Jennifer Harvey and today, her 5 year old daughter, ask the right question. Something shifts when we can open challenging conversations in clear, respectful ways.
One Little Perfectly (Obvious) Amazing Question
Money and Transformation: Diversity
Fundraising. Money. Economics.
Strange topics for me. I hovered near the bottom of the sales list every year when my Girl Scout Troop sold cookies. I hated my economics class in college. Today, I struggle to keep putting myself out there to market my book, Big Topics at Midnight.
Nevertheless, most of my life has circled around economics, especially fundraising. I am passionate about spiritual transformation, global justice and partnership across our differences, and that journey has lead me directly into money.
Money that I invest, spend or give to organizations working in these areas close to my heart. And money that I invite other to give in support of those organizations.
Last week I signed up for yet another fundraising committee.
Did I mention that I don’t really like fundraising?
This past January, I began my third Be Present, Inc. national 18-month training institute. For my first training, which started in 2003, I was a participant soaking up everything I could learn. Though initially I had a difficult time understanding all that was going on in the room, I knew that something was happening that I’d never seen before. I wanted to learn how to know who I was outside of the distress of anything that stopped me from fully participating in relationships/partnerships with everyone from my husband, Howard, to my grown kids, to friends, and to my work in organizations dear to my heart. I wanted to know how to really listen with my full self. And I deeply desired to be in partnerships that sustained and grew even in the midst of conflict across our many historical divides.*
That training was one of the most important of my life, and was part of the nudge to dive into the writing of Big Topics at Midnight.
In my second training, Be Present at the Table: Effecting Sustainable Change in Philanthropy, and this third one, The National Training Institute on Race, Gender, Power and Class, I have been on the leadership team.
Many organizations talk about the importance of diversity in their programs, but Be Present makes sure this actually happens. Too often, money stops diversity in its tracks: In order to attend, you must either pay the fee or apply for one of a few scholarships.
At Be Present trainings, no one is turned away due to lack of funds. Registration fees are on a sliding scale and support is offered for individuals to creatively raise money to cover these costs.
Stopping there would allow a few more people to attend, but the trainings would remain minimally diverse.
However, in addition to personal fundraising, all of the participants fundraise. That means that everyone, including people like me who have enough funds to easily pay our own way, works together to make sure that all of the registration fees are covered at a level that covers the site/training and organizational leadership costs.
Normally, folks like me are exempt from this fundraising process, leaving the responsibility for ensuring a diverse 
training on the laps of people with limited economic resources.
Be Present understands that every one of us benefits with the full diversity of people in our trainings. Therefore, we work together to make sure that happens.
This is what is required for trainings and conferences to embody a new paradigm of justice and inclusivity.
No matt
er how often I try to turn away from working the money, my commitment to waking up to the big topics and experimenting with keeping my values in line with behavior keeps bringing me back to the money. And fundraising.
Who Knows the Way? Women Do.
The message flows from all corners of the world: This is the moment in history when women need to lead the way.
This clarion call isn’t for women-only leadership. Or the well-worn way of ruling from the top.
“Social justice activists and diverse communities are re-imagining and redefining what leadership means and which faces are at the forefront. Late in the 20th century, scholarship emerged describing new leadership as a collective, shared process that evolves with participants and prioritizes relationship-building.”*a
Relationships are at the heart of leadership. Many women have long understood the importance of living within a complex web of family and friends, colleagues and strangers, ancestors and generations yet unborn.
Be Present Inc.’s Black & Female Leadership Initiative,* highlights the “leadership of Black women in partnering with diverse people to create sustainable change that serves everyone in our communities,” where all voices are welcomed.
Twenty years before I first stepped into Be Present trainings, Lillie Allen offered the groundbreaking Black & Female: What is the Reality?® Workshop at the First National Conference on Black Women’s Health Issues. Starting with black women and girls, Be Present’s work now includes everyone.
Be Present says, “Collective leadership occurs when people come together and mobilize resources in ways that improve their communities. It is an intrinsically inclusive approach to leadership because it requires individuals to cross boundaries of all types –such as race, gender, class, age, religion and culture – as they commit to cooperative learning, joint action, shared responsibility and mutual accountability. Competencies include the capacity to develop oneself and to cross many boundaries: those between individuals and groups, those among organizations and those fostered by issues that divide. It also involves challenging assumptions; expanding perspectives from an emphasis on the “I” to accentuating both “I” and “We”; and bringing people together to address conflicts.” *b
Today’s leadership needs to bridge the big topics that have separated the world into “us” and “them.” Instead, it needs to be collective, grounded in the intersection of “I” and “We.”
