From the Desert, Under Constantine

A high school prayer of refuge

2011-09-28T15:37:00.000-07:00

Afternoon in the West,
A teenage Muslim sister walks the line
Of shadows on the feild

Modest, flowing black school dress
Red hijab under a red hoodie
Just flowing with no obsessed pockets
No black or red flag hanging from them

Just posted
Like a revolutionary flag
Contemplating the line between shadow
And slanted red autumn sun

Pacing like a pilgrim from the 40 yard line to the soccer goal and back
While cell phone ringtones
Pop off like gun shots
She cuts through their orbits in calm silence
Like a razor sharp call to prayer
Like a refugee from the education camps we call classrooms

She reminds me of the times I used to act so strange
Fleeing high school drama classes to just sit for hours as the
Leaves would fall, begging for the season to change
Seeing God in what's unplanned

She reminds me I haven't changed
I can still pause my stress and stop writting these lesson plans
I can still cradle my face in prayer
With two fingers pointed up, like Malcolm, toward heaven
Becuase she points her two feet forward, like Malcolm, toward heaven
Becuase we can all still interrupt the bells of history and make this an early release day
Walking forward, like Malcolm, toward revolution
Revolving like an unwound tradition
Cutting silence into this chaotic confusion

I wish instead of worksheets on allusions,
I could assign this young sister's splendid moment of silence:

"Students your homework is to walk the edge of the field like a pilgrimage.
If anyone asks why you don't answer just tell them your ringtone is now
the sound of grass waving at the line between sun and shadow
you can't hear their drama becuase it has blended into your scenery.

If the school district asks me what's the objective of this lesson
I'll tell them I want you to discover it for yourselves:
That sometimes forward is all you need
Sometimes motion becomes your creed."

a Sabbath thought

2011-09-18T22:27:00.000-07:00

We've worked way too hard the past 10,000 years. It's time for a day of rest. A global sabbath, a jubilee, an exodus, a revolution. Then we can live on the fruits of our labor, and alienated work will become obsolete. As Ernst Bloch and St. Augustine put it, we can sing "Dies septimus nos ipsi erimus"- the 7th day will be us. That's when human history really will begin.

Heaven's prequel

2011-07-13T16:03:00.001-07:00

Here is a new spoken word poem inspired by the same piece as the title of Black Orchid's recent zine "Between the zeal of the young and the patience of the old".

We won't be revolutionaries,
we'll be the revolution.

We are the fault lines
the divine sign
and when it comes time
to fire that nine
we'll be feelin' fine

'Cause we'll take your profits
break them
the things we need
we'll make them
we'll put you in the cemetery
if you try to take them.

Because change
is somewhere between destruction and creation.
It's the pent up creativity after centuries of alienation.
It's the bread riot 'cause we need to eat
It's the love dance we start in the street
'cause we can't wait to find a place to meet
and besides,
we just abolished the whole concept of temptation.

So why are you still here bragging about your nation?
Fuck your borders and your bombs and all of your plantations

We are the global upheaval
Nat Turner's sequel
Marx's equal
and heaven's prequel.

And yeah, we're stormin' it -
fuck what's realistic, we're steadily ignoring it
'cause what's on our plate
is way more drastic than 1968
and even back then our graffiti was exploring it
"Demand the Impossible"
not the same old boring shit

Because communism
is somewhere between "where the people are at"
and utopia
between the crowd's spontaneous upsurge
and heaven's doors opening
between democratic workers' councils
and the end of work as we've known it

We won't be communists
we will be communism
just like when we were workers
we breathed capitalism,
ate, drank, and pissed every one of its divisions
and each day reproduced that horrible condition

when shit pops off we'll be breathing liberation
drinking freedom
and eating emancipation
reproducing prophets
who speak in conversation
not so much laboring
as being our creation
not so much working for it
more like generation
of everything between us
that conceives revelation

Is discipline a good thing?

2011-06-11T15:27:00.001-07:00

I'm part of a political group called the Black Orchid Collective, and recently we've been doing a study group on revolutionary theory and biographies. For the past few weeks we’ve been reading Black Radical, Nelson Peery’s memoirs from his years in the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) and similar organizations. Peery, a Black working class revolutionary who devoted his life to Black liberation and class struggle, writes a gripping account of the twenty year period between World War II and the Watts Rebellion. Showing the mistakes the Communist Party made, this book provides some crucial insights about what kind of revolutionary organization fosters healthy development of its members, and what kind of organization stifles its members. For more on the book, check out our blog post on it.

One of the most important questions that emerged from our discussion was the question: is discipline a good thing? Peery had been a veteran in World War II, and he carried the discipline he learned in the military into his life as a revolutionary after the war. Over at Black Orchid, we wrote:

We really admire the discipline that [Peery] espoused while recognizing that there were probably a number of negative aspects to it. This is very much related to our ongoing questions of what type of person is required to be cadre in a revolutionary organization. The Bolsheviks were soldiers. Is it too much to ask people to be soldiers right now? Is it unsustainable? Is it unreflective of our times? Does a revolutionary organization have to conform to the times in which it finds itself, and develop member expectations accordingly?
Our current society isn’t producing people with high levels of discipline and commitment to revolution. But this could change fast if things heat up. Back in Peery’s day, it was very uneven: the experience of WWII vets produced a lot of highly disciplined and motivated Black militants. The white working class, on the other hand, was experiencing upward mobility. Society produced very few disciplined white militants. That’s not the case for white working class now. That might mean more of a chance for highly disciplined multiracial organizing.
We also want to know how can we talk about discipline that’s not authoritarian? It might be useful to reclaim discipline with a Marxist-Humanist character, embracing creativity, love, and joy. You have a purpose because it makes you feel good, and because the struggle deepens your connection to humanity.

Katie and Scott from the Workers Self Education Project shared their thoughts on this topic in the comments section over at Black Orchid. I'm reposting their comments here because I think they shed light on how we can develop a revolutionary spirituality today. Katie wrote:

Discipline comes from learning that one’s actions have consequences. (The word “discipline” is from the Latin for “teaching” – the consequences are what do the teaching!) This can take the form of reward and punishment, so that becoming disciplined is akin to being trained like a dog. But it may also be that one’s actions have consequences for something other than oneself that one begins to care about – for another person, for learning an art or skill, for some common endeavor, or for a cause. When one realizes this, really feels it or sees it in practice, then the process of becoming disciplined isn’t just imposed from the outside. Rather, it is internally motivated by a larger aim – learning the skill, or not letting others down, or whatever. This is clearly a better kind of discipline!
It sounds like Nelson Peery’s experiences in the war instilled in him both kinds of discipline. On the one hand, he was at the bottom of an authoritarian power structure, expected to follow orders without asking questions. On the other hand, he and his fellow soldiers depended on each other for survival, and they also felt they were fighting for higher ideals such as democracy.
As you say, “our current society isn’t producing people with high levels of discipline and commitment” – not just to revolution, but to anything. Capitalism has made it extremely easy to live a life in which one’s actions don’t really have consequences. As a worker, you are replaceable. Relationships are transient – you can always move on to the next person. Immigrants with families still have discipline; so do the few workers who really want to claw their way to the top. The rest of us, lacking traditional responsibilities and having nothing particularly enticing to work toward, feel that we could pretty much disappear off the face of the earth with little effect. Why bother to cultivate discipline? Discipline toward what end? Of course, a life without consequences is also a life without meaning – and this is why, as you suggest, the end of upward mobility means “more of a chance for highly disciplined multiracial organizing” today. The problem is how to create an environment in which workers can begin to realize that maybe their actions can have meaningful consequences.
This is where I think community comes in, as they key to creating a culture of discipline that is not authoritarian. Here I am conceiving ‘community’ not as a ‘feeling’ but as a co-ordinated set of communistic projects that make workers’ lives better: living together, teaching and learning arts and skills, doing childcare, food preparation, etc. at a community-wide scale. In such projects, people’s actions really do have meaningful consequences – they have to work together, and they have to be reliable and committed, in order to succeed. And the results, the common goods and the feelings of solidarity that flow from these activities, are palpable. In this environment, social expectations will encourage discipline, but more importantly there will be things worth cultivating discipline for. This, I think, is how we can “reclaim discipline…embracing creativity, love, and joy”.
The life-affirming discipline learned in community can then carry over to class struggle – and here it will be an antidote to the fanaticism, the self-imposed authoritarian discipline, the willingness to sacrifice oneself and others to a merely abstract goal, that can come from conceiving all of one’s actions as directed toward ‘the revolution’. This isn’t to say that sacrifices won’t be necessary, just that they should be motivated by love (and guided by reason) rather than by the desperation that comes from having nothing worth living for. We need to have experience, real knowledge of the better world we are fighting for – because we’re not just going to win it, we have to build it.

Scott followed:

I’d like to submit a few words from radical psychoanalyst and humanist Erich Fromm. In the Art of Loving (1956) he writes:
“One might think that nothing is easier to learn for modern man than discipline. Does he not spend eight hours a day in a most disciplined way at a job which is strictly routinized? The fact, however, is that modern man has exceedingly little discipline outside of the sphere of work. When he does not work, hew wants to be lazy, to slouch, or to use a nicer word, to ‘relax.’ This very wish for laziness is largely a reaction against the routinization of life. Just because man is forced for eight hours a day to spend his energy for purposes not his own, in ways not his own, he rebels and his rebelliousness takes the form of an infantile self-indulgence. In addition, in the battle against authoritarianism he has become distrustful of all discipline, of than enforced by irrational authority, as well as of rational discipline imposed by himself. Without such discipline, however, life becomes shattered, chaotic, and lacks in concentration.”
The routinization of life under advanced capitalism, the spending of our time for a purpose alien to us as human beings and about which we have no say, produces an aversion to discipline and a lack of skill in practicing it. We are thus robbed of the opportunity for self-directed activity and self-mastery, which only come as a result of rational, non-exploitative discipline.
Later, in the same vein he writes:
“How does one practice discipline? Our grandfathers would have been much better equipped to answer this question. Their recommendation was to get up early in the morning, not to indulge in unnecessary luxuries, to work hard. This type of discipline had obvious shortcomings. It was rigid and authoritarian, was centered around the virtues of frugality and saving, and in many ways was hostile to life. But in reaction to this kind of discipline there has been an increasing tendency to be suspicious of any discipline, and to make undisciplined, lazy indulgence in the rest of one’s life the counterpart and balance for the routinized way of life imposed on us during the eight hours of work. To get up at a regular hour, to devote a regular amount of time during the day to activities such as meditating, reading, listening to music, walking; not to indulge in escapist activities like mystery stories and movies [and today one might add, video games], at least not beyond a certain minimum; not to overeat or overdrink are some obvious and rudimentary rules. It is essential, however, that discipline should not be practiced like a rule imposed on oneself from the outside, but that it becomes an expression of one’s own will; that it is felt as pleasant, and that one slowly accustoms oneself to a kind of behavior which one would eventually miss, if one stopped practicing it. It is one of the unfortunate aspects of our Western concept of discipline that its practice is supposed to be somewhat painful and only if it is painful can it be “good.” The East has recognized long ago that that which is good for man—for his body and for his soul—must also be agreeable, even though at the beginning some resistances must be overcome.”

Here is my response, which connects their comments to the type of spirituality I'm attempting to express through my writings on this blog:

Thanks Katie and Scott, your comments are really helpful, and I agree with what you’re arguing. You make Marx’s ideas in the 1844 Manuscripts (Alienated labor) concrete, accessible, and up to date. You also pull the ground out from under the kind of conservative critiques of modernity that I grew up around as a Catholic. Catholic critics are correct when they argue that modern life provides no positive vision of discipline and hence dissipates our energies and saps our creativity. However, they have no solution except for patriarchal, authoritarian, and repressive forms of spirituality and religion that bring us backwards instead of forwards. Your take on Fromm provides the basis for a different type of spirituality, one that unites the struggle for personal wholeness and positive self-discipline with the struggle against alienated capitalist labor. Instead of saying we should work hard and offer it up as a sacrifice, Fromm’s ideas suggest we should abolish alienated work, which then will allow us to abolish undisciplined, dissipated “play” so we can build a new type of human self-activity. This self activity would unite play and work into a creative whole, expressing our social humanity.

Sensuous infinity

2011-05-28T03:19:00.000-07:00

God is the relationships of sensuous existence

the ensemble and symphony of life generating life

in stillness you can hear the chorus of her mattering

she's sizzling through quantum ripples

evolutionary pathways

revolutionary events

explosions of neural complexity

lighting webs in the darkness

infinity lit outward on the inside of our eyelids

But usually we can't see it. 'Cause we chopped God into pieces and made gods out of her.

Prophets could see it, sometimes. So they picked up our hammers

And sickles to smash the gods we had made.

but instead of healing Her scars

they just ground the gods into a fine dust

filling the lofty abstractions of vaulted cathedral ceilings and factory smokestacks

While she kept bleeding out of our violated wombs below

We can't see her in us

'cause we chopped God into fine pieces and made commodities out of her.

they pulled their separate ways across the globe

drawing and quartering her bodies

and taking ours with them.

We bow down in confusion and obey the works of our own hands.

But God is resurrected in creative reproduction

are we in labor with her, or is she in labor with us?

we don't know, all we know is it matters

that she be the life generating life

that we become

more than workers

our labor mediating the metabolism

between humanity and nature

she breathes in our labor

it is no longer labor

it's creation

Grace, Works, and Fire

2011-01-09T17:41:00.001-08:00

The place where grace abounds is the space between us

But that space is filled with the fetid damp exhaustion

Of the city and its traces

That space is rotting

Out beyond the crack in the pavement by the empty basketball courts

Under the shattered cathedral window

Where the rain bores down toward purgatory

This place is where all of our relationships come for healing, prayer and therapy

It has become a swamp

The very space between our faces

Has begun to grow mold

So intricate in its strangulating patterns

That we can't figure out where it started

Or where it ends

So we just call it eternity

Around this place lie the records of our histories

Half-cleaned recycleables

Precepts of the law

Open letters

Activist flyers

Court injunctions

Manifestos

Child support payments

Psychologist appointment insurance company reimbursement receipts

IOUs

Good intentions

Appeals for Safe Spaces

Threats

Anarchist skill shares and

Leninist Party edicts

Betrayals

Lesson plans

Church missilettes

Unfinished parts of missiles

The Constitution

Parking tickets

Union resolutions

and

broken promises

They all pile up across the floor as we try harder and harder to work out our differences.

They all mix together and grow mold, as History and Reason and Identity endlessly patter on

Like the rain in a Detriot parking lot on a Tues afternoon.

St. Paul sits there as the rain soaks through the slashed cathedral window, as the odor of the world creeps like incense

As the priest lifts up the stinking chalice

Full of our rotted good intentions

And tries to get drunk off of it

To numb the pain of

The cancer that's eating his

Aged liver

Reformers burst in, like foremen bossing around the janitors to sweep the mess into piles.

They arrange and reaarange the piles in mandalas of precepts and hymns

St. Paul just watches, and lights a cigarette. He nervously paces around thinking about the 7 churches, their faction fights, their petty personal beefs, and the content of his next letter

The Reformers shout at the janitors to spray some bleach on the dirty chalices. All that does is add a caustic edge to the stench, and the mold spreads. The old priest just sits there complaining about what the world has come to.

St. Paul asks one of the janitors what he would do if this were his house.

They talk for a while in the dark corner, out of earshot of the priest and the Reformers and foreman.

St. Paul walks over to the pile of moldy debris

Drops his cigarette on top of it

And the thing catches fire

As the fire burns, we can finally see each other clearly

The space between our faces is filled with a crisp, clean light

And when we look around we can see that there were thousands of people

waiting at the door holding unlit torches

They come in to the bonfire and start to light them, from the embers of the altar

And slowly, with noone really signaling to start,

We begin to march out the door

Grace and Self-Activity

2010-12-06T00:20:00.000-08:00

When I was meditating and praying tonight I got stuck on something Pete said earlier. He said instead of changing the world we should submit to God's grace and through His grace He may empower us to change ourselves which in turn could have an impact on the world. I disagreed based on the idea that our Self and the world are not fully separate so changing one means changing the other.

But at a deeper level, isn't my answer still limited? Aren't I denying what Marx calls "self-activity", the ability of oppressed people to take matters into our own hands and to shape history. Aren't I still projecting that human activity onto God, giving God's grace credit for something which humans actually can and must do? Isn't this just another example of what Marx calls alienation or estrangement - when human beings create an idea or a material object or a social system and then endow it with power so it appears to be acting as an independent force which alienates and suppresses our own self-activity?

I think that a lot of Christians do in fact do that. We do at times abdicate our moral responsibility to change ourselves and the world, saying "I can't do anything about it, I'll just wait for God to fix it" when we can in fact do something about it and to not do anything about it is actually a sin of omission because it leads to unnecessary suffering for other people.

BUT, I think this typical Marxist criticism of Christianity is still limited. After all, the concept of "self-activity" itself can be a fetishization or projection.

Marxists and can also estrange themselves, and the intellectual concept of "self activity" is not a safegaurd against it. Like all concepts it can actually become reified, or frozen, taken out of the flow of the historical process, and turned into an idol.

As I argued in response to Pete, the idea of the "self" is itself a creation of human history... it was born with the Enlightenment and the rise of bourgeois liberalism. So this idea of a "self" that makes history is just as alienating as the idea of a God in the sky who makes history for us.

In reality, the self is an ensemble of social and material relations.... I am a relationship, not a thing, and so are you. I am far more contradictory and complex than a thing, and so are you.

So my "self activity" is also therefore more contradictory and complex, and so is yours.

So when we make history, we are not "things" empowered with force that shape a passive world... instead we are a complex part of a living, breathing web of life and we change that web as we act.

So that brings me back to prayer. Most of my prayer is not actually begging God as some detached object in the sky for favors. The deepest prayer I have ever experienced was after I read the book the Cloud of Unknowing, by a medieval Christian mystic. It argued that any image we put forward of God is actually a false idol, and to really pray we need to extinguish all notions we may have of God.

Marxism really helps with that.. it helps us walk through exercises like the one I just did above to strip away false and alienating concepts of God. That time when I read the book I remember stripping away all concepts of God and trying to pray to the Cloud of Unknowing that resulted.

At a certain point I realized that I would also have to strip away the experience of myself praying to that cloud.... if God is no thing, then my self is also no thing. And in that encounter of no thing with no thing, we actually become real. We just are what we are, and we are what we are becoming. I remember in that moment of prayer feeling more real, more connected to the world than ever because I no longer had a sense of "self" separate from the world, I was simply a part of it's process - a part with clear agency and the ability to change, not just a cog in the wheel - but a part nonetheless.

So maybe that kind of experience is what Grace really is. Grace is when our "self-activity" transcends and extinguishes self-consciousness... when we act without the false, alienating, ever-degrading awareness of being a separate self that is acting... when our action making history is not separate from the rest of history making itself - or rather all the other sentient beings making history together... when we have a deeper consciousness that goes beyond self-consciousness and is consciousness of our activity within a larger, complex, dialectical totality of life generating life.

So worship of God is not necessarily alienating... grace is not necessarily alienating. If anything, it can help us get beyond the idea of our SELF, which is a bigger fetish for those of us in 2010, and a bigger opiate of the masses than any notion of God.

Because after all, didn't Marx say that the real movement of the proletariat, it's real "self activity" in history IS communism? In other words, communism doesn't just come after the revolution, it is what we practice when we make history now through our self-activity.

But communism is the opposite of selfishness! It is love - Marx lifted the vision directly from the Book of Acts in the Bible: from each according to ability, to each according to need. So self-activity that IS communism needs to be selfless, and prayer to God as the Cloud of Unknowing is one way to live in that selfless grace.

Further discussion on pacifism and revolution

2010-12-05T23:14:00.001-08:00

A bunch of folks made very thoughtful comments on my essay Problems with Pacifism and Prayers for a Land Without Prayer. I just finally got a chance to respond to all of them. One comment, in response to Pete, was too long to fit in the comments section so I am posting it as a new post here instead. Please read Pete's comments first by clicking the link above and scrolling to the bottom. This is in response to his last comment:

Pete, I also agree with what you wrote here: " I don't believe that everyone is called to be on the front lines of the revolution: I believe there is space for artists, poets and contemplatives to create a more beautiful world without organizing in the community working to break down the structures that have made our world so ugly." I'll say more about that at the end of this comment.

That being said, I do think everyone has a responsibility to change not only ourselves but the world around us. In fact, I don't think that the Bible actually entertains any separation between our inner life and the rest of God's creation. That idea of an individual separate from his/ her social relations, and separate from the rest of the material world that sustains his/her body is not a Biblical idea, it is a distinctly modern Liberal idea that really began with the rise of the bourgeoise and modern capitalism. The capitalists actually had to destroy a lot of previous Christian ways of life in order to create the idea that each of us has a "self" we can change that is somehow separate from everyone else.

Like I said in my response to Tee, we are called to change the way we live... but to do that seriously will require us to come into conflict with the capitalist system that requires us to live and work in alienating and sinful ways. Jesus didn't just make a change in his own heart. His new way of life was manifested in concrete, material changes which brought him into bodily conflict with the Empire. That's the cross. It is not simply an abstract symbol of inner martyrdom and mortification, or a change of heart that separates us from sinful ways of thinking. It is a bodily change which brings us into a life or death reckoning with the World and its principalities and powers.

To paraphrase what the guerrilla priest Camilo Torres said about these questions: if I am going to love my neighbor, what I am I supposed to do when my neighbor is starving because his land was seized by an imperialist corporation? At a certain point, doesn't love really mean confronting those who wish to destroy our neighbors (and us?)

So, to summarize, Revolution definitely does require changing ourselves, not just exterior social structures... but we can't really change ourselves unless if we change the rest of society which our "selves" are not really separate from.

As for Jesus, I do think he was a revolutionary, and he reminds us that revolution is not exclusively violent because he did not take up arms. However I don't think he was a pacifist either, as the the quote you mentioned ("I haven't come to bring peace, but rather a sword") suggests. I think Jesus was preaching in a context where the ruthless revolutionary violence preached by the Torah was a given. The Exodus, Samuel, Judges, and the Prophets are full of calls for violent revolution at a scale an intensity that would shock even the most hardened Marxists or anarchists. Jesus does temper this message with a call for love, community, and compassion,in short for revolutionized social relations..... but I don't think he completely destroys or supersedes the ancient messages of conflict and struggle either... he claims to be their fulfillment. And the book of Revolution certainly ends the Bible with a return to a lot of these very violent revolutionary themes from the Hebrew Bible.

I disagree with you that "all the way to heaven is heaven." We definitely are not in heaven now brother! The ghettoes of Detroit, the oil choked Gulf Coast, the hellish factories lining the Pacific Rim, the slums of Baghdad and Kabul are definitely not heaven. The world is something more like purgatory - a volatile contradiction that could go either way. It is God's heavenly Paradise occupied by Satan's colonial army and the battle rages through the centuries and is not yet resolved. I do think we can come together in sacraments that prefigure the Kingdom of God - we can celebrate the fact that in Christ's life death and resurrection the world is "already" on the path to redemption, but at the same time we need to wait in Advent hope for the coming of the Kingdom because it is also "not yet" fulfilled. This is the basic tension that exists within Christianity. As I wrote in my most recent post, that waiting for the eruption of God's grace in history can't be passive (we probably agree on that)... we need to actively name that grace when we experience it, we have to name it by intervening, by living differently and encouraging others to do so as well, and by naming it we actually transform ourselves and the world.

That being said, I don't think Revolution and the Kingdom of God are the same. I'm not sure if the revolution we're fighting for now (the end of capitalism, white supremacy, patriarchy, and ecological destruction) will be the final redemption of humanity. It will certainly be a step in the right direction but perhaps the Kingdom will be something with infinitely more potential even than that. It is dangerous for revolutionaries to think we are going to create the Kingdom, the end of history. First of all, I don't think the revolution is an automatic given... we have to actually make it, if not it won't happen and we'll likely descend into barbarism when the oil runs out and the sea level rises. Second of all, there very well may be sin, conflict, prejudice, etc. even after the revolution, and in some ways the new society will simply be a more amenable environment for us to develop spiritually as human beings, for us to get down to more serious work on the spiritual conflicts which have been plaguing humanity since its birth. We'll be able to develop in virtue in ways we never thought possible, or rather in ways that only the most perceptive monks, poets, and philosophers dreamed of since antiquity. Again, we don't have to wait until after the revolution to do that - in fact we shouldn't' - but it will certainly be a lot easier in a society that is not systematically based on the worship of greed and murder.

Finally, I disagree with you that Ghandi is a model for revolutionaries. Perhaps he was a revolutionary the way Robespierre or Thomas Jefferson or George Washington was a revolutionary - he did help bring down an outdated and corrupt old regime. But that didn't mean he helped build a positive or anti-oppressive alternative. He was not fully anti-capitalist, he left the caste system intact and was very patronizing toward the dalits, India's most oppressed caste. He was also quite patriarchal.

The Body of Christ at the picket lines

2010-12-05T21:43:00.000-08:00

In Ethiopia, he said, there are monks who pray

in the jungle, somewhere,

not for themselves but for everyone

but you are not monks

so why have you come to support our labor struggle

when it doesn't directly benefit you?

When I replied, someone ended my sentence with a phrase

That I can only understand as a prayer:

An injury to one is an injury to all

He added that his mother was single

Boeing laid her off right before Christmas

From then on he couldn't believe in a system that rewards such evil

Are these conversations theology?

Some would say we are Reds, preaching atheism

Creating a monstrous new religion that ends in a Stalinist apocalypse

But I see the Body of Christ clandestinely recomposing itself

in basic human decency

At the picket line tonight it felt like a Church basement on a good Sunday,

Passing around cups of coffee

Good conversation about ultimate matters

Jeers at the devil

And signs of peace

Advent thoughts on Badiou and the Event

2010-12-05T00:42:00.000-08:00

So Advent has started, and I'm sitting here next to the Christmas tree reading about the advent of revolution in past moments in history and wondering when it's going to arrive next. This got me thinking about how our act of perceiving something new happening in history relates to our intervening to create that something new. For example, to what extent did people's response to the Good News of Christ's advent on earth actually constitute this event? Throughout the gospel, Jesus is unable to heal people unless they themselves make a willing choice to be healed - unless they are open to a new rebirth and a break from their past, unless they participate in an Event, something new in their lives and in history.

Similarly, when do we know a revolution is starting? At a certain point, isn't it the revolutionaries themselves who recognize something new is breaking out in their own life activity, and by recognizing and naming it a revolution they actually make it a revolution?

In this comment on a very interesting piece by Don Hamerquist, somebody named Jordan gets at this question, reflecting on the French Marxist philosopher Alain Badiou. Badiou criticizes rigid Marxist political parties of the old 20th century model that are not open to the advent of new Events in history and end up missing or trailing them instead of helping to create them. He says that in contrast revolutionary organizations today need to have a certain "porosity to the Event".

Badiou wrote a book on St. Paul and Christianity that I hope to read, and it seems his understanding of revolution is shaped partially by Paul's "porosity" or openness to the Christ Event.

Here is Jordan's comment:

This is specifically in response to Nate’s questions about Badiou’s conception of the event in relation to the ‘revolutionary party’:

By ‘porosity to the event’ Badiou means firstly the apprehension of the event. He doesn’t mean any sort of normal occurence like a tree falling or a person running into another; there is no sense of the day to day happenings that surround us implied in his definition.

Instead the event is something which is a nameless (only upon introduction into the situation) name, a part of the situation that has no clear basis in it. In this sense it appears totally radical and irrational, but this is only to the ‘state’ and those who view the event in the same way.

So, to have ‘porosity to the event’ one must be the ‘intervenor’, as Badiou says, that names the event first–so that it may become a reality in the situation and circulate as part of the knowldge therein–and secondly ‘selects’ those occurences which happen as a result of the event. Keeping watch for an event is what this ‘porosity’ entails, that one might be sensitive enough to discern what is actually new and therefore completely generic (not particular as a nameable object) in the situation. The generic character of the event is what makes it possible to be universal, though John points out that it is not of a completely transcendental character. If it were particular it would only have one place in the structure of knowledge and the world.

