religion and spirituality – somebody else's paradise

to knoxville

the coldest night in a motel in Murfreesboro (with heating this time).
a hamburger breakfast (lunch for the workers) in just the perfect
delightful home-cooking place (maggie definately has an eye).
buildings from the 1950s that suggest not much has changed since.
on the road to Knoxville.

at some point we get off the highway
and onto a small road that takes us through a beautiful landscape:
hills spread out with barns, meadows and old wooden houses
made soft and golden by the light of a late afternoon sun.

and i swear to god that it’s not much exaggerated when i say
that every second or third building along the road was a church.
looking for public spaces in this alien social geography deprived of
a center as we know them in Europe? here they are.
alongside the gas stations and the occasional small supermarket.
(that is before we hit mall-sized towns).

christians

two morning sessions of conference before nadia and jeanette and friends have their session. i actually start going to one of the sessions, on Lebanon. but i don’t make it through the first paper, time to escape again. there’s not much time though, and so it happens that i jump on one of these Old Town Trolleys that stop in front of the hotel and do a tour of the city. many places that i visisted yesterday, but also the harbor and Charlestown (US Constitution, Bunker Hill,..). heroic “cradle of liberty” stories alternated with trivia of various kinds.

i share the trolley with what on first sight seems a model hollywood family. very blond. and very loud – the woman has one of these high pitched voices that is difficult on the human ear. they display a great interest in what the driver/guide tells us, encourage the children to take it in and comment what a shame it is that this history is not taught in school in this country – the reason why their kids attend a Christian school, so that they would know about the history and values that found this country. at almost every stop the trolley makes they check with the driver if there is a McDonalds close by, despite him assuring them he would let them know.

it began with the driver making an allusion to me in relation to a piece of his narrative taking place in Europe. we had been talking before the family got on the trolley and he had wanted to know where i was from. the woman’s attention got fixed on me – where was i from, what was i doing in Boston. a conference, i reply, in middle eastern studies. in a split second i see her adopting a particular determined and complacent posture.
– “well sarah you must understand that when we go there, it is to spread the democracy and freedom that we have to places that don’t have it.”
i couldn’t think of an appropriate respons, baffled as i was, and it just somehow came out:
– “well it isn’t really working, is it… it seems that this country is good in making a big mess of many people’s lives.”
– “but you have to understand it is with the best of intentions. sometimes it’s difficult over there, you can’t always predict how things go. but you must keep confidence that good intentions will win in the end. that’s what built up this country.”

with every sentence we trap ourselves in continuing the conversation. soon we’re on the topic of the greatness and superiority of the U.S., “the best nation on earth” as she puts it. i challenge her. for some reason we get into education – i remember feeling i wanted to move on to health care – and i’m pulling together the evidence of how classist (no, don’t worry, i’ve learned, i didn’t actually use the word) it is. from all the things i list, she picks out the tuition fees.
– “but do you know why we have such high tuition fees? because we have all these international students coming here.”
with a nice and open and smiling face. i have a moment of just shaking my head which apparently she takes as a sign to continue:
– “and why do we have all the foreigners coming here? because our education is the best. everybody in the whole world knows it, and everybody wants it. they all want to get education in America.”

this conversation deterioriates at an amazing speed. some minutes later (in which we came back from standards of education, like levels of illiteracy, to the war in Iraq) i tell her i don’t want to have this conversation. yet the determination doesn’t suffice to break it off immediately. “okay,” she responds, “but take your time to discover our country and ask any American and he would tell you the same.” “how funny that you should mention that,” i reply, “as i just come from this conference with more than 2000 Americans and i can assure you their views are very different from yours. and given that they are actually informed about the Middle East, those views make much more sense than yours.”

sigh, another senseless conversation (10 more of these and i might start sounding like juan cole…). i’m actually saved by McDonalds, priorities are priorities, satisfied by some nuggets of independence history it is time for big burgers. from the corner of my eye i see the woman scribbling busily. before she gets off the trolley, she gives me a card – “please take this. i’ll pray for you.”

