Los Altos Town Crier - Bridging over troubled waters: Local efforts amass

Los Altos Town Crier - Bridging over troubled waters: Local efforts amass

Check out this link to an article in our Town Crier that I took part in regarding local efforts to assist Japan's disaster victims. It also has info on how ANYONE can help our brothers and sisters in Christ.

Just to Be

February 25, 2011

Matagalpa, Nicaragua

God of compassion,

 When I hesitate to be with another, strengthen me.

When I question the quality of my presence, assure me.

When I want to show my worth through actions, humble me.

When I forget the beauty of a loving presence, remind me.

When I run away from the call to be there, bring me back.

Just to be a blessing.

Joyce Rupp, The Cup of Our Life: A Guide for Spiritual Growth

 (Ave Marie Press, 1997, p. 128)

For the compassionate when confronted with the reality of poverty and the challenges of development in a nation such as Nicaragua a sense of overwhelm comes quickly.  North Americans want to fix things.  We are an energetic and resourceful people who want to do something when we find a problem.

One aspect of that sense of compassion overwhelm is that Nicaragua, and many nations like it, have no shortage of energetic and resourceful people of their own who are also eager to address their problems.  What stands in the way from achieving their aspirations for the future isn’t lack of faith or commitment.  It may be hard for us to hear but we North Americans may have little to contribute that Central Americans don’t already have.

They don’t want our charity.  But they might welcome our solidarity.

There is a significant difference between the two.  

Certainly there might be appropriate technological inputs that we could share.  Certainly there could be the appropriate investment of capital; North American and European wealth was established on the transfer of capital….labor and natural resources….during the colonial period from the central Americas and southern hemisphere in general.  These economic structures are maintained in a variety of forms today so that appropriate capital investment would not only be strategic but fair.

But the essentials for national or community development aren’t based on either technology or capital, as important as either can be.  Rather as has been the experience in the development of any successful community….by which we mean that its people have a sufficient and self-sustaining economy that provides sustenance to promote health and the opportunity for its individuals to freely thrive as human beings….leadership, social cooperation and the empowerment of local populations for self-development by education and free participation make all the difference.  For example, the gross failure of the Soviet Union proves that merely the presence of technology and capital does not a nation or community make!

Since the overthrow of the USA backed Somoza dictatorship in 1979, Nicaragua has endured a revolution, a counter-insurgency war (financed and equipped by the USA), significant natural disasters, political corruption and decreasing international aid.   Thirty-one years later Nicaragua’s GNP is growing, its infant mortality and maternal death rates are falling yet it remains an impoverished nation where one-third of its population lives on less than 1 US$ per day.

For visitors such this writer, on a team of medical personnel assessing the possibilities of future collaboration between Nicaraguan NGOs and our regional churches, a subtle and profound truth has been shared in the form of a development slogan:

If you want to help us, stay home.  If you see your liberation bound up in ours, then come and stand with us.

North Americans may have technologies and capital to share but they don’t have all the answers for a developing country such as Nicaragua.  The only answers to be found that are relevant and lasting will be those found by the Nicaraguan people themselves.    Thus leadership development, social cooperation and the empowerment of local populations for self-development by education and free participation have got to be the priority to address structural issues that result in poverty and these can’t be supplied by well meaning North Americans.

In general, North American NGOs may be all set to come into local communities to do a variety of projects, but unless and until local leadership has prepared for them, asked for them and planned for the consequences of their implementation such well meaning projects can at best be irrelevant and at worst harmful.

For example, a well intentioned NGO may be all ready to come into a village and donate a tractor.  But unless the local community has agreed that such a technological input is actually appropriate for their agricultural and environmental conditions, that there is a plan to fuel and repair it, train its users, store it when not in use the tractor may just as quickly end up rusting in a field.  Substitute “water well”, “new contraceptive device”, or “solar panel” to the scenario.  

Volunteer project teams from the USA have become a multi-million dollar tourist industry often directed by well meaning North American NGOs.   Teams that don’t speak the language, don’t take the time to consider the history and context of the reality they visit and leave without establishing any on-going relationship with those they seek to serve may enjoy a week’s hardship and a sense of accomplishment in the completion of a project for their own personal and/or community affirmation but do little to contribute to community development.

