Faith and courage are easiest on Sundays in church, harder on Tuesday when you witness armed people in tactical gear assaulting and abducting your neighbor’s husband as he returns home from work.
Mr. Trump’s private militia (ICE) never phones ahead, never allows us time to steel ourselves and plan our individual or group method of confrontation. Therefore, it’s important that we each have a simple plan, as an individual or a group. (The American Pamphleteer on Substack, and state or national ACLU’s provide information regarding the victim’s rights, your rights, and what information you can legally demand from the perpetrators.) The plan should include calling 911 to report an assault and abduction in progress, recording the perpetrators, their vehicles, and license plates.
How do we find our courage in the midst of this Administration’s violent, dehumanizing, and threatening kabuki dance against our siblings, when our adrenaline is surging? We turn to our faith. Center on the Holy Spirit. When we are confronted with injustice or cruelty, acknowledging the Holy Spirit’s presence can ground and calm us, help us focus on the challenge confronting us. I see faith as a conduit to the Holy Spirit, and the Holy Spirit as the source of courage and trust. I believe that, with the Spirit, no one is alone when confronting wrong or evil committed against another human being.
Every evening, I pray that each of us is able to keep our faith (whatever form that faith takes) and the strength of the Holy Spirit present in our hearts and, in our minds, a rough plan to follow should we encounter illegal/immoral ICE activity as we go through our daily routines in this brave new world. God bless us and keep us all safe.
Rev, Trimble is right. Today and going forward we are called to engage in moral action, we are called to provide sanctuary, we are called to defuse cooperation with unjust laws. We are being called to resist.
Such sadness is here, such terrible grief, as well as great fear. Thank you for this post. As I seek balance for response rather than reaction, I'm re-reading "Gandhi on Non-violence, a selection edited and introduced by Thomas Merton". Also Barbara Deming's "prisons that could not hold" and Pam McAllister's "you can't kill the spirit" (part of the Barbara Deming memorial series). They give accounts of people working non-violently, effectively, withstanding and bearing the suffering that often comes with that. And always working to hold to the truth, not falling into hatred but striving to be consistently fair and just: loving. It does call for tremendous fortitude and cannot be done alone. We need one another for this in so many mundane as well as spiritual ways.
I’m heartened by your response, Cress. And thank you for the reading tips! Nan Merrill’s “Praying the Psalms,” is a cornerstone for me. I’ve just finished Greg Boyle’s “Cherished Belonging,” and I’m halfway through Richard Rohr’s “The Tears of Things.” And I strive to read good fiction daily.
Thank you for this. Thank you also for continuing to share your reflections along the way during this difficult time.
I am led to reflect further that the so-called Christian churches enable and are complicit with fascism now - as they were in Bonhoffer’s time.
And recently someone pointed out that here in the USA the Democrats helped to build the throne Donald Trump is sitting on. That throne has been centuries in-the-making. That throne will not go away without radical transformation in the way we live.
Our civilization is ecocidal and genocidal. We thrive by killing off the rest of life.
This is why we are already living well into a rapid, anthropogenic extinction event. Our intentional ignorance keeps us from looking in the mirror. I am reminded of the story of the Portrait of Dorian Gray.
These terrible events happening now are no surprise, and follow quite naturally from our theology, which is rooted in the imperial imagination of domination rather than in the prophetic imagination of presence-with.
Will our churches learn the meaning of the word “repent”?
Repentance will mean learning to see “abundance” as mutuality and reciprocity with all of our relations on the planet.
I recently read Darren Dochuk’s “Annointed With Oil: How Christianity and Crude Made Modern America.” And also Paul Hawken’s “Carbon: the Book of Life”.
I see how our churches have been seduced and bullied into becoming “arm candy to empire”.
Becoming beloved communities of sanctuary and resistance will require true repentance and enlightenment - a changing of our hearts and minds.
The wheel that is crushing the life out of the biosphere is ecocidal civilization. Our churches are a part of that - American fascism is a symptom of that deeper disease.
David Suzuki recently stated - in a public interview - that “it is too late” to count on the institutions that ought to have been making a way for life. The ecocidal civilization has no motivation to make a way for life on earth.
The system is designed to convert living wealth into a pile of toxins and useless currencies. You start with a living Creation, and end with dead soil, poison water, and a poison atmosphere.
“When the last tree has been cut down, the last fish has been caught, and the last river has been poisoned, only then will you realize that you cannot eat money.”
Christians largely believe and act as though when we destroy and dispose of this planet, we get handed a new one by Jesus. But we rely on technological fantasies and bright green lies - “the electrification of everything” - as our real faith.
I currently believe that while we must exist within the system as it predictably self-terminates, we face tsunamis of change that will reduce the human population to a tiny fraction of what it is now.
May we see our own complicity and turn away from our role as ecocidal, genocidal co-conspirators.
