Spirituality

March 20, 2014

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

5. http://www.healafrica.org/learn/history-of-the-congo/

March 10, 2014

What do you do? Take 1

I used to hate that question. I’ve rarely had a simple answer. Physical Therapist worked for a decade. Mother. Retreat Leader. Board Member. None of those sounded normal and solid enough to be a “real” answer.

I could have said I was a novice spiritual revolutionary, but that never occurred to me in my younger years. Or activist-from-the-heart in training. Or spiritual seeker. Or visionary.

But I was milder then, trying hard to navigate being a nice, normal girl when I was so much more. Trying to understand the connections I saw all around me while navigating the explosive steam of compassion and justice that hissed around inside of me.

Since I turned 50, I’ve been trying to walk right into the middle of Marianne Williamson’s challenge,

“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It’s not just in some of us; it’s in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.”*

Courage is not conquering fear. I am still afraid. But I walk forward anyway. Boldness today is needed to serve our world for today and tomorrow.

“What do I do?” you might ask.

I am a stretcher of the boundaries. A catalyst. An awakener. A fire starter. A revolutionary. Warrior from the heart. Pioneer. Leader. Minister. Priestess. A root healer. A social activist seeking to change consciousness. A connector.

And I am only one of many.

What do you do?

Remember, playing it small doesn’t serve any of us. Be bold, even when your knees shake or part of you cowers at your audacity.

Future generations are waiting to see how bold we are willing to be.

*Marianne Williamson, A Return To Love: Reflections on the Principles of A Course in Miracles, pages 190-191.

March 5, 2014

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

December 28, 2013

Death in a Season of Birth

The call came in the middle of the night—a shrill ring startling me awake from a dead sleep.

It was Dad calling to tell me that my mother was “gone.” He couldn’t yet say the stark word “dead.”

That call came twenty-seven years ago last week. This holiday, I heard of one death after another—Richard, Skipper, Gabe, Brian, Shirley, Nelson and people whose names I only know as Dad, Mom and Grandpa. None of these people were in my inner circle of friends and family, yet all were people I cared about or were loved by them.

Each of these deaths involved phone calls no one wants to make or receive. Death here in the season where we celebrate birth.

I know the light is returning on this side of the winter solstice, but in the dark of night, the ever-present reality of death has settled deep in my bones.

In this upcoming year I will turn sixty, the age of my mother when she died.

My knee aches. Howard’s hearing diminishes. What will aging take from us?

Death and loss pace just outside the door of my life, and at this moment I’m afraid that someone I love dearly might be next.

Several years ago, I selected songs to honor Howard’s and my thirty-five years of marriage. One, “Nothing Lasts Forever,” was based on a poem by the mystic Rabindranath Tagore:

Nothing lasts forever…

keep that in mind,

and love.

To live with an open heart, loving others and life itself, will lead to the sharp pain of grief when death comes. And yet, paradoxically, full-hearted loving despite the fact that “nothing lasts forever,” it is only path to joy.

It takes courage to be awake and present in our lives. Rather than push my fear of loss away too quickly, I sit in the dark of night and let it soften me. Now is what we have each been given. Tomorrow is mystery.

Writing is one of the ways I make sense of my life and my feelings. Putting these words on paper didn’t make the fear evaporate, but it reminded me once again of the solid foundation that trust and courage offer all of me, including my loving heart and frightened bones. Someday soon, my fears will settle as they have many times before.

When that happens, I will remember that life and death are two sides of the same coin. And both are normal and safe.

December 23, 2013

I’d Like to Thank the Academy

My favorite part of the Academy Awards is the thank you speeches.* I love watching someone take the stage amid cheers, take a deep breath and say a big grateful wow to all the work, support, energy and heart that led to that moment.

I’m not sure I’ll ever be on an awards show, but I think now, more than ever, I need to pause and give a big grateful wow.

Our world seems to be rocking and rolling and groaning. Fear spreads like wildfire across the surface of our globe and narrow bricks wobble beneath our economic towers of Babel. But there are deeper truths and wider foundations.