This is the precise futility of a firm political party. The rules and guidelines that may be laid out in this party do not entail a revolution nor an event because they are in reaction to the current state and the overall situational structure. Reaction to the political or governmental structure is a simple denial of what is actually existent. It cannot be argued that the current structure is actually in place and actually working throughout the ‘Western world’, but trying to implant an idea into the structure, trying to change it by its own means, as it were, will never universally proclaim an idea, nor proclaim one that is radically different to whatever structure is in place. This is not to say that disagreement and denial of a flawed system and its rules is not an honorable first step, but that is not the point of intervention, of changing the structure and bringing a new idea into the world.

Badiou’s discussion of the Christ-event as the foundation of Christianity is a completely legitimate event that even the most stubborn atheist cannot deny. It isn’t that there is a metaphysical being called ‘God’ or that Jesus was the ‘dei filius’, but that as the ‘death of god’, which takes place in existence through his son, the event has happened. This is the point that what is trans-worldly comes to appear and then immediately exit (in the form of death) the realm of the world, or existence. This makes it event, and the cross as a newly obtained religious symbol, for before it was only an object of capital punishment. And the fact that this punishment is inflicted by the state and by a statist tool (the cross) it is recognizing that this man, this messiah to a certain group of people, is dying by it. Therefore the death is the emergent life and circulation of the Christ-event whether or not spirituality is involved. One can see then how this foundational circumstance had the effect of the Church-system. This, though being a religious model, is one that is congruent in structure to the political one.

His (Badiou’s) works are dense and sometimes sections of them come across as very cryptic. I can understand that someone without much time to undertake a new study would be overwhelmed by Badiou, so I hope that this helps a little. Though I have explained this in a philosophical way (hopefully easily understandable!) I don’t know that it can be done otherwise. I would say that the confusion and the upset that is found in our present time is due to a lack of ideological ground and so I won’t deny that we are in need of philosophy at the moment. We are in need of it to make sense of our situation and to found any worthwhile ‘action’, any legitimate thought on the world that we are engaging in.

Prayer after virtue

2010-12-02T01:27:00.000-08:00

social waves of innocent people

contemplate ballstic skies

The lights of Seabrook folding inward

The Atlantic shaking like the forth of July

I swore to God I heard Him speaking

through the static of charred goodbyes

And floating thoughts in rivers tweaking

Sentences composed while high

I chase the sound of sterile beacons

memories of winter sighs

the ache of longing still was sweet then

now it sags like tired thighs

church roof eaves leave bevels bleak with

snow lashed to the tips of eyes

apartments old enough to think in

residue of cleaner times

Meditation and the Crisis

2010-11-06T15:15:00.000-07:00

I am reposting this article from an outstanding new blog, "Diary of a disparaged CNA". It is by a nursing assistant who is trying to make sense of the caring work she does every day in a capitalist society that just does not care. This piece really shows the importance of meditation and contemplation as part of the struggle, a theme we've been discussing on here recently. I encourage everyone to check out her blog, it's updated regularly and its very inspiring.

peace,

Mamos

***for those who might not know, POC stands for "people of color"

POC meditation

Every Tues, I try to go with my friend R, to a POC meditation circle.I need the space for my mind to quiet, to meditate on survival and its trials. This summer/fall has been very strange. I have had very emotionally exhausting drama with people whom I thought were my good friends, and feeling betrayed by them. I suppose all relationships go through these kinds of tribulations, and you just have to grow from it.

R. and I talked alot about how in today's world, as the world seems to be increasingly collapsing in front of our eyes -- perhaps not in a dramatic apocalyptic manner, but in a manner of disintegration, chunks dropping off, increasing fire, increasing hazards, food riots, race war, future nuclear wars, etc -- it all seems very plausible. Everyone I know is feeling lost. We utilize, urgently, Marxist theory to try to explain the world, to try to intervene, to build organization, but the objective conditions are that the world is crumbling before us and we dont know really, what to do.

I think that the sense of helplessness I feel from the spate of publicized queer suicides and anti-queer violence, is exactly going to be the kind of emotions I increasingly feel -- extreme anger at the system but also a forboding sense that the problem is too big, too massive, and not knowing WHERE or HOW to start.

As more and more of us get unemployed, as more of us get shut out from school, as more of us who thought we could get a decent job w a BA degree find ourselves doing menial, undesirable work or worse still, be unemployed AND strapped w mountains of student loan debt -- we will feel the same: Helpless and massive demoralization cos what's pushing us down feels really really big and heavy and all-around. It is the State, it is Wall Street, it is the fucking WORLD ECONOMY.

We need to strategize and build organizations to resist, to articulate the problems, to start from somewhere. But more than ever I think, we need to create communal spaces for people to process pain, confusion and sorrow. This is increasingly where we are going to be headed: an emotional vacuum.

That's why I love going to POC meditation with R, and E and be in the presence of folks whom I dont organize with, but whom I respect deeply for the calming and honest vibe they bring to my life. I know I need this quiet space to share survival stories and boost up my emotional strength to face the ugliness of the world everyday, to organize with people who might not show me the same respect that I deserve, to face the bosses. To do that, I need emotional resilience and strength.

Problems with pacifism, and prayers for a land without prayer

2010-10-24T22:29:00.000-07:00

I was just reading Thomas Merton's diary "Dialogues with Silence" and one of his prayers really struck me:

Lady, the night has got us by the heart.
The whole wide world is tumbling down.
Words turn to ice in my dry throat
Praying for a land without prayer,

Walking to you on water all winter
In a year that wants more war.

It made me think about a video a friend shared earlier criticizing pacifism, showing that Ghandi and King were only successful because there was a real threat of armed insurgency against colonialism and global white supremacy during their era and the rulers knew they were better off dealing with the pacifists than the insurgents. In other words, nonviolence was used to co-opt revolution.

I am tired of liberal pastors, the American Friends Service Committee, and other organizations that preach nonviolence and then preach that we should go and vote for Democrats who are presiding over American Empire's war machine, which tortures and kills mercilessly as the recent leaks of classified war documents have further confirmed.

I'm tired of nonviolence being presented as a tactic that can stop this kind of mass slaughter. It clearly can't . We marched in the streets for years and hundreds of people chained themselves to federal buildings to stop the Iraq war and it didn't stop. It will only be stopped through revolutionary struggles, which are going on abroad right now and could erupt here if things keep getting worse.

That being said, I've heard people say they can only imagine dying fighting, they can't imagine living in the new society after the revolution, they wouldn't know what to do there. I think this happens to quite a few revolutionaries. We need to remember that the goal of revolution is life, not war. Sometimes it is necessary to fight to defend your life and your community. But the point of it all is not the fighting itself, it is life.

I actually have more respect for people like Thomas Merton than I do for the liberal pastors and nonviolent "activists" who claim to be for nonviolent "revolution". Merton was just sitting there in his monastery cultivating inner peace. That's not gonna change the world but at least he wasn't stopping others from changing the world or trying to co-opt their movements into ineffective and hypocritical "nonviolence."

Actually, I think Merton and other monks do make a small, humble contribution to the revolution. They show us one side of what life could be like after the revolution is won. They are so impatient for the new society they try to catch a glimpse of it now by separating themselves from the capitalist world, and they are willing to put up with all sorts of obnoxious church hierarchy and bureaucracy just to live free from alienated labor where they can at least partially live the lifestyle Karl Marx described as Communism,

where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic.

It seems to me that folks like Merton live in the spiritual desert, the wasteland at the edge of capitalism. They know they aren't separate from it, they know their existence on its margins is a result of their privilege and they know that like the rest of us in America, they live off the spoils of empire and capital, ill gotten and covered in blood. They're not pretending to be innocent or above it all... as Merton expresses directly in the title of his book "Conjectures of a guilty bystander." But in that spiritual desert they spend their time prefiguring the life Marx describes and praying for a world where we can live it, "praying for a land without prayer", or rather for a land where prayer is not a separate sphere of activity divided from work, play, and life itself. By living, and praying that way, they make a small, humble contribution to the revolution by helping remind the rest of us what we are fighting for, by reminding us what life looks like so that we don't start thinking it is only war.

What we need is to overcome the capitalist division of labor between scholars and soldiers, ministers and militants, prayer and labor, life and struggle. We need to be like the ancient Israelite armed prophets or the Wu Tang warrior-monks who combined the intellectual and the martial arts. Soldiers follow directions given by commanders. Warriors are creative and self-governing in their battle, and fight for life and a broader vision of society. They take the best virtues of the monastery (virtues Merton hints at) and deploy them in the streets.

God forbid that I become a solider who lives only for war

God forbid I become an old burnt out former revolutionary preaching nonviolence and telling others not to struggle valiantly, to simply give in and attempt to reform the Empire.

My prayer is that if I ever get burned out, and if I don't die fighting first, that I retire to some place where I'm not in other people's way and pray for a land without prayer.

But my real prayer is that I fight courageously as a warrior with others and that we build a new society together so that we can all live together and pray/play together in that land. There will be no prayer in that land because capitalism will no longer divide prayer from life... the revolution should make life itself our prayer.

Radical Jesus blog

2010-10-17T20:10:00.000-07:00

When I was a student and a new organizer in Providence, I was blessed to find a lot of mentors among the radical Christians in that city. We did a couple of demonstrations for affordable housing together and prepared for them with prayer, reflection and song. I learned a lot from this, and it was a key step in my developing commitment to radical politics. One of them just shared with me a blog he writes for: http://www.radicaljesus.org/. I encourage folks to check it out.

peace,

Mamos

A response to "Biodiverse Resistance"

2010-10-17T13:24:00.000-07:00

A friend just told me about this blog called Biodiverse Resistance and I'm really blown away by it. The author, Shiva, explores the links between the liberation struggles of folks with disabilities, queer liberation, feminism, transliberation, ecology, and anti-capitalism, and they use this concept of biodiversity as a framework for articulating these connections. It is some of the freshest radical theorizing going on right now. I particularly like this post. I'm posting my comments on it here because they were too long to put in the comments section on Shiva's blog. I'd be interested to hear Shiva and other folks' thoughts on all of this. My own knowledge on these topics, especially when it comes to disabilities liberation struggles, is very limited and I'm open to critiques.

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For years, I studied Christian theology, including ecological theology and feminist theology. I agree with Shiva that in Western cultures (and perhaps others?) there is a somewhat theological emphasis on "bodily acceptance", the idea that God (or nature) gave you your body and you shouldn't alter it. For a lot of Catholics, God and Nature are often synonymous, because so many of the traditions of Catholic moral theology are based in the concept of Natural Law, the idea that God as a Creator infused the world with purpose and direction. For this tradition, fulfilling the purposes of our bodies, our lives, our planet, etc. is a moral imperative. Here, norms don't come from external laws imposed on humans, they spring from our bodies themselves and their relationship to the rest of nature.

For reactionary, patriarchal, heterosexist, and transphobic Catholics this means that anything which does not conform to a narrow definition of bodily flourishing is evil. They would say, for example, that masturbation, birth control, homosexuality, trans identity, abortion etc. are evil because they go against some sort of normative bodily imperative to "flourish" by reproducing. They would argue that our genitals are to be used only for reproduction because that is their "natural", and hence God-given purpose. Some even even take this to the extreme and argue that walking on our hands is a venial sin because the hands are not made for walking, they are made for other purposes. I have also heard anti-choice Catholics use this as a wedge to divide disabilities liberation and feminist movements, when they argue for example that legalized abortion plus new screening technologies that can analyze the genetics of fetuses will lead to the selective abortion of fetuses with disabilities, and hence eugenics.

The irony is that a lot of these reactionaries have a completely different stance when it comes to altering those parts of the natural world that exist outside the human body. They would generally endorse capitalist development projects that enclose land and resources and turn them into commodities to be traded on the "free market". They would generally endorse aspects of modern science that alter nature for profit. They would be critical of deep-ecology and other political ideologies that say nature (conceived of as outside and opposed to human civilization) should be off limits for human influence and that any attempt to alter it is evil.

Some Catholic feminists have rejected natural law because of this reactionary baggage it carries. Others, like Christina Traina and Jean Porter have tried to reclaim/ reinterpret natural law by redefining what is natural based on contemporary science and the insights of feminist theory. They reject the patriarchal biases and the barely updated 12th century science that informs so much official Catholic thinking on nature, and would include homosexuality, and open celebration of women's sexuality as "natural" and hence something good, something that is part of human flourishing. The problem is, some but not all of these folks would endorse aspects of deep ecology and would say we shouldn't alter non-human nature and that our attempts to alter it are what have caused the ecological crisis. Again, there is that contradiction - what we ought to do with our bodies is contrasted to what we ought to do with the rest of nature.

Shiva's emphasis on biodiversity seems to overcome that contradiction, by breaking down the divide between human and non-human nature. The concept of biodiversity does this well, and it also is a good tool for challenging reactionary understandings of human nature, because it shows that human nature, like non-human nature, thrives when it is complex and diverse, and it perishes when it is reduced to some narrow concept of what is "normal." What's key here I think is to link the concept of biodiversity back into evolutionary theory, to show that nature itself is not static, it is always changing. At a certain point in evolutionary history, some of the things we take for granted like opposable thumbs or large brains were mutations, variations on the average body type. Who is to say that the body types our oppressive society considers "abnormal" or "freakish" today might not actually be new evolutionary forms of humanity and nature? Maybe queer folks, transfolks, folks with disabilities, etc. are actually showing the rest of humanity aspects of being human that are currently underdeveloped, and if they flourish they could help humanity as a whole grow and liberate itself from past material constrains and social oppression.

I would be cautious to say this is the only reason why queer folks, transfolks, and folks with disabilities should have freedom and justice because it can come off sounding like those liberals who argue for affirmative action only because "diversity" improves the leaning environment of white folks - instead of getting at the real problem which is that a long history of oppression has kept oppressed people down and this needs to be overthrown. Also, I want to avoid romanticizing the experiences of folks with disabilities, or reducing these experiences to some kind of "improvement" on "normal" body types. This can become its own kind of essentialism because not everyone with a disability necessary wants to embrace this disability and see it as something the contributes to humanity, and that's also a choice people should be able to make. So politically this rhetoric of biodiversity would need to be complemented by an emphasis on justice and liberation (I imagine Shiva might agree with this), but biodiversity is a key philosophical concept that can ground this struggle for justice and liberation in a broader understanding of nature and society.

The danger here is this type of thinking is illustrated by the person who criticized Shiva at the queer ecology conference. What about choice? What about folks who choose to be queer, or trans, for example, and don't want to see it as something "natural" they were "born with"? I agree this critic and with Shiva - politically, we need a libertarian approach that does not police folks choices when it comes to their bodies. As commentor Anne C put it well, bodily acceptance and bodily autonomy are not separate, they're two sides of the same coin because we should be free NOT to change our bodies if we don't want to and we should be free to change our bodies if we do want to. Anything other than that gives society and government too much power which can and will be used to reinforce oppression. This is true when it comes to limiting the power of the current patriarchal-white supremacist-capitalist-heterosexist state, but it is also true when it comes to envisioning a new society. Our revolutionary dreams could rapidly become nightmares if people start to tell transfolks or folks with disabilities "you can't alter your body that way anymore because there is no need to do it now, we've had a revolution and you're free to accept your body the way it is." This sounds a lot like the Revolutionary Community Party USA's line where they said homosexuality would disappear after the revolution.

Often the Left deals with this kind of dilemma by trying to do away with the concept of what is "natural" or "healthy" altogether. I've heard many Leftists argue that all concepts of nature and health are socially constructed, and hence can be changed by human agency. The problem with this is it imagines an abstract human individual who is separate from material reality and can just change that reality based on individual will. This seems to fall into some of the classic mind over body splits that Capitalism and patriarchy have created, which is something that feminism has tried to challenge. Also, it seems to put human willpower over and against nature, which can't be good in terms of developing an ecological politics.

What about an alternative approach, one that tries to understand choice, freedom, and agency as part of nature itself? Maybe Shiva's concept of biodiversity can contribute to that. Have folks ever read Murray Bookchin's book "The Philsophy of Social Ecology"? He tries to get at something similar (though his politics on disabilities, queer liberation, and transliberation are limited) He argues that human history is a part of natural evolution, they are not separated. Like Shiva, he thinks human society thrives when it has its own biodiversity,when it is complex and changing instead of simplified and static. He sees capitalism as simplifying and suffocating both natural and human biodiversity, possibly bringing evolution to a halt. And he envisions a social ecological revolution where human biodiversity will flourish and human society will become "nature rendered self-conscious."

He is able to imagine humans as nature rendered self-conscious because he sees choice, agency, and what libertarian Marxists would call self-activity present throughout nature. He argues that the idea of evolution as "survival of the fittest" or "adaptation" is outdated and is a distortion of oppressive Victorian era patriarchal, racist, and capitalist science. He draws from more contemporary evolutionary theorists who argue that sentient beings actually shape our surroundings and play a role in shaping our own evolution. Not just humans, but other beings as well. In other words, there is a an aspect of self-activity present in the evolutionary process even before humans emerge from it. Our capacity for self-activity and choice actually comes from our bodies and the way they evolved.

So if you take that as step further, our choices to alter our bodies could actually be an extension and continuation of this evolutionary process. And, this evolutionary process is not always as slow creeping linear development, it also includes breaks, leaps, and revolutions, which could happen even faster as humans re-organize technology to express our desires for freedom instead of to dominate each other and the rest of nature.

In any case, I think returning to some of these philosophical and theoretical points can really help us overcome some of the limitations of contemporary ecological, anti-capitalist, and feminist thinking. I'm looking forward to continuing the dialogue.

The Trinity in Prayer: contemplation, liberation theology, and comparative theology

2010-10-03T15:03:00.001-07:00

Just like God is a Trinity, a tension between three forms, so too does our spiritual practice need to live out a tension between three forms of prayer:

Prayer to God the Absolute means stripping away all attachments and images, to let go of our egos and our desires to be famous, well-liked, beautiful, wealthy, powerful, etc. All of these will pass away while the glory of God will flourish. This is the practice of contemplation.

Prayer to God the Incarnate Revolutionary, Jesus Christ, means following Christ's revolutionary path even if it means living in poverty, suffering under state repression, or even being crucified by gun. It means doing all of this for love of others. This is the practice of liberation theology.

Prayer to God the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of Freedom, means constantly being open to new seeds of the spirit in every part of our lives, and learning from these seeds of the spirit in every history, every culture, every religion. This is the practice of comparative theology and interfaith dialogue.

A well rounded Christian revolutionary needs to live out all three of these forms of prayer and practice : compassion, liberation theology, and comparative theology. Without all three of these in tension and contradiction with each other we can't grow..... or more precisely we will grow but it will be oppressive and distorted growth instead of the flourishing of God in history through our self-activity.

Self-activity means our free creativity, unalienated labor, our struggling, our co-creation.... but it is really selfless activity when done right because it is done out of love for others. Ultimately the highest form of self(less)-activity is what the Taoists call "wu wei" or actionless action - action which extends the developing healthy and free tendencies in folks social actions instead of forcing and confining these to the actions we desire. In Christian terms, it is graceful action, action which incarnates God's grace and sparks others to encounter this grace in their own experiences, through their own activity instead of through what we think their activity should be.

The three forms of prayer help us develop this graceful action instead of dissipating our energies in useless and frustrating activism.

The Trinity and Dialectics

2010-10-03T13:21:00.001-07:00

Recently I've been studying dialectics, which is a tradition of philosophy born with Heraclitus in ancient Greece and the Taoists in ancient China. It was developed by Aristotle and many others and came to fruition with Hegel and Marx. Dialectics means that everything grows through overcoming contradictions. For example, right now there is a conflict within me between the person I am and the person I am becoming, and I grow through that inner conflict. Right now there is a conflict our society between the ruling class and the working class and we grow through that contradiction.

I wonder if this concept of dialectics could help us understand the riddle of the Trinity, the complex traces in the scriptures and tradition of God's manifestation in 3 forms.

When I was in Church the other day it hit me with some clarity: The Trinity represents a profound contradiction in our understanding of God, a contradiction that explosively reveals our ignorance and forces us to abandon our false conceptions of divinity.

God "The Father" in Christianity means the Absolute, the Divine, the Transcendent, the Almighty. No images can ever represent this Absolute because it cannot be contained.

Jesus Christ is the negation of this absolute. In the person of Jesus, God becomes concrete, incarnate, personal, intimately present, and, most importantly, involved in concrete historical struggles for liberation against oppression. When Jesus Christ confronts us and asks us to walk with him we need to give up and negate the ideas we have of God as some all powerful force that would never relate to us in our humility. We need to give up abstract and intellectual concepts of God. We need to stop thinking of God as someone or something that only skilled, trained intellectuals or monks can reach in the abstraction of their minds and their withdrawal from daily life in the world. We need to see God, hear God, touch God, and in Communion, become one with God. In Jesus Christ, God becomes human so that humans can become divine. Jesus is the ultimate exaltation of humanity which humans can find through practicing what Jesus practiced: love, compassion, and justice for others.

However, the cycle of the Trinity does not end there. If it did, there would be a danger that we could turn Jesus Christ into an idol. We could worship him as the physical manifestation of God in the world as if God were not present in all of the rest of the universe. We could assume that the only place in the world that is Holy is is the place where he walked and the only time in the world that was holy was the time when he lived. We could assume that the only cultures in the world which have sanctity and holiness are those cultures that have had contact with the culture he was born into. This can justify imperialism and profoundly conservative conclusions - if you are not connected to the spiritual bloodline of Jesus Christ and the spiritual soil of Jesus' Christ's Holy Land then you are not part of that exaltation of humanity so we, the true divinized humans can exalt ourselves at YOUR expense. We can take YOUR land, dominate YOUR history and graft you as a subordinate into the tribe of descendants of the God-Man. This is basically what Christian Empires have been doing for centuries, from Rome under Constantine to the British Empire of the 19th and 20th centuries. This idolatry has lead to the genocide of millions of indigenous people who were deemed to be "pagans" and it has lead to the destruction of beautiful and illuminating non-Christian religious traditions.

That's why God in his infinite mercy negated Jesus Christ as well. God knew we would turn him into an idol and a symbol of conquest. That's why Jesus died on the Cross, descended to the Dead, rose again, and ascended into heaven. Just when we thought we had him pinned down he slipped from our grasp and traversed the full lengths and depths of life and death. Just when we thought we had him nailed down in one holy spot, he disappeared, negated himself, and then told us that if we want to find him we can find him everywhere and anywhere, in the Holy Spirit. Anyone, Jew or Gentile, Roman, Ethiopian or Celt, European or Asian, African or Latin American, etc, etc. can communicate with the Spirit because the Spirit dwells in all times and places. It's like the Bruce Springsteen/ Rage Agasint the Machine Song:

"Wherever you seen a cop beatin' a guy
Wherever a hungry newborn baby cries
Wherever there's a fight against the blood and hatred in the air
Look for me Ma, I'll be there
Wherever somebody's strugglin' for a place to stand
For a decent job or a helpin' hand
Wherever somebody's strugglin' to be free
Look in their eyes, Ma, you'll see me
You'll see me"

Jesus may have died but in his death he did not withdraw into the safety of the Absolute. No, he was and IS reborn again in every human's struggle for freedom and dignity, every ecosystem's struggle for health and dynamism, every living breathing development of freedom in history. The flame of the revolution Jesus launched against Roman tyranny and elite religious dogmatism may have been stomped out in the 1st century but the embers were scattered and spread around the world and from time to time they burst out in new fires of Pentecost.

To put it in dialectical terms, Jesus is the negation of God the "Father", and the Holy Spirit is the negation of that negation. In Jesus Christ God revels to us that he is not abstract and inaccessible, but as soon as he reveals that he also contradicts our ignorant grasping at this revelation by negating himself again and showing us that his concrete, incarnate presence in history is not confined to one time or place but is everywhere. So God becomes a concrete universal, the Absolute present in the concrete in every moment, every location, and most importantly in every living breathing sentient being struggling for life, love, and freedom.

So with this understanding we can end with a revamped Trinitarian prayer:

In the name of the Absolute, the Revolutionary, and the Spirit of Freedom, as it was in the beginning, is becoming now, and for ever will become

Ableism, the gospels, and the Book of Eli

2010-03-14T15:30:00.001-07:00

I've been giving more thought recently to the oppression that folks with disabilities face in our society. Under capitalism we are judged based on our ability to sell our labor as a commodity - that, is to work for wages. Those who can't work are often either cast aside or treated with pity and contempt; they are not considered equal citizens in society. This situation is called ableism, and just like racism, sexism, and classism, it is something we need to confront.

Do the gospels shed any light on this situation or do they simply reinforce ableism? Skimming through the Book of Luke today I was struck by several different perspectives on folks with disabilites that seem to exist side by side. I have very little time to write now, so this is only a sketch, not a serious analysis/ exegesis...

1) many of the religious authorities at the time (the scribes and Pharisees) considered people with disabilities to be cursed or possessed by demons. At times it seemed Jesus agreed with them; he just debated with them about whether or not these demons could be cast out on the Sabbath. (At times it seems he was also debating about whether this healing should be done for free or for a charge). This doesn't seem to be all that liberating because it still associates ability with godliness and disability with evil. It also assumes people need to get rid of their disabilities to be happy and free and doesn't imagine any positive role folks with disabilites could play in society.

2) At other points Jesus seems to flip this logic on its head; he says that people with disabilites are actually the ones who are more righteous than the religious authorities who judge them. In the Parable of the Great Feat (Luke 14: 15-24), Jesus says the Kingdom of Heaven will be like a banquet where the master has invited many prestigious guests of honor who are all too busy to come because they are caught up in their own possessions and business dealings. So the master invites all the "poor and the crippled, the blind and the lame" to eat instead. The idea is the last shall be first, the first shall be last - the outcast and oppressed in this society are actually more likely to find salvation. Those who you think are good are actually evil, and those you think are evil are actually good.

3) A similar theme runs throughout the gospels, where the scholars are unable to "see" clearly who Jesus is but the blind who they condemn are able to "see" and understand him.

This last theme is dramatized very well in the movie the Book of Eli which I saw the other week. In the post-apocalyptic world described in that movie, all of the Bibles have been burned because the war which brought the apocalypse had to do with religion and people burned the Bible to prevent it from happening again. Carnegie, the warlord/ gangster figure wants to get ahold of the last Bible so he can use it to rule through hegemony and ideological manipulation instead of through brute force. Eli is trying to bring the Bible to Alcatraz, which symbolizes the monasteries which protected certain forms of learning during and passed them on during the Middle Ages. At the end of the book we realize that Eli is blind. The copy of the Bible he is carrying is in braille. So when Carnegie steals it from him, he is unable to read it. The idea is that the true power of the book cannot be understood by the powerful who wish to use it to justify their power.... only those who "walk by faith not by sight" understand the book's purpose.

Is this consistent with basic themes of liberation theology? For example, the "hermeneutical privilege of the oppressed", the idea that oppressed people can unlock the meaning of scripture better than their oppressors? Are people with disabilities, as oppressed people, able to unlock the secrets of scripture better than those who condemn or pity them? Or, is the movie(and perhaps the Gospel narratives it revamps), reinforcing oppressive narratives like the "supercripple" who through sheer willpower overcomes adversity (the Christopher Reeve mystique?) Or is the movie (and the gospel narratives it revamps) romanticizing folks with disabilities, treating them like symbols of truth who are somehow more "pure", without recognizing their existence as complex and contradictory human beings?

These are questions I need to explore a lot further and I am open to folks' insights on this if you have any suggestions.

Haiti, Black Liberation, and the Book of Job

2010-01-31T14:32:00.000-08:00

My friends and I are doing labor organizing with custodians at University of Washington as part of the overall struggle against budget cuts, structural adjustment, and privatization there. Many of the workers are East African, African American, and Afro-Caribbean. Together we have been following closely the tragedy of the earthquake in Haiti and are organizing and collecting aid donations in response.