Solidarity, on the other hand, is based on listening, openness and dialogue between equal partners.  It takes time and investment in relationship building.   For the North American it is based on the hopes and decision making of the local communities rather than on North American agendas.  In the end it will be solidarity that will contribute to the end of hunger and poverty in the developing world, not charity.

Rupp’s prayer reminds us that all too often, at home, at work, at school and in what we often call “missions” we seek to prove our worth through our actions rather than the time-consuming process of  “presence with another”  in their context, with them as equals.  

A director of a comprehensive development NGO here in Nicaragua told us the story of a Christian organization that organizes teams from the USA to come in a rural village to paint a school. The goal of their week was the photograph of the team at the end when they could show their churches back home the newly painted buildings.  The goal wasn’t to learn why Nicaraguans are so poor or what they aspire to with formal education.  In fact the team stayed with each other most of the time as if on an exotic camping trip.  Last summer this Christian organization had five different teams spend a week each painting the same school buildings again and again. 

There may be appropriate times for charity; natural disasters come to mind.  But if we North Americans want to contribute to the future promise of a world where all of God’s children have enough, it is solidarity that our brothers and sisters are seeking in the tropical world….at least that is what we heard again and again from our partners in Nicaragua.

If you want to help us, stay home.  If you see your liberation bound up in ours, then come and stand with us.

Maybe the first step is to realize that we North American are in as much need of liberation as our development counterparts.   If that be the case that they have as much to teach us and we have to share with them.   Rupp’s prayer can be a beginning.

Only

February 22, 2011

Matagalpa, Nicaragua

In his orientation to the six members of our United Methodist Volunteer in Mission (UMVIM) Team Dr. Francisco Gutierrez of the Accion Medica Christiana (Christian Medical Action) outlined the current status of health care in Nicaragua by citing numerous statistical studies.  These reports suggested that since 1995 infant mortality, maternal death and malnutrition rates had all improved in this Central American country of 5.4 million people.  These statistical benchmarks are used internationally within the health community and by governmental and non-governmental (NGOs) funding agencies.  Nicaraguan progress in healthcare had not reached targeted goals but there were definite improvements in their nation’s health and healthcare system.

One of the challenges that NGOs such as AMC face is that organizations like the World Bank and the IMF (International Monetary Fund) appraise their funding to developing nations on macro-statistics such as those cited.  For example, Per Capita Income (PCI) is a mathematical formula by which the Gross National Product (GNP) of a nation is divided by the total of their population.   In Nicaragua’s case GNP and PCI have increased in the last fifteen years.  Ironically this has resulted in decreases of international funding to Nicaragua, especially to their health programs, as such funding has been redirected to other nations with lowering GNPs.  These formulas may seem logical expect for the reality that PGI is not distributed equally in any nation.  In the case of Nicaragua the gap between rich and poor has increased dramatically within those same fifteen years in which their GNP has grown.  Dr. Gutierrez concludes that Nicaragua’s healthcare targets have not been reached in part due to this decrease in international funding inherently based to avoid or ignore the disparities in wealth distribution in a developing nation such as Nicaragua.

Working with the National Ministry of Health, AMC is doing fantastic, pioneering work in community health education and promotion with his nation’s poorest of the poor.  Despite their progress such a presentation was no cause for celebration for Dr. Gutierrez, no moment of boasting, no moment of satisfaction at the process of his life’s work. 

We can imagine the planners of the World Bank and IMF reviewing the statistics of Nicaragua and concluding that today “only” 40% of the population of Manuagua, Nicaragua’s capital city of 1.5 million, lives at the “extreme poverty level” of one US Dollar a day or that “only” 80% of the rural 350,000 inhabitants of the Matagalpa District survive in such poverty when fifteen years ago the rates were higher.

“Only”.

 Can a Pediatrician boast that the infant mortality rate for his nation had dropped from 25% to 18% in the same period of time?  As if 18% of the Nicaraguan children dying before the age of five is an “only” compared to the 25% of fifteen years ago?  There may be some doctors who could but this Pediatrician, Dr. Gutierrez wouldn’t or couldn’t.

