungry and homeless, and denying them citizenship and its benefits if possible.

To sum up: In a society built on a social contract, whenever an individual is left to fend for him/herself, it shows a breach of the contract, and a failure of the communities that the individual is within. If a subgroup of people are left to fend to themselves, it shows a breach of contract and a failure of the greater community groups the subgroup is a part of. In this case, displaced migrant labors (in addition to being real suffering people) stand as representatives to a system that pits people against each other, and encourages abandonment.

The numbers of those abandoned by our societies is growing! From the article: "Every rural village that is successfully razed to make way for a new project creates more displaced people who join the ranks of the roughly 130 million migrants roaming the country looking for work. By 2025, it is projected that this "floating" population will swell to more than 350 million.' That's greater than the entire population of the United States. The idea that there could be a billion homeless people on this planet by 2025 mortifies me so deeply.

How deep must we dig to find the love to bind our communities together, to pool our resources, and take care of EVERYONE in a cooperative fashion? Surveillance cameras are not an answer to that question. They are an answer to the question: "How can the people who are benefiting from inequity and injustice and oppression continue to do so?" That's the kind of us vs. them thinking that exists in the kindergarten sandbox when the child won't share his toys. We need to move beyond that. Its much more complex than that, but at each level of complexity is a simplicity based on sharing and cooperation. That unravels the complexity, and we still see those who benefit from creating and sustaining competition. Many of us are unwilling/unknowing/cooperating participants. But there are many who are not participants who are only shut outside of the system, to be used, exploited, and used up. That's not the love I'm talking about. But I'm afraid if I keep rambling on, you will stop reading, so I'll stop here. Find the love and embrace it. Okay.


pax hominibus,
agape to all,
joel

Labels: anti-oppression, Capitalism, economics, freedom versus freedom, globalism, homelessness, indifferent corporations, oppression, politics, religious community

It didn't get all that much news coverage, but there was a police riot in New Orleans because the city council is looking to demolish housing out from under people who have been trying to live there. Here's the story.

How does this affect you and I? Well... These citizens of the United States have been abused by their government (and therefore you and I who allow such governance to continue) in such an ugly way. Many people lost their homes when Hurricane Katrina struck in August 2005, and were offered little to no assistance by any levels of government. In fact, the government has practiced a pattern of working against them, so now there are MANY former residents of New Orleans left homeless in other towns, and many who are trying to get the homes that they rightfully own in New Orleans, but are being fought by the government, who serve the interests of corporate developers and those who wish to gentrify. WHAT IS THEIR METHOD OF RECOURSE? Apparently, nothing short of a riot, because they are not being listened to. Tearing down this low-income housing is only going to increase the number of homeless people. I have talked to some of them in Oakland.

They are being systematically denied access to the basic necessities of life, when housing, food, and clothing CAN be made available without much difficulty (other than proving one could make a PROFIT by doing so). To me, this SCREAMS of class warfare, and is proof-positive evidence that endemic institutionalized racism is thriving in America today. Were it me who was abused like this, without voice in my city hall, without access to my elected representatives, I would be hard-pressed not to want to resort to just about anything, including violence, to be heard. Unfortunately, committing said violence can get one tossed in jail or prison.

Our penitentiaries are already overcrowded with poor people who weren't able to get up to the the bottom rung of the ladder. Our penitentiaries are already overcrowded with young black men who got busted for possessing some amount of marijuana, in our nation's War on Drugs, which is actually a class war, and a war of ideologies. Arresting people in the United States and locking them up is the best method of social control, rather than the more overt military and paramilitary methods our government uses to oppress people in other countries.

How can this be a good thing? It's not. America, when will your people have the freedom you claim they have? Ah, but I digress.

What needs to happen is for people to start talking, and shouting, in public places, demanding to be heard. Start conversations at the bus stop. Make your voices heard in churches. The poor people left to the streets (AND those who care about them) need to get vocal. If your ministers have not been addressing these human-rights issues, interrupt your church service, so people know that it's NOT business-as-usual here in America. God would want you talking.