For us, this is a matter of outrage, not pity. Outrage that the US military is stopping aid shipments from organizations it can't control. Outrage that the white supremacist leaders of the US are using this as an excuse to further neo-colonial control over Haiti. Outrage that Haiti just signed an IMF rescue package that will plunge them into further debt peonage to the global ruling elite. Outrage that Haiti's poorly constructed slum cities crashed and burned during the earthquake because for decades resources were diverted away from social reconstruction and toward paying back earlier loans to US-backed financial institutions. Outrage that the US had repeatedly plunged Haiti into deeper social instability through coups and civil wars, including the kidnapping of liberation theologian/priest-turned president John Bertrand Aristide.

Haiti was the site of the only successful slave revolution since the Exodus, a revolution which terrified the US slave-owning elites and inspired Nat Turner, Denmark Vesey's, and John Brown's revolts. In this sense the Haitian revolution has left a permanent mark on the development of insurgent Christianity on this continent. It is part of all of our collective tradition of liberation and the fact that the diabolical rulers of this continent have spent 200 years punishing the Haitian people for it should be something that propels us into the streets in aggressive solidarity.

How many Katrinas, how many Haitis, how many Detroits will it take before the Black liberation movement ignites again, pulling large segments of the New World working class into its vortex? I can't wait for that day...

Our group, International Workers and Students for Justice will be tabling on campus collecting donations for relief efforts in Haiti and we will be passing out literature talking about Haitian resistance to imperialism and the need for a direct worker-to-worker foreign policy from below, a new type of mutual aid. I encourage folks to donate online to some of the non-imperialist aid organizations listed here.

On a theological tip, I was horrified but somehow not surprised to hear Pat Robertson claim that the earthquake was God's vengeance for a supposed "pact with the Devil" that the Haitians made during their revolution against the French slave-masters. If anything, this theology is demonic, portraying God as a racist cracker who gets off on watching people suffer. On Facebook an image was circulating (I can't find it now) of a placard outside the "First Baptist Church of Haiti". It said simply "Fuck you Pat Robertson." Whether it was fabricated or real, this poster reminds me of Job's retorts to his patronizing and dogmatic friends. They try to console him in his suffering by suggesting he earned his pain by sinning. He basically tells them to fuck off. The middle of the Book of Job (minus the somewhat shady intro where God seems to act like a gangster proving to Satan he is harder than him) represents a profound rebellion against any form of theology that aims to justify the suffering of oppressed people.

I just got through Roland Boer's chapter on Ernst Bloch from Criticism of Heaven. In the spirit of Bloch, and in solidarity with Haiti, the only God I can worship right now is the one who will come to END suffering, to usher in the Kingdom of Freedom.

Review of Avatar

2010-01-31T14:16:00.000-08:00

I wrote this review of the movie Avatar for Gatheringforces.org. It deals with the political implications of the movie in terms of anti-colonial struggle, racism, dissent in the military, and ecological politics.

Tucked away inside the review is a discussion of the religious themes in the movie. I argue that the film contrasts the dualism of colonial scientist Grace Augustine with the spirituality of the Navi'i, the indigenous people of the planet Pandora. Their spirituality integrates idealism and materialism in a dialectical process; Augustine's mental and social location as a colonial scientist prevents her from understanding this.

I am reposting that part here in the hope of further discussing these themes.

At the same time, [Grace] Augustine is right, the Navi’i do not practice a “primitive” mysticism. Eywa is not a disembodied Spirit. The Navi are not idealists, in fact they fully integrate spirit and matter, idealism and materialism, in a way that only the most utopian libertarian Marxists and anarchists have dreamed up. They do not worship a God who stands outside of and dominates the natural world, nor do they merge into a pantheistic Oneness, a “night in which all cows are Black” as Hegel put it. Their worship involves merging their consciousness with the world around them through creative praxis: though a mix of contemplation and action. It is almost like all of them become Jesus figures: fully God and fully human(oid), they are in touch with universal truth in and through the concrete, particular, embodied reality they live in. This allows them to co-develop/ co-evolve with the natural world and that’s why they are able to develop such a sophisticated system of biologically-based technology. To extend the theological echoes here, I wonder if the choice of Grace Augustine’s name was intentional. For her, like for St. Augustine, grace and spirit come down from above to control disobedient bodies; for the Navi’i who defy her liberal racist science, there is no separation between spirit and matter.

Great quote from Harry Chang

2010-01-09T23:08:00.000-08:00

I was just reading the interesting discussion on socialism and Black nationalism over at Advance the Struggle and I came across a classic piece by Harry Chang critiquing Stalinist and Maoist approaches to Black liberation. The last paragraph is a pretty stunning and precise historical summary of how white supremacy has functioned as an integral part of capitalism the past 500 years. The second sentence of this paragraph suggests that the rise of "races" as modes of social organization was part of the ascendency of the bourgeoisie and it's attack on previous modes of social relations, including religious ones. I know this is something that Loren Goldner has explored, and I hope to post on his work here in the future. All I can say is that this is disastrous for Christians who are supposed to be baptized "neither Greek nor Jew, slave nor free." I can't help but notice that at times it seems in church we are asked to worship "Western civilization" (code word for "the white race") instead of God. But at this point we can't go back to a parochial identification with past forms of Christianity instead of with Western Civilization. No, we have to take up what Chang suggests - class struggle organizing that can target and destroy the socio-economic base of white supremacy, replacing it with true global solidarity.

Racist thought is probably the most inhuman thought produced by the bourgeois era. In its origin, it carries the bourgeois birthmark, being premised on the dissolution of tribal, religious, and cultural "ethnics." In its career, its virulency closely parallels the progress of primitive accumulation from Portuguese and Spanish colonies, through Dutch and French colonies, to the English-speaking world. In its death-throes, it has become married to fascist thought. The proven ability of Marxism to smash all the illusions of the bourgeois era must now come to aid us in our effort to keep vigilant against all attempts to reproduce racist thought, in our movement to expose its inhuman irrationality, in our struggle to destroy its socio-economic base.

Insurgent Iran: Is This Liberation Theology (Back) in Action?

2009-12-31T12:44:00.000-08:00

Happy New Year everyone! It already looks like it going to be an exciting one, with riots in Tehran, Palestine solidarity activists trying to march into Gaza to protest apartheid, and more student occupations planned on campuses from Croatia to California.

I am particularly inspired by the Iranian students and workers who have taken to the streets to try and bring down the dictatorship there. As the Lenin's Tomb blog argues well, this is not some Gucci revolution. These students are working class students, and now their cousins from working class districts like South Tehran are joining the fray and kicking the cops in the face, blowing up police stations, and chanting "Allahu Akbar" and "Death to the Dictator".

This is also not simply a revolution of polite liberal atheists, as some here in the US would like to have it. This is not a revolt AGAINST the 1979 Iranian revolution, it is a continuation of the unfinished business of that revolution. It may be a revolt agianst a Muslim dictatorship but this doesn't mean that this revolt and the form of society it might create to replace that dictatorship will be liberal, secular, or pro-US imperialism.

1979 was a moment where Marxists, socialists, and Muslims rose up together, where largely Muslim workers took over their factories and set up direct democratic councils (shoras), animated by a prophetic and revolutionary vision put forward by Islamic socialists like Ali Shariati. It was a moment analogous to the liberation theology movement of Christian workers and peasants in Latin America which was going on at the same time.

Since then, the revolution was coopted into a counter-revolutionary Islamic dictatorship, a kind of Islamic Stalinism based on the imperatives of production for the nation at all costs, smashing workers protests, and extreme patriarchy.

There are signs this counter-revolution is wearing thin. As the excellent book Iran on the Brink documents, workers councils (shoras) have reemerged in recent years as part of a renewed rank and file labor movement. And this year, since last spring's disputed elections, students and many other layers of society have joined the militant workers in opposing the regime. These past few weeks older and more religious layers of the working class have come out in full force after the regime attacked and killed 8 protestors, vilating the traditional ban on killing during the holy day of Ashura. Ashura is the Shia day of mourning for the martyrdom of Husayn Ibn Ali, grandson of Muhammad, who was killed by Yazid, a king who Shia Muslims see as a tyrant. During the Iranian Revolution, Ali Shariati and others called the Shah, the U.S.- backed dictator of Iran Yazid and thousands of people in the street shouted "Yazid will fall."

The same thing happened this week but now people are calling the leaders of the Islamic Republic Yazid. The spirit of Shariati and Islamic liberation theology is very much alive on the streets of Tehran:

Seeing this shows what workers and students can do and it inspires me to keep organizing here against our own Yazids and tyrants. It also inspired me to go back and revise a paper I wrote a few years ago comparing the Islamic socialism of Ali Shariati and the '79 revolution to the liberation theology of Gustavo Gutierrez. I wrote this after taking a seminar with Gutierrez when I studied theology at Notre Dame. Here is a short summary of the paper, and it is embedded below. I would greatly appreciate feedback and criticism from anyone interested.

Ali Shariati was an Islamic socialist leader during the Iranian Revolution. Gustavo Gutierrez is one of the most prominent Latin American Christian liberation theologians. This paper compares their theological ideas. Both argued that people of faith should engage fully in political struggles for human liberation against capitalism and imperialism. In this, they draw from and challenge their respective religious traditions. They also draw from and challenge the Marxist tradition they shared.

This essay also reflects critically on methods of religious studies, liberation theology, comparative theology, and Marxist philosophy of history.

Ali Shariati and Gustavo Gutierrez: A Study of Comparative Liberation Theology -

The true revolutionary is guided by a great feeling of love

2009-12-28T22:20:00.000-08:00

I just found this picture, which is now my desktop background.

What Che and Jesus have in common is they were both revolutionaries who were murdered for being revolutionaries.

What Che and Jesus don't have in common is that Che was a state capitalist and Jesus was not.

In a letter to his mother in 1956 Che also wrote: "I am not Christ or a philanthropist, old lady, I am all the contrary of a Christ.... I fight for the things I believe in, with all the weapons at my disposal and try to leave the other man dead so that I don't get nailed to a cross or any other place." That didn't work. He got shot. I wonder what he would have made of people turning him into a martyr who died for others.

I also wonder why did Che feel the need to tell his mom that he is not Christ? Were people already mistaking him for Christ during his lifetime? It seems strange to me, I've never seen a revolutionary of my generation have to explain to his mom that he is not the messiah, it's pretty damn obvious. Most of our parents just think we're either crazy or stupid. But then again, we haven't overthrown any U.S. backed dictatorships recently either.

For Marx atheism was not a prerequisite for socialism

2009-12-26T21:35:00.000-08:00

I just came across a great blog by a theology professor named Roland Boer who writes about Marxism and Christianity. I just ordered his book Criticism of Heaven on the theological writings of Western Marxists like Ernst Bloch, Walter Benjamin, and Gramsci. He also wrote a great piece on Rosa Luxemburg and religion. I hope to review both here as soon as I can carve out time away from our constant organizing.

In the meantime, I am struck by Boer's short, accessible review of Marx's stance on religion on his blog. Here is an excerpt:

While Marx admitted that he had a particular dislike of Christianity – ‘so specific is my aversion to Christianity,’ he wrote to Lasalle – and even though he is guilty of occasional moments of crass materialism, he also argued that atheism is not a prerequisite for socialism.

also:

Another reason for distinguishing between atheism and socialism was tactical. On one side Bakunin and the anarchists wanted the International to declare itself atheist, abolish cults and replace faith with science. Marx comments dryly, ‘As if one could declare by royal decree abolition of faith!’ On the other side there were plenty of accusations that the International was precisely as Bakunin had wanted. I do not mean the scaremongers of state repression, but former comrades such as Jules Favre and Mazzini, who stated that the International wanted to make atheism compulsory. Engels repeatedly points out that atheism is not part of the socialist program.

Marx basically argued that religion would only go away once a socialist society fulfilled all of its promises. Once the future socialist society develops into the social equivalent of the Kingdom of God, Christians will have nothing left to preach. Until then, Marx and Engels argued Christians were welcome to participate in the 1st Communist International.

Someone should go that to Revolutionary Communist Party leader Bob Avakian who keeps raving about the need to destroy religion. The RCP's bookstore even carries filth by "new atheist" authors who are helping to feed the neoconservative thugs in the ruling class plenty of ideas about the backwardness and barbarism of Islam.

I'm really impressed with what I've read of Boer's work so far. I don't know why he isn't read more widely on the US Left. This country is even more religious than his home (Australia) and we are in serious need of this kind of critical engagement with religion if we're ever going to build a serious revolutionary movement here.

James Connolly on Marxism and Religion

2009-12-26T21:19:00.000-08:00

It is a common idea that Marxism and religion are opposed to each other. I have heard this from Marxists and religious folks alike when I suggest that I'm trying to develop a religious vision of socialism from below/libertarian socialism. However, recently I've been stumbling across key texts from the history of Marxist revolutionary organizations that seem to challenge this assumption. I've been looking at Marxist parties and groups that did not narrowly imitate the practice of the Bolshevik Party in Russia, including Rosa Luxemburg's group in Poland/ Germany. Luxemburg engaged seriously with Christian theology, which is something hope to write about here in the future. I also just came across a great essay from James Connolly, who was a Marxist national liberation leader in Ireland and an early Irish American labor organizer in the US with the anarchist group the Industrial Workers of the World.

He argues that socialism is not opposed to religion because:

- most of the militant liberal atheists are also enemies of socialism. Their class base is the bourgeoisie/ ruling class.

- when the Pope attacks socialism he makes himself a fellow traveler of bourgeois atheists: "the ill-reasoned and inconclusive Encyclicals lately issued against Socialism make of the hierarchy of the Catholic Church belated camp followers in the armies marching under the banners raised by the agnostic exponents of the individualist philosophy."

- many workers falsely associate socialism with atheism/bourgeois criticism of religion because the propertied classes try to make this identification to discredit the socialists

- socialist parties should not take a position on questions of theology but should leave it up to their individual members to articulate a religious vision of socialism if they wish

-socialist doctrine is based on analysis of historical facts through human reason unassisted by faith. It does not require theological verification to be true. However, socialists welcome such theological verification if it helps the cause of socialism, they just can't be expected to make it party policy.

- the party should take this stance because it can't get caught up in battles between different religions or sects within religions

- Connolly models his party's policy on religion after that of the German SPD (Luxemburg's party). More on this later.

- He suggests this policy is designed to make religion a "private" matter. Would this leave him open to the critique that some liberation theologians have argued that making religion private ends up "privatizing" it, reinforcing bourgeois individualism and making ethics self serving, taking the bite of social critique out of religion and/ or demobilizing it as a force of liberation? Maybe not though because Connolly seems to suggest that individual party members can articulate a socialist vision of faith publicly if they want to, so it's not just private.

- But he does say that the Irish party should follow the German party in banning talk of religion or theology in party meetings or party events. I disagree with this, and the group I am helping build doesn't take this approach. I think when religious talk does come up we need to remind folks that they can't advocate for the revolutionary org as a whole to take a position in favor of any particular theology but they can openly discuss theology and can brainstorm with other group members about how to make theological arguments against patriarchy, capitalism, heterosexism, etc as cadre within the context of the group's organizing efforts.

- this quote sums up Connolly's position: "Socialism, as a party, bases itself upon its knowledge of facts, of economic truths, and leaves the building up of religious ideals or faiths to the outside public, or to its individual members if they so will. It is neither Freethinker nor Christian, Turk nor Jew, Buddhist nor Idolator, Mahommedan nor Parsee – it is only human."

Discussions on Islam and Liberation Theology Part 2

2009-12-26T20:53:00.000-08:00

Here is a follow up to my previous post on Islam and Liberation Theology. We have continued to discuss this topic over at Gathering Forces, and it has turned into a very fruitful dialogue about the intersections between comparative theology, liberation theology, and grassroots anti-imperialist organizing in Christian and Muslim communities. I am reposting the discussion here since on Gathering Forces it got buried inside the broader conversation about how to respond to the troop surge in Afghanistan. Some of the questions my friends Gila and JK raise are crucial and I hope to develop my answers to them in more depth in the future.

peace,

Mamos

gila // Dec 2, 2009 at 4:45 am

Mamos, because i’m extremely ignorant in terms of religion, what exactly do you mean by:

“What is missing in the mix are revolutionary religious forces from a direct democratic perspective who can jump into the 3 way fight without subordinating their distinctive religious content and vision….?”

What is “distinctive religious content and vision?” The way religions are practiced, it seems that one of the core tenets of each is that only followers of that specific religion know the true God or will be saved. Is it possible to be directly democratic but only include followers of one faith?

Mamos // Dec 4, 2009 at 4:35 am

hey Gila,

By a “distinctive religious content and vision” I mean that we should not be afraid to publicly proclaim a theology of liberation. I’m still trying to work out how best to do this, but I think it’s possible to organize religious communities and groups that overlap, draw from, support, and inspire broader multi-religious and/or non religious organizing efforts. For example, there is a dynamic relationship between Leftist religious communities in Chiapas informed by liberation theology and the broader Zapatista movement/ EZLN.

I don’t think there is any one theology that can stand alone and provide answers to our social problems without drawing from broader theoretical traditions that are not religious, at least not explicitly. One of the strengths of Latin American liberation theology is it meshed liberating political currents in the biblical tradition and in Church history with liberating currents of Marxist thought and practice. I should qualify that it did this only when it was at its best…. when it was at its worst it meshed a vision of a “progressive” or reformed Catholic hierarchy with Stalinism. I should also qualify that Marxism itself has historical roots in the long arc of Christian communistic struggle from the anti-Roman resistance of the early Church through the late medieval peasant revolts through the early slave revolts against primitive accumulation documented in The Many Headed Hydra: The Hidden HIstory of the Revolutionary Atlantic. So you could argue that when liberation theologians “baptized” Marxism and made it Christian, they were actually RE-baptizing it. Loren Goldner has also written extensively about the mystical roots of Marxism (for example, see here and here). Of course the “Christian” trajectory of these liberating currents has deep roots in indigenous religious traditions from African, Native American, and pre-Christendom European cultures.

Liberation theology is the critical reflection on practice in light of the word of God. In other words, when any of us are actively engaged in the struggle for human liberation and when we reflect, meditate, and pray as part of this struggle, we gain perpetually new insights into God’s revelation in the world. This stands in stark contrast to conservative theologies that claim there is one unchanging truth that God deposited only in the locked vaults of a select, elite corp of caretakers.

So by “distinctive” religious content and vision I don’t mean something that is completely separate from or hostile from “secular” political traditions…. much of my practice as a liberation theologian is informed by non-Christian traditions and much of the critical reflection I do on this practice is done in conversation with people of various religious and non-religious backgrounds.

Also, I disagree with your assessment that “the way religions are practiced, it seems that one of the core tenets of each is that only followers of that specific religion know the true God or will be saved.” Many religions don’t focus on “salvation” at all, that is a largely Christian concept, and of course, there are many traditions that don’t imagine that there is one “true God.”

And among Christians who do believe in salvation, I’d say there are many believers who assert that salvation is promised to everyone, not just Christians. In the Gospels, Jesus says that we are saved if we give food to others when they are hungry, clothes when they’re naked, drink when they’re thirsty, shelter when they’re homeless, etc. Many atheistic revolutionaries have taken this moral imperative more seriously then the bureaucratic leaders of various Christian denominations.

This is where liberation theology intersects with what is sometimes called comparative theology. Comparative theology is done when a Christian seriously studies another religious tradition and takes it seriously on its own terms, in its own historical, social, spiritual, moral, and aesthetic context, and then goes back and asks how we can better understand our Christian belief and practice in light of the insights the other tradition has to offer. For example, as a Christian I have studied Islam for years and this has prompted me to understand much more that “Allahu Akbar”, God is Greater – God cannot be captured or defined by any earthly power or authority. That’s why I have no problem chanting Allahu Akbar in Palestine solidarity street demos.

Of course there is a lot of religious chauvinism out there, and there are people in every faith who claim that only they have access to the Truth. We need to challenge this forthrightly, especially when these folks try to wield state power against people of other faiths or when they try to organize insurgent street forces to impose their beliefs on others by force. We also need to practice and promote dialogue between people of different faiths. However, the way interfaith dialogue is often done limits the terms of discussion to terms accessible to liberal multiculturalism. For example, in most “interfaith dialogues” I’ve been a part of (or thrown out of!), Christian and Jewish Zionist theologies cannot be challenged… when I have challenged Zionism I’ve been labeled an anti-Semite and shunned. But I do think the project of interfaith dialogue needs to be be built from below, from a firmly anti-racist, anti-imperialist, and anti-Zionist perspective.

Also, just to clarify, the “Three Way Fight” is the idea that we need to fight a) the state/ruling class/ imperialists AND b) the various right wing populist/ fascist forces who are also opposing the state/ruling class/ imperialists. The idea is that insurgency comes not only from the Left but also from the Right, and the Left needs to out-organize and compete with the Right to organize rebellions against the state and ruling class.

What I’m advocating in the US is that Left-wing, direct democratic religious radicals need to organize against both the religious right AND the liberal secular state. I would love to build this kind of organizing project but unfortunately for the time being I’m preoccupied with other work. I’m hoping that over the next few years we can “gather forces” and build circles of revolutionary religious folks who can start to take up this work more consistently.

JK // Dec 4, 2009 at 11:39 am

Hi Mamos,

Thanks for your comments! I realize this is sort of continuing the derailment of the conversation away from Afghanistan & Pakistan, but I’d like to learn more about your thoughts on leftist religious organizing. If folks think it’s best to move the conversation elsewhere, I would be happy to do that.

Specifically, you say that “Left-wing, direct democratic religious radicals need to organize against both the religious right AND the liberal secular state.” I’m more or less an atheist, and for me a big part of that is that my naturalistic view of the world/universe, including myself, gives me a strong sense of wonder, awe, and connection — things that I think religion can provide people too. At the same time, I would very much like to organize with religious radical leftists, and I have no interest in “converting” people to my view. How do you view the working and organizational relationships between atheists/agnostics/non-religious folks and religious folks in the 3-way fight?

Mamos // Dec 4, 2009 at 6:44 pm

Hi JK,

I agree this is getting a little off topic, but at the same time I do think your questions are relevant because the inability of secular and Muslim folks to fight imperialism together is one of the factors that contributes to the weakness of the antiwar movement in the US. Maybe I can answer your question and bring it back to the topic at hand by talking about how some of the folks around Gathering Forces have brought religious and nonreligious folks together in our Middle East solidarity organizing. This could be another post if the GF editors feel there is room, but if not, we can keep discussing it here in the comments.

So here goes…. many of us have participated in Middle East solidarity campaigns over the years. We have always tried to link solidarity to the struggle against white supremacy here in the US, pointing out how Israeli apartheid and US Empire are connected to racist institutions and perspectives here in our communities. To do this, we have organized in Arab and Muslim communities, bringing Arab and Muslim folks together with other people of color. There are many ways to do this – confronting bigoted anti-Muslim speakers like David Horowitz, Daniel Pipes, or Michael Medved when they come to speak on a college campus, doing mosque defense when a local mosque is getting vandalized and attacked, demanding a designated space on campus for Muslim folks to pray and do ablutions when folks get harassed for doing these things in public places, etc. In all of these cases, we have tried to build multi-religious coalitions on a militant anti-racist basis. Many practicing Muslims have gotten involved in these actions and both Muslim and non-Muslim folks in our groups have participated in Ramadan dinners or Iftars hosted by Muslim Students Association groups or have gone to Qur’an discussion groups or theological debates to meet folks and talk about organizing.

This work is not always easy. We have gotten criticized and shut out by MSA leaders, Imams, and other folks who felt we were turning rank and file Muslims against us and tried to isolate us as outside agitators (this is especially difficult for those of us who are Muslims who end up getting shut out from communities which are supposed to be theirs). Maybe other folks can elaborate more on these experiences.

Despite these difficulties though, this work has been fruitful because it’s given us a chance to build majority people of color multiracial groups in which Muslim folks participate as equals alongside atheists, Christians, Jews, Sikhs, etc. It has also given us a chance to challenge patriarchy and other forms of oppression within Muslim communities IN ORDER TO strengthen these communities to fight outside enemies like the racists and imperialists who try to use patriarchy and divisions in the community to justify attacks and occupation in the name of “saving” Muslims from themselves. Fatima, Ibn Jubayr, and Will described this “three way fight” very well in their piece on Nidal Hasan: Also, you might want to check out a piece that Fatima wrote here about the role of Islamic prayer in the Gaza solidarity rallies last winter:

I think to do this kind of work effectively, everyone, not just Muslim folks, need to study and train ourselves to understand the basics of theological debates in the Muslim community. Folks who aren’t Muslim can’t be opportunistically coming in as outsiders just packaging a pre-fabricated radical politics in theological window dressing. There needs to be genuine engagement with Islamic politics working from the assumption that atheistic/agnostic Leftists and Leftists of other faiths can learn something from the dynamic currents of Islamic political thought. Non-Muslims who have a healthy “naturalistic view of the world and the universe” which brings “awe and wonder” are certainly in a better position to do this than knee-jerk secular chauvinists. After all, if the entire world is full of dynamic, dialectical struggles which bring growth and development then so is the Muslim community. If the entire world is full of class struggle, expressed in myriad forms including struggles over culture, family, gender, and identity, then it should be no surprise that Islamic political traditions have taken up questions of class struggle in debates over the historical role of prophecy, the Ummah (Muslim community), the role of consultation and shoras (popular councils) and the greater jihad/ struggle for social justice.

All of these questions also come up in terms of organizing in Christian circles, which is something I’d love to do as a Christian revolutionary. I’d love to build organizations that could directly disrupt the Religious Right while trying to win over working class folks who the Religious Right preys on to a more anti-racist, democratic, and anti-patriarchal vision of Christianity. But that’s another whole conversation for another time.

In terms of the awe and wonder that comes from understanding the dynamism of physical and social nature, I feel that too as a Christian. As I see it, Creation is an ongoing process of struggle, rupture, evolutionary creeps and revolutionary leaps, all shot through with God’s glory. This is consistent with the tradition of Hagia Sophia, or Woman Wisdom in the Bible…. the author of the Book of Wisdom for example encouraged ancient Jewish folks to develop a meditative practice which combines naturalistic analysis with the tradition of Exodus from slavery and God’s revelation of social justice through prophecy. The Bible calls Jesus the incarnation of Sophia/ Wisdom, the “discourse of the universe” made flesh and taking on the pattern of a human life, one full of revolutionary opposition to oppression. So I think there is a lot of possible common ground here… in any case, I’d strongly encourage you to read those Loren Goldner pieces I quoted in the previous comment because he grounds the formation of revolutionary Marxism in the confluence of various “cosmobiological” traditions that had very strong spiritual tendencies: they saw the human person and human subjectivity as part of the dynamic cosmos.

Discussions on Islam and Liberation Theology

2009-11-29T21:30:00.000-08:00

Gathering Forces has posted a series of articles on Islam, politics, and resistance to US Empire. The first is about Nidal Hasan, the Arab American soldier who shot other soldiers at Fort Hood. The second and the third cover different dimensions of the US occupation of Afghanistan and Pakistan and the historic role of Islamic politics in both anti-imperialist movements and pro-US puppet regimes there.

All of these articles lay out the need for an anti-racist, anti-patriarchal, anti-capitalist Islamic theology of liberation. They subtly chide folks on the Left in both the US and the Middle East for their inability to envision, organize for, and support such a vision.

For example, Will from GF argues:

“Treating Islam as a backward or as false consciousness is only going to leave the field open to liberals and Wahhabists. The revolutionary left has to throw its dog in the fight. Concretely, this means that Islam is a religion and ideology, which must be engaged with. It means that there is a political spectrum and the left should help develop the most democratic, anti-racist, and anti-patriarchal interpretations of Islam. If Christian Liberation Theology is legitimate then why cannot the same be said of an Islamic liberation theology."

Below is a perspective that seems to expand on what Will is arguing, from a discussion on the Three Way Fight blog.