Most who read this will have no idea what it must be like to live wondering if your children are going to eat tomorrow.  I know I don’t.  I can’t even imagine what it must be like to live in such a reality, who I’d be and what choices I would make to insure my children’s survival.  Those medical doctors who have dedicated  their lives to working with just such people, the 20% of the world’s population who live on a one US dollar a day (UNDF), do so not for accolades or momentary satisfactions, although both may come their way. 

My hunch is that until the day arrives that all of God’s children have enough to eat, a decent place to live and access to health care Dr. Gutierrez will not celebrate any statistical markers besides 0.

He, like others throughout time, has been compelled by God’s promised future, “the Reign of God” as Jesus put it, a future where everyone has enough.  That’s why they do this work.  That’s why they don’t give up.   

In 1974, it was estimated that 40,000 people….mainly women and children…died each day of malnutrition and nutrition related diseases.  40,000 a day.   Today, the United Nations World Health Organization estimates that number to be 24,000.  Big improvement to be sure.  Things are getting better, yes.  “Only” 24,000.

“Only”?

Potters for Peace

February 20, 2011

San Juan de Oriente, Nicaragua

Very few potters in the world can make a living at it.  Rather most are domestic crafts persons who in fashioning functional ware for food preparation and storage have found a means of self-expression.   The techniques are passed down generations.  Each will take to the clay either as chore or passion.  Some are good.  Some do the minimal.  All extend this ancient and very human art form.

What could be more artistic than adding the symbols of nature, tradition or faith to the form and decoration of the cup that will hold the drink that nurtures, the bowl that serves the meal that will sustain, the lidded jar that will store something as precious as holiday wine or next season’s seeds?

Whether consciously or not potters transform the most common materials…..earth, water and fire….into useful and at times beautiful instruments of transformation and in so doing offer us the user the chance to touch and taste the life grounded in the living earth.

While on a medical assessment team to Nicaragua we ran into and learned about Potters for Peace (PFP).

 Potters for Peace is a U.S. based nonprofit, a network of potters, educators, technicians, supporters, and volunteers. Founded in Nicaragua in 1986, PFP works with clay artisans in Central America and worldwide on ceramic water purification projects.  PFP is a unique organization devoted to socially responsible development and grass roots accompaniment among potters.  Its goals are to offer support, solidarity and friendship to developing world potters; to assist with appropriate technologies sustained using local skills and materials; to help preserve cultural traditions; and to assist in marketing locally, regionally and internationally. The vast majority of potters in Central America are rural women and the core work for Potters for Peace has always been assisting these hard-working people to earn a better living.

 Every day 5,000 children die due to unsanitary water (WHO 2005). Since 1998 Potters for Peace has traveled the world teaching the fabrication of a low-cost ceramic water filters that can bring clean, potable water to those who need it most. PFP does not make, store or distribute ceramic water filters nor does it operate filter production facilities. Instead, PFP assists responsible local partners to set up filter production and distribution facilities, now in 33 countries in the tropical world. (www.pottersforpeace.org).

It should not be surprising, although it was, that potters across the borders of culture and language would work together to empower local artists in developing communities by transforming earth, water and fire into the means of health and healing.  They’ve been doing just that for millennium.

For this pastor/potter PFP inspires me once again to consider God at work when our hands create and reach out. 

Dead Wreaths

February 10, 2011

To my neighbors with their Christmas Wreaths still on the front door….”I feel ya!”….

Too harried to get the chores done…

Too exhausted to remember the Holidays just days past….

Too locked into the present crisis to bother…

Or…..could you still be waiting for Santa?

Basking in the echoes of Carols?

Still kneeling in adoration at the manger of Bethlehem?

In counter cultural rebellion do you insist that Christmas is a yearlong intention to worship the incarnate divinity?

As the wreaths degrade to dust, their plastic gathering grime, and their colors fading, will they sentinel your fortress until the Visa is paid off?

