Message of Hope, on the Inauguration of Donald Trump

On the evening a January 20, 2017, a group of students at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, along with friends, took to the streets of Oakland bearing a coffin draped in an American flag. We shared the streets with protesters before our funeral procession diverted and headed up Telegraph for a Requiem for the American Dream. I delivered the following homily as part of that service.

It’s been a hell of a week.

On Monday I attended a memorial service for a co-worker whose life was cut tragically short. The extinguishing of her light is a great sorrow, though on Monday we chose to celebrate the blessing she had been and what light she had brought to our community.

Today’s funeral is of a very different tone, because for all the grief that we feel, for all that we have to let go of, this loss is a wake up call, particularly for liberal white people, of all the ways the systems that we have put our faith in fail to protect and uphold the values we claim to hold so dear. The truth is that these systems have been failing a lot of people for a long time. Call it what you will, but the capitalist white supremacist heteropatriarchy of this nation has been killing people on this continent for centuries. For those of us who strive for justice, who feel sick and afraid and aggrieved by today’s inauguration and everything it seems to stand for, the way forward demands that we listen to the voices of the most marginalized, we step back and offer them leadership rather than simply trying to help the misfortunate other. For white people in particular, now is the time to show our support for the resistance and resilience movements already begun by those for whom the veil of the American Dream had already died - if it had ever even lived. But as Malcolm X wisely observed, “this ‘system’ that the white man created...has done the American white man more harm than an invading army would do to him.” We have an opportunity for those of us who have some privileges, whether we are white or male or cis-gendered or wealthy or whatever form it might take, to recognize the ways in which the promises of privilege and power have been used against us, used to hold us in line and prevent us from truly connecting with ourselves and the world and people around us.

The dominant hegemonic narrative of American history speaks of constant progress, and certainly that idea has been used, by Martin Luther King and others, to help expand privileges and rights to those who had been denied. But the history of this nation is darker and more complicated than that. The election of Barack Obama was the achievement of a dream many believed impossible, but it in no way ushered in a post-racial age.  Now, on the precipice of the age of Trump, we must turn our attention to the stories of resistance in which beauty and hope truly lie – even to those movements that seem to have failed and died.  Cornel West speaks of the “tragicomic hope.” He writes: “The tragicomic is the ability to laugh and retain a sense of life’s joy — to preserve hope even while staring in the face of hate and hypocrisy — as against falling into the nihilism of paralyzing despair. This tragicomic hope is expressed in America most profoundly in the wrenchingly honest yet compassionate voices of the black freedom struggle; most poignantly in the painful eloquence of the blues; and most exuberantly in the improvisational virtuosity of jazz.” What can we resurrect from the ashes of movement past? What can we learn from their successes and failures? What do they teach us about the true meaning of America, a meaning that lies not in the occupant of the office of the President but in the soul of every person walking these streets? Here in Oakland in particular, in a building that I’m told once housed a bar frequented by Black Panthers, what can we do to build upon their Ten Point Program?

I’ve been feeling rather cynical about the American experiment, whether the expansion of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness is enough to bring ‘justice, equity, and compassion to human relations.’ But America is where we are – even on stolen land, it is the place and possibility that has brought us all together in this moment. And you all are beautiful. You, who are willing to show up and show your pain. You, who are willing to stand up and say that the rhetoric and actions that come from this man inaugurated today do not represent you. You, who are sick and tired of the harm being done in your name but know not the best way to prevent it from happening again or how to make amends for what has happened before. How can I not feel hope surrounded by all this love and goodness and dedication to countering oppressions? As my friend Isabel said earlier today, in a slightly different context, “Maybe we can all love each other.” Take care of yourselves, beautiful people.

As a farmer, a gardener, a lover of life, I find hope, too, in the soil, in the regenerative power of compost, in the natural processes that create life out of death again and again and again. The more time I spend with plants and animals, the more aware I become of the ecosystems I inhabit, the less despair I feel. We are a part of something bigger than ourselves, a world that will continue to offer us ways to take care of each other in the face of whatever the future may bring.

Today, let us bury empire. Let us bury fear. And let us work with all the life forms, visible and invisible, that share this land with us, to transform our shame and our pain and our anger and our tears into new opportunities for life and love and community.