I generally agree with the points that Matthew makes on 3WayFight, I just think that some of these points are framed in a somewhat clunky way that makes it seem like the author is calling for “supporting” Muslim and Christian revolutionaries rather than organizing alongside them in the same organization. Also, he fails to take up the point that Will and mlove raise on Gathering Forces, that US Imperialism has actively supported authoritarian versions of Islamism, not just Napoleonic secular chauvinism. In any case, hope this is helpful:

“This is a fascinating and timely discussion. I agree with the Three Way Fight folks that sometimes anti-imperialist forces can take on an insurgent Right wing or fascist character, and that there are some Islamic versions of that in the Middle East today.
But it seems to me that Three Way Fight tends to overemphasize the influence of these right-wingers. Do the Al Qaeda networks and the Taliban really have that much clout internationally? How many everyday Muslims actually support them?
People like David Horowitz and the organizers of Islamofascism week at campuses across the country next week claim that most Muslims support these fools. But that is just witch-hunting and imperial propaganda. Obviously the 3-Way Fight folks aren’t coming from the same angle as Horowitz and it seems they would be equally as opposed to his white supremacy.
But could they also be overemphasizing the power of the Islamic right? I would argue that Al Qeda and the Taliban are relatively marginal in terms of the politics of the world’s several billion Muslims. It seems there is much more international grassroots support for groups like Hizb’Allah and Hamas because they are the most prominent forces currently on the ground mounting mass struggles against Israeli apartheid and for social reconstruction. But are these groups really fascist or on the Right? In many ways they have more in common with authoritarian Leftism: their program is a kind of revolutionary cultural nationalism with a state capitalist/ social democratic emphasis on social justice and aid from above.
In this, they are no doubt oppressive forces poised to betray the workers, women, queer folks, and other everyday Muslims who have at times expressed very militant aspirations for democratic self-government (for example the popular committees of the Intifada). But this betrayal is not a result of Hamas or Hizb’Allah’s Islamic character. After all, plenty of secular nationalist and socialist parties in the Middle East performed similar betrayals in earlier stages of anti-colonial struggles, and that’s at least one of the reasons why so many folks have turned to Islamic politics as a supposed alternative.
Secular populist, Leftist, and state capitalist regimes have also launched brutal campaigns against women, queer folks, indigenous peoples, and others, (as Matthew recognized with Chavez and Ortega). Reinventing an earlier secular nationalism or Communism is not viable considering these historical failures. Whether Islamic or not, something new is desperately needed. The key question is, where will folks go once they see the new Hizb’Allah and Hamas “Islamic” versions of state capitalism betray them once again?
I would argue that this will not automatically be in a secular direction. It could also be a different type of Islamic politics, a more libertarian or direct-democratic vision from below. This is of course not guaranteed but it is one viable possibility worth fighting for.
It is good to see some activists in the US working to critique both US imperialist attacks on Arabs and Muslims and also the patriarchal and authoritarian aspects of right-wing Islamic movements today. These are important first steps. But when are we going to actually propose alternatives that engage with religious thought seriously in its own vocabulary, language, etc.? When will revolutionaries throw their full support behind Muslims who are attempting to articulate libertarian Islamic theologies of liberation? Are they despairing that such folks do not exist in the Muslim community? In my experiences, they do exist, but are often boxed out and squeezed between the secular chauvinism and racism of the Left, the conservatives of the mosque and Muslim Students Association leadership, and the authoritarianism of insurgent Islamic tendencies. What types of political organization will open up space for new Muslim possibilities? I would argue that the largely atheist forms the Left has taken historically are inadequate for this task.
Many young folks are slowly but surely becoming fed up with the bootlicking leadership of groups like the MSA who constantly try to prove to whitey that they are the “Good Muslims” unlike the “Bad Muslims over there.” Many of these young Muslims will see no alternative in authoritarian Islamic insurgents and will turn instead to some version of secular Arab or Muslim power politics. Others will similarly see no alternative in authoritarian Islamic insurgents and will turn instead to some vision of Islamic liberation theology. Revolutionaries of all religious and non-religious backgrounds in the US need to be prepared to respect, support, and understand, and further BOTH potential developments and cannot subordinate either one to the other. These tendencies will only be vibrant if they cross fertilize each other.
Incidentally, I would argue a similar orientation is needed to deal with Christian imperialism and fundamentalism in the US. This is not the place to articulate a full vision on this front, but preliminarily, we need to recognize that a) liberal, multicultural and “interfaith” oriented Christian theologies generally serve as smoke-screens for US Empire because they argue that the US is a progressive force in the world because God ordained America (manifest destiny) to spread separation of church and state, dialogue, and tolerance in order to uplift backwards Third World cultures, especially Islamic ones. b) this liberal theological consensus is fracturing domestically because it cannot contain the frustrations of class tensions, de-industrialization, people loosing their jobs, etc. c) one response to this is an insurgent, populist Christian right that has definite fascist groupings within it that function as vanguards with influence beyond their numbers. d) we need to combat both the liberal imperial theology as well as this insurgent Christian right (we need a 3 way fight), e) it is not enough to simply make a secular critique of both theologies and encourage people to leave Christianity; we need to actively develop Christian liberation theologies that pose insurgent alternatives to both. A top priority in this should be to articulate, in uncompromising and militant Christian prophetic language, why it is crucial for Christians to stand in solidarity with everyday Muslims against imperialism, white supremacy, and fascist attacks.
I’m glad you pointed out some of the legacies that such a liberation theology could draw from, ranging from the late medieval peasant uprisings to the militant abolitionism of John Brown and David Walker. This whole history needs to be retrieved and reconsidered. Again, I can’t go into sufficient depth here, but in many ways it wasn’t capitalism that waged an assault on feudalism in Europe but rather a whole range of insurgent Christian heretic groups, as Sylvia Federici has documented. Capitalism was a middle class counter-revolution that attempted to co-opt this anti-feudal movement and establish a new ruling class. As a result, the middle class’s secularism is not unambiguously progressive. Enlightenment liberals struggled against the Church hierarchy and its feudal ties, but they also struggled against direct-democratic Christian visions from below and attempted to contain the self-activity of peasant, artisan, and early workers who were becoming Christian revolutionaries. Nowadays this middle class secularism takes its most destructive form in the NeoConservatives who act like Napoleon, attempting to shove the Liberal revolution down Muslim peoples’ throats from above and secularize them whether they like it or not. Revolutionaries must distinguish ourselves from this imperial project at all costs, while still mounting our own struggles against religious authorities whether these be conservative, liberal, or insurgent Rightists.
What is missing in the mix are revolutionary religious forces from a direct democratic perspective who can jump into the 3 way fight without subordinating their distinctive religious content and vision. These urgently need to be articulated and organized.”

The Death and Resurrection of In Soo Chun

2009-11-08T13:08:00.000-08:00

A year ago, In Soo Chun, a Korean-American custodian at the University of Washington poured gasoline over his body and lit himself on fire in front of the office of the university's president. Several students rushed to try to put out the fire in vain. In Soo Chun soon passed away.

The media dismissed him as deeply troubled, following the lead of UW public relations rep Norm Arkans. There was no effort to ask why he chose such a public way to die. There was no effort to ask whether it had to do with the poor working conditions many UW custodians face. There was no effort to ask whether In Soo Chun was attempting to carry on a tradition of self-immolation that has been a central part of the Korean labor movement.

I work closely with an organization called International Workers and Students for Justice, a group of rank and file UW custodians and tradespeople. IWSJ held a memorial on the one year anniversary of In Soo Chun's death at which they asked these difficult questions. A video of the memorial can be found here. A publication of workers' writings dedicated to In Soo Chun's memory can be found here and here.

This memorial came soon before All Souls Day and the beginning of November, a month of remembrance for the dead in the Christian tradition. Sitting here on a dark and brooding Sunday afternoon in Seattle, and thinking about In Soo Chun, I'm flooded with memories of past encounters with death and ressurection.

In the fall of 2006 , my grandfather passed away in New Jersey. I remember flying into New York for the funeral and feeling like he was present, alongside all of my ancestors whose blood and sweat went into building the gray buildings and gritty streets. I remember feeling like their faith was a narrow opening, a crack like a small stained glass window in a dark cathedral, shining the perpetual light of God's remembrance into this ancient city of exhausted hearts and bodies. I remember writing and reciting the Prayers of the Faithful for the funeral, reminding my family that my grandfather would live on because God will re-member him in the Kingdom, because God never forgets his creations. I said we need to come together in remembrance so that he can rise again with us in the Church.

Over the years, I have practiced this month of remembrance by attending the School of the Americas protest at the gates of Fort Benning Georgia where we remember those who have ben killed in Latin America by counterinsurgency forced trained at the US Army School of the Americas. This protest involves a very powerful act of mourning and resistance where the names of all those killed are read out and the crowd raises white crosses and chants "Presente", Spanish for "I am here." This embodies the spirit of Oscar Romero, a liberation theologian and social movement leader in El Salvador. He said: " "I have frequently been threatened with death. I must tell you that, as a Christian, I do not believe in death but in resurrection. If they kill me, I will rise again in the Salvadoran people."

Last year after a young Black man named Oscar Grant was shot in the back by a cop in Oakland, CA, people took to the streets chanting "we are all Oscar Grant."

Last year at a protest against speed up and overwork, custodians started chanting In Soo Chun's name. At the memorial this fall, referencing that event and the Oscar Grant protests, we chanted "we are all In Soo Chun; we will struggle together as one."

Will In Soo Chun rise again in the Church, or among his coworkers, or among youth in streets, like I am sure my grandfather, Oscar Romero, and Oscar Grant have already?

The difference is that he took his own life, he was not murdered and he did not die of natural causes. He was a devout Christian. Why would a Christian choose an act of suicide, which is considered a mortal sin in the Christian tradition?

My Christian friend Shin Gu has a good reflection on this over on Exile from Pyongyang blog. He writes:

"Evaluating the meaning of In Soo Chun's actions is not exactly an easy thing to do. As the UW Daily pointed out, ritual suicide is a fairly common practice in Korean labor and was also a big part of the democracy movements during the 70s and 80s. The act of self immolation publicly also has a political history about it, rooting with Chun Tae-Il's self immolation back in 1970. Chun Tae-il quickly became a martyr for both the labor and democracy movements and many activists chose similar routes during their lifetimes.

The question remains is exactly HOW this act became so rampant throughout the movement. Unlike Japan, there isn't any sort of tradition ritual suicide in Korean history. To make things even more complicated many people who committed political suicide were also devoted Christians (Chun Tae-il was as devout as you can get) which condemns suicide as murder and a one-way ticket to hell. By Christian logic, Chun Tae-il paid the ultimate price with his soul for his sacrifice. Prof. Nam at the University of Washington told her class that there seems to be no known source for Chun's actions. None of his writings warn about this and he did not seem well aware of the Buddhists in Vietnam who performed self immolation to protest the Diem government.

Is the action just a symbolic "FU" as one commenter posted? Is it just an example of how the human mind and soul can only be pushed too far? Or is there something we are all missing? Its stuff like these that make mankind a creature of great mystery no matter how hard we try to "rationalize" things.

One of the custodians who spoke at the memorial for In Soo Chun is a devout Christian and a good friend of mine. He shed light on the situation when he said: "In Soo Chun did not want to DIE here, but was trying to send a message which the people in the building behind me did not want to hear." Was In Soo Chun crying out in desperation, and in hope that someone would stop him and spare his life? Was he hoping to continue his life seared by fire but living to see positive changes in working conditions for his coworkers?

A year after his death some workers were afraid to come out to his memorial because of management harassment and retaliation. One manager scheduled a mandatory meeting during the middle of the memorial (which was planned during the day shift break) preventing many from attending. Some union officials almost divided the workforce by calling their own separate memorial because they were worried that asking difficult questions about In Soo Chun's death might anger management. When only about 10 people showed up they walked over and joined us anyway. My Christian friend told me he prayed and prayed over the course of the week that the memorial would come together. When many workers came despite these challenges, he told me that he is sure In Soo Chun was watching over us from heaven.

I am certainly not advocating ritual suicide. God's creation is a beautiful thing and our bodies ultimately belong to the Creator, not to ourselves, so we ought not to sacrifice them. I think ritual suicide is a tragic way to protest and I want workers to live on and enjoy the fruits of their resistance. But I also do not think it is helpful to conclude that In Soo Chun is therefore a sinner and that he will never rise again. In Soo Chun's act was not a selfish one, it was not an act of isolating pride. You can judge a tree by its fruits, and the fruits of his action, a year after the fact, is a greater sense of solidarity, compassion, and courage where many workers are now willing to take risks and to stand up for their coworkers, families, and communities in his memory.

The core message of In Soo Chun's memorial was that never again should a worker feel so isolated that he resorts to such drastic measures. We must come together and struggle collectively to make sure that we are all In Soo Chun. Only then will he be able to rise again among the people.

In Soo Chun: may perpetual light shine upon him. May he rest in peace.

God is not the author of confusion

2009-10-18T15:46:00.000-07:00

In Korea, thousands of workers at Ssyangyong occupied a factory to protest layoffs, outsourcing, and casualization. All across the US, workers are also protesting casualization. Casualization is when management breaks up a union and creates a new tier of second-class citizen workers without union wages, benefits, or protections. Usually this is done along lines of race, gender, or citizenship status. At its extreme, casualization means they ask you to work for a few hours one week then 70 hours the next.... to work hard for 3 years at a job then to be unemployed for another year then to bust your ass at another job for 5 then to retire early into debt and poverty.

I was discussing this with my friend. He is a custodian and kind of a "philosopher king", as the director of the new movie about campus custodians puts it. He is a theologian, poet, artisan, blacksmith, instrument maker, musician, revolutionary, and labor militant. He told me that he had seen a newspaper article about how in Georgia unemployed workers are "auditioning" for scarce jobs. They are working for free for a week so the boss can see who will bring in the most profit and who will therefore get the job. It's like a modern day slave auction.

My friend pointed out the severe moral implications of this process of "casualization." Really, the word casualization speaks to the heartrot seeping through more and more of modern society. It begins with the bosess and then trickles down, or really blasts down through the ranks of labor. We are forced to regard our fellow human beings casually. Our presence in each others' lives can never be guaranteed because we could be forced out and broken apart through layoffs, gentrification/rent hikes, imprisonment, etc., etc. We can't build stable relationships, we can't plan for the future, we can't risk deeper connections with each other because it could all come crashing down at any time.

To paraphrase Marx, as capitalism marches forward everything holy is profaned, everything stable melts into thin air.

My friend came up with a biblical phrase to describe the actions of someone who was facilitating this process of casualization in his workplace. He said this misleader is endowed with the "anointing of confusion." And God is NOT the author of confusion.

All across the country, across the world, society is getting scrambled with the anointing of confusion like a legion of demons marching through every relationship that we used to think was sure or stable. We are being scrambled, confused, messed up. Society is regarding us casually.

There is only ONE good thing about this process: a lot of previous idols are also melting down. People are loosing faith in all mighty Mamon, in capitalism, in the assumption that we should just slog it out in our dead end jobs cuz we might get rich one day. That American Dream is being replaced with chaos and confusion. The alternatives could be terrifying or they could be beautiful: it is up to us and it is up to God's providence working through us.

God is not the author of confusion, but we have been told that God can make good out of a confusing situation. God does not regard his creation casually but he can still find us in the swirl of confusion and casualization that is beseting us and teach us the way in and through this disastrous situation. Precisely because we're no longer clinging to the sureness of our past idols, he can find us and share the good news with us.

After all, God was casualized on the cross. He was regarded casually, as a thing to be tossed away and discarded. The early church was ripped up and scattered to the wind. And yet out of that, the community rose again with God's spirit, recomposed itself, and found its dignity. Jesus' good news to the poor today is that our labor is not destined for pure confusion. We can still use our hands and our minds to build up God's creation with justice and stability. God will get our backs as we rise up against the bosses, the casualizers, and the confusers of this world. This is part of the age old struggle against the Anointer of Confusion who the bosses always seem to be praying to.

To love our neighbors, we need to revolt against the system that forces us to regard each other casually.

Hip Hop Has Saved My Soul (and Spirituality)

2009-09-26T21:51:00.000-07:00

Hey folks,

Here is a reflection from Bao Yun Cheng, a good friend of mine and someone I've been organizing with for several years. My buddy Krisna posted it over at Democracy and Hip Hop Project. Krisna's intro is in italics below.

When I read this, it brought tears to my eyes - it is some of the freshest theology I've read in years. I've studied academic liberation theology, and Yun Cheng and I have practiced the arts of liberation in the streets but it's been hard to bring those two worlds together. Sometimes the most eloquent shouts of liberation aren't obviously theological and usually liberal-progressive academic theology just simply isn't liberating. I agree with Yun Cheng about hip hop though - it is probably one of the clearest expressions of deep currents of American liberation theology, remixing and sampling earlier traditions running back through soul, gospel, the classic spirituals, the music of Black Power back through the abolitionists back to that original creative fusion of radical reformation, African, and indigenous spirituality that has always chanted down Babylon here in the Americas.

I'm reposting this note that I was tagged in from my Facebook page. It is from a very good friend of mine in Seattle, BYC, who I and LBoogie also collaborate with (among several other good folks) on a new blog calledGathering Forces which I hope all of you will read and participate in too.

This is a very introspective and striking essay that means a lot to me on a very personal level. Personal, because everyone has their own story of how hip-hop has transformed them. In the case of BYC, as a conservative youth evangelist who was repelled from hip-hop due to its apparent violence and patriarchy, to his process of becoming a revolutionary who finds within hip-hop a deep sense of spirituality and struggle and not the cartoonish and proselytizing forms we see with Jin, Toby Mac, or still worse manifestations.

My history and sense of alienation from Christianity as a youth for its missionary vibe, its judgmental predisposition, and its straight-up racism, found legitimation in the lyrics of hip-hop music which many times raged against the contradictions and historical crimes of official Christianity. Through it I've found that hip-hop has sent up, in an uneven and contradictory way, the from-below tradition of spirituality (including within Islam, NOI, 5% NOI) that saw saving one's soul as engaging in the fight against injustice. Over time, as my own politics and perspectives matured and deepened, hip-hop went with me expressing a vast range of conflicting ideas and sensibilities and each time I found a way to make it relevant to my specific place in life.

Read and digest this essay carefully for it is one of the most original contributions to hip-hop that I have ever read.

_________________________________

I know this is long but I hope everyone tagged will read this and forward if they want.

As insomnia kicks in, another profound post (I hope) is produced. I only get exciting ideas to write about in the middle of my sleep- surely, it’s divinely inspired. It’s like the Tupac line from Ghetto Gospel, “Never forget, that God isn’t finished with me yet//When I write rhymes, I go blind, and let the Lord do his thing.”

I dedicate this entry to all my friends and family from Seattle Chinese Alliance Church. It’s hard to write this and not think about the past five years of what could have been had I continued ‘growing in Christ’ with you all. I ask that you will be patient as you read this, as I’m sure much if not all of this note will provoke some kind of offense, and genuinely welcome and encourage your comments at the end.

A second audience I want to address here are some of my progressive friends who do listen to hip hop, but intentionally limit their listening to ‘underground’, ‘political’, and ‘socially conscious’ rap—artists like the Blue Scholars, Immortal Technique, Dead Prez, Talib Kweli, Mos Def.

I think the title of this note is really fitting, because I wish to say that hip hop, in its entirety, including its most violent incarnations (i.e. gangsta rap, horrorcore), has rekindled my spirituality when I had completely abandoned God by providing me an alternative conception of Christianity and faith that was understood and embraced by people struggling against a system that had marginalized them from the political process and from economic opportunities. Hip hop has also taught me so much about the world and has given me so much purpose to what I do as a community organizer.

Recently, I’ve become very annoyed with Jin the emcee. I used to love him in his battle rapping days on BET’s 106 & Park and followed him closely when he moved to Hong Kong and rapped in Cantonese. In fact, he was the only rapper that I could listen to with my family (not to mention my grandparents too), as he produced a lot of family-friendly, humorous tracks innocently portraying the landscape of HK or touching on lite-themes like dim sum dishes. Recently, though, he’s abandoned all of this and turned pretty staunchly into an evangelistic ‘Christian’ rapper. I won’t be surprised if his next album hits Christian stores alongside established ‘Christian’ rappers like Toby Mac, John Reuben, Grits, and T-Bone (whom I think is probably the only technically sophisticated ‘Christian’ rapper) or played on spirit 105.3 (actually, I would be surprised if Jin got airtime, since spirit 105.3 likes to play white artists). Jin’s latest two songs, “The Light Club” and “The Best”, really capture an aspect that I really hate about Christianity and Christians today. The dominant notion of Christianity today says that if you want to be identified and accepted as a Christian rapper, there are certain moral and thematic parameters by which you must abide. Jin captures this sentiment very well in “The Light Club,” with lyrics like “you want raps about pimpin’ killin’ snitchin’ ballin’?//You won’t get ‘em from me, naw that’s not my callin’//God Almighty reached out I mean this sincerely//He spoke to me like Morgan Freeman did to Jim Carey.”

The former me relates a lot to this sentiment of morality. Let me backtrack a bit. For those who don’t know my past, back in my high school days, I was almost ‘militantly’ Christian. I evangelized everywhere I went, helped establish our high school’s Christian club, and even preached to a congregation in Mexico. Kids at high school hated me for this, but I saw it as a challenge from God and accepted the mission of evangelism quite humbly. Without ever explicitly admitting this to myself because the rhetoric of church forbid Christians from judging others, I did actively judge others on a daily basis, based on the promiscuous activities that I saw and coarse language I would hear. It was subconsciously built into my system that those activities were evil, sinful, and ‘hell-sent’ (to ironically quote a song title from my favorite gangsta artist, Bone Thugs-n-Harmony). I’ll spare you the long story of how I drifted away from being this evangelist, being this type of Christian, why I left the church, and ultimately why I abandoned God (although if anyone really wants to hear it, I would be happy to lay out all the reasons in person).

One of my biggest qualms about the mainstream/dominant version of Christianity is that it makes all these indictments against activities that are commonly associated with youth of color. Growing up, probably the biggest reason why I never listened to ANY rap (let alone gangsta rap), was I heard from so many sources- my parents, my pastors, my youth counselors- that rap music was promiscuous, that it was sexist, that it was violent. Much like how I approached evangelism as a high school Christian, the church itself makes no attempt to contextualize or see youth of color according to where they’re at. Instead, evangelism itself becomes a tool of colonialism, of ‘civilizing’ the barbaric tendencies of the ghetto.

Never mind the structural inequalities of gentrification, the overcrowding of low-income people of color into a small unsanitized neighborhood, the rampant unemployment, and the homelessness that impelled the creation of hip hop in the 1970s. Never mind the structural racism that prevents youth of color from any chance of formal success in the forms of college education and high-paying jobs. With the economic crisis today and the exponential increase of tuition in universities across America, youth of color will only be further marginalized from access to colleges, pushing more and more to identify with the messages of hip hop culture. Never mind the police brutality and racial profiling that institutionalize colonial thinking among mainstream society one the one hand, and fear and resistance by victims of such on the other.
When Christians do engage the ghetto, communities of color, and the homeless in their limited way, it’s almost always in a patronizing form that reinforces white supremacy, patriarchy, homophobia, capitalism. Growing up, I was repulsed by gay people. Whenever I met someone gay, I had to force myself to talk to them by telling myself it’s not the people you hate, it’s their ways. And the typical conversation would end up with me telling them to follow Jesus and he would give them the power to rectify their sexual orientation.

I distinctly remember that one of the ‘social justice’ activities I participated in with my high school youth group was to go to Capitol Hill and feed the homeless for one night. No real connections need to be made, just give them food and hopefully they’ll take a track or listen to us attempt to proselytize them for a few minutes. It’s this shock therapy multiplied a few times with monetary and racial privilege that characterize mission trips today. Let’s go into a third world community of color, tell them (implicitly of course) that their gods are weak and poor by providing them with foreign aid and English instruction, show them the love of God through helping them build their communities, and frame this foreign aid as the outward reaching, selfless ministry of Jesus Christ. I hate to burst the bubble, but oftentimes this type of soft imperialism in the form of nonviolent priests coming into and converting entire communities was used either as a substitute for or a precursor to the violent imperialism of European colonists in the New World. Either by force or Christian/Catholic conversion, though, the natives were ultimately subjected to their own massive Exodus (this word is quite intentional) from their homelands or subservience to European empires.

While Christians busily impose their own Cultural Revolution against hip hop (term is deliberate as what Christians say about hip hop is what Mao said about all non-Mao praising culture when he imposed a massive ban on literature, films, etc) and inner city culture, I have discovered a Christianity and spirituality rising from the streets that more so exemplifies the social critic and revolutionary of Christ than any of the messages emanating from mainstream churches.

Christ was first and foremost a critic against Roman occupation. It was very telling that, in Luke 8:30, when he cast out the demons called “Legion” from the man, he drove them into pigs that rushed down a river bank and drowned themselves. At that time, the only use for the term “Legion” was to describe the Roman army. To needle the colonized Jews who saw pigs as unclean animals, the Roman army frequently called themselves swine. This example and others reinforce the anti-empire, anti-state oppression character of Christ.

In mainstream churches today, though, there is an overemphasis on being ‘apolitical’ and taking no stance on (or in the worst case, sometimes actually explicitly reinforcing the) injustices committed by Western governments and their allies. Sure, widespread abuses of China, Sudan, Iraq, and other countries that the U.S. government deems ‘evil’ can be similarly indicted at church, but when it comes to America’s own oppression and colonization of people of color in the inner city, of its own occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, or when it comes to the state of Israel occupying Palestinians, then churches have to be silent. Make no mistake, silence not only reinforces these injustices by making us complicit in them, it is ant-Christ.

It is in the lyrics of Public Enemy, TuPac Shakur, and Ice Cube that I have discovered the same anti-empire, anti-state tendencies of Christ. It is in rap where I see American injustices called out and America’s hypocrisy exposed. While mainstream Christianity has the privilege of ignoring oppressions and struggles against oppressions happening right around them on a daily basis, the victims of these oppressions have been impelled to use hip hop, among other forms of struggle, to fight. Let me emphasize that ignoring oppressions is a privilege that unfortunately condemns the forms of struggle taken up by the oppressed most of the time. The hypocrisy of the church is glaring. While they focus on misogynistic images in rap videos, they overlook the sexism of the state. While they focus on the violence of gangsta rap, they overlook the fact that the state monopolizes formal violence, from the army to the police, and that these violent actors exist for the sole purpose of securing profit for a minority at the expense of the majority. If Christians are going to condemn these patriarchal and violent tendencies, why don’t they start with condemning the state? In my mind, only when a movement that pushes for a wholesale transformation of the state into one that is truly democratic, truly anti-racist, and truly anti-patriarchal arises, will we start to see forms of popular culture reflect this new reality.

It is within this context of marginalization of and institutionalized state violence against low-income, people-of color from which hip hop arises, and from which we get the ultra-violent forms of hip hop. For many youth of color, gangsta rappers speak to their reality of being caught in the game- not by choice but by the reality of being dark-skinned in America and thereby automatically disenfranchised from opportunities that I myself, other mainstream Christians, and many liberal progressives take for granted. Perhaps my favorite Christian artist, the gangsta rap group Bone Thugs-n-Harmony (yes they identify as Christian), say it best when they say “I tried so hard, can’t seem to get away from misery//I tried so hard but [I’ll] always be a victim of these streets//It ain’t my fault ‘cause I tried to get away but trouble follows me” (“I Tried” ft. Akon). Another one of my favorite Christian artists, DMX, would immediately be condemned by many mainstream Christians for being overbearingly violent and coarse in his lyrics. To all those ‘Christian’-hatas out there, he reminds you to “Look thru my eyes, see as I see, do as I do, be as I be//Walk in my shoes, hurt your feet, then know why I do dirt in the street” (“Look Thru My Eyes”). In another song “The Convo”, he casts himself in the traditional Christian poem ‘Footprints’ as the man carried on the beach by Christ. He ponders the question of many a youth stuck in the game, “I tried doin’ good, but good’s not too good for me//Misunderstood, why you chose the hood for me,” to which Christ, also played by DMX, replies, “My child, I’ve watched you grow up, And I’ve been there//Even at times you least suspected it, I was there//And look what I’ve given you, A talent to rhyme//I may not come when you call, but I’m always on time.” In spite of the systematic oppression dealt against him, DMX is able to express his faith without being overbearingly evangelistic. Because he comes from the hood, unlike many other ‘Christian’ rappers, he is never judgmental and retains his gangsta persona throughout his albums to remain relevant to youth.