curiosity wins, as usual. (fieldwork material, as nadia says) the card reads:

We are believers in the faith that was the foundation of this most accomplished (for our age) nation on the planet. Our bravery, generosity and true love for all peoples has benefitted every nation on earth. God bless you.

they are from Riverside, California.

~~~when i get back to the Marriott it is time to pack and check out. in the elevator a conference participant is talking in arabic on her cell phone, but she loses reception. she seems distressed. she turns to us and asks who was assassinated? we haven’t heard anything. she insists, yes, somebody was killed, in Beirut. while entering the room i tell nadia to put on CNN, cause somebody was killed… nadia is packing in front of television – Pierre Gemayel, she responds. trouble. ~~~the session of nadia and friends is a fine one, that doesn’t get the context it deserves: scheduled in the very last slot of the conference means little audience, and the questions go off in strange directions (but here i should shut up cause i had a question, which moreover the friends liked, when i put it to them afterwards, but i didn’t ask it during the session…) a last drink in the lobby, and time to get ourselves back to New York.

healing

i finished reading God’s Daughters. Evangelical Women and the Power of Submission in an airport or an airplane somewhere. it helpfully elaborates on something that strikes me, since i’m living in the U.S., as a peculiarity of the religious formations that i came across thusfar. a peculiarity that seems to have grown wild in california and santa cruz.

healing.

the book is grounded in an ethnographic study of Aglow, a nation-wide (and international) network of Christian charismatic women. positioning this specific mode of religiosity, within existing religious and cultural coordinates the author identifies three main threads of which the movement is made.
1/ the Pentacostal revival since the 1900s, with its prophetic message and experiental, ecstatic style of workship. in the following decades, a strand of Pentacostal evangelists focussed less on preaching the gospel and calling people to salvation than on bringing down the power of the Holy Spirit to enact miraculous healings -culminating in the American “healing revival” of the late 1940s and 1950s.
2/ the Recovery Movement and Therapeutic Culture. This is traced back to the 1930s when Alcoholics Anonymous was found, and since then methods of “twelve-step”, “self-help” and “recovery” were elaborated, transposed to various realms, and became part of popular culture.
3/ an emphasis on women’s “eerie restlesness” and the need to find cures for it. such discourses were very much part of late Victorian America, and when the crisis of female “restlessness” was reformulated in the post-war era, it provided one of the impulse of second wave feminism (cfr. Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique). while conservative evangelical women would come to conclusions very different from the feminists ones, the point has been repeatedly made that there is some shared ground in perceiving a problem with the social roles and situations women find themselves caught in.

it’s the heavy mixing of the therapeutic with religion (less perhaps in the third thread, although there’s a lot of therapeutization going on in the field of “women’s restlessness”). religion marked by a cultural shift from salvation to self-realization. connected to the so-called “small group” movement with people seeking authentic, intense experiences that they fail to find elsewhere. the sacred becoming personal, and serviceable in meeting individual needs. a tendency that fails to acknowledge hiearchies of human suffering, and that is drenched in selfism and narcism in its exaggeration of personal pain. and its particular attraction to women.

living in Santa Cruz means living with the omni-presence of therapeutic discourse. it’s simply part of the air one breathes over here. it comes with a vague sense of spirituality here, although it is not so difficult to see its (Protestant) evangelical and charismatic influences and roots.

the difference with “indigenous” Protestantism and evangelicalism in Europe is sharp. remember the fierce rejection of vacinations and other kinds of modern medical treatments in the Dutch Bible-belt: as much as healing might be taken as the working of God’s hand, so is getting sick and dying, and one should not mess with that. there is no salvational quality to healing. and perhaps more importantly, there is a resistance to the psychologization of religious experience (among believers). among my visits, conversations and encounters in the field of Dutch Protestantism, there’s only one instance where religion and psychology met, in the person of an orthodox reformed believer who was also doing a phd in psychology. she discussed with much interest psychological studies and takes on religion, where the religious is connected to emotional needs. but it remained fingerspielerei for her, in which she engaged for pleasure, but that did not interfere with or taint her sense of belief.