I close with an excerpt from Langston Hughes’s poem, “Let American Be America Again,” which keeps coming back to me time and again. The whole poem is worth reading, but for now let me close with the last few verses:

O, let America be America again--
The land that never has been yet--
And yet must be--the land where every man is free.
The land that's mine--the poor man's, Indian's, Negro's, ME--
Who made America,
Whose sweat and blood, whose faith and pain,
Whose hand at the foundry, whose plow in the rain,
Must bring back our mighty dream again.

Sure, call me any ugly name you choose--
The steel of freedom does not stain.
From those who live like leeches on the people's lives,
We must take back our land again,
America!

O, yes,
I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath--
America will be!

Out of the rack and ruin of our gangster death,
The rape and rot of graft, and stealth, and lies,
We, the people, must redeem
The land, the mines, the plants, the rivers.
The mountains and the endless plain--
All, all the stretch of these great green states--
And make America again! 

post-election/pre-inauguration thoughts on the American Dream

When they ask me, many generations hence, inshallah, how this happened, I will tell them: we failed to listen to each other’s pain. As I watched the campaign with as much distance as I could muster, I wondered who each side was trying to convince. Maybe I just don’t understand the undecided voters, but I struggle to believe there were that many people who really weren’t sure whether to vote for Hillary or Donald. If people were undecided it was likely between a major party candidate and a third party candidate, or between a major party candidate and voting for a presidential party candidate at all. And is mudslinging really going to win those votes? From the start, I blamed the media for all the free coverage Trump received by being just so ludicrous. At first they thought it was funny - we all did, I think. But then it stopped being funny. If anyone was surprised by the kind of scandals that rose up around Trump, I don’t think they were paying attention.

I was devastated by the results of the election, but I wasn’t shocked. I’ve spent enough time amongst Libertarians and in the Heartland to know how frustrated people on the right and left are with the establishment. A vitriolic comment from a pregnant dental hygienist who had me watching Fox News while my teeth were being cleaned gave me a sense of the anti-Hillary animosity that runs through conservative communities. And of course voters are not rational actors, and never have been. Poor whites voted for Donald Trump for the same reasons they defended slavery nearly two centuries ago. Back then it was the largely inaccessible American Dream of one day owning slaves themselves; today Trump represents the Dream of having great wealth such that one can refuse to be beholden to anyone or accountable for one’s words and actions - a perverted freedom.

I experienced my sorrow over the election results by crying over shrimp. That’s what burst the little hazy bubble I’d been living in for the first couple days post-election. My mom has some moral reason she has forgotten as to why she doesn’t eat shrimp. I usually eat shrimp without thinking twice about it, because it can be so difficult to eat in a way that truly reflects one’s moral values in this world and I have to draw the line somewhere. But that day I paused in contemplating the shrimp soup. One of the many reasons I was hesitant to move into the dorms was because I didn’t want to lose control over my food ingredients. I have access to only a small and grimy shared kitchen, and while though I suppose I could put forth a moral argument that would get me out of the meal plan, the truth is I enjoy the company of dining with my fellow students too much (which has its own redeeming moral value) to want to opt out. I don’t eat the meat but I do eat the fish. That post-election day, I stood there pondering whether the shrimp soup would be delicious and nourishing enough to compensate for its moral, ecological cost, and suddenly I thought to myself, “We’re all fucked. At this point, what does it matter?” I served myself a bowl of soup. I took the soup and a plate of food to the table with my friends, and realized the weight of what I was feeling. I couldn’t eat until I named it, and in naming it, the tears came.

The tears passed, I ate my dinner. Since then, on occasion, I’ve prayed “estaghfirallah” (forgive me god) before consuming something of particularly questionable moral origin. Not that god cares, but it helps me.  In truth, my life felt more clarity and resolve in the post election days. I followed my heart and my dreams - in my schoolwork, in my own life - and pieces fell in to place as the semester drew to a close.