While DMX expressly believes in Christ, TuPac conveys a more conflicted sense of spirituality. Throughout his lyrics, you can see him genuinely struggling between the mainstream conception of Christianity and his fate of thug livin’, which he accurately and poignantly frames as the product of a racist and capitalist system. In songs like “Life Goes On” and “Thugz Mansion,” he attempts to reconcile his gangsta life by creating a heaven for g’s- one that is stress free and one where homies can just kick it. In “Ghetto Gospel,” he challenges mainstream Christianity’s morality and exposes its inadequacy to understand the ghetto by ending the song with the line “Am I less holy, cuz I choose to puff a blunt or drink a beer with my homies?” In perhaps his greatest song criticizing mainstream Christianity, “Blasphemy,” he further exposes the irrelevancy of contemporary church leaders like the Pope and juxtaposes him with figures like Malcolm. He further breaks down church imagery of devils and hell, implicitly asking Christians what they know about each when in the hood, he inevitably fights devils on a daily basis in a living hell, a sentiment similarly echoed years later by Young Jeezy, “Tonight I can’t sleep, I’m livin’ in hell//First they gives us the work, Then they throw us in jail” (“Soul Survivor” ft. Akon).
While the violence in gangsta rap is unfortunately directed against other g’s caught in the game, it validly expresses the extreme anger and frustration of youth who are isolated from the façade of the American dream. As an organizer, while I think much of this frustration needs to be channeled productively into organizations that combat systemic injustices, if you simply overlook and condemn gangsta rap, you would be doing the state’s job of invaliding youth anger due to real injustices rooted in the system itself.

The spirituality I express today is much more in line with the liberation theology of Latin America, the black theology of Africa, the min jung theology of South Korea, the hip hop theology of the American hood, and the non-white Christ who existed centuries ago. Thank you hip-hop for saving my soul by providing me with a spirituality that actively speaks out against injustice. I may not go to the same heaven as some of you tagged in this note (can I at least request “a bottle of gin, in case I don’t get in?” – TuPac in “Life Goes On”), but I’ll be more than content if I can kick it in Thugz Mansion with the likes of Billie Holiday, Malcolm, TuPac, Tech N9ne, and Bone Thugs.

Communion of Saints

2009-09-12T15:58:00.000-07:00

The incense rises as the rain falls:

Augustine pulls his hood

Over his dreads

And lights a cigarette

Home in the inner

City of Man

He watches God’s tears fall

They stir the faces of the puddles

He remembers the faces of the youth

Gargoyled by stray bullets

Now they’re mug shots in the ground

staring down divinity

He remembers Job crying from the ash heap

And Job’s friends, less comforting than social workers

He gently touches the light of his cigarette

To the tip of a cigarette in the gargoyle puddle

And heaves his head back up

As the sky rages open

Gathering Forces

2009-09-12T15:52:00.001-07:00

hey folks,

My friends and I just launched a new blog called Gathering Forces: http://gatheringforces.org/. I will be posting comments regularly and articles occasionally over there under the name Mamos, and I will cross-post articles on religion from time to time. Here's a summary of what the new blog is all about:

We began in 2003 among a number of activists primarily involved in anti-Israeli apartheid work. Searching for a means to deepen our association and build on our experiences we formed a small grouping of people, which provided the basis for further discussion and support organizing in other areas important to us. Some of the areas of work we are or have been involved in include labor, anti-budget cuts in the schools, anti-racist, anti-apartheid, queer liberation work, as well as around public transportation. We currently are deciding on an organization name.

Our world is changing in uncertain ways. It is a time of transitions, as one period seems to be passing and an unknown one emerges. At the same time, the historic Left has long ago lost most of its organic roots among the working classes and oppressed communities. There is a profound discontinuity in American radical traditions and, to some extent, a crisis of historical memory among oppressed people.

This is a time of ideological and organizational changes. Small circles of people in all areas of social life, whether people unidentified with the Left or those who consider themselves part of it, are discussing the deepening problems facing this decaying society.

It is this recognition that has brought us together. We haven’t come up with all the answers. Yet although we are young, we have arrived at a few basic ideas. There is a tremendous need to learn from those who have come before us, their achievements and mistakes, but we cannot just pick up ready-made traditions of the past. Keeping this in mind, we need to explore and discover new ways forward.

Yet, this is not simply a matter of ideas; it is also one of action. Not only is revolutionary organization needed, it is vital. We need to continue to try out new ways of organizing, learning from our successes and our mistakes. The aim must be to build new organizational roots in oppressed communities and the working class.

Finally, only the self-emancipation of the working class and the oppressed can lead to the overthrow of existing conditions and the arrival of a new, and better society. We are not the vanguard, but just one part of what needs to be a movement of millions. We are not a party, nor the kernel of a future party or organization that will lead the masses. We have only just begun and much remains to be done.

This site is intended to be a space for discussion for those around our project, those we work closely with, movement friends and neighbors, and those we hope to meet and engage in conversation and, hopefully, common action. The goal is to explore the history of our people and our contemporary world, sharpen our knowledge, further discussion of organizing and organizing traditions, and search for both the fault lines of conflict and contradiction, as well as the outlines of a new society–the future in the present.

We hope folks will join the discussion. Let’s continue to build the community and the links necessary to contribute to and advance a new movement. The ruling class is taking advantage of the crisis to deepen its agenda. It’s time to push back.

peace,

Mamos

Jesus Gave Me Water (riff on a Sam Cooke gospel song)

2009-09-05T19:41:00.000-07:00

Behind these walls all down these halls there’s a raging sound of waterfalls

It’s ripping through our veins like the story teller’s spell

It’s ripping through our ventricles like pumping crumping tentacles

It’s raging through ours cyphers cuz it is was not in the well

In crowded streets through cracked concrete the rain falls while our parents sleep

And the souls of the departed seem to come back here to dwell

We pour libations beneath train stations for the slain of all our nations

Pouring out the water that was not in the well

With more proof than 40 proof, it’s enough to blow right off the roof

It’s the liquid inversion of the daily grind in hell

It’s the weekend break from the devil’s fake piss tests that they make us take

It’s the ecstasy of moonshine light that was not in the well

In third world slums where the rivers run with the residue of cracker guns

And the very stones are sold off before their stories tell

Where fresh water’s jacked and throttled mothers fill their babies bottles

With crucified water that was not in the well

New blog coming up

2009-09-05T19:33:00.001-07:00

hey folks,

This blog has been dormant for several months because I've been involved heavily in middle east solidarity and labor organizing the past 6 months. My friends and I are about to launch a blog that will be a collaborate forum for political discussion, linking a lot of our local organizing to key debates and discussions across the country and around the world. I will probably cross post articles on religion both there and here, but I will also keep posting some original material (especially poetry) here if I have time. I'll post the link to the new blog on this site as soon as it goes up (in a week or so).

peace,

Mamos

Confronting the Politics of Torture

2009-04-11T00:40:00.000-07:00

So I haven't updated in a while. Our Middle East solidarity campaign is in full swing and I have major responsibilities in terms of organizing. But I'll try to post now and then anything from our campaign that's relevant to the themes and subject matter of this blog.

On that note, here's the transcript of a talk I gave back in January called Confronting the Politics of Torture. It was part of an interfaith panel called "After Guantanamo" hosted by the Muslim Students of the School of Social Work. It explains the political reasons for why the US engages in torture, and how this relates to deep-rooted structures of white supremacy and patriarchy.

Since I gave this talk, Obama issued an executive order to close Guantanamo and end the CIA "Black site" torture cambers. However, he did not stop the policy of outsourcing torture to US allies by sending prisoners to other countries for interrogation. He also did not close the prison at Bagram Air Force Base in Afghanistan, which could become Guantanamo II. It reminds me of when they closed the School of the Americas and opened it again the next day under a different name.

Since I gave this talk, more and more evidence of Israeli atrocities during the Jan siege on Gaza has also been revealed. Which is why we have to keep on organizing against Israeli apartheid and US Empire.

Handala meets Jesus

2009-02-09T10:18:00.001-08:00

I haven't posted in a while - my hands have been full with Palestine solidarity organizing. My friend Sush just sent me a link to Handala.org. The cartoonist Naji Al-Ali created the character Handala, a 10 year old Palestinian refugee child, who has become and icon of Palestinian resistance. Al-Ali's summary of the meaning of this child is posted below. To the right is one of many images in which Handala interacts with Jesus. Jesus is thinking "Bethlehem" in Arabic, signifying the fact that his hometown is still suffering under Israeli apartheid and occupation today. Handala is looking up at him with a mix of hope and despair, a mix that Jesus himself must have felt on the cross. Jesus is wearing a key around his neck, like the Palestinian refugees who still carry their keys to their homes on both sides of the Green line, inside and outside of the 1948 boundaries of Apartheid Israel.

Here is Al-Ali's reflection on Handala:

“The child Handala is my signature, everyone asks me about him wherever I go. I gave birth to this child in the Gulf and I presented him to the people. His name is Handala and he has promised the people that he will remain true to himself. I drew him as a child who is not beautiful; his hair is like the hair of a hedgehog who uses his thorns as a weapon. Handala is not a fat, happy, relaxed, or pampered child. He is barefooted like the refugee camp children, and he is an icon that protects me from making mistakes. Even though he is rough, he smells of amber. His hands are clasped behind his back as a sign of rejection at a time when solutions are presented to us the American way."

Handala was born ten years old, and he will always be ten years old. At that age, I left my homeland, and when he returns, Handala will still be ten, and then he will start growing up. The laws of nature do not apply to him. He is unique. Things will become normal again when the homeland returns.

I presented him to the poor and named him Handala as a symbol of bitterness. At first, he was a Palestinian child, but his consciousness developed to have a national and then a global and human horizon. He is a simple yet tough child, and this is why people adopted him and felt that he represents their consciousness."

Takbir! - The Struggle Comes From Within

2009-01-19T12:47:00.000-08:00

This is from my friend A reflecting on the same Gaza solidarity rallies we've beeen discussing on here the past few weeks. She originally sent it as a comment on the post below, but it definately deserves its own post.

Two days ago I called "Takbir!" at a rally and the crowd responded enthusiastically. It was exhilarating. I spent my youth in a masjid feeling alienated because I couldn't make announcements after prayer, my male friends would enter the prayer hall and leave the masjid without saying hi because they didnt see me in the back, and I secretly dreamed about being able to lead the call to prayer.

Because of these rallies, I have been seen by my Muslim community and have been supported in leading chants. I, as a twenty something activist, only got up the courage to call Takbir after a woman in her teens did it first. I had supported her in taking the bullhorn, and she had supported me in taking visibly religious leadership at this rally.

And rather than accept the timidity instilled in me by my patriarchal upbringing, I got in several arguments with uncles over the right to express our political connections to Palestine in ways that were authentic to us; as Muslims, as queer people, as women, as youth, as people of color engaged in various anti-colonial struggles, and as men who embrace the leadership young women in the community.

Allahu Akbar holds no patriarchal resonance for me whatsoever. It is part of my journey to forge queer leftist radical mystical Islam as my spiritual path. Rather, it was the male leadership of the rally yelling "stop killing women now, stop killing children now" that made it clear that they see youth and women as passive victims in the struggle. They feed into the duplicity of the death tolls, which count any male adult in gaza as a militant, not a civilian. This includes the many male paramedics who have been targeted while trying to evacuate injured folks to hospitals.

My response to the leadership is this:

"Women, girls, boys, men
The struggle comes from within.
Our communities will fight back
We will not accept attack!"

Echoes of the Intifada

2009-01-19T00:56:00.000-08:00

As I mentioned in previous posts, the Middle East solidarity organization I'm a part of wrote a reflection on the Gaza solidarity rallies we've been attending these past 3 weeks. We've been circulating this piece among local organizers and it's posted over at BlakOrchid: A Blog by Asian rebels

As I've been arguing, there is an ethos of Islamic liberation theology at these rallies that has been very inspiring. In his comments on my previous post, my friend Eli pointed out that at the rallies he's been to it's mostly been Muslim men chanting Takbir-Allahu Akbar (God is Great). He warned that such religious chants could reinforce patriarchy. But in our group's experience this hasn't been the case. Recent rallies have been energized by a dynamic group of youth and the most consistent leaders of this crew have been young women from local high schools. As our group reflection describes, this is similar to the first Intifada where women and youth played a central role in the democratic resistance.

At the most recent rally (yesterday), we brought a banner that read "Youth for Palestine" and it was mostly young hijabi women who carried it and got on the megaphone to energize the crowd. At points when they were shy about leading, women from our group shared the mic with them and encouraged them, which worked well. We got a nice cypher going with other groups behind us echoing their chants.

At several points the young women shouted Takbir- Allahu Akbar. Some of the uncles did seem puzzled at first to hear women leading this, but once a few enthusiastically responded more were won over. One middle aged man in particular seemed ecstatic that they were chanting it, and he responded vigorously.

One of the young women also started chanting La Allah Ila Allah - There is no God but God. At that point, a man presumably from the group leading the march came over to complain that we were being disruptive. He said "there are Jewish and American people here supporting us and we don't want to alienate them, this is not a Muslim event." By "American" he must have meant white Christians - as if all of the South Asian, East African, Southeast Asian, and Arab Muslims there are somehow not real "Americans." In any case, I told him straight up, "look man, I'm a Christian, I'm obviously not offended by this or I wouldn't be holding the megaphone for the folks chanting it." I also think it was ironic that he was saying we're being disruptive and alienating since it was a speaker from the group organizing the rally who had earlier said some b.s. about how the "Jews control the media" and even suggested that the Holocaust wasn't as bad as people say- at which point our group shouted "down with anti-Semitism!" In any case, K. El Bathy, who wrote the piece below, pointed out that if the movement is going to be democratic then folks should be able to do Muslim chants if they want. Needless to say, we didn't stop and the organizer went away disappointed.

Islam and American Radicalism

2009-01-13T00:50:00.000-08:00

This is an excellent note from my friend K. El Bathy. We organize together as part of the same Middle East solidarity group, and he is reflecting on one of the local Gaza solidarity protests I mentioned in my previous post.

I attended what was one of the most beautiful and powerful rallies for Palestine in my lifetime. Across the world hundreds of thousands if not millions poured into the street to protest the Israeli massacre of Palestinians in Gaza, and the 60 years of occupation and apartheid. In Seattle there were anywhere from dozens to 2000 of us (news sources clearly cannot agree, or count for that matter, but most folks think around 1000).

What was great about this crowd was the multi-racial and multi-generational make-up of the protesters. It seems as though most of the Muslim people in the Seattle area showed up to march through the downtown area, some driving as long as 3 hours just to be a part of it. There were whole families; young kids, youth, adults and even the older generation.

I think what struck me the most about this rally were the chants at the beginning. All the speakers got up and said their piece, but none of them resonated with the crowd. Most were white and most were in their 40s if not older. While they bemoaned the humanitarian aspect of the slaughter, me, my friends and a number of young Palestinian folks around me yelled and chanted "Free Free Palestine" and "Fight, fight the tide! End Israeli apartheid!"

Even more amazing were the continuous rounds of Allahuakbar's that were made in between each speech. The MC, one of the few Arab folks on stage, encouraged everyone to take part whether they were Muslim or not. He explained for those not in the know that Palestinians are chanting this when they are living, when they are dying and when they are fighting.

What was beautiful about yesterday was that chanting Allahuakbar was opened up to everyone in solidarity with Palestine. All at once the particular became so universal, and the universal so particular. Although it was a Muslim practice, it also became a practice and expression of multi-racial solidarity against white-supremacy.

There were a lot of folks who were put off by this; "white" folks, and even parts of the so-called progressive Left. There was even a guy holding a sign that called for a "Free and Secular Palestine" (note the "secular" part).

On one end, this opposition to Islamic politics is just straight-up racism. The Right talks about a clash of civilizations and values whenever Arab and Muslim people fight back, while the revolutionary Left maintains this backwards, dogmatic opposition to all religion, playing into the hands of the Right.

Islamic politics is just the most recent political expression of the Muslim world. Arab liberalism failed to deliver us from the jaws of colonialism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, while Arab nationalism and authoritarian Marxism failed to deliver on the promises of liberation after European colonialism collapsed. So Brown folks started looking for a new way to understand the world, and fight back. Religion became a search for liberation; not automatically authoritarian.

I remember an imam I knew telling me that many Muslim immigrant didn't "find" religion until they came to the US. Identities shift. Thousands from Muslim families have identified as nationalists, Marxists and now Islamists. Thousands more imagined a new Black community during the era of Black Power, some even dressing as Chinese peasants in solidarity with the Chinese anti-colonial movement.

Probably the only thing I will agree with the Christian Right about is that religion -- though not only Christianity -- is a big part of American civilization. Many of the early European settlers were were Reformation rejects from Europe. While the Puritans could be said to represent the right wing of this movement, there were also Anabaptists who threw their lot in with the resistance of indigenous people, and also run-away slaves.

The Abolition movement is one example of this radical Christianity, but it's important to note that this early American Christianity fused with Native American and African spirituality that formed the backbone of the radicalism behind the Civil Rights movement.

Islamic politics and Muslims today, much like the Reformation Christians of three or four hundred years ago, are breaking with the status quo of Islam. Islam of the state is complicit in Palestine, whether right here in the US or in Mecca itself.

What I saw that Saturday was an Islam from below that rejected US empire, that rejected Arab-centrism, and became a call for all people in solidarity with Palestine to defend a democratic umma, and defeat white-supremacy. Islam is firmly rooted among the tradition of American radicalism creating a multi-racial -- and multi-religious -- democratic movement.

So let's do it one more time:
Free-Free Palestine!
Takbir - Allahu Akbar!

***some ideas on religion and American radicalism are taken from Loren Goldner's "Afro-Anabaptist-Indian Fusion: The Roots of American Radicalism" at http://home.earthlink.net/~lrgoldner/

Allahu Akbar: Gaza and the God-fearing

2009-01-11T12:06:00.000-08:00

This past week massive protests against Israel's massacres in the Gaza strip have erupted around the world, with street clashes in European cities between far-right pro-Israel supporters and Arab and Muslim youth. In the Middle East, workers and students are taking to the streets to support the Palestinians while cowardly, collaborationist Arab leaders like Mubarak in Egypt try to keep things under control. An Egyptian guy I met at the local Arabic restaurant put it well: "Egypt is a volcano."

Seattle is not quite a volcano but things are heating up here too. My friends and I have been to three Gaza solidarity demonstrations this week and the crowd has gotten progressively more courageous and confrontational. At the second two demonstrations, the moderate leaders of the organizations who called them lost control over the crowds and people began to act independently, feeling their own strength and power.

At the demonstration yesterday, this energy was initiated by youth of color from the ages 5 to 17. They were getting bored with listening to dry speeches so they organized themselves into an unpermitted march around the downtown city blocks. My friends and I joined them and gave them our megaphone. We tried to support some of the young sisters who were nervous about getting on the mic for the first time. When they got on there they gave the crowd some real talk: "Hey Obama, why the silence, speak out against this violence!" and "Long live Palestine, Long Live the Intifada!"

This march looped back through the crowd at the rally and the youth pulled their friends and in many cases their families into it and the vast majority of the rally turned into a spontaneous mass march through downtown Seattle. This inspired many onlookers who responded with fists in the air and car horns.

The cops were pissed. They tried to corner some of my Muslim friends who helped with the megaphone and accused them of "inciting a riot" and threatened to arrest them if it happens again. It wasn't anything near a riot. It was courageous youth inspiring their elders to break the deadlock of politics as usual. As Jesus put it, "I tell you the truth, unless you change and become like these little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven." (Matthew 18:2).

One of the chants the Muslim youth initiated was Takbir . Someone shouts "Takbir" and eveyrone else responds "Allahu Akbar." It is sort of like when Christians yell out "testify!" or "can I get an Amen?" In Arabic Allahu Akbar means "God is Greater." In this context, it was very powerful to see 10 year old kids facing down disapproving uncles, the cops, the Zionist counter-protestors, and there in the background the whole machinery of US Empire and Israeli military power. In the face of all of this they were saying "God is Greater."

At a rally earlier in the week, Muslim folks in the crowd also wanted to chant Allahu Akbar but the leaders of the demonstration kept trying to stop them, saying "we need to keep it secular!" They kept asking my friends and I to try and help them stop it. Their rationale was this isn't just a Muslim issue and we don't want to disrespect or alienate non-Muslim supporters.

First of all, as a Christian it is not my place to tell Muslims to stop saying "God is Greater." I will not be a missionary for secularism just like I will not be a missionary for imperial Christendom. Secondly, as a Christian I was not alienated by the chants, I was actually inspired by them. In fact, at an earlier rally Muslim leaders had encouraged non-Muslims to join in saying "Allahu Akbar" if we wanted. They pointed out that it's a chant they use in Palestine and the people of Gaza would be happy to hear us saying it.

So rather than trying to stop the Muslim folks in the crowd, I chanted right along. Lord knows it's not against my Christian faith to chant "God is Greater" in Arabic. In fact, it's pretty consistent with what Jesus taught. In the Middle East, Arab Christians call God Allah and I'm sure that many Palestinian Christians are praying to Allah right now to give them heart to survive this genocidal onslaught.

What has always inspired me about Islam is that sense that God is above all earthly powers, so we should fear God and not the state, the cops, the imperialists, or the patriarchs. It reminds me of Acts 10: 34-35: "Now I hear the truth, that God does not respect persons, but in every nation whoever fears him and does right is acceptable to him." God judges us not by earthly status but by the quality and dynamism of our submission to Him.

This morning, for my sabbath spiritual reading I reflected on some themes of Anabaptist spirituality that echo this sensibility. Anabaptist Christians were the radical wing of the Reformation. They were influential in the German peasant uprisings and aspects of their theology inspired some of the first international working class and anti-slavery movements. In the 1600s, calling someone an Anabaptist was like calling someone a terrorist today - it could send that person to prison, or worse.

Not surprisingly, the Anabaptists had prayers very similar to the Takbir. They also believed that God is Greater. As they put it, we should become a Godfearing people.... a people who fear the One and are consequently fearless before any other power. The Anabaptist political prisoner Endres Keller wrote the following with broken, bloody hands that had been destroyed through torture: "the secret of God is not in outward appearance of a person, whether he be king or emperor, prince or count, noble or common, burger or farmer, herdsman or still lower..... for David says in Psalm 25 [:14]: 'The secret of the Lord is with them who fear him, and he will make his covenant known to them.'"

The chants of Allahu Akbar at the demonstrations this week did not alienate me. Instead, they opened up possibilities of interfaith solidarity and dialogue that I haven't seen for years now.

I was also impressed with how the Takbir was so universal - it made the issue larger, not just a Palestinian nationalist but a pan-Islamic issue where Somali, South Asian, and other Muslim folks at the rallies could express their solidarity. As one uncle at the protest told me, "the best hope to prevent genocide in Palestine is that there are a billion Muslims who will rise up if Israel tries to do it." I just hope the Christians will rise up too, especially againt the nutcase Christian Zionists who fund Israeli terror.

If anything, these demonstrations reminded me what of what Christians have lost since our churches veered to the right in the 80s and suppressed liberation theology. I caught a glimpse of what it must have been like to be an anti-imperialist Christian militant during the height of the Central America solidarity movement, where Christian liberation theology gave folks heart to fight against US backed genocidal attacks in Guatemala and right wing regimes across Latin America. Back then we were called terrorists for expressing our faith in these ways. I thought to myself, when will we as Christians rebuild the kind of public witness and testimony against injustice that Muslim youth are repping today?

So next time, when folks shout Takbir I hope that other Christians in the crowd reply Allahu Akbar! And if you're one of them, come find me, we gotta talk.

Palestinian Pieta

2009-01-06T22:59:00.000-08:00

I've been meaning to blog about the brutal, racist Israeli massacres in Gaza but I've been too busy organizing against them. The local protests have been inspiring moments of interfaith solidarity. More on this shortly.

In the meantime, I'm posting this image from Dubito Ergo Cogito, a Palestinian Pieta. I'll meditate on this during this week's actions.

The Palestinians are what liberation theologians call a Crucified People - a people suffering under organized systems of sin, a people who cry out to God for justice . In this case those systems of sin are U.S. Empire, white supremacy, and Zionism.

It wasn't the Jews who crucified Jesus, it was Roman imperialism, but the U.S. is imitating Roman imperialism today in its global domination, and Israel is the frontline of American Empire in the Middle East. Our leaders, whether Jewish, Christian, or Muslim, are to blame for the ongoing crucifixion of Palestine because they are all acting like Pontious Pilates (or at least like cowardly, collaborationist Herods).

But the Palestinian people, like Jesus, rise again and again, affirming life against all obstacles.

Free, Free Palestine!

Long Live Palestine!

Radical Christmas Greetings

2008-12-27T20:17:00.001-08:00

Some of you celebrate Christmas, some of you don't, but I'm sure that most of you have come across the civil, polite Christianity that portrays the virgin Mary as a proper, white Victorian lady. I have found this hard to reconcile with the fact that she was a prophet of a colonized people, and Bethlehem is still colonized today. I wanted to get out another Christian perspective, one which recognizes how revolutionary Jesus' life really was. So here's a reflection on Christmas under occupation that I wrote a few years ago:

The Nativity has been made into a pastoral scene, peaceful and calm, on a Hallmark Christmas card. It can be hard to celebrate such a pastoral holiday knowing that the world is still in flames.

In reality, the world was in flames at the first Christmas too, and the message of Christmas is one of liberation from oppression.

In reality, Jesus was born into a war zone, a colony. The shepherds that gathered at the manger would have been considered lower-class, undesirable elements by Roman elites and it would have been a point of unspeakable shame for an unmarried woman like Mary to "wrap her child in swaddling clothes and lay him in the manger."

It was a time of turmoil. The great wars were over, the world pacified and unified under the "civilized" iron fist of a tremendous empire. All across the known world, economic development progressed as the imperial armies built roads and outposts for their local puppet governments. The empire proclaimed an era of peace, of tolerance and diversity, claiming that every religion was welcome to flourish as long as the people bowed down to worship the emperor.

And yet, the Middle East proved to be a thorn in the side of this Empire. A small minority group, "backwards and uncivilized" in the eyes of the elites, refused to partake of the so-called progress that had been offered to them. They remembered a time when they had their own kings who had ruled with God's mandate. They were strict religious zealots, willing to die for their God in order to purge their land of the infidels. They launched guerrilla attacks against the legions of Empire, prompting swift unilateral military invasions that left thousands of civilians tortured, maimed, or murdered.

It was the 1st Century C.E. A time much like our own. The Empire was Rome, the rebellious colony was Israel. Into this arena, a strange man was born. Mary, his teenage, single mother gave birth to him in a barn in a rural backwater of this colonized nation, shamed and cast out by all of the innkeepers. Noone believed her when she told them it was God's son. They probably called her a slut and threw here into the street.

She married a worker and together they raised this child like many other children were raised - to work with wood, to fish, to pray, to make a meager living and to get by. Fearing the future, the local puppet ruler was hell-bent on snuffing out the prophesied leader. So when this boy was young, his family had to flee political persecution. He grew up as an illegal migrant in a foreign land.

Everyone was looking for a king, a new ruler who could shake off the empire and govern the people with discipline and strength, bringing back the rule of God's law. Because of the miracles he performed, some thought this child might be this long-awaited King. Yet when this boy grew up, he refused to become such a ruler. Instead, he gathered the people - the poor, the dispossessed, the outcast, the prostitutes, the sick, the shunned, the sinners, the marginalized. He led them by preaching that His kingdom - their kingdom if they chose it - was in their hearts. Rather than bowing to him, he asked them to bow to the Spirit of God within themselves and amongst themselves. Using parables and stories, he taught them to embrace their dignity as children of God. He preached that these - the oppressed, the marginalized - not some messianic King - could rule in the world he embodied for them. The law was not simply a strict reading of religious texts. The Law was in their hearts, manifest by his divinity. It was Love, a law through which they would liberate themselves.

Indeed, he taught that they would inherit the Earth. As a result, he was killed by the occupying army as a threat to national security.

The Prophet Isaiah foretold that when the Messiah came to earth, "the government would be upon his shoulders." Isaiah's listeners probably interpreted this to mean that He would rule the Earth as a monarch. Jesus subverted this dream: the Government that was upon his shoulders was the cross.

