Freed from th System

Richard Rohr:


Once we idealize social climbing, domination of others, status symbols, power, prestige, and possessions, we are part of a never-ending game that is almost impossible to escape. It has its own inner logic that is self-maintaining, self-perpetuating, and self-congratulating, as well as elitist and exclusionary. It will never create a just or happy world, yet most Christians never call it into question. Jesus came to free us from this lie, which will never make us happy anyway, because it’s never enough, and we never completely win.

Great Love and Great Suffering

Here's another meditation by Richard Rohr:

We must learn to be able to think and behave like Jesus, who is the archetypal human being. This becomes a journey of great love and great suffering. These are the two normal and primary paths of transformation into God, preceding all organized religion. This journey leads us to a universal love where we don’t love just those who love us. We must learn to participate in a larger love—divine love.

In this, God utterly leveled the playing field and made grace available from the first moment of creation when “God's Spirit overshadowed the chaos” (Genesis 1:2). Surely the God who created all things was thus available to all creation, starting with the so-called Stone Age people and the natives of all continents, and yes, even the barbarians. I can only assume that they loved and suffered too and thus met God, “who is love” (1 John 4:7-8).

Any journey of great love or great suffering makes us go deeper into our faith and eventually into what can only be called universal truth. Love and suffering are finally the same, because those who love deeply are committing themselves to eventual suffering, as we see in Jesus. And those who suffer often become the greatest lovers.

Second Anniversary of Occupy Movement

September 16 saw the 2nd anniversary of Occupy Wall Street...
here's a type of manifesto from Adbusters, the communication force behind the movement:

Hey all you still breathing out there,

On the second anniversary of OWS, here’s a manifesto to fill your lungs:

A Reboot of the Capitalist Imagination

Look outside your window today and admire how permanent everything is.

Cars faithfully zoom in and out of traffic without end. Financial skyscrapers frame the streets, investing your dollars and cashing your paychecks with ease. People pour out of apartments on their way to the office, to visit friends, to look for work. The social order, all the basic interactions of the day, are predictable, normal, most likely the same as yesterday. The sheer rigidity of the political system is not in question.

Now imagine that it all snaps. That everything you know is turned upside down. The coffee shop is closed. The bank door is shut. People stop following even the most basic prompts.

Looking out the window today, we have that same feeling we had on September 16th, 2011, the day before those first courageous occupiers packed up their tents and made their move on Wall Street. Only this time, as we gaze beyond the glass, there is an assuring upward tilt on our otherwise steady lips. We now have a confidence in this generation that we didn’t have before. There are still curveballs that can shock the financial and psychological order. There is a growing conviction that the things that can happen, will happen. The world is still up for grabs.

Revolution is a Rhizome

What we experienced in 2011 is still reverberating around the globe. Most recently, in Turkeyand Brazil, that feeling in the guts, that the future does not compute, is vibrant as ever. And because of that gnawing anxiety in the depths of an increasing mass of people, the new mode of activism, what Spanish journalist Bernardo Gutierrez calls a “new architecture of protest,” is spreading like a frenzy: what starts out as simple demands – don’t cut the trees, don’t raise the transit fair, don’t institute that corrupt judge – erupts into an all-encompassing desire to reboot the entire machine.

In the coming political horizon you can expect that wherever there is a crack, scandal, teacher strike or pipeline deception, you’ll find a hornet’s nest underneath. When you have a connected generation, all of their unique and individual demands are connected, too. Protest becomes a cornucopia, not a straight path. And the desire is not to destroy the system but to hack it, to re-code it, to commandeer it … to see revolution not as pyramid but as a rhizome … to see the system not as an unchanging text but as an ever changing language of computation, an algorithm.

More than ever we are seeing the actuality of the modern-day truism, “we are all one.” Now, as we have the technology to organize – who cares if the NSA is listening in, in fact we welcome them to listen in and to be inspired – this first-ever global generation will be able to articulate itself more clearly, more viscerally, more intensely and at a frequency like never before. #OccupyGezi becomes the call of Turkey. Brazilian flags are waved on the streets of Lima and Mexico. #idlenomore inspires indigenous sovereignty and environmental movements across the globe.