the healing discourse repulses me both ways around. the individualist and voluntarist take on physical, mental and social (and societal) health. the way it domesticates and impoverishes the sacred, pushing that what fills us with awe, God, to revolving around me-me-me. the worst of two worlds.

community

melissa is dropping off bits and pieces of her stuff and slowly moving in. leta mentions inner light to her; it reminds me how soon the church tends to come up in conversations in our house. to reassure melissa, leta emphazises: “it’s not about jesus or anything, it’s all about community, you know.” or liberal and new age religion in a nutshell.

spiral dance

yesterday evening we celebrated pagan new year, the feast of Samhain.
marÃa and i went to the Spiral Dance, the ritual by Reclaiming,
the activist wicca (witchcraft) group of Starhawk,
in the Golden Gate park in San Francisco.

mourning the dead of the year that passed away (all the names…
shoes of people who died in iraq… photos of young brown and black
men shot by SF police…). welcoming new life.

insisting chants, and a spiral dance with hundreds of bodies
spinning a circle of life with a promise of renewal of the earth.
(and as spirits strayed among us,
i recognized a guardian angel)

(impression from the altar of the north | the winter )

march for peace and unity

marÃa, veronica and i arrive at the Watsonville plaza just in time to hear the song of this year’s march played on the harp and the blessing by Lutheran priests. the churches should be here, he said, this is where our struggle is. jesus of nazareth is with us at this march, she declares. in 1994 the Brown Berets marched for the first time through all the neighborhoods of watsonville, to insist that the violence must stop, that the community must empower itself. this is how they started a work that still continues; they stand, in their brown uniforms, in silence and dignity.

los alteres. pictures of those who died, flowers and objects, the Virgen of Guadalupe. marÃa had noticed it: in the spanish text people were invited to bring objects for the altars, in the english translation the altars were not mentioned.

the White Hawk group which i had seen before at a march against violence in santa cruz. they are the head of the march, dancing the whole way through. stopping at some places, to perform rituals with incense. our intuition about these places turns out to be true: killings happened here.

names of peoples, their ages. placards at the front of the march, which we help carrying for a while. i ask the guy next to me, eventhough i see that he is not wearing the uniform, whether he is part of the Brown Berets. i don’t go to the meetings and stuff, he responds, but this is part of my heritage. this is my community, this is where i come from.

there are not so many people. if one would start counting the people affected by violence in this community, it doesn’t make sense. yet the march is powerful, in the way it stands for commitment and remembering.

see more reports and pictures on indymedia

more light

sunday morning and sahar wants to go to church, we join leta to inner light. different from last time; without penduling cynthia, with reverend deborah. she’s definately a charismatic figure. but the comparison with last time clarifies how her charisma serves to wrap up the emptiness at the heart of this church or gathering.

there’s something else in her charismatic style that strikes me. she did the black preacher thing. the language, rhetoric, accent. maybe not a surprise, you might say, considering she’s a preacher and she’s black. but it striked me because in washington, at the spiritual activism conference, she spoke in a different way. seeking spiritual authority through well-composed speeches delivered in a slightly austere posture. what’s particularly interesting about her doing the black preacher thing, is that the church is so white. what does this “black performance” for a mainly white audience mean? plus the lesbian thing. what kind of intentional and non-intentional economies of subjectivity go into the white liberal santa cruz crowd seeking for words of wisdom from a black lesbian? you might say: why do you need to insist that she’s a black lesbian? she’s a preacher of the church, she happens to be black and lesbian, and the church happens to be mainly white. i tend to be sceptical about this kind of “happen to be”, but there’s more than that. virtually all the people that have spoken to me about the church did not talk about its particular beliefs or theology (i’d actually doubt that there is a coherent story to tell about the church’s theology…), but about the amaaaaazing reverend deborah who – did you know? – is a black lesbian. yes, that’s santa cruz (with a slightly complacent smile), we have a church with a black lesbian reverend. oh poor white knee-jerkingly liberal santa cruz, where do you go for redemption…

interestingly, a part of the sermon is about virtual space. its apparent disembodiment (“an affair in cyberspace doesn’t really count…”) but as we are spirit, as it’s all about where you put energy and creativity, it is as real as anything else, the reverend tells us. the theme of the month is creativity. sahar points out that she says some good things, especially considering the context of california and santa cruz, where people are “into creativity”. creativitiy, rev. deb. stresses, doesn’t necessarily produce good things. “we didn’t get a heart to love with and one to hate with – its the same heart.” likewise with creativity. it is also the source of computer games that are all about violence and destruction. clearly a message for those in church – must be a good bunch of them – commuting to silicon valley every day.