Looking at the circumstances of Jesus' birth completely changes the significance of his life and message. This is key, because the harsh conditions of Jesus' birth have not lessened over the past 2,000 years. Bethlehem is once again under marshal law, governed by an occupying army: Israeli apartheid. (It is this occupying army that is currently bombing and starving out civilians in Gaza). It was the Romans who killed Jesus, not the Jews as the Christian anti-Semites like to claim. But the state and ruling class of Israel today have made a pact with the new Rome, the American Empire. And our rulers still seem hell-bent on snuffing out any prophesied deliverance.

Yet as we know, this was not and will not be the end of the story. Jesus embodied the hope that revolutionaries must live by: faith that the dead shall rise again. As CLR James puts it, "touch that, and the whole thing goes." His movement dispersed, his body broken, Jesus knew that history, as always, goes on. The cross, the Imperial symbol of persecution, was transformed into a rallying cry of hope. Like a dispatch from the underground, the message remains: "He goes before you to Galilee."

That is why we can celebrate. So have a Merry Christmas!

The two most dangerous forms of American idolatry

2008-12-22T02:48:00.000-08:00

1) Giving thanks to God for something that you or your ancestors actually took from other human beings. For example, the Puritans stole land and food from the natives and then turned around than thanked God for what they had stolen. For example, many middle class white people thank God for all of the privileges "He" gave them and then reflect very piously about the responsibilities (or should I say burdens) that come with them.

In reality, their ancestors created an unjust system that gave them these privileges. God had nothing to do with it. God is not in the business of giving the well-off more wealth. He is in the business of taking away their wealth in order to give it to the poor... or possibly multiplying the loaves and fishes so that everyone has more than enough to live joyfully. As a wise woman of color once said, "My soul magnifies the Lord and my spirit rejoices in God my savior.... he has thrown the mighty down from their thrones and lifted up the lowly" (Luke 1:46-55). So when you thank "God" for lifting up the mighty and throwing down the lowly, you're basically worshipping the opposite of God.

2) Convincing yourself that you are Moses when you are actually acting like Pharaoh (or at least Pharaoh's loyal and wretched servant). Given the fact that God is in the business of throwing the mighty down from their thrones and lifting up the lowly, human beings are most spiritually alive when we are in the process of helping God tear down thrones.

Someday, hopefully before the second coming, we'll live in a society where the deepest moments of human spirit and striving come in peace and playfulness. But we're not there yet so at least the near future being fully alive means being the underdog struggling to tear down the thrones of our masters. Jesus said if we want salvation we have to take up our crosses and follow him.

That's easier said than done. One of the greatest modern temptations is the belief that we are taking up our crosses when we are really just sweating and getting a backache hammering the nails into Christ's wrists.

If being fully alive means being the underdog tearing down thrones, the modern middle class could easily be left out of this story. They are not lowly and they don't have a good record of tearing down thrones (yes, I know, they had their moment in Paris in 1793 but it was the working women of Paris that scared them into it!). So many modern middle class people have trouble placing themselves in the Biblical stories. How are you gonna be Moses when your entire life is based on enslaving Moses' people?

Well, one thing you can do is pretend to be Moses by becoming a nationalist. Modern nationalism is based on creating a mythology about how your people were wronged and how you need to fight your enemies to vindicate your national pride. It allows you to play the role of the underdog. It allows you to live the vibrant, intense life of struggle against oppression without actually fighting for justice. You can wage this struggle from your throne, comfortably shouting orders to exterminate your "oppressors." It helps to have "oppressors" with no money or weapons.

Nationalism has some validity when a nation is ACTUALLY oppressed - when it is fragmented and needs to pull itself together to fight for justice. For example, the revolutionary nationalism of people of color fighting colonialism is a good thing.

But nationalism is dangerous when Pharaoh wages it in order to play Moses. For example, consider white nationalism in this country. The soul of American religion consists of variations on the theme of "Go down Moses, way down to Egypt land.... tell old Pharaoh to let my people go." This spiritual was forged in the Black liberation struggle against slavery and has been taken up by the rest of the oppressed multitude that built this country including immigrants from Latin America, Asia, Africa, and Europe. But white nationalists like the Aryan Nations and Christian Identity flip this on its head. For them, Pharaoh is Black and the enslaved Israelites are white. They claim Black people run the world, and they claim Black people are oppressing them through things like affirmative action, welfare, and crime. They try to convince other white people to wage a national liberation struggle against Black people.

This is all bullshit. We live in a white supremacist society where a multiracial but largely white ruling class subordinates and dehumanized Black people. Most affirmative action and welfare historically have gone to white workers.

Now this doesn't mean that white workers can't join Moses..... just that they might come out of their whiteness when they come out of Pharaoh's Egypt. They might be reborn, baptized in the Red Sea as part of the mixed multitude.

In reality, many white folks ARE oppressed, just not in the way the white nationalists claim. They're not oppressed by Black people, they're oppressed by the white nationalists! What do you think these little Hitlers would do if they actually did manage to kick out the Latinos and Blacks who are "stealing" "white" jobs? They would give these shit jobs to white workers and they would treat them like Negroes.

In the meantime, white workers are oppressed by their white bosses who take away their health care and evict them, who send their kids to die in Iraq, who divide and conquer them, turning them against workers of color to prevent a rebellion of the motley majority against the rich white minority - to keep the true Exodus from beginning.

The international, multiracial working class is the most dynamic new Israel alive today. It is the most vibrant nation on Earth precisely because it is more than a tribe, it is a collection of unique peoples forged together wandering in the desert marching toward freedom.

Pharaoh is jealous of this nation, so he starts wars to prove how he can be badass too.

Brick Collage

2008-12-12T15:46:00.000-08:00

This is a spoken word poem I've performed a few times. In the past I've mostly written free verse, non-rhyming contemplative poetry, but I'm trying to branch out now.

They say the kingdom will come in fire by night
Maybe the kingdom will come in these foggy lights
That scout the ridge between our neighborhoods and the rich whites

Cuz the segregation line at 35th is dark tonight
Pacific rain is falling hammering their side tight
And while they sit and meditate and contemplate their birthright
Their screen painting’s shanked by someone angry at their rent hikes.

Cuz they tore up the fabric of our family backyards
Shape up they said
You’re gonna be working real hard
So keep yourself solid like the face of an old God
Fashioned from the platinum of a dead master’s idol rod

Stone hearted genocidal flag waving factory yard
Stone hearted genocidal flag waving birthing hard.
Stone hearted genocidal flag waving church guard.

I’m tired
Of their bleached out petrified race card
I wanna cancel my membership
By burning up that draft card

Brick collage shattered glass makes the stained saints
Pieces of these histories a sample of the old grace
Dripped with color like the other pain of a new face
Rain, rain muddy water paint over soul chase

So while I try to reach the other
People of the valley class
I have something to confess
Many times I’ve tried to pass
Bread and wine with vinegar to neutralize the tear gas
So pass a bottle light it up
Chameleons of the street crash

Cuz someofthe families down Delridge to White Center
Have rusted cars and houses full of lead splinters
Just like the spot when I was young that my family rented
The wealthy kids called us white trash for living in it

Brick collage shattered glass makes the stained saints
Pieces of these histories a sample of the old grace
Dripped with color like the other pain of a new face
Rain, rain muddy water paint over soul chase

Though my house is not still
I sneak out into the clutter world
Night of the soul
ever listless on the tiltawhirl
A carnival of silence
Their residue in retinaswirl
Keeping the closure of a cold peace
In the world

Brick collage shattered glass makes the stained saints
Pieces of these histories a sample of the old grace
Dripped with color like the other pain of a new face
Rain, rain muddy water paint over soul chase

If I shout Halelujah will awakening come back?
Long enough to sit
Buddha style of the train tracks?
Long enough to stop the traffic
Rolling over Outbacks
And find a place to REST
Where the heavens
Can stay Black
And we can lay back
And never hold back

Where God can nurture sprouts
Of the messiah in our child’s play
And she can stop the wreckage
Of their false prophets’ new day
And we can pick up the pieces
And try to do it our way
With grace flowing down our skin in colors like the new way
Forward inward outward upward
Finding faces in the crowd
Together all our bodies are so spiritually well endowed
That we can move mountains that will register in ultrasound
And we can part the waters that the government can’t get around
And we can smash their submarines
On dry land
In Puget Sound

Brick collage shattered glass makes the stained saints
Pieces of these histories a sample of the old grace
Dripped with color like the other pain of a new face
Rain, rain muddy water paint over soul chase

Fragments of Contemplation

2008-12-07T14:50:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I was driving home after an exhausting but productive meeting, weighed down by a weak of dealing with conflicts.

The Seattle gloom suddenly broke open, revealing the sharp contours of the Olympic and Cascade mountains, Puget Sound sparkling like flint, and the clean, sharp snow of Mt. Rainier.

I was overcome with a flood of desires pulling me in a hundred different directions. All of the parts of myself that I had been ignoring in order to focus on my organizing and teaching the past week came crying out, competing with each other for attention. I felt like a herd of goats let out of the barn the first day the snow starts to melt, running in circles.

I tried to keep my focus on the road, feeling the anxiety of rushing cars, suddenly aware that I could die in an accident while watching Rainier and so much would be left unresolved, unrepentant for, and unborn.

And yet, this thought didn't grow into the prayer that it should have become. Instead it turned into a strong desire to get home and wrap myself up in all of those desires, crawl into myself, fold myself into them, and fall asleep in a cocoon of blankets where I'd be safe from sunlight, mountains, cars, and relationships with other people.

At church this morning, I realized that this is one of many moments were I've been offered a choice between heaven and hell, and I chose hell. Hell is isolation from people, a false contemplation that turns us inwards seeking relief from the responsibilities of caring for other people. It inflates our egos so we can crawl inside desperately seeking warmth, solace, and false peace, as if this flabby, temporary, changing thing we call ourself were God - we mistake our own self-pity for God's compassion.

In contrast, heaven is that raw, visceral, clean, clear and sharp desert - the desert rhythm of conversations, glowing snowy mountains, wet city streets - the shifting, risky, wild, and spontaneous landscape of love.

This reminds me of the movie Magnolia, which I watched with friends on Thanksgiving evening. It is a series of intertwined stories of broken American lives. The first half is brutal in its unrelenting exposure of the nihilistic, selfish, violent choices the characters make as they attempt to keep their own self-images from shattering. They cheat on each other, abuse and exploit their children. For a second, it seemed like the movie was going to drag on and on with no redemption, no moral vision, just poking fun at and almost celebrating the fragmentation and barbarism of our society. Because of that, my partner was like "is this some sort of hipster movie?"

In the middle of all of this, there is a Black kid who raps a cryptic poem laced with prophecy: "when the sun don't work the Good Lord sends the rain." The cop who he's talking to doesn't get it, and just keeps telling him to watch his language.

This marks the turning point in the movie; he is like a voice crying in the wilderness.

Seemingly random, visceral events begin to intervene in the characters lives to shake up their sin-hardened hearts so they can take a chance on redemption. The TV quiz show whiz kid pisses his pants so he can't win the competition, and this prompts him to stand up to the producers and his father who are exploiting his talents. Two of the old rich Hollywood actors and producers are dying and have to confront their lives of self-centered manipulation of other people, from cheating on their wives to abusing their children. This goes on for the second half of the film, as the characters stories begin to intertwine and they have to face the need to forgive each other.

The problem is, there is no way to make sense of, let alone forgive the meaningless evil these characters had committed - at least not according to "normal", everyday concepts like justice and fairness. There is no way they can make up for it, and some cheesy deathbed conversion is not enough to help them comprehend the karmic ripples of their actions, the devastating chain reactions their sins have caused in the lives around them.

Ultimately, this takes an apocalyptic break of biblical proportions - frogs begin falling from the sky ( a reference to Exodus 8:2 "And if thou refuse to let them go, behold, I will smite all thy borders with frogs")

The extra-ordinary, almost supernatural character of this event suspends the normal expectations that govern human relationships, and opens up a space in which the characters can make an existential choice to forgive and to let go of their burdens. In this case, it takes the chaotic, bloody pounding of frogs on the windshield and through the skylight to make the recklessness of compassion and forgiveness actually credible.

A lot of Christian reviewers of the movie see this Biblical event as a punishment for the characters' sins. But it's more than that. It is also a radical break with the world and its principalities and powers - its addictions, neuroses, and lacerating whips of desire. It is God marking a different type of time, a kairos, or crisis moment where the characters can wake up and be free. In this sense, it is like the inbreaking of the Kingdom of God in all of its scandalous, physical particularity. It saves us from a slow heat death, from dissipating like a scream into static, like entropy dissolving into nothingness. It erupts from within the world like a thief in the night, splitting it open, rising from its contradictions and giving its history and its bloodstained biographies the possibility of a real ending.

The moment of sharp winter sunlight over Seattle steel, water, and mountains could have been a moment of the inbreaking Kingdom just like the moment when the frogs fell in the movie. In reality, we are confronted with kairos moments like this all the time in our lives. Thomas Merton calls them the "seeds of contemplation" that the universe is constantly planting in us. Usually we kill them before they sprout because the comfort they offer stands in direct contradiction to the comfort we usually seek by turning into ourselves and wrapping ourselves up in our own desires.

A lot of the Christian reviewers of the movie are like the cop figure (who happens to be a Christian himself)- they miss the prophecy running through the film because it is told in vulgar, confrontational language just like the boy's rap. But what the film - just like contemporary hip hop - tries to do is to take the jagged fragments of contemporary culture and to weave them back together like disparate samples woven into a new beat which can build a path for new prophetic words.

These Christian conservatives miss the point. They think that by shielding themselves, by folding themselves back into a world of cocooned peace and porcelain civility they will somehow be able to avoid temptation and sin. In my own experience, such desires to avoid the messy contradictions of contemporary life are actually the root of temptation and sin. All sorts of addictions - whether to alcohol, food, drugs, sex, or self-righteous prayer - arise when folks try to escape the world of other people and find peace in the false solitude of self-gratification.

The alternative is the spiritual desert. The early Christian monks embraced the harsh, sharp, and dangerous spontaneity of the Egyptian desert because here they literally had to pray to stay alive. They denied themselves the option of going home and wrapping themselves up in some preoccupation to forget the world. If they did not concentrate on every action - getting water, making tools, carefully fasting to preserve their food - then they would die. In the process, they died to their egos and were able to be at peace in the middle of harshness and conflict. This allowed them to help other people without burning out.

We don't' have to go to a literal desert to find this unity-in-struggle, this peace-in-contradiction. The city is a spiritual desert, full of dangerous confrontations and harsh edges. Rather than running away from these dangers, we should use them as a grinding stone to grind down our egos and selfishness through daily practice so that we can better love our neighbors.

When we do this, we will become more open to the seeds of contemplation that the clean winter wind is blowing into our faces as we drive home, stuck in traffic on the I-5 bridge among millions of people waiting for the advent of the Kingdom.

Catholics for Palestine

2008-11-30T20:50:00.001-08:00

These are pictures of murals in Belfast, Northern Ireland calling for solidarity with the Palestinian liberation struggle. The opression of both peoples is a legacy of the British Empire, which the U.S. Empire seems hell bent on outdoing today in its divide and conquer tactics.

You Can't be Irish and White at the Same Time

2008-11-30T19:31:00.000-08:00

I just read the first chapter of Noel Ignatiev's "How the Irish Became White."

Ignatiev is a staunch opponent of white supremacy, a longtime labor activist, and editor of the Race Traitor magazine. I have some criticisms of Race Traitor's politics, which I may post later. Nevertheless, I am inspired by Ignatiev's insistence that the people who grew up as white need to reject white identity, become race traitors, and side with people of color to fight white supremacy.

Ignatiev points out that the idea of the white race is a social construction created to oppress people of color through slavery and colonialism. It also divides and conquers the working class and allows rich white folks to smash and co-opt anti-capitalist rebellions. White workers are given a deal: if they side with their white bosses against workers of color then they will receive higher wages, better living conditions, and less state terror from the cops, vigilantes, and prisons. They get real benefits, not just illusions of grandeur. But these benefits are far from straightforward "privileges." They are a poison bait that the white rulers use to buy off white workers and keep them in their place. White workers don't end up rich, they just end up less poor than people of color. As Ignatiev puts it, embracing whiteness means they "hug the chains of their own oppression" (see more here). For this reason, Iganteiv encourages white workers to commit treason against the white race and to identify instead as working class militants.

Sometimes I hear people say that this is impossible because white supremacy and racism more broadly have been with us for ever, they are part of the evil side of human nature, etc. A lot of Christians I've talked to end up coming to all sorts of sick conclusions from this. I heard a white Unitarian Universalist tell me once that it is impossible to overthrow white supremacy so what she was trying to do instead was "work on her privilege" by "recognizing her inner racist" and "atoneing for it." Atoneing for it won't do shit as long as the officers of white supremacy continue to smash the faces of people of color into the pavement. White Christians should leave their whiteness in the confessional and come out into the streets to actually do something about it.

What I've been emphasizing in my history classes recently is that white supremacy CAN be overthrown since it is only about 500 years old - it began with the European colonization of the new world. Before that time you only had a bunch of Viking, Anglos, Saxons, and Celts running around Europe killing each other - no unified white race bent on, let alone capable of, world domination. Hell, African states had larger armies AND larger libraries than any Europeans did back then, and it was Asians, not Europeans who invented gunpowder, the printing press, and the other technologies European elites would eventually use to conquer and subjugate people of color. So if White Supremacy has only been around for 500 years, that means it can be ended.

What's more, a lot of people who consider themselves white today were not white 10 generations ago. The Irish were called the Blacks of Europe. They faced racism in Europe from a vicious British colonial occupation and were treated little better than slaves there. They were forced to work on British ships and on Caribbean plantations, where they participated in slave rebellions alongside African slaves (for a good account of this, check out The Many Headed Hydra: Slaves, Sailors, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic). In the early 1800s, many people speculated that Irish and Black folks might actually amalgamate into one "race" because they intermarried and shared a common culture of the oppressed.

However, this didn't last. The escaped slave and abolitionist militant Frederick Douglas said, "the Irish who, at home, readily sympathize with the oppressed everywhere, are instantly taught when they step upon our soil to hate and despise the Negro... Sir, the Irish-American will one day find out his mistake." As the abolitionist paper The Liberator put it, " Passage to the United States seems to produce the same effect upon the exile of Erin as the eating of the forbidden fruit did upon Adam and Eve. In the morning, they were pure, loving, and innocent; in the evening guilty." (The Liberator argued that this sin could be atoned for not by feeling guilty but by rising up against the slave system. John Brown would put this into practice.)

So how did the Irish become white? Ignatiev's book argues that when faced with racist anti-immigrant mobs, vicious bosses, and the grind of urban ward politics, Irish workers followed demagogue politicians into coalitions with the white supremacist ruling class, beating down Black folks in order to gain acceptance in the American system.

Ignatiev narrates how the Irish anti-colonial leader Daniel O'Connell, known as the Liberator, addressed the Irish-American community, demanding that they side with the Abolitionists in the struggle against slavery: "Over the broad Atlantic I pour forth my voice, saying, Come out of such a land, you Irishmen; or, if you remain, and dare countenance the system of slavery that is supported there, we will recognize you as Irishmen no longer." He was trying to link the struggle for Irish independence from Britain to the cause of abolition. At first, the Abolitionists in the U.S. were able to rally Irish- American workers through such appeals. But eventually the Catholic newspapers, opportunistic Irish-American politicians, and slaveholders who opportunistically took up the cause of Irish independence managed to separate the Abolitionist and the Irish anti-Colonial causes.

They often did this by advocating a strategy of assimilation, saying O'Connell as a foreigner had no right to interfere in American domestic politics. They were trying to make their community the "model minority", a group that would pledge its loyalty to the U.S. and play the role of the "good Irish" even if it had to renounce the "bad Irish" abroad. As Ignatiev puts it, "The columnist Thomas Brady went on to cite, as a horrible example of the sort of person he was referring to, a speaker at an antislavery convention reporting favorably on the degree of racial amalgamation he had observed in Mexico, the West Indies, and Central America. 'Irishmen', asked Mr. Brady, 'what think you of that? Are you prepared to amalgamate with the negro, or rather are you not prepared to execrate any wretch, no matter what his own taste may be, who would insult you by such a recommendation?'".

So the Irish chose to be white at the expense of solidarity with American Blacks. As one southern Irish-American organization put it, "as the alternative has been presented to us by Mr. O'Connell, as we must choose between Ireland and South Carolina, we say South Carolina forever!"

Those of us who are not happy with the outcome of this choice should try and recover the tradition of Irish anti-whiteness and multiracial solidarity. In Belfast today there are still murals celebrating the Palestinian intifada. The Irish hip hop artist Marxman raps about his solidarity with all people from Asia to Africa to the Middle East who were also oppressed by British colonialism (he incorporates some dope Irish fiddle into his beats too). These folks are the real Fighting Irish! Maybe through these kinds of links, the struggles of Catholic workers in Northern Ireland against Protestant death squads and Anglo occupation soldiers can contribute to the global traditions of liberation theology.

What is the Spiritual Desert?

2008-11-29T14:44:00.001-08:00

Three years ago, I was a young student of Christianity in the process of becoming a Palestine solidarity activist. I wrote this paper for a class on Early Christianity and Ecology. It describes the social, political, and economic significance of the mass movement of early Christians to the deserts of Egypt and Syria. They were sick of the increasingly decadent official Christianity that the Roman Empire was using to conquer its subject peoples, and they were looking for another way to be Christian, even if that meant going to the margins of society. The icon here shows Moses the Ethiopian, one of these early Christian radicals.

I no longer agree with everything I wrote here. In particular, my conclusion argues that the experience of the early Christian monks and nuns is relevant for us today as we face a world of diminishing resources and ecological destruction. Like them, we should learn to live on little so that we don't start fighting each other over scarce goods. What I was missing at the time was a more developed understanding of capitalism and how it actually creates artificial scarcity. Today, we have the capacity to develop the technology necessary for everyone in the world to meet their basic needs while working much less than we currently do. Capitalism wastes so much; if working people reorganize the economy from below, we could retool production to make it more ecological and more just. In the meantime, learning not to fight each other over artificially scarce resources is still important, but I guess I also appreciate much more the sense of "damn, if the rich get to live the good life, why can't we" that you see in the Bling-Bling aesthetic of contemporary hip hop. (For a good analysis of this, check out DEMOCRACY AND HIP-HOP PROJECT: a blog of politics and culture from below: The Dialectics of Hip-Hop ) We live with wealth all around us and yet we don't have what we need. We should take it, but we should also take a tip from the early Christian desert peoples and share it with each other when we get it. That'll still take some spiritual discipline.

The other thing I would do if I were to rewrite this is I would emphasize much more that the desert Christian monks were not just an arrogant vanguard looking down on the rest of the world. As I wrote back then, "Monasticism was never completely a self-righteous counterculture of ornery folks bent on the destruction of society. Monasticism was a social alternative to the world, an orderly and stable challenge to the world, dynamically engaged with it, offering its citizens new values and new possibilities of living by higher ideals." This needs to be developed further.

Finally, I don't think I paid enough attention to some of the gender and ethnic opression that the monks fell into and brought with them from the cities. Like most revolutionaries, they were far from perfect. This book, among many, is a good place to start: http://www.amazon.com/Symbolic-Blackness-Difference-Christian-Literature/dp/0415243696

In any case, I'm posting the paper here so ya'll can get a better sense of where I'm coming from with this idea of the spiritual desert. I apologize for the rough formatting, I'm still learning how to blog :)

To see the paper, click here: http://spiritualdesert.blogspot.com/2008/11/what-is-spiritual-desert.html

Tag their walls; make them your hermitage

2008-11-29T04:07:00.000-08:00

I wouldn't have started blogging if it weren't for my partner Jomo, who convinced me that I needed to get my thoughts out there, even if they're in fragments over time. If not, I might drive her crazy by talking about theology all the time! :) So she was happy when she saw this up, and was struck by the ambiguously gendered graf image on the banner. Are they monks or nuns in their cloaks? Are they hip hop generation youth in their hoodies? Are they hijabi women or kefiyahed men? (or maybe hijabi men and kefiyahed women?)

In any case, she said it reminded her of a poem I'm working on about the tombs of Roman freed slaves, the kind of folks who made up the first generation of Christians. Here it is:

Queer Roman Tombs

I. Freedwomen

At least now they own their own veils

And can lift them in stony gestures
Warding off aristocrats
Shielding their faces
From their slave-girl pasts-

When it had been illegal for them to refuse
When their children couldn't wear necklaces
To ward off the evil eye

II. Freedmen

Of different shades and tongues
The tools of their trades tangled
To scrounge a new home

Maybe the common name
They had acquired from their master
Let them pass as brothers

III. Fonteia Elesus, Fonteia Helena

Somehow their female names survived the chisel
Their hands clasp like lovers
And this had to be edited

Yes, one of them - her hair is short
That’s because they chipped away her veil
To make her a man

But you can still see her Venus rings
And their tender glances

See, someone has carved a wedding ring
Into this woman’s hand

On Christian-Muslim Solidarity

2008-11-29T03:22:00.000-08:00

I have found other people living in the desert, from every tribe and every religious practice. The desert Christians were not the only ones to rise up against Constantine's heirs. Deeper in the desert you find Medina, the City, home of the Medina Compact, center of the Umma, a new way of living in prophetic justice and equality. I am living in exile in the spiritual desert with Muslim friends and non-blood kin. We are trying to keep the Empire's bombs from raining down on our people. We are organizing to try and stop the war, end Israeli apartheid, and get U.S. troops out of the Middle East.

Introduction

2008-11-27T02:19:00.000-08:00

My pen name is Mamos, given to me by someone I love. I am a Christian, a revolutionary, a teacher, and a poet living in the middle of the spiritual desert that is the U.S.

Like the desert Fathers and Mothers, I'm frustrated that my church has given itself over to worshipping the mayor, the police chief, and the gold coins with the Emperor's pale-ass face on them.

Like them, I'm fleeing the churches built by the Empire with stolen gold, and running to the desert on the other side of the barbed wire.

Like them, I often find myself worshipping God at the margins, in places not designated by the authorities, in places the authorities are afraid to go, in places where it is hard to live comfortably but you can keep your soul.

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Like those early monks and nuns, I have found a city growing in the desert, full of escaped slaves and undocumented prophets. I have found deep company where they said there would only be silence and loneliness.

I write this because I am grateful to rhyme with the desert. Like the early monks and nuns, I hope one day to storm the empire's capitals and help Jesus chase the money changers out of the temple.

After Guantanamo Panel

2007-04-11T00:58:00.000-07:00

Confronting the Politics of Torture

Thank you to the Muslim Students of the School of Social work and to all of the other organizations that helped put this event together. I am representing Democracy Insurgent, a Middle East solidarity group on campus animated by principles of democracy, antiracism, Third World feminism, and queer liberation.

Before I get started, I should say that this talk might be a little rough around the edges because we’ve had our hands full these past two weeks organizing nonstop to oppose the Israeli massacres in the Gaza strip. The recent Palestine solidarity demonstrations have been inspiring, and they are part of an emerging upsurge in political activity, especially among youth, Arab, and Muslim folks. The theme of this panel is After Guantanamo, and I will argue that we are in a moment today where many people are trying to figure out how to challenge the war on terror and the politics of torture which gave birth to institutions like Guantanamo Bay. The fear that Guantanamo was built to instill in the community is starting to thaw a bit, and new possibilities are emerging. So in that sense, this panel is very timely.

The goal of my talk is not to provide empirical documentation of human rights abuses at Guantanamo Bay. Other folks on the panel have already done a good job pointing out examples of torture and abuse, and there’s ample documentation available showing that the U.S. government has engaged in torture not only at Guantanamo but also at Abu Ghraib and in other prisons around the world. What I will do in my talk is attempt to situate this torture in a broader political context. I will show how torture is not an isolated exception to the normal practices of the American state but that it is actually a key part of how this state governs. When I say the “politics of torture” I mean that torture is a key part of how the U.S. rulers maintain their imperial domination over the Middle East and other subordinated nations. I mean that torture draws from and reinforces the white supremacy and patriarchy already present in U.S. society. So I will focus today on how we can analyze, organize against, and confront these politics of torture.