Now is the moment for humans to honor all of our wisdom—feminine and masculine—and for leaders to serve in a way that benefits us all.
In my latest YouTube exploration (located on my website’s Gender page), I explore how writing Big Topics at Midnight helped me access parts of myself I understand as feminine wisdom—intuition, body knowing and playful creativity. The more I listened inwardly, the more profoundly I woke up to myself and to the world around me. Only then was I ready to step into the fullness of my own leadership within the collective, Nancy Ann Mathys Thurston style.
*Be Present, Inc., Black & Female Leadership Initiative, Overview and Design, January 2013-December 2017.
All quotes are from this Leadership Initiative. The other citations’ reference information are noted in this Initiative:
*a. A Framework for 21st Century Leadership, http://www.joe.org/joe/1995december/a1.php
A Review of Leadership Theory and Competency Frameworks, http://www2.fcsh.unl.pt/docentes/luisrodrigues/textos/Lideran%C3%A7a.pdf
The Holistic Leader: A Developmental Systemic Approach to Leadership, http://www.julieorlovconsulting.com/docs/holistic_leader_article.pdf
*b. The Collective Leadership Framework: A Workbook for Cultivating and Sustaining Community Change, a publication of the W.K. Kellogg Foundation (2007), www.iel.org/pubs/collective_leadership_framework_workbook.pdf
Grief on the Way to Transformation: My Cell Phone and Violence #2
Why concern myself with human rights abuses in far away places like the Democratic Republic of the Congo? Why make connections between myself and the behavior of a long-ago king, the Belgium’s colonial policies or missionaries’ behavior when, although I personally am outraged by their behaviors, none of these people were my family members?
Why think too much about the fact that materials for my cell phone and wedding ring may have involved injustice and ill treatment of others half way around the globe? For me, my cell keeps me connected to people I care about and my wedding ring is a symbol of a life-long love.
I have no interest in collapsing in shame and despair. That is a dead-end street that feels lousy and helps no one.
Yet, I am no longer willing to keep global horrors at arms length, grateful that since I don’t approve I can wash my hands of any connection to things done by other humans, national and transnational corporations who produce the goods I buy, or “my people” (which includes people who share my Euro-American roots, white skin, Christianity or wealth).
Distancing myself from other’s behavior makes it too easy for me to forget the deep historical roots of today’s world events and the fact that I enjoy the benefits of things grown and produced under horrifying conditions.
Maintaining that distance requires that I go back to sleep. That isn’t an option for me anymore.
However I can’t, nor should I, shoulder the responsibility for all of these actions. Nevertheless, I can stop and grieve. Weep for violence and injustice—for both victims and perpetrators. Let my heart break open for those who suffered and continue to suffer far outside my neighborhood.
My personal grief and the world’s grief meet in my heart. That is where I experience the truth of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s words, “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny.”1
No defensiveness is needed. Only seeing. Grieving. Not getting stuck there, but also not bypassing my need to wail about tragic aspects of human behavior.
Fear is fanned on every street corner and news show. Despair for the enormity of the environmental destruction and human inequity feels like it could easily undermine our capacity to cope with daily life.
The only path I know of that moves toward transformation, runs right through the middle of grief. “To let ourselves feel anguish and disorientation as we open our awareness to global suffering is part of our spiritual ripening. … Out of darkness, the new is born.”2
Against all logic, this path leads me to joy and gratitude. Standing solidly in the center of both grief and joy, I find clarity about my place in the global world. I am prompted to continue to ask myself, “What’s next? What is my next step to further align my behavior with my values?” Not from a place of despair, shame or over-responsibility but from a solid knowing of the interconnectedness of us all.
Paradox again. I always return here. The more I can learn to hold grief and joy, the greater my capacity to live life fully in ways that serve us all.
1. Martin Luther King, Jr. Letter from a Birmingham Jail, April 16, 1963
2. Joanna Macy and Molly Young Brown. Coming Back to Life: Practices to Reconnect Our Lives, Our World (British Columbia: New Society Publishers, 1998) Pg 45
My Cell Phone and Violence: #1
My cell phone.
My Belgian roots.
My membership in a Christian church.
My wedding band.
The genocide and massive use of rape and sexual torture in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Rwanda and Burundi are connected to these four things. The violence in that land is not a far off horror that has nothing to do with me, nor is it an innate character flaw within the Africans themselves.