if last time the sermon was a mediocre lecture on global warming without charisma, this time it was an charismatic apolegy for neoliberalism. in the end its all in your own hands… healing, responsibility, what you make of your life. but all religion is apolegetic, sahar insits. perhaps for something, but not necessarily for neoliberalism. much of the ‘robust’ religious revivals articulate a position partially breaking out or in tension with capitalism and neo-liberalism. but then they’re apologetic for sexism or homophobia, sahar replies. and it goes without saying that this neo-liberal church honored a youth queer group this morning. divisions of the persistent kind…

inner light

Soon after i moved into the Washington Street house i found out that all of the housemates at the time – Leta, Kathy, Chris and Fiachra – were somehow connected to the same church called Inner Light ministries. They invited me to come along and i was curious. They insisted on what an open and progressive place it was, and were particularly enthousiastic about the reverend – a black lesbian, as i was immediately told. Then i met Rev. Deborah at the Spiritual Activism conference in Washington two months ago, and she was rather impressive during this first meeting.

This morning i finally went; we got a ride from Cynthia who offered to take everybody in the house with her. She proposed to first have breakfast at a place close to Inner Light where many church members go, the Farm. This turned out to be a rather fancy gourmet bakery where you could sit down to have truly delicious patisserie amidst beautiful expensive objects which you could also buy. Where to start… Cynthia’s arrival at the house in the morning was everything but peaceful: nervous, rushing everybody, waking Mihui up cause it’s part of her “saving Mihui plan” to take her church, excessively apologizing to Giulia and me for having to wait, slighty annoyed that MarÃa wouldn’t join that morning… a bad start. But it was nothing compared to the episode in the Farm.

As we were having breakfast, Cynthia got into another monologue, this time she wanted us to know about the pendulum. She got her pendulum out and told stories of how it guided her in making decisions. You have to find “your” pendulum (don’t worry, you’ll recognize it when you see it), you have to fix which movement signifies “yes” and which one “no” for you, and once you’re equiped all you have to do is ask a (yes or no) question and you’ll be surprised how you’ll be guided through the contigency of life to all the right answers and places and people and… i’ll spare you the details of all the stories (of e.g. finding the right bag, on sale, when you don’t have much time), but they clearly boiled down to this: the pendulum as a device par excellance for enhancing your consumerism. As Cynthia was talking, an elaborate image of herself doing groceries, going to the mall, visiting shops and boutiques, finding the right present for friends… with her pendulum in her hand cristallized. In case we would have somehow (but really, how?) missed the point, she gave us a demonstration on the spot. She let her pendulum show what i really wanted or needed – a piece of sophisticated parfumed soap. Now i’m not entirely sure exactely how low that figures on the list of things i would like… My response that i don’t really use soap was met with a nervous laugh. Then she went on a quest for a lotion for a friend. It turned out that the friend really needed pomegranate lotion, also Sprach Der Pendulum. By that time mihui had gone silent, i felt numb and tried to avoid cynthia. Giulia had run out, as she felt a great rage well up in her, struck all of a sudden by the whiteness and well-off character of the Farm, of the whole place. And it didn’t look any better outside on the parking lot with all the big cars, almost as many of them as people inside.