To give credit where credit is due, I should say that a lot of the analysis I’ll lay out here draws heavily from Kristian Williams’ excellent book American Methods. (note: all quotes in this transcript are from this book).

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Torture, Religion, and White Supremacy

The very location of Guantanamo Bay is a powerful symbol of white supremacy and American Empire. The land the prison is located on was seized by the United States as part of the Spanish American War, the same war in which the US colonized the Philippines and Puerto Rico and subordinated Cuba. This was the war that Rudyard Kipling claimed to justify when he wrote The White Man’s Burden. Guantanamo is a symbol of ongoing U.S. power in the Caribbean and Latin America. Now the US operates a military base there in a way reminiscent of the extraterritorial concession areas it set up in China and elsewhere during the colonial era. Here, Cuban law does not apply but U.S. law doesn’t exactly either. It is not the US and it is not part of any other country; it is a no-mans land, a perfect place to hide a torture chamber. At the Navy Exchange in Guantanamo they sell T-shirts with pictures of rats in turbans and orange jumpsuits, with slogans like “Guantanamo Bay, Cuba- Home of the Sand rat.” In such conditions, the fact that torture emerged is not surprising.

Of course, the Bush administration claimed that they built Guantanamo to save the nation from terrorism, not to reinforce white supremacy. Assistant secretary Jay S. Bybee justified harsh interrogation tactics by weighing the lives saved by gathering information that could prevent another 9/11 against the harm done to the prisoner.

In reality, the U.S. government is well aware that torture is a lousy way to gather information. One US Army field manual states, “Use of torture and other illegal methods is a poor technique that yields unreliable results, may damage subsequent collections efforts, and can induce the source to say what he thinks the interrogator wants to hear.” The victim will confess to almost anything to end his unbearable pain. Under pressure to yield a high-profile success in the war on terror, interrogators at Guantanamo engaged in torture, as other folks on this panel have explained. But Lieutenant Colonel Anthony Christiano reports that “ interrogators at Guantanamo obtained information of only minimal to moderate intelligence value.” The prison camp did provide some faulty information: British detainees known as the Tipton Three confessed to meeting with Osama bin Laden even though the British intelligence service MI-5 later proved their innocence.

So why then would the American government waste so much time and money running a torture chamber that isn’t actually helping to fight terrorism? Well, Guantanamo plays other important roles within the context of the war on terror.

The war requires that the general population maintain a high level of paranoia. First of all, we need to be kept afraid that a new 9/11 could happen any minute so therefore the government must be given extraordinary emergency powers to spy on us and wage preemptive strikes in our name. Running a prison camp like Guantanamo maintains this fear – it provides a spectacle of brown skinned men with beards in orange jumpsuits, men the US claims it has saved us from. Even if these men are not personally connected to any real terrorist organization, the fact that they are being held without trial and are being tortured sends the message to the general population that they MUST have been planning something dangerous to merit such emergency treatment. Racism is reinforced through a spectacle of domination and mistreatment.

And if a credible terrorist threat is not always available (or if the US is unable to actually catch Bin Laden and company) then “terrorists” can be produced by forcing less threatening detainees to make false confessions to terrorist acts under torture.

Secondly, Arab and Muslim folks, and anyone else who might object to imperial assaults on Iraq and Afghanistan plus suspension of civil liberties in the U.S. – all of these potential dissidents need to fear that we will be suspected of terrorism and possibly tortured if we speak up too loudly. Thus, it is helpful to maintain a prison camp like Guantanamo as a form of intimidation. Folks like the Tipton Three are broken and humiliated until they confess and then they are released back to the public. This sends the message that everyone breaks under torture so you cannot trust people in your community since they may inform on you if you speak out too loudly and then you might be sent to Guantanamo.

This, coupled with the COINTELPRO type system of paid FBI informants in mosques, is a tactic aimed to break up the social solidarity of the Ummah, the Muslim community. Instead of being a cohesive social body that provides religious and political meaning for its members, the U.S. government wants the Ummah to be dismembered and defunct. They want it to become a collection of isolated individuals who cannot trust each other and hence cannot organize together to stop the war, divest from Israeli apartheid, or fight back against anti-Muslim hate crimes. The government is proud of the fact that it offers religious freedom to Muslims, as if folks should be grateful that mosques have not yet been shut down entirely. But the freedom offered is simply the freedom to practice Islam privately, as an isolated individual. Any sense of a collective Muslim identity based on a common struggle for social justice becomes a target for dismemberment by the war on terror and the politics of torture. For a religion like Islam that so strongly emphasizes social justice and civic responsibility, this is disastrous.

In general, the state fears that religious communities can provide a common space where movements can gestate and grow so they have to attack the religious expressions of oppressed peoples. This is not particular only to Islam. In fact, a similar strategy was used against Catholic liberation theology during the 70s and 80s. Left wing Catholics were struggling against U.S. - backed dictatorships in Latin America. Many of these dictatorships employed torture to dismember the church and render it ineffective as a source of political opposition. All people of faith should stand in solidarity with Muslim folks now because our communities have also been dismembered before and they will be again if we don't stop the politics of torture.

My friend and fellow DI member Shemon Salam was active in Palestine solidarity organizing in the large Arab and Muslim community in Detroit during the height of the second intifada in Palestine and the divestment movement here in the U.S. At that point hundreds of Arab and Muslim youth were out in the streets protesting and demanding divestment from Israel. This movement started to die down though when the Patriot Act and other machinery of the War on Terror was set up. In the wake of 911, 1200 people, mostly Arab and Muslim folks who didn’t have U.S. citizenship, were rounded up and jailed across the country. Many were kept incommunicado and denied legal representation. Some were deported or held in indefinite detention. The rise of Guantanamo Bay is part of this machinery of the war on Terror and it works with the rest of it to instill fear in the community. The target is not just Arab and Muslim folks. The government makes an example out of them in order to control everybody else. My own parents have warned me many times not to keep up my Palestine solidarity organizing because they think that if I do I will end up in Guantanamo Bay.

This entire framework of the war on terror is designed to punish disobedience and reward passivity and political disengagement. Mahmoud Mamdani has written about how the war on terror divides the world between so-called Good Muslims and so-called Bad Muslims. The Good Muslims are the ones who accept the logic of American empire and who vehemently and publicly distance themselves from any angry or rebellious criticism of the American government. Bad Muslims, in contrast, are those who identify with anti-imperialist struggles in the Middle East, who express anger or outrage, who stand up to the government. The politics of torture aims to dismember the Ummah so that individual Muslims will feel powerless, will feel like they have to play the role of the submissive Good Muslim or else they will be sent to Guantanamo.

This logic is produced, reproduced, and taken to the extreme inside Guantanamo itself. The interrogators create a perverse world in which betraying the Muslim community is made the highest virtue and prayer, solidarity, and community are made into violent threats that must be suppressed with torture. Michael Ratner from the center for constitutional rights states that at Guantanamo, cooperation means “telling the interrogators everything about your life, about all your acquaintances, anything they want to know about people back home, so they can also be rounded up and arrested. And it means confessing to whatever they want you to confess to.” Inside Guantanamo, the “good Muslims” are the ones who confess to meeting Osama bin Laden even if they haven’t. Outside Guantanamo, Good Muslims who have absolutely no connection to Osama Bin Laden publicly apologize to America for what happened on 9/11 out of fear that they will be arrested if they don’t. Fear of having to make the first type of forced confession helps produce the conditions where so many people on the outside feel they have to make the second kind.

The guards at Guantanamo were subordinated to the directions of the interrogators, who made the entire camp into elaborate system of privileges and punishments, where privileges meant access to basic rights such as toilets, food, and clothing, and punishments meant subjection to humiliation and extreme pain. Detainees were sometimes beaten if they prayed but loudspeakers blared “cooperate and you can go home.”

Guantanamo’s internal riot cops participated actively in the torture by labeling even the most modest expressions of dignity as potentially violent insurgency that had to be crushed. For example, Tarek Dergoul describes one encounter with the riot guards:
“They’d already searched me and my cell twice that day, gone through my stuff, touched my Koran, felt my body, around my private parts.. .And now they wanted to do it again, just to provoke me, but I said no because if you submit to everything, you turn into a zombie. I heard a guard talking into his radio… and I knew what was coming. The five cowards, I called them, five guys running in with riot gear. They pepper sprayed me in the face, and I started vomiting… they pinned me down and attacked me, poking their fingers in my eyes, and forced my head into the toilet pan and flushed. They tied me up like a beast and they were kneeling on me, kicking and punching. Finally, they dragged me out of the cell in chains, into the rec yard, and shaved my beard, my hair, my eyebrows.”

It is difficult to see how such actions are possible unless they simultaneously build off of and reinforce white supremacist stereotypes of the Angry Muslim man who will somehow explode and blow you up the minute he expresses any dignity or self respect. The only way to avoid torture inside Guantanamo was to become the Good Muslim – docile, submissive, ready to apologize for terrorist attacks you didn’t even commit.

An extreme version of this dynamic was reported by former translator Eric Sarr. He quotes an interrogator called “Brooke”:

“ When Fareek returns to the cell in the middle of the night, he usually spends a great deal of time praying. I believe the problem here is that it’s too easy for him to regain strength when he returns to his cell… We’ve gotta find a way to break that, and I’m thinking that humiliation may be the way to go. I just need to make him feel that he absolutely must cooperate with me and he has no other options. I think we should make him feel so fucking dirty that he can’t go back to his cell and spend the night praying. We have to put up a barrier between him and his God.”

Brooke put this logic into practice by sexually harassing and molesting Fareek and smearing his face with simulated menstrual blood.

Torture and Patriarchy

Acts of sexual humiliation are common not only at Guantanamo but also at Abu Ghraib and in civilian prisons inside the U.S. Rape and threats of rape have also been employed by US prisons operating in the war on terror, most prominently at Abu Ghraib. The use of rape is a key part of the politics of torture; torture builds off of but also reinforces patriarchy and violent male supremacy.

Although it is not as widely reported, 42 women were held at Abu Ghraib during the 1st months of the US occupation. Many of them were kept in solitary confinement – the excuse for this was to protect them from the male inmates but in reality it made them more vulnerable to abuse by the guards. Most of these women were not suspected of any crime or resistance activity. They were taken in during neighborhood sweeps or raids or they were held because a male relative of theirs was active in the resistance. This last point shows the patriarchal attitude of the U.S. prison officials – they did not recognize these Iraqi women as having any independent social existence outside of their male relatives so they thought it appropriate to punish them in order to punish their husbands or fathers. Because of the stigma associated with sexual assault, few women detainees have spoken with the media about it, but the Fay report includes unreleased photos of women being raped at Abu Ghraib.

There are also numerous examples of male inmates at Abu Ghraib being raped or threatened with rape. Many times these men were forced to stand naked in front of their guards for long periods of time or were forced to wear women’s underwear while the male guards said they were going to “treat them like women”, suggesting they were going to rape them.

In U.S. prisons, this dynamic is very common. Male guards in female prisons often use rape as a form of punishment against rebellious prisoners. The patriarchal dynamic of the broader society is intensified when the male guards have so much direct power over the female inmates. Unfortunately, this is usually not recognized as torture because rape is seen as such a common part of life in patriarchal society that it is not considered unusual. In reality, rape is fundamental to the politics of torture. It is a form of torture in and of itself because it inflicts pain in order to dominate, control, reduce, and humiliate someone. Also, other forms of torture are so effective because they contain within them the fear that they might be followed up with rape.

In male prisons in the U.S., rape is also a common tactic of torture and control. Although there are no women present, the patriarchy of American society is also intensified inside male prisons, where men who are raped are forced to take on a female gender role as part of a subordinated political and economic caste within the prison. A patriarchal division of labor is created in the prison even if no women are present. Any man who is unable to defend himself from rape is likely to become the “property” of other men, forced to provide sexual service as well as doing chores like cleaning their cells. These men are often called “prison wives” and are basically treated like slaves.

This dynamic was replicated at Abu Ghraib by Military Police guards who had experience in U.S. prisons. That’s why they made the Iraqi detainees wear women’s clothing. Rape was a part of reinforcing this patriarchal hierarchy. The guards played the role of the dominant men and the Iraqis were forced to play the role of submissive women.

Sometimes women prison guards actually played the dominant role, raping or threatening to rape the Iraqi detainees, or sexually harassing and humiliating them. Now I’m sure there might be folks out there who will conclude that this shows American military women have achieved some degree of power or equality because they are playing the dominating role. Others have suggested that women were used in the interrogation of Iraqi men because Arab culture supposedly deems it particularly shameful for men to submit to women.

These arguments are part of a broader white supremacist argument that some liberal feminists in the US make concerning Arab and Muslim culture. They claim that Muslims are exceptionally patriarchal and that the US needs to maintain its power in the Middle East in order to bring women’s rights and equality to an otherwise backwards region. This is oppressive at many levels, especially since it renders invisible the struggles that Arab and Muslim women are waging on their own for equality in their own societies, and it neglects the fact that the U.S. occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan have killed many women and put many more in danger of rape in the context of warfare and instability. But this imperial feminist argument is particularly offensive when applied to this phenomenon of American women prison guards sexually abusing Iraqi men. It encourages us to explain away the Abu Ghraib photos in terms of Arab sexism, overlooking the very real American sexism at work here. It almost subtly suggests that these male victims of rape somehow deserved it because their culture is patriarchal and it makes it seem like U.S. culture somehow does not have a problem with gender oppression.

Just like Black cops and prison guards can often reinforce white supremacy in all of its violence, women prison guards and soldiers can reinforce patriarchy. Their power comes from their role as agents of the state, and as we have seen, the state regularly employs sexual torture to reinforce patriarchy in its prisons. The women torturers at Abu Ghraib are helping to create a subordinated gender within the prison – they are equating femininity with something inferior, something that can and should be dominated, invaded, and humiliated, and they are trying to fit Iraqi men into this role as a form of torture. In prison slang, to “make a woman out of someone” is to rape them. When U.S. military recruiters target male adolescents they claim that joining the military will “make a man out of you”, meaning it will turn you into a cold blooded killer. As Kristian Williams puts it, “whatever the actual sex of either person, the gendered relationship between victim and torturer reflects the same sort of sexist thinking.”

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What Can we Do About it?

So far in my talk, I have contextualized torture at Guantanamo within the broader politics of American white supremacy and patriarchy. The question remaining is what can we do to confront these politics of torture?

Well to start, Obama has stated that he will close Guantanamo, but he hasn’t given a concrete timeline. Bush has also talked about closing Guantanamo since 2006. Vincent Warren of the Center for Constitutional Rights fears this might mean “The same old Bush administration policies with some human rights window dressing.” To help prevent that, it’s important that we all participate in the walk out here on campus on Inauguration Day, Jan 20th. We’ll be rallying on Red Square at 10:30 AM to encourage Obama to live up to his promises and to call for a definitive end to the war on terror that has given birth to Guantanamo.

We Need to Challenge the CIA

However, even if Obama closes Guantanamo, our work won’t be finished. It might be in the interest of U.S. imperialism to close Guantanamo because it has so badly damaged the credibility of the U.S. government both at home and abroad. But this will mean nothing if Guantanamo is simply decentralized and outsourced to an archipelago of U.S. military and CIA prisons around the world. Many Guantanamo prisoners have also been moved back to Afghanistan where they’re being kept in similar extra-legal gulags.

The Washington Post reports that the CIA is holding 100 suspected terrorists in secret CIA prisons around the world. These are the so-called “Black sites” where ghost detainees are kept with little oversight and no communication with the outside world. The CIA may have even wider latitude in applying torture techniques than the guards and officials at Guantanamo. For example, the joint CIA-military unit 6-26 in Iraq was tasked with searching for ex-Baathists. They engaged in broad sweeps, imprisoning many Iraqis with no Baath party connections. Four of their members were reassigned after they tortured prisoners with Tazers. Similarly, a secret CIA unit tasked with hunting Al Qaeda received attention when a man they tortured to death turned up in photos packed in ice at Abu Ghraib next to the grinning face of a prison guard there.

These CIA Black Sites often involve kidnapping people and then sending them to be tortured by governments allied to the US such as Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and Morocco. This is called “extraordinary rendition.” It allows the US to keep its image clean. If the torture of one of its proxies happens to be exposed in the media, the State Department can always claim that this kind of torture is just one more example of Arab backwardness and that’s why the US needs to be in the Middle East to spread democracy and human rights.

CIA agent Robert Baer disclosed that “There is a rule inside the CIA that if you want…good information you send the suspect to Jordan, if you want them to be killed or tortured to death you send them either to Egypt or to Syria – never to see them again.” A former CIA counterintel chief acknowledged that “Egyptian jails are full of guys who are missing toenails and fingernails.” Considering the rise of a massive Palestine solidarity movement in Egypt and the recent militant strikes lead by women workers at Mahalla, the Egyptian state that does all of this torture might have already been overthrown if it weren’t for the billions of dollars in military aid that the US pumps into the regime to help it repress its people.

So even if Obama closes Guantanamo, we still need to keep organizing to stop these politics of torture. We can start right here on campus. The University is currently collaborating with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, an umbrella group that includes the CIA and the Department of Homeland Security. UW worked with this office to create the Institute for National Security and Research, or INSER on campus. This program is basically a recruitment tool to help attract and train the next generation of intelligence operatives. The UW administration has also invited CIA agent Tim Thomas to teach classes on how to spy on Internet media sources and blogs (for more information, click here).. Democracy Insurgent is launching a campaign which will demand that the UW administration close INSER and fire their resident spook. Our campus should be for education, not for training people to staff an agency that is running secret torture chambers. If you’re interested in getting involved, please speak with us after the event.

We Need to Challenge Israeli Apartheid

Even if Obama closes Guantanamo, we also need to confront the politics of torture as they rear their ugly head with Israel’s massacres in the Gaza strip, which are going on as I speak.

It is no secret the Israel and the United States collaborate closely. The U.S. provides Israel with 2-4 Billion dollars a year in foreign aid, much of which goes towards military and intelligence training. In turn, Israel collaborates with US military and intelligence forces to help suppress any Arab nationalist, socialist, or Islamic organizations across the Middle East which might pose a challenge to US empire. Israel has also supported right wing governments and paramilitaries across the Third World, including the genocidal regime in Guatemala in the 80s and apartheid South Africa. Israeli agents were present in Guatemalan dictator Rios Mont’s army camps while his military was attempting to torture the Mayan population to death. For this reason, when the Palestinian people rebel against Israeli apartheid, their struggle is at the forefront of anti-imperialist struggles that people of color are waging across the world.

Ever since its founding through ethnic cleansing in 1948, the state of Israel has fought a brutal counterinsurgency campaign aimed at breaking this Palestinian resistance. The current massacres and siege in Gaza are simply the most recent intensification of this campaign.

Torture has been a routine aspect of Israeli counterinsurgency tactics, something the CIA is no doubt fully aware of and may even be supporting and learning from. Even during the so-called “peace process”, human rights groups investigating Israeli prisons documented the use of sleep deprivation, stress positions, hooding, focused beatings, continuous loud music, extremes in temperature, confinement in closet sized rooms, inadequate access to food and toilet facilities, and violent shaking. In 1998, for example, B’Tselem estimated that the GSS interrogated between 1,000 and 1,500 Palestinians each ear, using torture in 85 percent of its interrogations. (133). Palestinian prisoner Abd al-Rahman al-Ahmar testified that he was subjected to “body hangings in so many different ways where each separately or all together cause exhaustion and pains in the body and in all the internal organs… sometimes they bound a person to a very small chair leaving half his body hanging in the air… and as to the pains that this position caused, no words can describe them adequately… I suffered from continuous vomiting.”

Palestinians rose up in the second intifada partly because the charade of the Oslo peace process could not cover up this ongoing regime of Israeli terror. In response to the Palestinian uprising, Israeli army chief of staff Moshe Yaalon said, “the Palestinians must be made to understand in the deepest recesses of their consciousness that they are a defeated people.” Israel intensified their practices of mass torture in order to achieve this goal. In July 2002, the GSS admitted to torturing 90 Palestinians, citing “ticking time bomb” emergencies. Human rights groups such as the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel argue that the vast majority of the hundreds of prisoners that GSS interrogates each year are tortured.

Today, these politics of torture are being extended even further. To punish the Palestinian people for democratically electing Hamas, Israel has turned the entire Gaza strip into an open-air prison. Just as Israel uses the logic of counterterrorism and the specter of a “ticking time bomb” to justify torture in its prisons, so too does it claim the right to starve, bomb, shoot, and mangle the prisoners of the Gaza strip, including the unarmed population. The death toll in the current assault is around 1,000 so far but another 4-5000 more are wounded. They are likely to face tremendous suffering considering that Gaza’s medical facilities and access to medical supplies have been severely compromised. This is not a war. It is mass torture - no different from shooting a prisoner in the arm and then denying her medical attention. The goal of these practices is not to gain valuable counter-insurgency information. It is not even simply a dubious claim to self-defense against terrorist attacks. It is an attempt to break the will of the Palestinian people, to dehumanize them and neutralize their resistance to apartheid.

As part of this attempt, the Israeli Defense Forces’ recently attacked a U.N. school and bombed the Islamic University of Gaza. These attacks on educational institutions cannot be tolerated and in response, Democracy Insurgent is organizing in solidarity with our fellow youth and students in Palestine whose education has been put on hold by Israel’s racist occupation. We are launching a campaign to demand that that the University of Washington cease any academic collaboration with Israeli universities including research trips, study abroad programs, conferences, etc. until the Israeli government ceases both armed attacks and economic blockades of the Gaza strip.

Students, faculty, workers, and community members should decide U.W.’s foreign policy, not undemocratic bureaus of the U.S. Empire and it’s security state. It’s time that we take back our campus so we can stand in solidarity with our fellow students in the Middle East.

The Current Moment: Fear is Not an Option:

This kind of campaign is viable right now because we are entering into a very inspiring moment in history. I’ll conclude by reading from a recent statement that Democracy Insurgent wrote summarizing this moment:

The newest round of attacks by Israel against the people of Palestine has been bold, outrageous, and tragic. However, these attacks have been met worldwide by an increasingly bold, confident, and outraged solidarity movement. Thousands of people have come together to protest Israel's violence in marches and rallies across the Middle East, Asia, Africa, Europe, and the Americas, while just a month ago, these rallies would likely have drawn only a few dozen. The numbers, however, are just the beginning of what makes these recent actions different from what Palestine solidarity activists have seen in the past.

On Saturday, January 3rd, Seattleites witnessed the largest Palestine solidarity march to take place in their city in years. Nearly 1000 people came out into the streets of downtown Seattle. The multiracial character of the crowd, comprised of Arabs, South Asians, East Asians, Southeast Asians, Black and Jewish folks, and also the multigenerational participation, ranging from pre-schoolers to people in their 60s and 70s, further distinguished this march from its predecessors.

Last Saturday, January 10th, there was a stationary rally downtown at the federal courthouse. Arab and Muslim youth ages 8-15 started a spontenous march, chanting “Long Live the Intifada”, “Allahu Akbar”, and other chants. Democracy Insurgent joined them and offered them our megaphone. Eventually they galvanized the vast majority of the rally and lead the crowd of about 200 in an unpermitted march through downtown Seattle.

These youth refused to be Good Muslims, refused to be passive and silent in the face of the politics of torture and the war on terror. The fear that Guantanamo produced is beginning to thaw and people are beginning to demand more. Only this kind of popular mobilization can close Guantanamo for good. Only this kind of popular mobilization can ensure that no prison like Guantamao is ever built again.

Speaking from Outside the System: Social Ecology, Self-Government, and Desert Places in Early Christian Monasticism

2005-05-29T13:24:00.000-07:00

Introduction

In the 4th and 5th Century CE, Egyptians lived in constant bondage to the whims of the Roman Empire, the fluctuations of an economy of scarcity. They lived in a world where the threat of hunger was ever-present, where farmers carefully watched the Nile week after week, waiting for the yearly floods and hoping for a good planting cycle. Citizens across the Roman Empire lived in a world where scarce resources were hoarded by the powerful, and kept from the many through domination and brutal military rule.[1] The Roman emperors were now nominally Christian, but they still operated under the logic of what the Christians had negatively called "the world," lording power over the poor and oppressed while coveting created things and procuring them through force. Since the first generation, the Early Church had seen this world as a place of sin - greed, idolatry, injustice, and war. The promise of the kingdom of God was in marked contrast to this world and present age. But in the 4th and 5th centuries, with the legalization of Christianity, Christians were becoming a part of the world. Like the world they sinned, and like the world they made compromises; they bent their Christian practices to suit the management of an Empire.
Yet while some may have questioned the possibility of living a full Christian life in the world, life outside of this Empire must have seemed impossible. There was nowhere else to go. Some Christians may have perceived the social order of Roman cities and farms to be brutal or sinful, yet they relied on this social order for their food and their safety. The landscape of Egypt dramatizes this dependence. In Egypt, the world along the Nile was green and lush compared to the "rolling dunes of dead sand, which rose in gentle ridges from the very edge of Lake Mareotis."[2] Egyptian peasants may have faced the horrors of starvation and oppression amid the palm trees of the Nile delta, but the only other option was the vast, inhuman emptiness of sand, heat, and sky, a place whose freedom was more terrifying than the predictable routine of slaughter and poverty in the valley. Egyptian Christians could stand at the boundary between civilization and uninhabitable desert and contemplate what life might be like beyond this clear geographic border of the world. But life as they knew it was only possible in the world.
Yet some Early Christians at this time voluntarily chose to dwell in this desert. They sought to model a more fully Christian life by fleeing the world, and to do this, they had to live in territories beyond the world's control. They were searching for a new way of life that could more closely approximate Christian ideals of compassion, fellowship, hospitality, and self-control, ideals many felt could not be realized in the decadent society of empire, hunger, and greed. Sin was in control of the cities; the desert, on the other hand, was pure. By crossing over that line between green delta and yellow sand, Christian monks developed what Peter Brown calls the "myth of the desert...one of the most abiding creations of late antiquity."[3] As James Goehring points out, St. Antony and his fellow Desert Fathers and Mothers were not the first ascetics; before, during, and after their moves to the desert there were monks living in the cities and at the edges of the cities.[4] However, the narrative of their withdrawal, or anchoresis, into open desert spaces provided a compelling and popular model through which thousands of other Christians could frame their spiritual and social aspirations for a better way of life. This "desert ideal" resonated with so many because it opened up the wilderness as a realm of spiritual freedom, where Christians could die to the slavery and domination of the world and live in a self-managing and compassionate way, taking steps towards the realization of God's paradise.
The Egyptian landscape did not mechanistically determine the historical development of this desert spirituality; certainly, earlier cultural perceptions of the desert such as the Exodus myth provided an interpretive lens with which to read the desert landscape. Moreover, the "desert ideal" was adaptable and multifaceted, easily recontextualized in the geographies of Syria, Cappadocia, and the European countryside. Basil of Caesarea visited Egypt and Syria in 357, observing monastic practices there and transplanting them to the Pontine Hills along the River Iris in Cappadocia.[5] Martin of Tours was born to pagans in Pannonia. In the late 4th century, he converted to Christianity and "at the age of twelve, he longed for the desert"; he would later seek a life of "desert" asceticism in the forested landscapes of southern Europe. [6] As Belden Lane outlines, through Christian history the concept of the "desert" became a metaphor for interior spiritual states - the medieval Spanish mystic "Saint John of the Cross knew and wrote about desert-mountain experience better than most people in the history of spirituality, yet he spent little, if any, time in starkly arid or elevated country."[7]
However, the actual landscapes of Egypt, Syria, and Cappadocia certainly contributed greatly to the historical development of this spiritual tradition. The experience of living at ecological limits - at the edge of cultivated land and wilderness - provided the fertile tension that powers the contemplative traditions born with the Desert Fathers. To live a human life in a place considered inhuman required great self-discipline, a willingness to "die" to the social self or ego constructed by the oppressive and idolatrous world one had left behind. The desert provided a situation of displacement that brought Christians to an existential encounter, an opening of themselves to new, multifaceted possibilities of Christian practice, leaving behind the captive ego and opening to the free soul. As Peter Brown puts it, "The myth of the desert was...above all, a myth of liberating precision. It delimited the towering presence of "the world," from which the Christian must be set free, by emphasizing a clear ecological frontier."[8] The experience of choosing freely to live on very little, within the narrow ecological limits of a desert world indifferent to human arrogance, provided key models of ethical restraint, political possibility, community flourishing, and apophatic spirituality that would later branch out into rich and complex renderings of the Christian tradition.