America (the USA) is not going to get better UNLESS we the people make it better. Don't expect your elite leaders in the white house, the senate, and the supreme court to do it. They've had an opportunity to do so, and at best, they pay it lip service. At worst, they baldly perform acts of injustice and find ways to frame them as if they're just.

You judge a culture by how it treats its poor! The culture is made up of the people, not of the elite in government and in the media. The media may try to portray it a certain way, but that's only because they have the megaphone.

Which brings me to another very important point: What happens when the media all (under)reports something in one way, but the people begin to understand that the truth is something else? Because we in America do not have any method in the mass media* to be critical of the news as (un/under)reported, the raw power of the TV feed creates its own reality that cannot by publicly contested! This is what the Bush Administration folks are talking about when they deride people for being in "the reality-based community." With the power to speak comes the power to shape people's understanding of what is happening, what has been happening, and what can happen. Get your churches talking.

lyrics: "I feel it in my fingers, I feel it in my toes..." - Love Actually

colors: Black and White and Read all over.

mood: Tired of being mad at America. Tired of being part of the problem. Ready to be part of the solution.

chant/prayer/mantra: Let the people hear the people, and may restorative justice rule the day!


pax hominibus,
agape to all,
joel

*The blogosphere and the indymedia.org's on the Internet hardly count, because they don't hold a candle to CNN, MSNBC, etc, and because bandwidth costs money in a way that the UHF/VHF spectrum handed out by the FCC to the major media companies does not.

Labels: homelessness, media, oppression, theology

When I'm president, in addition to taking care of the homeless in general, I intend to take care of the troops. Here is an article about the disastrous reception and care that our Vietnam veterans got and our Iraq veterans are getting, and the fact that there are almost 200k of them who are homeless.


pax hominibus,
joel

Labels: homelessness, politics, war and peace

today while walking the dog, and walking my sweetie to the BART stop, we came across a homeless woman. marie (not her real name) is no ordinary homeless woman. then again, is there really such a thing as an ordinary homeless person?

she went to our church for the first time last week with a friend of hers. so today on the way to BART, we stopped and talked with her for a while, before maggie got uppity to continue her walk and started barking. on the way back, we saw her again, and talked for about 15-20 minutes. she was spare-changing, and as i approached, she was miffed about some people who had just walked by and entirely ignored her as if she wasn't there.

today, marie was begging for money so that she could get a pregnancy test for her homeless friend. and she's hoping that soon she can get back into a low-rent housing somewhere. she has a bachelor's degree, and has things surprisingly well together (how together would you have your life if you had no home???). anyway, from the topics of our conversation, including her experiences, her interpersonal care for friends and the homeless community, and her sharp and honest wit, i suggested that perhaps she should look into seminary and ministry for two reasons: first, her ministry could draw upon the wealth of experience and character built up from the adversity she's lived through. and second, she could get student loans and get a leg up off the street.

when you have a project and you want it to get done, to whom is it best to apply the commission of that project? how much better would the disaster relief in new orleans been if the person in charge of FEMA been a new orleans resident, rather than somebody entirely uninterested? would one have a white person as the primary advocate for the rights of blacks, or a straight person for gay rights? true, sometimes people can go against the grain and do great work for communities that they are not "a part of" but that's the exception and hardly the rule. but the person who is going to make the most efficient use of resources and have the most drive is the one who has embodied experience within that oppressed position. those from outside the community, the best thing they can do is offer support -- financial, physical (actually show up and serve at the soup line, or build the low-rent house, for example), spiritual (prayers and positive intention), and mental (teach necessary skills) -- but for an outsider to take on the role of the primary agent for a project is something that will mitigate the strength of the effort, and i'd question why somebody would do that if there is a more embodied person available?

with a little practical experience working with institutions, she would be an ideal leader and advocate for the large-scale homeless project i'd like to see happen. all that would be left would be to get the resources together (monetary, raw physical goods, and human expertise). where would all that money come from?

well let's say there are 100k homeless people in each state. that means 5 million in the United States. my numbers could be off by a little, but certainly not by an order of magnitude, so this would suffice for a mock-up plan.

from the previous post, linked above:

What I really want is to establish a system of dormitory/ashram/hostel - style housing units (30-100 people/unit) where we can have ~four people to a room with:

• clean cots/beds/bunks
• decent inexpensive meals (accepting donations from restaurants and grocery stores)
• clean clothes (accepting donations from anyone)
• laundry
• career counseling*
• mental health counseling*
• a health-care ombudsman*
• multi-faith-skilled chaplaincy*
• a computer room with Internet access (for email and education)
• massage therapy*
• vegetable gardens

*weekly, bi-weekly, or semi-weekly visits.