I, an agent of suburban angst, a long time disciple of bourgeois capitulation, I salute you!    Whatever the motivation…sloth, neglect or statement …I am the fool who prides himself by putting Christmas away, neat and tidy, boxes labeled, a few days after New Year.

A pride as empty and decayed as a wreath long brown.

Egypt and the Birth of Al-Qaeda

Al-Qaeda and the eventual atrocities of 9/11 were born in the jail cells of Egypt, according to Lawrence Wright, author of his Pulitzer Prize winning book The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 (Vintage, 2006).

 In the 1950’s and 60’s Sayyid Qutb was imprisoned and tortured in Egyptian prisons for writing and organizing against Gamal Abdul Nassar’s post-World War II government.  Qutb founded what would become the Muslim Brotherhood and argued that the modern values of secularism, tolerance, rationality, democracy, subjectivity, individualism, mixing of the genders and materialism was infecting Islam through the agency of colonialism (Wright p 28). He envisioned an Egypt governed by Sharia, Islamic law.  Qutb would apply an obscure Islamic concept of takfir or “excommunication” to justify and encourage violent resistance against the Muslims supporting the regime of Nassar which Qutb insisted betrayed the faith.  (Wright p. 34)  Qutb was hanged a martyr to his cause in 1966.

“Takfir”, considered a heresy by most Muslims, evolved out of the concentration camps in Egypt to its current form to fuel the suicidal violence of modern extremists in direct contradiction to The Koran which forbids violence against another Muslim, non-combatants and women and children. (Wright pp. 142-43, in confusing contrast to many citations justifying war and violence against the non-believer, also note that the Koran strictly forbids suicide (Surah 4:29), prohibits the killing of innocent non-combatants (Surah 2:190-192) and advocates compassion towards non-hostile non-believers (Surah 60:8)) 

Ayman Al-Zawahiri was one of the thousands educated, middle-class Egyptians who adopted the writings and philosophy of Qutb  as a result, in part, of their frustration with the brutality, corruption and privileges of the ruling class of Egyptian secularists.  A leader in a cell of the Muslim Brotherhood he would be swept up in the aftermath of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat’s assignation by elements of the Brotherhood in 1981, although he had no direct involvement in the killing.

One line of thinking proposes that American’s tragedy on September 11 was born in the prisons of Egypt….torture created an appetite for revenge….the main target of the prisoners’ wrath was the secular Egyptian government, but a powerful current of anger was also directed toward the West, which they saw as enabling force behind the repressive regime.   They held the West responsible for corrupting and humiliating Islamic society.  Indeed, the theme of humiliation, which is the essence of torture, is important to understanding the radical Islamists’ rage.  Egypt’s prisons became a factory for producing militants whose need for retribution, they called it justice, was all consuming. (Wright p. 61) 

It would be Al-Zawahiri  in partnership with Osama bin Laden who would conceive of and organize the bombing of the US Embassy in Nairobi Kenya, the attack on the USS Cole in Yemen and  the 9/11 attacks on mainline USA.    

When our Presidents Bush and Obama insist that we are not at war with Islam they are right.  Religion may have given Al-Qaeda and the extremist Jihadists the philosophical framework to justify their violence, after much theological manipulation.   But Islam is not the enemy.  Social class, economic and political oppression and the corruption of autocracy, which we now see confronted in the streets of Tunisia, Egypt, Jordan and Yemen, are the ground out of which such violence has grown.  

Not that that offers any excuse.

There is no excuse for terrorism, even in the name of retribution, even in the name of victimization and especially in the name of God.

"Washington has been very anxious about what's happening here, but it shouldn't be. It should be happy. This will reduce terrorism. When people have their voice, they don’t need to explode themselves."

--Mohammed Fouad, an Egyptian software engineer. (The Washington Post, 2/2/11)

What to do about atheists?

The parishioner looked shocked when I recommended "my favorite atheists".   We were speaking of the hypocrisy so evident in church life when the subject came up. 

Since 9/11 there have been a number of best-selling books from atheist authors reflecting on the power of religion to do harm.  