The foundation for these atrocities has its roots in “my people” and me.
“In 1885 Belgian King Leopold ‘founded’ the land he called the Congo Free State (later Rwanda and Burundi) as his own private colony. Booker T. Washington wrote an article, “Cruelty in the Congo Country,” where he reported, ‘There was never anything in American slavery that could be compared to the barbarous conditions existing today [1904] in the Congo Free State.’1 In 1908 King Leopold turned the colony over to Belgium. During the years of Leopold’s rule, the population of the Congo declined from an estimated twenty-five million to less than nine million.”2
Belgium assigned the responsibility for education of the Congolese to the missionaries, staunch supporters of colonialism who were interested in educating men who wanted to go into the priesthood. The first Congolese citizen admitted to a university without heading to the priesthood happened in 1954—the year I was born. “By the eve of Congolese independence in June 1960, the aspiring nation had only sixteen African university graduates out of a population of more than thirteen million. There were no Congolese engineers or physicians.
“Perhaps most crucially, the lack of centralized education left the new nation in a stunted state of growth. Across the African continent, educated Africans had often played a key role in the independence movements, and these leaders had then stepped in to govern the new nations which emerged in the 1960s.”3 Due to Belgian colonial education practices, however, this critical foundation was never built.
Limits to education weren’t the only blows dealt the Congolese by the Belgian missionaries. “The most important legacy of colonialism in Rwanda and Burundi involved the Belgians’ obsession with racial, ethnic classification. The Belgians believed that the Tutsi ethnic group in Rwanda was racially superior to the Hutu ethnic group because the Tutsis had more ‘European’ features.”4 They turned ethnic differences, which had long been present, into gasoline-soaked kindling for a bonfire of war.
Though this region is among the poorest in the world, it is resource rich. “It contains 2/3rds of the world’s remaining rainforests, and vast mineral wealth including cobalt, coltan (used in cell phones and other high tech equipment, Congo is home to 80% of the world’s coltan reserves) copper, cadmium, petroleum, diamonds, gold, silver, zinc, manganese, tin, germanium, uranium, radium, bauxite, iron ore, and coal.” 5 Greed for these natural resources was also a major influence in the Belgian, and later global, treatment of this country.
Millions have been killed. Hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people, mainly women, have been brutally raped and tortured. The land has also been raped through extraction of minerals such as coltran.
Don’t get me wrong. I am not taking personal responsibility for actions done generations ago by one of my homeland’s cultural ancestors. I am not refusing to own a cell phone or wear my wedding ring. However, I don’t want to pretend that I don’t see the connections between my life and these horrors.
For decades, my heart has ached for the women who have been brutally raped, their bodies and lives ripped apart. I am grateful that in 2011, many, including Eve Ensler, stepped in to open the “City of Joy” in Bukavu, Democratic Republic of Congo, to serve these women.
Only recently have my thoughts turned to the perpetrators of this violence. How does a human being’s behavior become so twisted that he is capable of torturing, raping, brutalizing and killing? What can be done for the men who have perpetrated this heinous violence? How can there be a turning of the tide within these countries with extreme violence still active in so many men?
What can be done about the foreign and transnational corporations, and the people who run them, who have allowed their lust for riches to lead to violence and economic devastation of people native to this resource-rich land?
I don’t know how to stop these horrors, but I won’t pretend that I don’t see the ways that my cell phone, ancestral homeland, faith tradition and wedding ring have connections to unimaginable horrors.
I woke up to the paradoxes in our world today and won’t go back to sleep. In very concrete ways, I am not disconnected from anyone or anyplace on earth. I pray that my life, and my small and large everyday choices, will support the Great Turning so needed in our world today.
1. “The Booker T. Washington Papers,” University of Illinois Press (1904): 8, 85, http://www.historycooperative.org/btw/Vol.8/html/85.html.
2. Thurston, Nancy, Big Topics at Midnight: A Texas Girl Wakes Up to Race, Gender, Power and Class (Portland: Rosegate Press, 2012), 325
3. http://www.ultimatehistoryproject.com/belgian-congo.html
4. http://geography.about.com/od/belgiummaps/a/Belgian-Colonialism.htm
We Confess
I have ashes smeared on my forehead. They were placed there with the words, “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”
It is a good spiritual practice to live fully, whole-heartedly, remembering that we, along with everyone we love, will die.