Entering the Terrible Wasteland: Christian Views of Desert Places

The Coptic word toou refers to both mountain and desert; it suggests that "for early Egyptian monasticism all terrain beyond the safety of the Nile was regarded as equally hazardous, a place of brokenness where divine mercy must suffice."

[9] It may be easy for us, in the early 21st century, to assume that the Desert Fathers went into the toou because they were drawn by the beauty of wilderness. In our time, wild lands are rapidly disappearing and many romanticize the wilderness as a place of recreation, a place that is supposed to provide us with an easily accessible and guaranteed "spiritual experience." But the desert monks of late antiquity did not go to the desert seeking sublimity, beauty, ecstasy, or spiritual experience; when these came to them it was generally perceived to be a gratuitous gift of God's grace amid a harsh landscape of struggle.
After all, the Roman Empire of Late Antiquity was a collection of cultures on the brink of starvation, constantly battling the elements to eke out survival. City dwellers and farmers alike were at the whim of grain markets, political fluctuations, droughts, floods, and food shortages. [cite Gurney] Perhaps for this reason, early Christian writers tended to find beauty and solace in ordered terrain, land that had been subjected to human cultivation and was thus predictable and balanced.[10] The garden was the image of paradise, not the wilderness. Yet only a few privileged elites had their own gardens. Most Egyptians were compelled by real whips as well as the "whip of hunger" to work on the fields of others. They were disciplined into subservience because they had no other options - there was the narrow belt of Nile civilization that oppressed them and there was the vast desert wasteland beyond it.
Monks chose the landscape of the desert for both its positive and negative attributes, as we will see here.[11] Much monastic literature describes the desert as a terrible place, grotesque and full of danger. For example: "Abba Elias was famous for having spent seventy years in the terrible desert of Antinoe. No description can do justice to that rugged desert in the mountain where [he] had his hermitage, never coming down to the inhabited region. The path which one took to go to him was so narrow that those who pressed on could only just follow its track with rough crags towering on either side."[12]

The Terror of the Desert is Better Than the Sins of the City: Critiquing the World From the Outside.

What would compel thousands of former citizens of "the world" to enter a landscape they perceived to be so terrible? Historians have forwarded several competing theories as to why there was such an explosion in the fourth and fifth century of Christian ascetic practices. Some argue that as state persecutions of Christians stopped with the conversion of Constantine and parts of the Roman ruling class to Christianity, monasticism replaced earlier martyrdom as the premier model of Christian witness. Others have argued that economic hardship is what pushed Christians out of the villages; crises in the Roman Empire caused significant chaos, compelling many to seek out the monasteries in order to survive. Another explanation argues that many pursued asceticism out of a disgust for what they saw to be a decadent and too-worldly Christianity that had begun to form as many elites opportunistically donned Christian practices in order to get ahead in a now-Christian empire.[13]
Each of these explanations has its flaws and is overly reductionistic on its own. But it is safe to say that for one reason or another, the 4th and 5th century marked a time of moral crisis for Christians in the Roman Empire, where asceticism provided them a way to live by higher ideals. Whether these ideals were a life of strenuous witness, a life free from economic oppression, or a Christian practice free from imperial corruption, Christians sought to live beyond the sinful conventions of what they called "the world." They sought to live the values of the gospels in a purer and more exemplary way, refusing to make the compromises the "world" demanded. The monk was a living icon, an image of separation. He or she represented a critique of the world from an outsider perspective. He or she modeled a way to hold up Christian values of compassion, fellowship, and hospitality as distinct from those of a dominating society and to offer these back to the world's citizens as pure gifts of spiritual guidance. As Peter Brown argues, "The 'world', 'the present age' of previous Christian radicals had been almost too big to be seen. Its measureless demonic structures had engulfed the very stars. There was no outside viewing point from which to take the measure of its faceless immensity, and no hope of disengagement from its clutches other than through drastic rituals that promised total transformation, through the formation of small, inward-looking groups of the redeemed."[14]

R.M Price develops this further, arguing that with the conversion of the Roman Empire this sense of the church as a small cadre struggling against the world was watered down. Christianity moved from being a small sect of "inward looking redeemed" and became worldly in its own right. The "drastic rituals" mentioned above, namely baptism, "[Were] now too common to seem a source of special grace."[15] With unprecedented numbers of sometimes lukewarm Christians becoming baptized, Baptism itself seemed worldly. It was performed openly now with imperial blessing in cities full of warfare and greed. Christians needed new ways of spiritually removing themselves from entanglement with this world.
The desert landscape provided a way. From Egyptian, Syrian, and Cappadocian monks, the experiences of living beyond ecological boundaries generated rich new metaphors for the separation of the Christian soul from the sinful, oppressive, and corrupting world. In this, the emerging desert spirituality drew from a long tradition of prophets speaking from the wilderness, from the margins of society. Prophets could "speak truth to power", could condemn the rulers and elites of society by speaking from the limits of the kingdoms they controlled. But the experience of the desert monks of late antiquity marked a watershed moment in the development of the concept of the exemplary dissident who is able to survive outside of the world long enough to launch a critique of society from a detached perspective. Here we see the development of a voice that claims to speak from completely "outside the system". As Brown puts it, "Seen from the slight eminence of the desert of Egypt...the "world" was no more and no less than the green valley below. This was a valley of crowded villages, condemned to ceaseless labor by the ever-present fear of famine. These villages were presided over by ancient temples. Throughout the fourth and much of the fifth centuries, the temples still resounded with oracles that foretold the rising of the Nile: seductive, demonic rumors, as insistent as the honking of the bullfrogs along the stagnant canals in the tense night before the great river once against stirred to life, to flood the dry fields. Seen from the desert, this timeless landscape gave to the notion of the 'the world' a concreteness and a precision that it had lacked in all earlier Christian sensibility."[16]

Many ascetic texts argue that this world is even more full of pain and drudgery than the difficult, yet free life of the desert monk. For example, the Sayings of the Desert Fathers describes the following exchange between Abba Paphnutius of the Egyptian desert and one of his disciples who was struggling with sexual temptations: "[The brother] said, 'Even if I take ten wives, I shall not satisfy my desire.' The old man encouraged him, saying, 'No, my child, this warfare is from the demons.' But he did not let himself be persuaded and he left for Egypt to take a wife. After a time it happened that the old man went up to Egypt and met him carrying baskets of shellfish. He did not recognize him at all, but the other said to him, 'I am so and so, your disciple.' And the old man, seeing him in such disgrace, wept and said, 'How have you lost your dignity and come to such humiliation? No doubt you have taken ten wives?' And groaning, he said, 'Truly I have only taken one, and I have a great deal of trouble satisfying her with food.' The old man said, 'Come back with us.' He said, 'Is it possible to repent, abba?' He said that it was. And leaving everything, the brother followed him and returned to Scetis, and thanks to this experience he became a proved monk."[17]
The gender dynamics here are certainly troubling - the monk leaves his wife behind, hungry and probably socially ostracized while he seeks his own freedom. But the significance of this passage for the argument I am developing here lies in the ideological framework it sets up as a teaching tool for young monks. It attempts to argue that the drudgery and labor of the world is humiliating and below human dignity. Dignity and freedom come from being self-managing in one's own work and survival, as part of a desert community. This requires self-control over one's desires; the monk who is able to quiet his or her passions is able to live more happily in the desert than in the city, shaping his body like an athlete for the performance of freedom. The passage is especially striking in that it places the responsibility of agency on the monk himself, not his spiritual master. Paphnutius has no coercive control over the young brother and when the brother chooses to go to the city, Paphnutius lets him go. Desert life is a choice, for which a monk would have to take responsibility; he or she would have to renew this choice on a day-to-day basis.
In this sense, the ascetic texts describe the world as a place of constant temptation. Just as the Israelites of the Exodus story were tempted to return to a slavery that seemed easier than their desert freedom, monks must remain ever vigilant lest Satan and his demons tempt them back to a life of servitude in the cities and valleys. Living first at the edge of the city, St. Antony became a model of Christian witness: "The only fire that burned in the heart of that exceptional man was that of his determination to appear second to none...And he did this in such a way that although he surpassed all others in glory, he was nevertheless dear to them all."[18]
He has already given up the household and familial commitments that bound a person to the Roman social world and had become self-sufficient beyond the city limits as an athlete for Christ: " He no longer thought of his family wealth or of his relations but focused all his longing and attention on what he had undertaken and worked with his hands, for he was aware that it says in the Bible, 'He who does not work, will not eat'."[19]
Yet, Antony had to struggle fiercely to maintain this independence and autonomy: "While Antony was busy with these things which caused everyone to love him, the devil, an enemy of the word Christian, could not bear to see such outstanding virtues in a young man so he attacked him with his old wiles. First of all he tried to see whether he could drag Antony away from the form of life to which he had committed himself: he made him remember his possessions, his sister's protection, his family's high status. He tried to awaken in him a desire for material things or for the fleeting honors of this world."[20]
In many monastic texts, the devil tries to tempt monks by luring them back from the desert into "the world." Material cares, familial responsibility, and honor were some of the basic social values that made a person a recognizably human in Roman society; to reject these required fighting for ones' psychological autonomy, defining a new and exemplary way of human being. When Antony resisted these temptations and succeeded at living as a new person, he became a model of a Christian who could successfully live beyond the values of the world. This required his firm commitment to stay outside the city and refuse the temptations to leave the desert.

The Desert as a Self-Governing Social Alternative

This ascetic freedom made monks potentially dangerous to the social order. Once they had become dead to the world like Antony, the persuasions of household, wealth, status, and honor no longer held them. As Belden Lane puts it, "The broader political implications of this truth were not lost on the authorities in the early years of the Christian empire. The desert monks, unlike others in society, were free to love at great risk. It was no wonder that prelates and emperors continually sought to curry the favor of these desert athletes, recognizing the intense political danger of a people who had nothing whatever to loose."[21]
And indeed, though bishops and emperors tried to manage the monastic movement, monks could not be easily threatened or co-opted. Authorities could not banish them because they had already gone into voluntary exile in the desert. Authorities could not starve them because they were already living on small loaves of hard bread and brackish water. Authorities could not kill them because many of them were all too willing to become martyrs, and were already voluntarily climbing up the cross.
Bishops often wrote hagiographies (saints' biographies) of these ascetics, certainly with ideological intentions in mind. For example, in Life of Antony, Athanasius emphasizes Antony's obedience to the bishop and his unflagging orthodoxy. Nevertheless, the political radicalism of the monks comes through even in these texts, showing perhaps that there was only so much the bishops could do to domesticate the monks. For example, when the emperor Maximin was persecuting the church, Life of Antony describes Antony leaving his desert cell and following the trail of martyrs to Alexandria. Antony says "we shall either take part in the fight ourselves or we shall watch the others in battle." He was a destabilizing political presence in Alexandria because he organized the martyrs in work camps and galvanized their resistance: he was, "Ministering to the confessors in the mines and in the prisons, he exhorted with great frankness and concern those entering the lawcourt for he hoped to prevent them being driven to deny Christ by fear of their wicked persecutors. Rejoicing that the sentence given meant that they received the martyr's crown, as if he himself was the victor, he accompanied them as far as the place where their blessed blood was to be shed. The judge was disturbed by the steadfastness of Antony and his friends and gave the order that no monk should watch the trial or stay in the city. And on that day everyone else thought it was a good idea to hide, but Antony had no fear; disregarding the persecutor's order he washed his overgarment. The next day he took up a prominent position, dressed in white, to catch the judge's attention as he walked past, for Antony was burning with a desire for martyrdom. He demonstrated to us that Christians ought to persist in an attitude that scorns punishment and death."[22]

While state functionaries struggled to keep their cities under control, some became disturbed by the new ways of life brewing up in the mountains and out in the wilderness, fearing that bands of monks could swoop down and disturb the peace of the cities. Like modern guerillas, monks disciplined and trained themselves out in the wilderness, yet also engaged in the struggles of society when the time became right.
Just as disciplined monks were more immune to threats than worldly Christians, they were also more immune to co-optation. Abba Arsenius was a former aristocrat who gave up his wealth to become a desert ascetic. One day, a magistrate came to him in the desert, bringing the will of a senator in his family who had died and left Arsenius with a large inheritance. "Arsenius took it and was about to destroy it. But the magistrate threw himself at his feet saying, 'I beg you, do not destroy it or they will cut off my head.' Abba Arsenius said to him, 'But I was dead long before this senator who has just died,' and he returned the will to him without accepting anything."[23]
If he had accepted the will, he would have become again the manager of an estate, exploiting the labor of peasants and living by the social codes of the aristocracy. Instead, he chose to die to all of this, and live as a Christian, side by side with Egyptian peasants as their equal: "One day Abba Arsenius consulted an old Egyptian monk about his own thoughts. Someone noticed this and said to him, 'Abba Arsenius, how is that you with such a good Latin and Greek education, you ask this peasant about your thoughts?' He replied, 'I have indeed been taught Latin and Greek, but I do not know even the alphabet of this peasant."[24] Rather than managing an inherited estate, Arsenius chose instead to focus on managing himself in the desert, living with and learning from his brothers as equals.
In Wisdom of the Desert, Thomas Merton compares the monastic movement to the modern anarchist movement, saying that the monks lived by a higher authority, rejecting the false authority of the state: "They were in a certain sense, 'anarchists', and it will do no harm to think of them in that light. They were men who did not believe in letting themselves be passively guided and ruled by a decadent state, and who believed that there was a way of getting along without slavish dependence on accepted, conventional values."[25]
However, like the better angels of the contemporary anarchist movement, the Desert Fathers and Mothers were not anti-social individuals cut off from any meaningful community, government, or organizational life. Monasticism was never completely a self-righteous counterculture of ornery folks bent on the destruction of society. Monasticism was a social alterative to the world, an orderly and stable challenge to the world, dynamically engaged with it, offering its citizens new values and new possibilities of living by higher ideals. Antony's example of monastic life spawned a vibrant, stable, and functional society in the desert. According to Life of Antony, the monks "Appeared to inhabit an infinitely large area, a town removed from worldly matters, full of piety and justice. Anyone who set eyes on the multitude of ascetics, anyone who saw that heroic and harmonious community were no one caused any harm, where there was no slander from tale-bearers, but a crowd of people leading lives of restraint, competing with each other in the performance of their duties, would immediately burst out with these words, 'How beautiful are your dwellings, Jacob! Your tents, O Israel, are like shady groves, like a garden by the river, like tents that have been pitched by the Lord, like cedars growing beside the waters.'"[26]
Athanasius (certainly with some exaggeration) describes the emerging monastic community as a perfectly self-governing society based on Christian values, where people compete to serve the community rather than to hoard resources as they do in the world. This new community recalls the tribal federations of ancient Israel, governed in harmony and justice. It also prefigures a garden paradise, the hope of the kingdom of God- a renewed social order as a part of a renewed natural world and a renewed cosmos. Hence, the harsh infertile landscape of the desert becomes politically, socially, and spiritually fertile, "like a garden by the river."

The Social Role of the Monks: Dual Power as Neutral Arbiters in Desert Places

Though this type of monastic community existed for its own self-development, focusing on building the virtue of its members, this task by no means signifies an indifference to the rest of the world. The monk of late antiquity played a definite social role in relationship to everyday people from the cities and farms. Peter Brown asserts that ascetics were admired in late antiquity as neutral arbiters or legislators, people distanced enough from the world to be able to judge it rightly. At a time when many traditional institutions were loosing legitimacy, Christians turned towards monks to resolve dilemmas such as property disputes, family problems, and grievances against unjust magistrates.

[27] In these cases, they instituted a sort of dual power situation, setting up an alternative framework of judicial and economic affairs. For example, according to Theodoret of Cyrrhus's History of the Monks of Syria, James of Nisibis saw a judge giving an unjust verdict and "Laid a curse on a huge stone that lay nearby, and commanded it to shatter and explode, and thereby confute the man's unjust verdict. Immediately the stone broke up into a thousand pieces. The bystanders were panic-stricken, and the judge, now filled with terror, revoked his earlier verdict and decreed instead a just one."[28]
Stories like this display a desire for a type of order and justice that the world could not provide; the desert ascetic, because he is free from the world and dead to its entanglements and corruptions, is able to judge the world and correct it.
Belden Lane argues that the ecological dynamic between desert and cultivated land provided a rich metaphor to reinforce this image of the ascetic as separate from, yet just and compassionate towards people of the world. Monasteries were built far enough away from human habitation to maintain this sense of being "outside the world." Yet, these monasteries had to be close enough to accept pilgrims, providing spiritual service to those struggling "in the world." Lane shows how many Judean monasteries were built into hillsides, where they were difficult to access yet had a clear "prospect" or view of cultivated land.[29] Monastic texts often emphasize the distance and difficulty in reaching monasteries, sometimes exaggerating their remoteness from the city. Yet these texts show from their own testimony that dedicated pilgrims could reach the desert ascetics and bring their message back to the world. For example, Jerome describes the landscape of the Wadi Natrun on the border of the Libyan Desert in Egypt: " the place is reached by no path, nor is the track shown by any landmarks on earth, but one journeys by the signs and courses of the stars."[30] From landscapes such as this, monks could judge the Empire from a safe distance.
In the process, these removed, wild places - formerly seen as dangerous - took on an aura of holiness. They were "non-places" transformed by the emerging desert ideal into sacred places, zones of liberation. For example, when James of Cyrrhestica, a monk in Syria, "Repair[ed] to that mountain which is thirty stades distant from this town, he has made it distinguished and revered, although formerly it was totally undistinguishable and sterile. So great is the blessing it is confidently believed to have now received that the soil on it has been quite exhausted by those coming from all sides to carry it off for their benefit."[31]
James chose to live without a roof, at the mercy of the elements, marking his complete independence from the necessities of the world's economy. Local people, oppressed under the burden of this economy took soil from James' "desert" in the hope of finding the power of this detached, free holiness in their own lives. James became a symbol of a human being who could survive completely outside of the world, dependent only on God's glory and the holy mountain. As a result, the mountain's "wilderness," formerly seen as a dead and ugly place, was transformed into a holy place as it came to symbolize the monk's transcendence of the world below.

Staying Put and Staying Human in an Inhuman Place: The Monastic Regimen

This sense of place was important not only for pilgrims from the cities, but also for the monks themselves. Many monastic texts emphasize the need to commit oneself to a particular desert place. The paradigm for this is Antony's decision to live within the tombs at the limit between the Nile valley and the open desert. As Douglas Burton-Christie argues, Antony's long-term commitment to this place, despite being attacked by demons, was his decision to finally "die" to the domestic world and rise again to a new desert life. The monk's position as a holy person removed from society yet close enough to serve it is an inherently unstable one, open to infiltration or temptation by the encroaching "world" until the monk finally dies to his ego and thus to threats and co-optations. According to many spiritual masters, the best way to fight these fears and temptations was through fidelity to a particular place. Once he became an Abba, Antony cautioned that, "Just as fish die if they stay too long out of water, so the monks who...pass their time with men of the world lose the intensity of their inner peace. So like a fish going towards the sea, we must hurry to reach our cell." When asked "what must one do in order to please God?" Antony answered pastoraly, "In whatever place you live, do not easily leave it."

[32] Similarly, Amma Syncletica counseled," Just as the bird who abandons the eggs she was sitting on prevents them from hatching, so the monk or the nun grows cold and their faith dies, when they go from one place to another." [33]
Perhaps these texts emphasize particular places to prevent the "desert ideal" from becoming an abstraction, a nice romanticized image excerpted from the actual physical struggle to survive beyond the principalities and powers of the world. In the Life of Antony, Athanasius uses the word place (topos) at least 20 times, and consistently mentions the names of specific places.[34] Conceivably the goal here is to belie any essentialized, fixed, or universalized conception of the desert life, to focus instead on the particular situations of struggle that constitute desert asceticism. Abbas and Ammas knew that their monks would not survive in the desert if they idealized it as an automatically holy place. One could not go to the desert and be guaranteed a "spiritual experience." Without careful attention to the minute particularities of exterior life - daily work, observing the weather, procuring food, etc. a young monk out to have a "desert conversion" would not only miss this experience but would likely die. In a world with many scorpions and little water, every detail counted. Abba Antony counseled: "If he is able to, a monk ought to tell his elders confidently how many steps he takes and how many drops of water he drinks in his cell, in case he is in error about it."[35] While this could be interpreted as an authoritarian master disciplining his disciples, what it evokes when read in context is a careful leader concerned for the survival of his community. Antony recognized that if monks did not discipline themselves carefully, with the help of their community, they could easily die in the desert.
In addition to this careful accounting of external details, the emphasis on paying frank and careful attention to interior thoughts and mental habits was not simply a method of prayer, it was a method of survival. In fact, the merger of survival and prayer is a hallmark of desert spirituality; the desert is place where you literally have to pray to stay alive. Brown outlines the constant fear of loosing one's humanity in such an inhuman environment. The monks had left behind many of the conventions of "civilized" life and they feared going mad in their absence. They had to cling to a constant discipline of prayer, liturgy, and fasting in order to keep a semblance of human dignity: "In moments when he was close to breakdown, the ascetic felt driven to wander as free and as mindless as a wild beast, gnawing at the scattered herbs, mercifully oblivious, at last, to the terrible ache of a belly tied to morsels of human bread, cruelly spaced out by the human rhythms of prayer and fasting. This was the dire state of adiaphoria. In it, the boundaries of man and desert, human and beast collapsed in chilling confusion."[36]

Fasting and Agency in the Desert

If a monk could remain sane in such a state of deprivation, he could finally break free of "the world." The world lay beyond the dunes of Egypt, the scrub of Syria, the dark forests of Europe, offering food but also drudgery, domination, oppression, greed, etc. To escape this system, the monk had to learn to live on nothing, to survive as a human in an inhuman environment. In many ways, the Roman Empire in late antiquity was a place of starvation whether in the wilderness or the city. In the city, people were constantly scrambling to survive in an economy of scarcity, dominating each other to procure food. The goal of the monk was to transcend this domination and replace it with Christian self-restraint and hospitality. However, to do this, he would have to learn to live outside of this world. This required choosing poverty and starvation (through fasting). Like the peasants in the valley below, the monk was poor and hungry. The difference was that he had come to choose this poverty, calling it a fast. In effect, the fast was a way to survive without food on inarable desert land, but it was dignified as a free choice, an act of the will. This act prefigured a free society, beyond necessity and domination, and validated the self-activity of everyday people: " Perched at the edge of the desert along the valley of the Nile, within sight of the settled land, the monks of fourth-century Egypt stood as a perpetual challenge to the situation of hunger and bitter dependence on the marketplace that characterized the society of a starving and laborious Near East. They, at least, had broken the dark cycle of hunger and avarice."

[37]
When monks flocked to follow his example and join St. Antony in the desert, this message was the basis of his homily exhorting them to a new way of life. He points out that all things of the world are inherently limited and will pass away. Whatever wealth can be horded will be lost, at the very least, by death. The ascetic realizes this, and seeks instead to live by higher ideals: "Why then do we not make a virtue out of necessity? Why do we not voluntarily abandon what must be destroyed when this light comes to an end, so that we might gain the kingdom of heaven? Let Christians care for nothing that they cannot take away with them. We ought to seek after that which will lead us to heaven, namely wisdom, chastity, justice, virtue, an ever watchful mind, care of the poor, firm faith in Christ, a mind that can control anger, hospitality. Striving after these things, we shall prepare for ourselves a dwelling in the land of the peaceful, as it says in the gospel."[38]
The ascetic must reject the logic of hoarding resources, waging war, and oppressing the poor that justifies the ways of the world. If she can develop "a mind that can control anger" and can die to all things which will die, all things which cause death, then she can live for others in hospitality. She can care for the poor and act with justice and virtue. Monastic life then prefigures the kingdom of God, the "land of the peaceful." The ascetic's example, replacing hoarding domination with generous hospitality, is thus an eschatological move, representing a step towards the Kingdom of God.

Conclusions

Like the Roman Empire in late antiquity, our own society is ecologically limited. With the reality of global climate change, we also face famines, floods, and crop failures. As resources become increasingly scarce, we will likely see an increase in domination and oppression as elites attempt to manage this scarcity for the sake of a few. In this, the desert monks model the psychological, spiritual, and ethical disciplines necessary to live Christian lives under a regime of scarcity. When the world defines domination, war, empire, and starvation as a necessary though tragic reality, the monks of late antiquity model for contemporary communities the possibility of Christian agency and self-activity contrary to this constructed "reality."

Our own environmental movement draws from the spiritual imagery of the Christian desert experience - the redemptive challenge of wilderness, the hope for a new humanity that may emerge there, etc. The liminality of the desert experience provided a lasting metaphor for Christian theology, one that has been taken up by modern and contemporary ecological writers such as John Muir and Terry Tempest Williams.

However, it is still an open question of what new spiritual forms, new literature, new politics, new theologies may emerge from our own experiences of landscape and ecological limitation, our own attempts to live at the borders of ecological limits so as to be free of the world's sin and oppression. What theologies will we glean from the landscape as we attempt to live by ideals higher than those of a dominating society scrambling for vanishing resources?

[1] Peter Brown, "The Desert Fathers: Anthony to John Climacus" in The Body and Society. New York: Columbia UP, 1988. Page 217.
[2] Brown, page 215.
[3] ibid, page 216.
[4] James Goehring, "The Encroaching Desert: Literary Production and Ascetic Space in Early Christian Egypt" in Ascetics, Society, and the Desert: Studies in Early Egyptian Monasticism. Harrisburg: Trinity Press International, 1999. Pages 73-88.
[5] Belden Lane, The Solace of Fierce Landscapes: Exploring Desert and Mountain Spirituality. New York: Oxford UP, 1998. Page 47.
[6] Sulpicius Severus, Life of Martin of Tours in Early Christian Lives, trans. and ed. Carolinne White. New York: Penguin Books, 1998. Page 137.
[7] Lane, page 41.
[8] Brown, page 216.
[9] Lane, page 3.
[10] D.S. Wallace-Hadrill, The Greek Patristic View of Nature, Manchester: Manchester UP, 1968. Page 90.
[11] Lane, page 160.
[12] Historia Monachorum, XII, in PL:21.432B. trans. and cited in Lane, page 160.
[13] R.M. Price, intro to Theodoret of Cyrrhus, History of the Monks of Syria, trans. and ed. R.M.Price. Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1985. Page xxvi.
[14] Brown, page 216.
[15] Price, page xxvii.
[16] Brown, page 216.
[17] Trans. Benedicta Ward, Sayings of the Desert Fathers: The Alphabetical Collection. Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1975. Page 203.
[18] Athanasius, Life of Antony, in White, page 11.
[19] White, Life of Antony, page 10. Note: this emphasis on actual economic self-reliance was a greater feature of Egyptian asceticism than of Syrian asceticism. In Syria, the monks were generally supported by the church, while Egyptian hermits and monasteries attempted to support themselves.
[20] White, Life on Antony, page 11.
[21] Lane, page 172.
[22] White, Life on Antony, page 37.
[23] Ward, page 14.
[24] Ward, page 10.
[25] Thomas Merton, The Wisdom of the Desert. New York: New Directions, 1960. Page 5. Cited in Lane, page 173.
[26] White, Life of Antony, page 36.
[27] Lane, page 162.
[28] Price, page 15.
[29] Lane, page 162.
[30] ibid, page 160.
[31] Price, 135.
[32] Ward, page 2.
[33] ibid, page 231.
[34] Douglas Burton-Christie, "The Place of the Heart: Geography and Spirituality in the Life of Antony" in Harriet Luckman and Linda Kulzer, eds. Purity of Heart in Early Ascetic and Monastic Literature. Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 1999. Page 47.
[35] Ward, page 9.
[36] Brown, page 220.
[37] Brown, page 221.
[38] White, Life of Antony, page 21. Italics mine.