That violence by religious institutions and individuals of all persuasions has been done in the "name of God" is evident throughout history and continues today.  Flying airplanes into buildings, the perpetuators committing suicide and killing thousands of innocents in the process, can only be justified by a gross theological manipulation of the tenants of Islam.1   Yet such thinking, even when held by a small minority, has been the occasion for many others to question the value and purpose of religion itself.  

Unfortunately, we don't have to look far for other examples; clergy sexual abuse of children, the religious justifications for segregation and violence  based on ethnic, gender and sexual orientation differences, the public face of North American Christianity as represented by those willing to attribute blame for hurricanes and earthquakes on those they don't like.  Terrible things have been done and said in the "name of God".   Few can deny that.  Since 9/11 it has been grist for the mill of atheism.

Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins have been the most popular of these authors selling millions of books and generating scores of rebuttals in print.  Harris' A Letter to a Christian Nation (Vintage, 2008) and Karen Armstrong's The Case for God (Anchor, 2010) would be my two favorite examples of this debate.

Is it shocking to learn that a Christian pastor has a favorite atheist author?   It doesn't mean that I agree with or am thrown into doubt and confusion by such writing.  Neither should we be afraid to listen and learn from other points of view.  After 35 years of pastoral ministry, during which God's existence and relevance have been constantly questioned by those I seek to serve, it is comforting to address a rational argument for atheism when it is so often presented in the context of pain.

The spouse of the shooting victim, the teenager diagnosed with cancer, the returning soldier from a tour of what is worst about humanity, all cry out "how can there be a God when there is so much evil in the world....how can a God of love allow such atrocities....where is God now that I feel so alone..."?  Such moments are rarely times for academic discussion!  At such moments all one can do is to listen and embrace with compassion those on the journey though grief.   As a pastor many times my first concern is the heart, the head will come later.

Sam Harris' Letter to a Christian Nation is short, articulate and thought provoking.  I'll take that any day over a parent burying a child who has wrapped himself and a car full of friends around a tree, crying out "....where was your God when Bobby needed him!...."

Such agony is different than atheism per se.  Ironically, it assumes a powerful divinity which for some twisted reason has chosen not to act benevolently or has chosen to "allow" tragedy for pedagogy or punishment.  "The god in control of all events" has been worshipped since the beginning and remains a popular deity in a variety of religious traditions, including my own. In times of tragedy we seem programmed to project our blame or rationalizations onto this deity.

Any god that would cause or allow a 9/11 should be rejected and denied.  In part because such a god is incongruent with the Divinity found in scripture that watches Adam and Eve choose to eat the fruit (Genesis 2-3); the God that does everything it Its power through the witness of the Hebrew prophets to warn the 'chosen people' from their apostasy as they hurtle towards self-destruction as a nation; because that same God hangs incarnate butchered on a Roman cross.

The power of the Judeo-Christian God is the creative force of transformation, the lure to that which is best and possible in each moment, not in divine control or coercion.  God shares the journey with us.  God doesn't dictate it.

There is an ironic comfort suggesting that "God has a plan" for each and every moment however terrible it might be, which may be one reason that "the god in control of all events" remains a popular idol even today.  The notion of "free will"...the doctrine suggesting that in each and every moment the choice is always our....gives little comfort and lots of frustration in the face of broken reality to those who would be faithful.  Yet if "determinism" is our stance then we either deny the reality of evil or we worship a deity that would inflict 9/11s on innocent people. 

"The god in control of all events"?  Is that the God Jesus prays to in the garden of Gethsemane asking three times to take away the "cup of crucifixion" and in the end chooses his fate? (Matthew 26:36-46)  If God determines each moment why would Jesus need to ask?  Why would Jesus need to choose?

What to do about atheists?  People of faith don't need to be afraid to read them or listen to their derision.   The atheists poke at the hypocrisy of religion and its history of harm with insight and righteous indignation....as we all should.   We may have something to learn in the process.

Far more significant for the faithful is the self-imposed agnosticism born of disappointment, betrayal and tragedy for such isolates us from each other and the heart.  The old preaching punch line may be trite but it’s still true; "If God seems far away…guess who moved?"

1          for example the Koran strictly forbids suicide (Surah 4:29), prohibits the killing of innocent non-combatants (Surah 2:190