So i was telling you about going to church. We were all pretty quiet in the car as we left the Farm and drove on to Inner Light. A young guy seriously into heavy metal directed us to a parking space. As mihui commented on this look, cynthia cut her short – something about not judging and that there is room for everboby in the church. Not mihui’s freaking point, and it turned out that she was seriously into heavy metal herself as a teenager (how funny to imagine her like that!). But it seemed to me that Cynthia’s response and the emphasis on “there is space for everybody and everything, you should not judge” revealed something about this kind of church. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not that i don’t believe in the effort of trying to make spaces more inclusive (although i do reject relativism), and it’s not at all about the heavy metal guy whom i don’t know. It’s something about this kind of knee-jerking liberalism that is so empty, so poor, so dead – nothing more than inclusivity as a style, a brand.

From the very start the church feels cold. Giulia and i squeeze somewhere in the middle of one of the benches. In front of us, where traditionally you would find scriptures and song books in a church, there’s a box of Kleenex, three or four per bench. Giulia desperately needs to get out and we end up sitting in the front on the ground, with the children. But the children leave quite soon after the service starts and we end up squeezing in on the first bench. Nothing moves me in any kind of way. Not the music by a group of young people – “angels” someone calls them – on bare feet, with dreadlocks, with eyes staring into some other invisible realm. Not the “readings” which amount to some pages on evolutionary biology from some kind of novel. Not the “sermon” which is a lecture by a UCSC professor in ethics of ecology (Rev. Debora is on vacation in Hawaii). The lecture is not bad, it comes pretty close to Al Gore’s anti-global-warming manifesto An Inconvenient Truth, including the self-celebrationary tone of the guy who supposedly is only telling us the message. Not the “rituals” which amounted to not much more than reading out the church’s statement of purpose (“Inner Light Ministries is an Omnifaith, outreach ministry dedicated to spiritual transformation. We provide Tools for Living that encourage the practical application of Universal Spiritual Principles to all of life’s circumstances. Our aim is healing through the energy of love and revealing of our own Inner Light. As an Omnifaith ministry, we acknowledge Spiritual Oneness, appreciate individualized expressions, and honor all paths that lead to Truth.”) and some kind of affirmation of adherence. Then there are the things that freak me out: the general emphasis on unity and harmony. The particular emphasis (theme of the month) on creativity. Meanwhile i’m looking around and seeing overwhelmingly white people bonding and feeling good.

The service is followed by drinks and snacks and socializing. For some reason Mihui, Giulia and i first wander through the crowd each on our own. Then Giulia and i find each other in the bookshop. i wanted to get an idea of the theology or ideology of this church – the bookshop reflects the emptiness i had expected after the service. Some touchy-feely small books, some books on “social problems”, some small objects like stones with “wisdom” and “peace” and a big table with Rev. Debora’s book and DVD. There’s no spirit in this place, i say to giulia at some point, nothing spiritual at all. She reminds me that there are different spirits and that some people here seemed touched by something – which is the point when we begin laughing about what one could be touched by. In the central hall we find mihui who carefully asks us what we thought about the whole thing. Boring, says giulia. “Oh you guys…” Mihui starts laughing with relief. And there’s no stopping her anymore, she goes on and on about how she had no idea before she came to Santa Cruz that cynthia – an old friend from high school – was into all of this. About the things cynthia has been telling her that freak mihui out: meeting aliens, talking to fairies, plants screaming at her… (“We have a name for that in Europe,” giulia tells her, “madness.”) And about how she thought we all were into it. She knew leta participated in cynthia’s juicing obsession (we now grow wheat-grass in the kitchen to be juiced in the morning). One of her first days in the house she saw marÃa reading Starhawk and when she asked what it was marÃa spoke about witchcraft. She saw me, with my dreads, in a tank top one day and noticed all the hair in my armpits – she was convinced i was a hard core hippy. After a week in the house she phoned her friends in New York and Boston and told them they would not believe what a nuthouse this is… Her friends urged her to get out of the place as soon as possible… We can’t stop laughing. The beginning of a friendship.