And the way to find them is through gratitude.

So here’s my acceptance speech, my list of thank yous and a big, grateful wow:

* I am grateful for the perspective of the horizon, that bigger picture that contains the close up details of each day. When the rocking and rolling and groaning of the world around me get loud and crazy, I can raise my eyes to the place where heaven meets earth and remember the long term view: generations in the future who will reap the harvest I help plant today; the mystery of Spirit that transcends and infuses everything; the new sprouts that grow even as the old crumbles.

* Unable to see the path ahead on this journey of life, I am grateful for my growing courage and tr

ust to take that next step. Mary Jo Leddy’s poem sings in my heart:

“We walk on the waters of gratitude

knowing there is nothing there

trusting there will be enough

to go on.” **

* I am grateful for this flesh and blood and bone body that I was given at birth. She carries me through every day. When I slow down to notice, I feel the tingle in my feet when I am grounded, a cloud of confusion when something smells “off” and I need to pay close attention to what is happening around me or a tickle on the top of my head when something feels right on. My wise body has much to tell me every time I stop to listen.

* I am grateful for paradoxes that meet me at every turn, and keep showing up even when I fight them. Paradoxes like living personally and globally at the same time or my conflict about putting my book in an online bookstore while supporting independent bookstores (as I spoke about in this blog).

* I am deeply grateful for every one of you and to others around this globe. We were born to be in community, to work together across our diversity. When each of us contributes, we have everything we need for equity, justice, joy and creativity.

* I am grateful for my partnership with Harvest Time , Be Present, Inc. and Community Wholeness Venture where I have both received and given in one smooth, continuous motion. And for Khara Scott-Bey, illustrator for Big Topics at Midnight and the drawing above. Her creativity invites me to delight and ponder. Working together with partners like these gives me great hope for the world.

So there’s my list. If you’re in the mood to share, I’d love to read yours.

Now is the time to celebrate how far we’ve journeyed, to fan the flames of creativity and joy that fuel our sight and work, to drop to our knees with a big grateful wow, knowing, as Rumi wrote, “There are a thousand ways to kneel and kiss the ground.’”

Blessings to each of you as the light of 2013 fades to a close and soon gives way to the dawn of a new year.

*This was a newsletter I wrote last month. As the year nears its end, I find that gratitude fills my heart. I am posting it here for those who missed it in the avalanche of emails that filled our inboxes just after Thanksgiving.

**Leddy, Mary Jo, Radical Gratitude (New York: Orbis Books, 2002) pg 38

December 4, 2013

What Is Your Theory of Social Change, and What Does That Have to Do with Money?

Rose Feerick Director of Harvest Time — Rosemary Feerick
Director of Harvest Time and author of this guest blog

“What is your theory of social change and what does that have to do with money?”

That was a key question that emerged on the first day of Harvest Time’s annual board retreat. Knowing that our plans need to be anchored in a clear vision, John Bloom asked the big picture question.

A rich silence ensued. Then, for the first time, I was able to see and understand clearly what it is that we do at Harvest Time and why.

I remembered a talk at the 2012 SoCap conference in San Francisco. John Fullerton of Capital Institute (www.capitalinstitute.org) distinguished between three paradigms of social change.

One way that people and organizations try to effect social change, Fullerton said, is by working to solve specific problems. For example, we work to solve hunger in a particular community by creating a local food bank.

Another way to create change is to shift systems. For instance, we might work to prevent the injustice and environmental destruction that are consequences of capitalism by working to shift capitalism so those problems do not occur.

Yet another approach involves trying to shift consciousness.

For years I have known that Harvest Time is not a social activist organization. Our goal is NOT to move x amount of money to organizations that serve people who are poor (though that often happens as a byproduct of our work). And the organizational impulse to move to “scale” in order to have a wider impact has never grabbed my passion. Why? Because what I am most interested in is shifting consciousness, and I believe that happens best in small, committed, authentic spiritual community.

But how does this make social change?