Depending on location (urban/suburban/rural), the housing could be between 2500 and 10000 dollars per person per year. Let's say a round figure of $6000/person/year for housing. Food, done efficiently and spartanly, and with donations, could be $1000/person/year, especially if supplemented by gardening. Clothes, this planet is bursting with clothes -- most can be acquired through donation, and clean socks and underwear can be had for $100/year.

I'd like to take a moment to note that EVERYTHING in this plan will technically happen through "donations" in one sense or another, even the money, EVEN if it comes from tax dollars, or from volunteered labor. After all, aren't our tax dollars supposed to be (consensual - to the degree that we elect our decision-makers) donations toward the commonwealth and the good of the community, for things that we as individuals wouldn't/couldn't purchase on our own?

What about my assumption that career counselors, mental health counselors, and massage therapists would donate their time? Why would they do that? Because they fucking care about other people! (It grieves me deeply that so many people think of genuine caring as the exception, rather than the rule.) They recognize that there are other people who need what they've got, and that they are blessed with the good fortune to have the skills/resources they do. If you think of yourself as a caring Christian or caring person of any religion, and think twice about giving favors for free, you might want to recheck that definition. Sharing is going to be how we survive. And I recognize that sharing runs counter to our individualized "pull resources toward oneself" economic system. I think the sharing should stay, and the greed should go.

In some of my reading for the Bawa Muhaiyaddeen online course, he talks about zakah, or charity, one of the five pillars of Islam. Christians, make no mistake, I think you should hold your own feet to the fire on this one. If I could, I'd set up a charity competition between Christians and Muslims. And I daresay that at present, with respect to many sects of Christianity (the Amish excluded), the Muslims would be winning. Whether the United States of America is a Christian nation or a Muslim nation, it is indeed blessed with riches beyond the dreams of Jesus or Mohammad. The zakah essentially says to tithe according to your assets/wealth (2.5%), and not according to your income (though I think a combination of the two would likely be the most just, so people don't try to get around the rules by not earning, or by spending on perishable goods).

So, what Bawa says (from a very theo-centric viewpoint) is that according to God/Allah, "what people do not realize is that it is I who created the nourishment that is permissible for them. Anyone who claims [the stuff of] this world as his own, anyone who grabs the world and says it belongs to him, has changed into satan and is surely going to hell." Those are pretty strong words and I don't see it exactly that way. I would say instead that to the degree that a person claims property for him/herself they are Satan, and they are in hell. I've seen it happen to me and I've seen it happen to the people who walked by Marie. When they/I walk by, it is with a feeling of "this spare-changing person is asking for my money, for my time," but Bawa essentially says that property is theft from the world's sharable resources, and claiming something as yours puts one in enmity with the world, which will ultimately reclaim any resources we temporarily usurp. Does a tree own anything? I guess technically trees compete for resources (sunlight, air, soil nutrients) with other trees, undergrowth and the like, but if they were able to, I fear they'd do a better job sharing than humans....

I'd imagine that not all Muslims follow the tithing rule, in much the same way that most Christians don't give 10 percent. The real problem is taxes -- they are supposed to be donations toward the commonwealth and the good of the community. Instead, I just read on a USA Today front page as I walked by the newsstand, that the Congressional Budget Office estimates that the cost of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars is presently at $2.4 TRILLION dollars!! By my estimates, for that kind of money, we could easily have already equipped the entirety of the United States with solar energy.... (I think I might be getting myself mad here (or perhaps its the USA Today article, or perhaps its the Bush Admin's expensive (in oh so many ways) cowboy-style foreign policy)).....