Cynthia was clearly pissed. Not that we said anything to her – but the laughing complicity is clearly out of place. Last week Cynthia was crying during the service, it seems that the Kleenex are there for a reason. This week she’s angry, which finds its expression in a monologue as we drive home. The official target of her anger is the UCSC professor. He’s not creative enough, he still translates the problems (of global warming in this case) in the current frameworks and consciousness, he speaks of hope which annoys her because it points to the future and obscures the fact that we can change things here and now. If you have enough will power. She’s very dismissive of how the UCSC guy is stuck in his “small self” and brabbles about hope and some small things you could do, when it’s about getting into a higher consciousness. Like some guy she’s in full admiration for, who works behind the screens, convinces big CEOs (“it’s a win-win situation”) to change their policies. Disgusted by how her vision exhales individualism, conspiracy, the elected few, i phase out, just want to get home. Giulia angrily says: “And what about the war in Iraq?” It fuels Cynthia anger, which obviously wasn’t directed to the UCSC guy alone. She keeps on bringing up the same mantra – we need to look at things with a higher level of consciousness.

When we get home we seek refuge in my room, closing my door that leads to the kitchen, the door which i usually leave open. We lie close to each other on the bed. Giulia is full of anger and hatred, for Cynthia, for Santa Cruz, for California, for America – an inevitable chain reaction. It’s strange, this matter of degree, jerking from paradise to nightmare, no possibility to rest someplace in between. When she arrived just 10 days, she was enchanted by the place, especially the city (San Francisco), and now she’s into homocidal tendencies, triggered off by all this privilege drenched in a discourse of unity and harmony… Giulia, i don’t want to be writing what your anger was all about, will you write it down? For me, the anger in this place has made this very clear: my way of being in the world, of comprehending it and having some kind of grip on it, of acting in it, of transforming it, needs a notion of antagonism. In this America, in this California, antagonism seems to be contineously covered up. Win-win situations, we all want the same thing, we all have opportunities (if we want), we’re all on that train to the bright future (if we want)… Fuck you America, we don’t, we’re not, and remember that empire will be destroyed…

(i’m surprised at how sharing this anger at a political structure and culture that seems to leave so damned little grip on change – while ruining the lives of so many in the whole world – does me good. i didn’t expect it, i was not waiting for it, i was not needing it, but there we were sharing anger and hatred and sadness – which i only managed to shed off at some point in New York, a bit on my own – and it feels better. “This is how it was for me in the first two months in this Santa Cruz”, i tell her. “I didn’t realize it was so bad,” she tells me.)

We jump up at some point to be in time for Deepa Mehta’s latest film, Water. Definately a romanticised version of the ill fate of a child-widow in India in the 1930s, but an impressive account (how she portrayed all the relationships between the women in the ashram…) full of conflict, indignation, resistance (from widows and untouchables, not the elected few…) and movements (not lobbying among CEOs…) for social justice.

manifestation

Time to introduce you to our 5th housemate, Cynthia. Cynthia used to work in Hollywood, as an assistent to Tarantino during Kill Bill, till she couldn’t take the guy anymore and quit. Yet another story of some kind of burn-out and being in Santa Cruz to heal. Santa Cruz seems to be made up of healers or those in need of healing or both at the same time.

Cynthia lived in the house before, some years ago, so she and Leta used to be housemates. I didn’t meet Cynthia before she moved in, Leta assured me she’s great and that we’d all like her. Some days ago Cynthia cooked us a dinner and there was a chance to talk a bit more than the first exchanges of friendliness. Cynthia is into spiritual things big time. The red thread throughout her stories of spiritual quest and many years of following certain spiritual leaders, is the power of manifestation. Which boils down to the cultivation of will power and visualisation, i.e. of different levels of consciousness, to make things happen, real, material. Kind of like: all that is in the air can condense into the solid.