My fundamental assumption is that Christ is present and active in history, working, among other ways, through individuals whose hearts have been opened and transformed. For me, the most effective way that we can transform society is by supporting people who seek their own conversion so that they can participate in the flow of Christ’s love and energy as it moves through the world.

This support begins with helping people learn to recognize the presence of Christ moving through their lives and hearts. That is a function of spiritual direction and of spiritual practice.

We then create opportunities for people to support each other as each finds the courage to participate in that presence. We need this support because the way of Christ’s love is not the ordinary way of the human ego or of human culture. In other words, there is a transformation process that needs to happen if we seek to align our lives with Christ, and in this transformation we need one another’s help.

That is the work of authentic Christian community and of transformative spiritual practices. When hearts are converted and open, the Holy Spirit can then flow with ease through the individual into their relationships and communities as love.

The conversion need not be dramatic. God can work through any of us at any time, no matter where we are on the journey. But I do believe that the more we are able to open our hearts, the more effectively we can be channels of God’s love.

I love the way Rumi puts it: “Our task is not to find love, but to find everything in us that blocks love and remove it.”

For us at Harvest Time, money is the practice place. It is a great practice place, because money sits at the intersection between the person and society. It is exactly that place where so much individual and collective shadow is acted out in our culture. If you want to find your blocks to love, start paying attention to money and your relationship to it.

And there is more. Because money is a symbol of our interconnectedness, the more we are able to shift our attitudes and relationship to money, the more the love of God can move into the world through us through our money.

What we do with money, what we value through it – how much we hold onto, how much and how we give, how we spend, how we invest – all of this changes as our hearts change and are opened. Money becomes more and more an expression of love and an agent of grace as God works through the converted heart.

This is why I think what we do in Harvest Time — gathering people in small circles to talk about money and engage in spiritual practice — is key to social change.

What do you think? What is your theory of social change?

This blog was written by Rosemary Feerick, Director of Harvest Time. Seeking help to align my heart and spirit and money, Harvest Time was one of the first places Howard and I turned after my family financial inheritance came to me. We have been in one of their retreat circles ever since, and both of us have served on the board (that is still true for me). Harvest Time is a ministry of “Christians of wealth engaging with money as a doorway to spiritual transformation.”

November 21, 2013

One Author’s Paradox

I want to live my values, yet so many of my choices are complex, multi-layered. I will never be able to avoid this paradox, but it is important to me to keep asking the questions, noticing my inconsistencies, always seeking to bring my values more in alignment with my actions.

For example, I buy locally; shop predominantly in neighborhood stores; support small businesses; and hire individuals doing a service or producing something that flows from their hearts.

These are important values of mine.

And yet a huge online bookstore is also part of my life. Big Topics at Midnight, both paperback and eBook versions, are carried in that store-without-walls. Occasionally, I purchase a book there myself.

This cyberbookstore is often where book buyers turn to when looking for a specific book—including mine. Their selection is vast. Drive-less shopping is convenient. Prices are often discounted.

And this business is hurting local bookstores.

How can I reconcile this paradox?

Initially, I begrudgingly put my book on their virtual shelves. I didn’t want to be there, yet I wanted my book to be available there. Whenever I could, I directed people to buy the book from my website, local bookstores or at my Big Topics Conversation workshops. I was on their “shelves” but I didn’t want to promote them by advertising that fact.

In essence, I was trying to go two directions at the same moment. Stepping in while holding back put me in conflict with myself. That was neither good for my health nor for selling books.

Since neither removing my book from their stock nor being in conflict with myself is an acceptable choice for me, what can I do?

I am searching for the deepest foundation where I can stand solidly, with integrity, amidst opposing values.

Online publishing options, bookstores and social media platforms are central marketing arenas for today’s author. Part of me resists offering Big Topics at Midnight in eBook form. I love reading books printed on paper, underlining favorite quotes, leaving colorful tags sticking out to note cherished passages and sharing a favorite read with a friend. But my deepest value was to offer Big Topics at Midnight in a variety of formats, both paperback and eBook (and, I hope, an audio version sometime in 2014).