Back to the topic at hand... If it costs us in the range of $10k/year to support the homeless and help them get back into the economy, that would be 10,000 x 5,000,000 people ONLY 50 billion dollars per year. In other words, for the price of these two wars, we could've eliminated homelessness for 50 years (and on reflection, all of our lives would be better for it). Think about that.

lyrics:
you can laugh at my behavior
that'll never bother me
say the devil is my savior
but i don't pay no heed

and i will go on shining
shining like brand new
i'll never look behind me
my troubles will be few
-Supertramp, Goodbye Stranger

colors: red, white, yellow

mood: ready to go to work.

chant/prayer/mantra: help your friends, and that's everybody.

pax hominibus,
joel

Labels: Christianity, economics, homelessness, Islam, oppression, politics, religious community, Satan/devil, theology, USA

I was an usher today at church. It started ta 11:15, and generally goes until 12:30 or so. I signed up for ushering before my new work schedule came out for the semester. So I was supposed to work when the library opened at noon. I stepped outside briefly at noon to call the shift supervisor to let her know I'd be about an hour late. She was fine with that.

Just as she picked up the phone, a man advanced up to me quickly and was asking for money and help, so he could get a shower and something to eat, which rattled me a bit since I'm not such a good multitasker, especially for unexpected things. I regained my composure on the phone and finished up my conversation, and then spoke with him. He told me that he has been living in the bushes over by the freeway, and that some people had assaulted him a while ago and his shoulder was dislocated, and he needed my help as a brother in God. He pulled off his shirt so I could look at it and it didn't look good. The skin was all right, but underneath, the musculature and skeletal structure were pretty fouled up. I asked him if it was OK to touch his shoulder, he replied affirmatively, but he recoiled away at the slightest touch (I'm not sure how much was emotional and how much physical, but obviously there were issues he needed to get resolved.) He needed assistance getting his shirt back on and buttoned as well.

I gave him some money and told him he really needed to get to the ER to have it looked at, and that I had to get back inside to usher (it was really rattling to me that I was supposed to be inside really soon to pass the plate, and wasn't sure exactly when that was happening). I got back in with about a little time to spare, and noticed that he had followed and come in through a side door and sat in the back row among the other parishioners. As I was getting composed and gaining understanding of the greater context of the situation, it was all too frustrating that I had opted for the middle way* and now his welfare depended on the people he was sitting next to. I spoke to the other usher and explained about how I needed to go directly to work after the service, and could she put him in touch with the services we had in place for when someone comes calling like this?

Her response was a bit like what I suspected. We don't have a system or procedure in place for this kind of help. The person next to him would be able to find out and hopefully help. He got up and left before the end of the service and I'm not sure how much assistance was offered.

The toughest part for me was that our service was about community, family, Ohana (the Hawaiian word for the family of community), and was titled "No One Left Behind." I was collecting the offering and thinking of what we were collecting it for, if not to be able to help him. (I recognize here that we do need to raise money to reinforce the building so its safe in case of an earthquake. Presently, if there were a sizable earthquake during a service, there could be 200 casualties. I also recognize that there are many other programs that need financing, ranging from countering oppressions, and other forms of community outreach beyond services for the poor/homeless.)

*As should be clear from the story, I hardly feel myself absolved in any way. The middle way to me here was as if from the JC parable where the guy gets beaten up by robbers and left at the side of the road. The pious people all walk by and do nothing. The Samaritan takes him to the inn, feeds him, and tells the innkeeper to put it on his tab. I gave the man some money and left him to fend for himself with it.

When people are sleeping at the side of the highway with broken shoulders, I think its high-time we all realize that the government is barely providing for the welfare of the people, if at all. Who shall take up the slack? And when is the government going to stop taxing us at these high rates, if they're no longer providing for social welfare and education (I'm reminded here of the Oakland school kids who stand outside the grocery stores to sell this or that, so that they can have books...). I want that money for the churches, schools, and non-profits.

lyrics: Fu Manchu, The Action is Go.

colors: clear as water

mood: how do you suppose?

chant/prayer/mantra: peace begins with community.


pax hominibus,
joel

Labels: Bible, Christianity, homelessness, massage, our mission, religious community, theology