It’s not that i don’t believe in the power of will, of spirit, of intuition, of things that escape the radars of those senses which we have learned to develop better. But the form, content and extent it takes with Cynthia is sick, really. Which could just be a case of another weird inhabitant of Santa Cruz – the brand of this place functions as an open invitation… – only her stories suggest entire networks and powerful individuals involved. Like the story of one of her gurus who was received a phonecall from Clinton the evening before the Senate’s vote on impeachment. (“Bill, you’re not leaving me much of a margin to work here…”)

No doubt all of that (her fascination with power) is part of the conspiracy delirium of her universe – yet another vision of the elected few who hold the power – but i’m starting to see how important it could be to understand better how all this shit taps into existing power structures.

So i get into the fascination of investigation (in a positive mode, not only the “i have to write about this place or it makes me crazy”) and ask for more, like i ask her what people use manifestation for. The answer is immediate and clear: the top two among the people she knows is money and a partner for life. It disgusts me profoundly. And then there are all the stories i didn’t have to ask for (Cynthia is into monologues…), like the meeting with her boyfriend. The cold, instrumental dating. Not finding a connection at first but going back to the list of qualities she had written down (helps for the manifestation part) and concluding that he really is all she asked for. Laughing with the ironies of spiritual power – “tall” was one of the qualities in her (long) list, and Drew is giant. Then there is his previous life as a knight, when he was unhappy in an arranged marriage, found his true love but then she got killed by his wife. A trauma he is still working through. And Cynthia is keeping a watchful eye out for whomever might be the reincarnation of the wife, who might be seeking to kill her…

It’s all about creativity, it’s all about abundance. If you put your mind to it – and all that the mind is capable of – you can have what you want. American dream gone California nuts…

a little revolution of sorts

I’ve been busy writing again these days, will need to be writing till we leave for Yosemite. So it’s a bit of the usual writing mood but somehow it’s less holy – more mundane and more relaxed. Been working a bit in my favorite cafe this weekend, installed in the armchair opposite the yellow one that you can see. Pergolesi is a good place to hang out and actually get work done. Meanwhile i would so much like to finish my notes about the spiritual activism conference, but i’m a afraid it might not happen before Yosemite. But i still feel like sharing a taste of what i felt was going on at the conference, so i’ve copied some paragraphs from a book i bought there and that i’m reading at the moment.

The book is called “The Irresistible Revolution” and is written by Shane Claiborne. Shane is a founding member of The Simple Way in Philly, one of these (“intentional”) communities of radical evangelical Christians that are popping up like mushrooms all over the county. Especially on the east coast is my first impression. But then again, the conference was on the east coast, so that impression might be biased. At the same time, there’s a wide range of other kinds of spiritual intentional communities on the west coast, so that there might be less specific evangelical ones. Does it make a difference? For those of you for whom any kind of spirituality (including the witches!) is suspect or profoundly flawed, it probably doesn’t. But the thing is that at the moment evangelical Christianity is married to other conservative and right-wing forces who all together are slowly (although not so very slowly…) ruining this country and this world. Carrying a “revolutionary” radical agenda within evangelical Christianity at this point in time comes very close to a waging a struggle from (within) the belly of the beast.

The book very much reflects at least one thing that i saw in action at the conference: the articulation (combination) between what we recognise as left-wing positions (very strong on redistribution of wealth, starting from the lives of the poor, very strong on anti-war/peace and anti-torture, strong on hospitality, insisting on community, strong on anti-racism and anti-patriarchy, strong on the environment, insisting on radical love) and religious (in the case of the conference, also non-religious spiritual) beliefs and practices.