Take a look out the window today. It wasn’t always this way. It won’t be this way forever.

A Generation Under Pressure

This generation is under pressure. Leading American pundits like David Brooks and Andrew Sorkin laugh us off as ungrateful kids and milquetoast radicals, people who just aren’t willing to work like the previous generation. But these folks just don’t get it. The engine light of humanity has turned on. But no mechanic of the old paradigm can fix it. We’re experiencing a global system failure like never before. But no programmer of the old language can re-write it. The Earth is getting sick. The culture is in terminal decline. Mental illness is the number one cause of lost workplace hours in America. What other indicator does one need? Rejection is not ungratefulness, it’s a beautiful and sincere longing for a sane and sustainable tomorrow. But as the valves are twisted tighter … well … you can see the result everywhere.

Last July, as hundreds of thousands of protesters were marching in cities throughout Turkey and Brazil, Adbusters creative director Pedro Inoue skipped work to join the magic in the streets. He sent us this testimony from the center of São Paulo, a portrait that became the backbone of one of our most spirited and hopeful publications yet. We’ve long been accused of being too negative … yet here our readers saw a bright light:

It’s something you feel when the lover in your arms is laughing and you feel like your heart is going to break because there couldn’t possibly be any more room for good inside. The high begins to float you away. We were walking to the governor’s house, taking time along the way to talk, look at people waving flags from apartment windows, listen to chants coming and going like waves in this sea of people. I looked into this kid’s eyes. He kept talking but I only remember those eight words.

“Man, what a beautiful world we live in,” he said.

I was mesmerized by the shine in his eyes. Sparks. Flashes. Pulses. Bursts of light. When the global revolution finally arrives … it’s going to shine everywhere like that.

The conditions that spurred on the Greek anarchists, the Arab Spring, the Spanish indignados, #Occupywallstreet, the Chilean student revolt, Pussy riot, the Quebec uprising, #idlenomore, Yo Soy 132 in Mexico, and the insurrections in Istanbul, Lima, Bulgaria and São Paulo have only worsened. Inequality is reaching obscene proportions in America and many other nations. There is an ever-greater concentration of wealth, ever-bigger banks, a steady increase of high frequency trading (HFT), derivative confusion and outbursts of rogue financial algorithms that send markets dipping and waning beyond any human control. $1.3 trillion in speculative financial transactions keep swirling around the planet every day. The stage is now set for a much more catastrophic market crash than 2008. And inside each and every one of us, the desire for real is growing: Real economy. Real democracy. Real possibilities. Real humanity.Real leadership. Real horizons. Real interactions. Real things. Real life.

Three Metamemes for the Future

Here at Adbusters, we see three big tactical breakthrough ideas, three metamemes, that have the power to veer this global trainwreck of ours from its date with disaster. Make no mistake, the crash is a brutal world – a barbarian reality. It’s a happening that none of us should seek out joyfully. Yet we cannot just go with the flow, sing with the speed and trust the inertia of our current economic doomsday machine.

The first thing we can do is call for a radical re-think of our global economic system. Unbridled neocon capitalism has been riding the back of humankind without opposition for nearly two generations now. It has provided no answer yet and it has no answer for the most pressing threat of the future, namely climate change. Economics students and heterodox economists must rise up in universities everywhere and demand a shift in the theoretical foundations of economic science. We have to abandon almost everything we thought we knew about the gods of progress, happiness and growth. We have to re-imagine industry, nutrition, communication, transportation, housing and money and pioneer a new kind of economics, a bionomics, a psychonomics, an ecological economics that is up to the job of managing our planetary household.

The second thing we can do is usher in a new era of radical transparency … to add the right to live in a transparent world as a new human right in the constitution of nations and in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Current events in Syria are a perfect example of how secrecy by the major powers of the world leads to confusion and the possibility of catastrophic failure. Assad may get away with a type of murderous appetite not seen since WWII, for no reason other than the fact that America can no longer be trusted to tell the truth. Radical transparency is the only path towards a viable global democracy of the future.