But January is hard. There’s all this energy about new beginnings and recommitments on an arbitrary cold dark day, when one is still recovering from all the feelings that Christmas with (or without) the family brings. The first week brought incredible highs - soaking in the baths at Esalen, listening to the ocean crash on the cliffs below - and tragic lows - the death of a co-worker. And throughout, this creeping sense of doom that I’ve tried to keep at bay but can’t anymore. I’ve blocked out as much of the political hogwash as I can, because I don’t see how this game of coverage is any different than the pre-election one, which clearly didn’t work. If I don’t listen, if I don’t hear about white supremacists in the cabinet (and who knows what will happen to the Supreme Court!), then maybe it won’t affect my sheltered little California daydream. I can take care of myself, grow and love and challenge and most of all increase beauty in the world around me. And then we’ll be okay, right?

For all my extensive studies of social movements and the Holocaust and evil and altruism and change, I feel woefully unprepared for this moment. But maybe I’m being too hard on myself. I would bet that most true heroes of the past did not sit around wondering, “How do I make sure they won’t judge me in the future the way I judge my racist, colonizing ancestors?” Rather, they said, “In the face of horror, how do I maintain the kind of decency that allows beauty to continue to live?” Activist friends, take note: This is not a time to burn yourself out. We need much more from you than your marching, so do what you need to do to build justice and increase love, compassion, and generosity in the coming years.

In the face of my fear of what Friday will bring, and at risk of offending those whose health care is already at risk or in other ways are already hurting, I also feel very strongly the need to recognize this as an opportunity. A Hillary victory would have meant the continuation of business as usual - but Business as Usual was NOT working. Even a Bernie victory, I feared, would not challenge the system enough - progressive policies would come from the White House, but Bernie would likely have been as nearly constrained by the system as Obama was. Obama, who was going to be our savior. Obama, who, as a black man, was our symbol of how far we’ve come. Obama, who was attacked for any affiliation with angry and outspoken others, and even as President of the United States of America perhaps felt he lacked the privilege to speak from that place of crude and open critique in the way that both Sanders and Trump confidently do. Obama, who disappointed us in large part, I think, because we disappointed him.

Obama was able to be elected as the first black president of the United States because he bought into the American Dream, he used it to sell himself. And it worked. I was there, in 2004, when he preached his personal American Dream story at the DNC and was launched onto the national stage. I was sold; I wanted him to be my president. And four years later he was! But the Obama presidency has shown many of us that progress is not the clear arc we wanted to believe it was. Politics is a messy, messy game of egos, the results of which sometimes work in your favor but in a convoluted and expensive way. I have a lot of respect for people who stay in the game for the right reasons, but if we want to get better results, we need to either redesign the board or change the rules. Donald Trump’s victory demonstrates how possible it is to game the game - to manipulate the people, to get passed the checks in the system designed to protect us from demagogues, to treat the campaign like a joke and win. And on one level, he gets away with it because we all know the game is rigged anyway. In a feat of cosmic irony, he played the Trump card. The game is over; to keep playing is futile. We can restart playing the same game, though last I checked that involved a lot of bloodshed, genocide, slavery, environmental destruction and devastation, extinction of species, and just in general exploitation and abuse of everything. Or we can decide that maybe it is time to play a new game. What would America look like if instead of just applying what propertied, Protestant, heterosexual white men had to say about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness to everyone, we allowed everyone to shape what that means, to name and define the terms of our aspirations? What if life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness aren’t the values of progress, aren’t the dreams we want to drive our nation? What if, instead, we found some others, such as justice, love, and peace?

And so, the dream dies and we must lay it to rest. Some of us will just hunker down and try to survive as best we can, hoping in four years to reset the clock, try again, not make the same mistakes, revive the dream. But in the face of climate catastrophe, in the face of Syrian refugees, in the face of the many for whom the American Dream was never a possibility, in the face of all those who have come to these shores or crossed this continent in search of something better, hoping beyond hope that somewhere out here was a second chance, was freedom, was a new beginning, was home, hibernation is not enough. We need a metamorphosis, to rethink everything - home, freedom, family, America - and decide what will rise from the ashes of this dream. Our ancestors, previous generations of organizers, has been fertilizing and cultivating and otherwise preparing the ground for us. We need to decide carefully what we want to plant - but perhaps this time with an awareness that we will never be able to completely impose our will on this land, it too has things to say, and a successful American future is only possible if we learn to work with it. We have so much left to learn, but the work has already begun. Let’s go.