Faith and courage are easiest on Sundays in church, harder on Tuesday when you witness armed people in tactical gear assaulting and abducting your neighbor’s husband as he returns home from work.
Mr. Trump’s private militia (ICE) never phones ahead, never allows us time to steel ourselves and plan our individual or group method of confrontation. Therefore, it’s important that we each have a simple plan, as an individual or a group. (The American Pamphleteer on Substack, and state or national ACLU’s provide information regarding the victim’s rights, your rights, and what information you can legally demand from the perpetrators.) The plan should include calling 911 to report an assault and abduction in progress, recording the perpetrators, their vehicles, and license plates.
How do we find our courage in the midst of this Administration’s violent, dehumanizing, and threatening kabuki dance against our siblings, when our adrenaline is surging? We turn to our faith. Center on the Holy Spirit. When we are confronted with injustice or cruelty, acknowledging the Holy Spirit’s presence can ground and calm us, help us focus on the challenge confronting us. I see faith as a conduit to the Holy Spirit, and the Holy Spirit as the source of courage and trust. I believe that, with the Spirit, no one is alone when confronting wrong or evil committed against another human being.
Every evening, I pray that each of us is able to keep our faith (whatever form that faith takes) and the strength of the Holy Spirit present in our hearts and, in our minds, a rough plan to follow should we encounter illegal/immoral ICE activity as we go through our daily routines in this brave new world. God bless us and keep us all safe.
Rev, Trimble is right. Today and going forward we are called to engage in moral action, we are called to provide sanctuary, we are called to defuse cooperation with unjust laws. We are being called to resist.
Such sadness is here, such terrible grief, as well as great fear. Thank you for this post. As I seek balance for response rather than reaction, I'm re-reading "Gandhi on Non-violence, a selection edited and introduced by Thomas Merton". Also Barbara Deming's "prisons that could not hold" and Pam McAllister's "you can't kill the spirit" (part of the Barbara Deming memorial series). They give accounts of people working non-violently, effectively, withstanding and bearing the suffering that often comes with that. And always working to hold to the truth, not falling into hatred but striving to be consistently fair and just: loving. It does call for tremendous fortitude and cannot be done alone. We need one another for this in so many mundane as well as spiritual ways.
I’m heartened by your response, Cress. And thank you for the reading tips! Nan Merrill’s “Praying the Psalms,” is a cornerstone for me. I’ve just finished Greg Boyle’s “Cherished Belonging,” and I’m halfway through Richard Rohr’s “The Tears of Things.” And I strive to read good fiction daily.
Thanks also, for the reading recommendations!
We are holding tanks of love....let the human spirit go free
Thank you for this. Thank you also for continuing to share your reflections along the way during this difficult time.
I am led to reflect further that the so-called Christian churches enable and are complicit with fascism now - as they were in Bonhoffer’s time.
And recently someone pointed out that here in the USA the Democrats helped to build the throne Donald Trump is sitting on. That throne has been centuries in-the-making. That throne will not go away without radical transformation in the way we live.
Our civilization is ecocidal and genocidal. We thrive by killing off the rest of life.
This is why we are already living well into a rapid, anthropogenic extinction event. Our intentional ignorance keeps us from looking in the mirror. I am reminded of the story of the Portrait of Dorian Gray.
These terrible events happening now are no surprise, and follow quite naturally from our theology, which is rooted in the imperial imagination of domination rather than in the prophetic imagination of presence-with.
Will our churches learn the meaning of the word “repent”?
Repentance will mean learning to see “abundance” as mutuality and reciprocity with all of our relations on the planet.
I recently read Darren Dochuk’s “Annointed With Oil: How Christianity and Crude Made Modern America.” And also Paul Hawken’s “Carbon: the Book of Life”.
I see how our churches have been seduced and bullied into becoming “arm candy to empire”.
Becoming beloved communities of sanctuary and resistance will require true repentance and enlightenment - a changing of our hearts and minds.
The wheel that is crushing the life out of the biosphere is ecocidal civilization. Our churches are a part of that - American fascism is a symptom of that deeper disease.
David Suzuki recently stated - in a public interview - that “it is too late” to count on the institutions that ought to have been making a way for life. The ecocidal civilization has no motivation to make a way for life on earth.
The system is designed to convert living wealth into a pile of toxins and useless currencies. You start with a living Creation, and end with dead soil, poison water, and a poison atmosphere.
“When the last tree has been cut down, the last fish has been caught, and the last river has been poisoned, only then will you realize that you cannot eat money.”
Christians largely believe and act as though when we destroy and dispose of this planet, we get handed a new one by Jesus. But we rely on technological fantasies and bright green lies - “the electrification of everything” - as our real faith.
I currently believe that while we must exist within the system as it predictably self-terminates, we face tsunamis of change that will reduce the human population to a tiny fraction of what it is now.
May we see our own complicity and turn away from our role as ecocidal, genocidal co-conspirators.