But that is not the main reason Ash Wednesday is my favorite liturgy in the Episcopal Church. Since my first trip to Haiti, the service for this first day of Lent had a special place in my heart. It is the only time when the Episcopal community asks for forgiveness for our cultural sins.
This week, confession and asking for forgiveness as a nation feels particularly important.
Yesterday, I went to an Oregon Humanities Conversation Project talk on “Alternatives to Incarceration,” led by Walidah Imarisha. I learned disturbing statistics. Our prison population has increased 370% since 1970 (when I was in high school). If it hadn’t been for the “War on Drugs,” 70% of the people now in prison would NOT be there. We lock up more of our citizens than any other country in the world. Ironically, the amount of violent crime today is similar to what it was in 1950 (four years before I was born).
Incarceration is just one hot issue. If I started to list all of the cultural sins that are rampant in our world right now, I’d be writing for a very long time. With such a heavy heart, I headed to church on this Ash Wednesday to join my voice to others praying for forgiveness:
We confess to you, Lord …
Our self-indulgent appetites and ways, and our exploitation of other people …
Our intemperate love of worldly goods and comforts. …
Accept our repentance, Lord, for the wrongs we have done:
For our blindness to human need and suffering, and our indifference to injustice and cruelty …
For our prejudice and contempt toward those who differ from us,
For our waste and pollution of your creation, and our lack of concern for those who come after us. … 1
These words of confession spoke the things I so long to address in my life and in the world. Often Christians focus on personal sin but ignore institutional and organizational sin that we all participated in together.
Not me.
Not today.
I ask for forgiveness for myself and for my country. That is the first step toward transformation.
1 “Ash Wednesday Liturgy,” The Book of Common Prayer, (New York: Seabury Press, 1979), page 268
Reacting rather than Answering
Comedy is often based on quick jabs and rapid-fire remarks. Answering serious questions, however, takes a bit longer.
An interviewer asked Jerry Seinfeld a question: why most of the guests on his Web TV series Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee were white men.
Seinfeld got pissed off and rushed headlong into deflecting the question. “Who cares? People think [comedy] is the census or something, it’s gotta represent the actual pie chart of American.”
Many media reports followed suit.
“His job is to make people laugh, not fill quotas.”
He is “entitled to prioritize humor over diversity.”
Don’t forget that Seinfeld has lots of black comedian friends
Why don’t non-white men and women of all colors just create their own shows?
The usual reactive fare.
The conversation could have gone another direction. What would have happened if Seinfeld stopped to ask himself why he thought that 21 of the 25 guests chosen to be on his show had been white men?
The depth of my reaction to Seinfeld’s rant, however, wasn’t about him. It was about me.
I’ve spent far too many years reacting and getting offended when someone asks me a challenging question, especially one that I fear casts me in a light that is diametrically opposed to my stated values.
I may feel justified in my defensiveness, but my response doesn’t make any changes in me or in the world around me.
I am done with that. I am working like crazy to take responsibility for myself, to keep up my curiosity and to remember my commitment for a more just and joyful world.
I wanted Seinfeld to do what I didn’t do for so long.
Listen to the question.
Turn inward and try to stay open, without judgment or shame—both of which will stop us in our tracks. See what honest answer emerges.
Sometimes I hadn’t thought about it before. I was still asleep as to how race (or class or gender) influenced my choices.
Sometimes I was behaving in ways that felt comfortable or familiar.
Sometimes prejudice was lurking in the shadows.
Sometimes though my behavior mimicked injustice in the culture around me, in truth, I was acting justly.
Seinfeld could have stopped to understand his authentic answer underneath his bluster. Likewise, the interviewer could have wondered why his BuzzFeed Brews audience was predominantly white men and women, as the angry Seinfeld had pointed out. For me, I want to know my own truth.
We each get to make our own choices, hopefully after reflecting inwardly.
However, it becomes more complex when the perspective widens from the personal to the culture milieu. In fields like comedy, white males have more access to performances, especially lucrative gigs. The same is true for institutional or political appointments. Or philanthropic foundation grants going to pet projects of the (often white male) donors.
We live in a world with unequal access to power and position. For someone who has access, like Seinfeld, to say that he “has no interest in race or anything else” means that he is still unaware, or doesn’t care, how race and gender continue to unjustly influence opportunities available to equally qualified people.