In a similar way, I love to meander through a local bookstore, touching books as I walk down the aisles, flipping through ones that catch my eye. When I purchase a book, I know that I am also supporting a business I want to remain in my neighborhood. But I also want to offer Big Topics at Midnight to readers at the huge online “bookstore” where so many routinely shop.

That is where I have landed. For now. My preferences remain, but my choice is clear: I want to reach readers through a diversity of formats and locations.

As I type, I must admit that I am a little afraid that writing about my issue with huge online stores will result in their refusal to sell my book.

But silence in the face of fears of retaliation by a powerful corporation also violates my values.

Paradox again. Nevertheless, my choice clear. I will click “publish,” and this blog is released to cyberspace.

Illustration by Khara Scott-Bey

August 21, 2013

When Life Throws You a Tornado

I awoke startled from a dream. A house was flying through the air, beginning to come apart amid an iron, ironing board, car, flip-flops and furniture heading in every direction.

What is needed for this time when everything seems to be flying off its hinges or soaring up from tried and true foundations? Lord only knows where it will all land.

The invitation I hear in the middle of this chaos is to let it all go. Don’t look for landing spots. And, hardest of all, don’t be afraid.

I am flying through the air myself. Am I the iron—desperately wanting to remove some wrinkles? Am I driving the car that has left the road behind?

Every time I wake up during a sleepless night, I am off and flying in my thoughts and fears. No landing in sight.

When life throws me a tornado, I need to learn to fly—or swirl or release.

The rest is up in the air.

June 4, 2013

Whale Blows, then Dives Deep

The moment my eyes open

the old story—

inflated, puffed up and glowing—

shatters.

I sit with a heart full of dread

grief

sorrow

the ache pours out my eyes and belly.

I want to rush ahead.

How can I fix it?

Make it OK again?

Make this ache go away?

Escape merely tightens the clinch,

lets it all decay underground again.

One option is all that remains—

wait, sit in the ache.

Slowly

morning light returns.

The big picture emerges from the shadows.

The moment spreads across time and space.

A blue whale blows then dives deep down

into the abyss of the Monterey Bay,

making me remember

the present moment held in the middle of eternity.

April 15, 2013

It All Depends on My Perspective

It’s easy to feel overwhelmed. This morning, the remainder of nine book-related events before the end of June set off my internal alarm system, waking me before dawn.

Sitting in the Mercy Retreat Center chapel a few hours later, my perception shifted.

How many people have the privilege of returning to places, people and organizations that have been the source of a lifetime of wake-up calls and gentle support?

I walked that trip in my head and on paper during the writing of Big Topics at Midnight. Pouring over diaries, journals and little tidbits tucked into dark corners of my memory gave me a new perspective on my life and Life in general. Now I am physically returning to the places and relationships where these moments occurred.

Yesterday I was with twenty-two others here at Mercy Center as we explored wake-up calls that have filled our bones and flowed from the Spirit. Most came because they’d heard about my event through Mercy Center—much as I was drawn to some of the events I’d attended here for the last twenty-nine years. But some were important people in my life; Pam, my first spiritual director; Bill and Peter, pastor and priest; Kate, an old friend; Ann and Paul, part of a now-ended Harvest Time circle; Holly and Bill, newer friends.

This morning I got an email from Andrea at the Presentation Prayer Center in Fargo, North Dakota where I will be doing a couple of events in October. In the late 1980s and early 1990s I traveled across town almost every week for the seven years we lived in Fargo to gather there for my covenant group’s meeting, a class or spiritual direction.

Following unexpected guidance while writing my book, I discovered the power of returning to the land where important things had happened—both ancestral and personal. I now realize that my book travels are the next step of that pilgrimage.

What had felt overwhelming is also a grace-filled gift. An “overly full calendar” holds the opportunity to be in places and with people who have been part of my formation while also meeting new acquaintances and having the transformative conversations I long for.

My heart overflows with gratitude. I feel like the luckiest person on the planet.