The third thing we can do is take inspiration and learn lessons from a new tactical breakthrough in global activism – the revolution algorithm. The internet has reversed a centuries-old power dynamic. The street now has unprecedented power. Through hacking, rhizomatic organizing, viral memes, it can paralyze cities, bring whole countries to a standstill … protests and uprisings can spook stock markets into plunging 10% in a single day, as happened recently in Turkey, and, if we the people are angry and fired up enough, we can force even the most arrogant presidents and prime ministers to the democratic table.

In the 21st century, democracy could look like this: a dynamic, visceral, never-ending feedback loop between entrenched power structures and the street. In this new model, corporate power will be forever blunted by sustained and clearly articulated demands for new economic, political and environmental policies, for visceral debates and referendums on critical issues, for the revocation of the charters of corporations that break the public trust and for new laws and constitutional amendments on democratic fundamentals like secrecy, corporate personhood and the rules by which nations go to war. Every government department, every minister and the whole political establishment, right down to the think tanks, media pundits and CEOs, will be under the gun, on an almost daily basis, to bend to the ever changing pulse of the people.

As this second anniversary of Occupy passes, perhaps with raging flames, perhaps with only a few sparks, we can take solace in one thing: Our current global system – capitalism – is in terminal decline … and while its corpse is still twitching, our jobs, yours, mine, all of us, are to stay vigilant and to keep working on our own lives … We shy away from the megacorporations, we refuse to buy heavily advertised products, we meticulously seek out toxin-free information, we eat, travel, socialize and live as lightly as we can … we fight for our happiness … we build trust with each other and play the #killcap game at least once every day … and most important, we focus our eyes on the horizon and wait for our next moment to come.

—  Kalle Lasn and Darren Fleet

There's still a long way to go...

We Surrender to Find

A meditation from Richard Rohr:

G.K. Chesterton wrote, “When a person has found something which he prefers to life itself, he [sic] for the first time has begun to live.” Jesus in his proclamation of the kingdom told us what we could prefer to life itself. The Bible ends by telling us we are called to be a people who could say, “Come, Lord Jesus” (Revelation 22:20), who could welcome something more than business as usual and live in God’s Big Picture. We all have to ask for the grace to prefer something to our small life because we have been offered the Shared Life, the One Life, the Eternal Life, God’s Life that became visible for us in this world as Jesus. What we are all searching for is Someone to surrender to, something we can prefer to life itself. Well here is the wonderful surprise: God is the only one we can surrender to without losing ourselves! The irony is that we actually find ourselves, but now in a whole new and much larger field of meaning.

Syria Is About People, Not Politics

Here's Jim Wallis' view on the situation in Syria:

I have been literally disgusted at how “politics” has dominated the media’s response and coverage of the Syria crisis. Millions of lives are at stake, as is the security of one of the most critical regions of the world. But all many of our media pundits can talk about is how this affects politics — i.e., how this could weaken President Obama’s second term or what this might mean for Obamacare.

I heard the same media blathering when I was in London last week when the Syria chemical weapons crisis broke through. “Does the vote in Parliament hurt the Prime Minister and help his opposition?” “Is the Labor Party now up, and the Tory down?”

Who cares?!

It makes us all even more cynical about politics when we see some Republicans, who we know would support military action if it were being proposed by one of their presidents, ardently opposing these strikes because Obama is calling for them. Then we see some Democrats, who always oppose military solutions, supporting this one because their president is in charge. Disgusting. There are massive numbers of human lives involved here, plus a real danger of war engulfing the region and spreading out with weapons of mass destruction present — yet all we can talk about is politics?

So let’s have some honest talk for a change.

First, I believe it is very good news that so many people in America and the rest of the world have now turned away from military solutions. It’s due to more than “war fatigue,” but the growing realization that the tactics of war (and more bombing is always an act of war), are just not working. Pope Francis was one of the first to denounce Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s alleged use of chemical weapons, but also one of the first to speak out against military strikes, reminding us that “violence begets violence.” That is not a sound bite or a generic religious response; it articulates our very recent experiences with ineffective military solutions to terrorism and brutal dictators.