In 1987 I became a charter member of the National Museum of Women in the Arts. When I saw their first exhibit of women’s art through the generations, I was stunned. Though the quality of the exhibit was equal to any I’d seen in a wide array of museums, I’d never heard of most of the artists. The standard curator’s excuse, like the one Seinfeld used, “if you are funny [or a good artist], I’m interested” doesn’t account for the extensive, high quality art/comedy of non-whites and females that has been overlooked for thousands of years.
Seinfeld, and all of us, have a right to make our own choices. But we live in a world that is still deeply divided. To react, rather than seriously ponder challenging questions, comes at a high cost to us all.
When we can wake up to ourselves and to the world around us, we can notice the rich variety of comedy, art or leadership that comes from the full diversity of who we are as humans. With exposure we can grow to appreciate something more than what comes through others who look like us.
Rising Up With a Little Kick-Ass Help
I know Nancy signed her name to this blog, but mind you she wouldn’t be speaking today if it wasn’t for me—Hectate. I’ve been at her side all her life, but she didn’t notice me. She was sweet, nice and very helpful.
A few years ago I took hold of her ovaries, woke her up and she’s been rising every since.
Let me introduce myself. Straight-laced as Nancy was, she always had her little flare so she messed with my real name. When she first noticed me, she thought I was Hestia, the goddess of the home and the sacred fires. Nope. I was Hecate, wild goddess of crossroads like birth and death—those big paradoxes that make most humans quake in their boots. As much as her Texas roots have embarrassed Nancy, she was clear that I was the sort of strong-willed woman she recognized, like Sue Tipps Mathys, her native Texan mother. And, good as she is with words, she’s a lousy speller. My Greek name is Hecate. Nancy called me “Hectate.”
That works for me. All I wanted to do was to wake up good girl Nancy, light the flame of her heart and send her strong and clear into the world. Women have been on the sidelines for far too long. These midnight times for our Earth—the planet, people and creatures—are hopeless without the rising of feminine wisdom. Nancy’s always had that, but it was tamed and flimsy.
I like women who stand up and take charge. Women who lasso the lies of our culture and fan the flames of clarity. You women have been fed a pack of lies that now bounce around in your head. Quit hating your body, trying to fit into an airbrushed ideal. Life is too short and you are too beautiful.
Start thinking with your heart and your gut. All of that good head learning you got in school is still there, but balance it with your body’s smarts. Quit limping around with just part of your clarity.
Life isn’t a forced march. Quit trying to do everything all at once. Listen for what is yours to do next, then do it. Simple as pie.
Smash any box that tries to contain you or your thinking. Life is always bigger, broader, deeper. Keep the boundary of your heart soft and subtle so it can grow and grow and grow.
Remember what we are all here for—to live justly, joyfully and equitably—to build a world for ourselves today and generations yet to come. Keep your focus there.
Let your emotions flow. Anger. Delight. Sadness. Joy. Grief. Disappointment. They all have something to tell you. Ride their waves; dive deeply underneath to see the treasures they hold. Then let them go and act from the wisdom they gave you.
Pay attention. Quit being disrespectful in your words and stop tolerating disrespect from others. Check out your assumptions. Honor yourself and the others enough to treat everyone with respect.
Drop those scales over your eyes. Your experience isn’t everyone’s experience. Jump outside your own skin regularly and listen carefully. We can learn from the world’s diversity.
Be too much. Too loud. Too excited. We need to be respectful of those around us, but holding it in all the time leads to a constipated life.
Know who you are—the stuff you love about yourself—and do well. Your questions. Your burps. Your “good” and “bad” habits. Wrap your arms around the whole shebang. Then there is no need to be reactive or offended when someone says something about you. Either it is true or not true. You know. Quit quaking in your boots.
Sometimes you say or do something that looks like the messed up behavior in our crumbling world. We have millennium of crazy behaviors around stuff like money, skin color, genitalia, brain smarts and religion that has seeped into us all. When you get caught, notice it then change. When it just looks familiar to that smelly stuff, but isn’t, know the difference and keep moving forward.
Maybe you weren’t as far gone as Nancy was. Either way, I hope my little tidbits were helpful.
Now I’ll let Nancy say a few words.
Hectate came and never left. In my wildest imagination, I’ve always wanted to stand with billions rising for justice. Hectate stepped in and used her kick-ass ways to teach me how to do that in every cell in my body. Thank you, Hectate.
I am grateful to Hedgebrook for posting this blog on their website in February 2014. I love their byline– “Hedgebrook supports visionary women writers whose stories and ideas shape our culture now and for generations to come.” It is what our world needs now.