Happy New Year 2021

Happy New Year 2021

I am not sure how happy this new year is for most of us.  For me, it started like so many of the days before it - gray, rainy and straining my ability to think up new things to do to keep myself from sinking into boredom and lethargy.

But I do feel hope in the new year.  There is a new federal administration coming  in a few weeks that won’t solve all our problems or do everything I want, but will definitely do better than what we have had.  With any luck the daily news won’t be full of a barrage of lies and attacks on our democracy by the very leaders who are supposed to be upholding and advancing our democratic principles.  Maybe some decency will even enter into the public discourse and we will offer meaningful, tangible support to all those who have been hurt by the pandemic and all those who were already hurting due to their immigration status and/or poverty wages.

That’s a lot to ask, it seems.  How can we be the richest country in the world yet have so many people living in intolerable circumstances?  Can it be that we collectively worship wealth more than equality?  Can it be that we care about justice only if it doesn’t cost us anything, or inconvenience us in any way, or limit our own ability to accumulate wealth?

The pandemic ended life as we knew it, and now that I have been lamenting this for over nine months, I am beginning to understand that there is a gift in this, waiting for us to claim it.

The Indian writer Arundhati Roy writes[i]:

What is this thing that has happened to us? It’s a virus, yes. In and of itself it holds no moral brief.  But it is definitely more than a virus. Some believe it’s God’s way of bringing us to our senses. Others that it’s a Chinese conspiracy to take over the world.

Whatever it is, coronavirus has made the mighty kneel and brought the world to a halt like nothing else could.  Our minds are still racing back and forth, longing for a return to “normality,” trying to stitch our future to our past and refusing to acknowledge the rupture. But the rupture exists. And in the midst of this terrible despair, it offers us a chance to rethink the doomsday machine we have built for ourselves. Nothing could be worse than a return to normality.

Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew.  This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next.

We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it.

Dreams in the Time of Fear

In 1998, Zapatista women in Amador Hernadez demanded daily that the Mexican military leave the village communal landholdings. (Photo by Tim Russo)

Dreams in the Time of Fear

The sterility of the bourgeois world will end in suicide or a new form of creative participation.  This is the “theme of our times,” in Ortega y Gasset’s phrase; it is the substance of our dreams and the meaning of our acts.

Modern man likes to pretend that his thinking is wide-awake.  But his wide-awake thinking has led us into the mazes of a nightmare in which the torture chambers are endlessly repeated in the mirrors of reason.  When we emerge, perhaps we will realize that we have been dreaming with our eyes open, and that the dreams of reason are intolerable.  And then, perhaps, we will begin to dream once more with our eyes closed.               --  Octavio Paz, The Labyrinth of Solitude, 1961

I am probably way out of my depth here, but I am going to plunge ahead, anyway.  After all, I am in Mexico, I am a Zapatista and a kind of Catholic, and despite everything, I am a believer.

Believer in what, I expect you to ask.  Well, not in only reason, certainly.  It has its place, I am sure, in the scientific laboratory.  But as Octavio Paz said almost 60 years ago, this path of reason we have been on since the Enlightenment has not brought us to a better place in terms of our social structure, or happiness, or well-being, or ability to simply live without destroying ourselves and the planet.  That’s a pretty monumental failure in my opinion.

I don’t really care who is to blame, and thank god I am not an academic or a philosopher so I don’t have to say all of this is a certain way which will be convincing to someone who will write articles and books and then maybe we will all come to understand this.

No, that is not my job, thankfully.  I am a simple person, highly educated in a certain way, but I know that I know nothing, really, except what I feel in my heart.  And that’s OK with me.  

One of the joys and afflictions of aging is memory loss.  I can’t always readily call up to mind the word or fact I want.  I’m not really interested in debate though I like to hear others well-thought out arguments.  I detest being lectured to, but enjoy giving my opinion to those who are truly open to listening.  I try to understand what my heart is telling me, and work with my shadow self, all while trying to stay present in the Now.

I am a minister by training and experience and calling.  It is what I do and who I am anymore.  I can’t imagine anything else.  And what I do as a minister is listen; I travel and people tell me things; I work as a chaplain and people tell me things; I do what I can for social justice and people tell me things.  And what they say is that we want a better world for ourselves and our children.  That is universal. 

We want adequate food, water, clothing, housing, education, healthcare and the ability to make a living.  We want to have hope for the future.  We want to worship in our own way, and live free from fear of oppression and bodily harm.  We want our children to live and thrive.  We want to fall in love and have a fiesta or two.  We want to laugh from time to time.  

Is that so much to ask?

It seems that it is, for the many people who struggle in poverty conditions in the United States and elsewhere.

Dreams Can Come True

 

Plant Dreaming Deep: The Story of

EarthWorks Community Farm

by The Rev. Connie Yost

December, 2006

                  

EarthWorks Class Fall 2006

            In 2002, while in seminary at Claremont School of Theology, I attended a conference on poverty and heard a young man from inner city Boston named Wil Bullock speak about how at age 15 he became employed by The Food Project, where for one whole summer he worked alongside other youth to grow and sell organic vegetables to the community.  Now he was 22 and running The Food Project’s for-profit business venture – marketing salsa made from their farm’s organic tomatoes, peppers and onions.  He said, “The Food Project changed my life.  It gave me – a kid from a struggling, single parent family – the chance to do meaningful work.  It gave me a way to think about the importance of food and community.  Now I work to advocate for the health of our planet and people.”   He said, “Today I am honored to be part of this movement for change.”

            That speech touched me deeply.  It was one of those aha moments when my entrepreneurial passion joined my passion for social change and gardening, and a practical vision for restoring our connection to each other – especially to our youth – and to the earth was born.