It breaks my heart every time I see the pain of our countless veterans who have lost their limbs — or hear the grief from the families of those thousands who have lost their lives — and juxtapose that with the results of our military solutions in Iraq and Afghanistan. The blame for that clearly does not go to the brave men and women who have sacrificed so much, but to the generals who push and run war, the politicians who keep voting for it, and the profitable war business of the “military-industrial complex” that former general and President Dwight Eisenhower warned us against.

Just yesterday I was with my dear friend Walter Jones, a conservative Republican Congressman from North Carolina, who now calls his vote to support the war in Iraq “a sin.” Walter says he and his colleagues sent young people to die because of the “lies” they were told. Why don’t more members of Congress have the courage to say that now?

“Violence begets violence” is both a factual analysis and the moral judgment of failed military strategies that lead to more destruction and loss of life. Modern warfare makes it easier to kill from a distance without “boots on the ground,” but when we respond to violence with more violence, the cycle of retribution grows. 

Second, we now have a possible alternative to more war in response to Assad’s moral atrocities. On the eve of potential American military strikes against Assad’s regime, a fresh diplomatic alternative emerged — some would say, unintentionally — that could remove chemical weapons from this brutal dictator’s arsenal and put them under international control. And now the world holds its breath, hoping that this new initiative might work.

As we learned from Secretary of State John Kerry’s offhand remark about Assad turning over chemical weapons, there are often other diplomatic solutions to the problems that war claims to solve — but how can governments encourage creative problem solving? And how can the rest of us challenge them to do so? It’s time for a broader vision and bolder thinking when it comes to resolving crises.

What does it look like to “wage peace?”

The immediate crisis in Syria provides an opportunity to rethink our response to conflict. Other alternatives are possible and many have been proven to be very effective when prioritizing international relationships and working together:

• responding to crisis early,
• identifying risks,
• promoting preventive actions,
• using diplomacy,
• strategically deploying development aid,
• building resilient societies by strengthening civil institutions,
• providing security assistance, and
• helping countries and the international community to protect people early on.

Experts in conflict resolution and humanitarian aid agree that that investing in crisis prevention in the form of aid and development is more cost-effective than allowing conflicts to escalate. Research tells us that investing early to prevent conflicts from escalating is, on average, 60 times more cost-effective than intervening after the fact. But, according to the Friends Committee on National Legislation, the world spends just $1 on conflict prevention for every $1,885 it spends on military budgets. That is a habit of war more than the proven effectiveness of war — a habit we need to break.

How can we find deeper and more effective responses to conflicts and humanitarian crises like Syria, Rwanda, and North and South Sudan? There were many points in the past when we could have acted to save lives, instead of ignoring them for so long that the options for became more and more limited.

The civil war in Syria, for example, is a conflict based on ethnic/religious conflict, which often pit bad actors against bad actors, quickly involve civilians caught in the crossfire, and clearly will not be easily resolved by cruise missiles. Understanding those conflicts and employing the tools of conflict resolution is much more likely to be effective than old and simplistic habits of military actions.

Third, conflicts are rooted in our failures to resolve fundamental issues of justice, fairness, and human dignity — and there are few places in the world where those issues are more unresolved than the Middle East. Zbigniew Brzezinski is the only commentator I’ve heard remind us that there will be no solutions to any single crisis in the Middle East without the “big” solutions in the whole region, including our ongoing crisis with Iran and the resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Those are very wise words. And, as we just remembered the 12th anniversary of 9/11, it is time to find the courage to ask how U.S. historical policies and practices in the Middle East have helped to fuel and actually further the extremism that has grown in the Middle East and now threatens the whole world.

It’s time to admit that more missiles and more war not only are poor solutions — but they often only further the recruitment of terrorism. Addressing terrorism, by groups or by heads of state as in Syria, requires broader and more creative strategies.