There is much more to say about this tendency, about the conference, but i want to anticipate the stories to come with the affirmation that this articulation is taking place here in the U.S. To what extent – i don’t know. In Shane’s paragraphs below there is a sense that their way of doing church is gaining momentum. During the conference the Washington Post ran a front-page article claiming “The religious left is back!”. Frankly, i don’t know how much this reflects a real social force or movement. Susan tentively ascribes more real force to evangelicals who disagree and dissociate with the current regime out of a more conservative agenda. The nice thing is to be able to do these investigations parallel to hers, so we cover different movements within evangelical Christianity away from the current unholy alliance with the political right-wing. The thing that is becoming more and more clear: a good number of important movements (movements that in fact could end this regime, something the liberal left on its own seems quite unable to do) are happening within the realm of religion in this country. Some of Shane’s words now:

“Meanwhile, many of us find ourselves estranged from the narrow issues that define conservatives and from the shallow spirituality that marks liberals. We are thristy for social justice and peace but have a heard time finding a faith community that is consistently pro-life [note: this is a re-appropriation of the “pro-life” discourse of the christian right] or that recognizes that there are “moral issues” other than homosexuality and abortion, moral issues like war and poverty. So some folks just end up trying to save individual souls from their sins, and others end up trying to save the world from “the system”. But rarely do we see that the sickness of our world has infected each of us, and that the healing of our world not only begins within us but does not end with us. I recently received a letter from a young man that read “I am alone, surrounded by unbelieving activists and inactive believers. Where are the true Christians?” A “silent majority” is developing as a growing number of folks are deliberately distancing themselves from the noise and arrogance that have come to mark both evangelical Christianity and secular activism.”

“I have a confession I’m sure many of you will find refreshing and familiar: I don’t really fit into the old liberal-conservative boxes, so it’s a good things we are moving on to something new. My activist friends call me conservative, and my religious friends call me liberal. What I often get branded is “radical”. I’ve never really minded that, for as my urban-farming friends remind me, the word radical itself means “root”. It’s from the Latin words radix, which, just like a rad-ish, had to do with getting to the root of things. But radical is not something reserved for saints and martyrs, which is why I like to complement it with ordinary. Ordinary does not mean normal, and I lament the dreadful seduction which has resulted in Christians becoming so normal. Thanksfully, there is a movement of ordinary radicals sweeping the land, and ordinary people are choosing to live in radical new ways. So this is a book for ordinary radicals, not for saints who think they have a monopoly on radical and not for normal people who are satisfied with the way things are.
So I am radical in the truest sense of the word: an ordinary radical who wants to get at the root of what it means to love, and to get at the root of what has made such a mess of our world. And many of my heroes were “radicals,” trying to get back to the roots of Christianity. In the past, being labeled radical was nice because it made me feel sassy, and I never had to worry about folks taking me too seriously. It was a word you used ot write someone off, usually folks who exaggerated the truth that the world was neglecting. But something strange has happened. Either I’m no longer radical, or there are a lot of ordinary radicals out there. People are actually paying attention. The question if no longer what to do if nobody listens but what happens when people actually take us seriously.”

“There is a beautiful moment in the Bible when the prophet Elijah feels God’s presence. The Scriptures say that a great and powerful wind tore the mountains apart, but God was not in the wind. After the wind, there was an earthquake, but God was not in the earthquake. After the earthquake came a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire. And after the fire came a gentle whisper. It was the whisper of God. Today we can hear the whispter where we least expect it: in a baby refugee and in a homeless rabbi, in crack addicts and displaced children, in a groaning creation. In the words that Indian activist and authors Arundhati Roy proclaimed at the World Social Forum in Brazil, “Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.” The whisper cries out for God to save the church from us Christians and breath new life into the aging Body.”

“If by evangelical we mean one who spreads the good news that there is another kingdom or superpower, an economy and a peace other than that of the nations, a saviour other than Caesar, then yes, I am an evangelical.
No doubt, there is much noise in evangelical Christianity. There are many false prophets (and false profits) out there, and all kinds of embarrassing things being done in the name of God. Religious extremists of all faiths have perverted the best of our traditions. But there is another movements stirring, a little revolution of sorts. Many of us are refusing to allow distorted images of our faith to define us. There are those of us who, rather than simply reject pop evangelicalism, want to spread another kind of Christianity, a faith that has as much to say about this world as it does about the next. New prophets are rising up who try to change the future, not just predict it. There is a movement bubbling up that goes beyond cynicism and celebrates a new way of living, a generation that stops complaining about the church it sees and becomes the church it dreams of. And this little revolution is irresistible. It is a contagious revolution that dances, laughs and loves.”