Thousands of years ago, the apostle Paul advised Christians to feed their enemies, to “heap burning coals on their heads” (Romans 12:20). What would happen if we surprised our enemies by investing in education, particularly for women and girls, technology, infrastructure, and principled economic development in the Middle East?

A growing number of religious leaders agree with the necessity of a determined moral response to the Assad regime in Syria, but we have raised deep questions about the moral and unintended practical consequences of military strikes and the risks of escalating war, especially for more innocent civilians and suffering people. Therefore, we applaud the president’s call to pursue the new international opportunity to remove Assad’s chemical weapons and postpone the threat of military action.

As religious leaders, we are called to peacemaking — not just peace loving — which requires harder and more imaginative work than always falling into old habits of military solutions. Our priorities will be to mobilize global support for the millions of vulnerable Syrian refugees and more millions in jeopardy inside Syria, and to do the hard work of conflict resolution that could lead to the necessary political solution in Syria.

Many in the faith community will now pray and act, believing that there is still time to avoid a military option that could lead to even more bloodshed.

We fundamentally reject the assumption that not initiating military action is doing nothing.

Jim Wallis is president of Sojourners. His book, On God's Side: What Religion Forgets and Politics Hasn’t Learned About Serving the Common Good, is now available. Watch the Story of the Common Good HERE. Follow Jim on Twitter @JimWallis.

Parameters

Here's a link to a sermon on the Parameters we prefer for Jesus to work Under:

We all have preferred parameters that we think Jesus should work within.
We often think that Jesus can only work through certain channels - mainly our own particular tradition...
We limit Jesus to our own understanding...
Jesus is much bigger than our limited vision and parameters...
Grace is not limited!!!

Take a listen (it's only about 10 minutes long)


http://wp.patheos.com.s3.amazonaws.com/blogs/nadiabolzweber/files/2013/08/2013-08-25-NBW-HFASS-Sermon.mp3

A meditation by Richard Rohr:

I promise you that the discovery of your True Self will feel like a thousand pounds of weight have fallen from your back. You will no longer have to build, protect, or promote any idealized self-image. Living in the True Self is quite simply a much happier existence, even though we never live there a full twenty-four hours a day. But you henceforth have it as a place to always go back to. You have finally discovered the alternative to your False Self.

You are like Jacob awakening from sleep and joining the chorus of mystics in every age. “You were here all along, and I never knew it!” he says (Genesis 28:16). He “anoints the stone pillow where this happened, and names it Bethel or the house of God and gate of heaven” (28:17-18). Jacob then carries the presence with him wherever he goes. What was first only there is soon everywhere. The gate of heaven is first of all in one concrete place, better if carried with you, and best when found everywhere. That is the progression of the spiritual life.

Silverstone MotoGP 2013

I've been preparing for my classes (horror) so I haven't got round to blogging my weekend in England.
I clocked up 950 kms on my Yamaha Fazer. (Lille - Dunkerque - Dover - Peterborough - Silverstone - Peterborough  - Dover - Dunkerque - Lille) The weather was excellent and the roads good.
It was also a nice opportunity to meet up with my sister, brother-in-law and nieces - my dad wasn't there as he was on holiday in Scotland.
I had the fortune to watch the Sunday races, the 3 Moto categories; GP (1000cc), 2 (600cc), 3 (125cc)

The highlight of the weekend was the spectacular win by Gloucestershire boy Scott Redding who's leading the Moto2 world championship. Cal Crutchlow came in a disappointing 7th (which was a miracle after he had 3 crashes over the weekend). The race was dominated by the two spaniards; Lorenzo and Marquez - who battled it out to the very end - Jorge Lorenzo winning on the last straight!

I enjoy watching it on the box but to be close to the track, the bikes, noise and atmosphere was so much better...a fantastic (late) birthday present.

My dream machine went well, smooth, great acceleration, and superb handling. I thoroughly enjoyed my adventure. I must admit that my old bones were a little stiff on Tuesday but it was well worth it :)

My bike and stiff old bones...