Where the Buffalo Roam, Take Two

Everything the Kiowas had came from the buffalo...Most of all, the buffalo were part of the Kiowa religion. A white buffalo calf must be sacrificed in the Sun Dance. The priests used parts of the buffalo to make their prayers when they healed people or when they sang to the powers above.
So, when the white men wanted to build railroads, or when they wanted to farm or raise cattle, the buffalo still protected the Kiowas. They tore up the railroad tracks and the gardens. They chased the cattle off the ranges. The buffalo loved their people as much as the Kiowas loved them.
There was war between the buffalo and the white men. The white men built forts in the Kiowa country, and the woolly-headed buffalo soldiers shot the buffalo as fast as they could, but the buffalo kept coming on, coming on, even into the post cemetery at Fort Sill. Soldiers were not enough to hold them back.
Then the white men hired hunters to do nothing but kill the buffalo. Up and down the plains those men ranged, shooting something as many as a hundred buffalo a day. Behind them came the skinners with their wagons. They piled the hides and bones into the wagons until they were full, and then took their loads to the new railroad stations that were being built, to be shipped east to the market. Sometimes there would be a pile of bones as high as a man, stretching a mile along the railroad track.
The buffalo saw that their day was over. They could protect their people no longer.[1]

A year ago, when I moved to Kansas, I mourned for the buffalo. There is a terrible, tragic beauty to this barren landscape, where each year topsoil is lost to dust, what water is left is contaminated by fertilizers and herbicides, and human communities suffer due to their dependency on extractive and unreliable industries. The beauty that remains is in the broad wide landscapes, and the sunrises, and the flocks of birds migrating overhead, occasionally stopping to drink and to feed where the hospitality of the Great Plains still lingers on. I couldn't understand why people would live in this place, land that used to be free and open prairie, now subdivided into monocropped acreage dotted with oil wells. "We weren't meant to settle here," I thought, through images of dust bowl farmers and folks who didn't have whatever it took to make it further along the Santa Fe Trail.

I cried over the buffalo because they are a symbol, to me, of all the violence we have done to this vast and magnificent prairie, to the regenerative biodiversity, to the people who made their homes here, moving across the land, migrating like the birds, and the buffalo. I could cry about the people, but that pain was too great for my struggling, aching, heavy heart. So instead I cried about the buffalo.

A year ago, my sorrow over the buffalo was tinged with guilt. I knew the thrill of shooting buffalo from the Oregon Trail computer game, and believed that overhunting was the cause of the decline of the buffalo. White people, the story goes, contributed to the decimation of buffalo populations by shooting bison out the windows of passing trains, but the natives too did their part, committing occasional mass slaughters of buffalo.

While it may be true that the natives killed more buffalo than were necessary for their survival, and over-eager whites recklessly shot buffalo for fun, this is far from the complete story. The bison population would not have declined so dramatically if these were the sole causes. Rather, the decline of the buffalo population was due to deliberate genocidal policies on the part of the United States government in its attempts to wrest land from the indigenous populations. Destroying the local population’s food supply – in this case the bison herds – was a cruel and effective military tactic.

I only just discovered this truth this week, while reading Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’s An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States. A year ago I wrote, “I know why we killed the buffalo,” and I genuinely thought I did. I thought it had something to do with the thrill and exhilaration of chasing down that which is rare and beautiful. I felt a deep mournful sense of complicity in destroying this landscape all because I knew I would have shot a buffalo.

What needless shame I felt! Dunbar-Ortiz writes: “In an effort to create Indigenous economic dependency and compliance in land transfers, the US policy directed the army to destroy the basic economic base of the Plains Nations – the buffalo.” (142) It was the army, and governmental policy, that nearly brought the buffalo to extinction, much more so than a bunch of trigger-happy settlers. This doesn’t totally free me from complicity – I am the beneficiary of American imperialist land grabs – but it does help me to see that what happened was about much more than individual actions.

The slaughter of the buffalo and the subsequent land transfer was celebrated by (White) Americans as a “populist” victory of free land to homestead and thus “improve.” The blind arrogance of this makes me shudder, because what they actually did was slowly but surely destroy the land, due both to practices and to a mindset of private property and self-interest. Practices have changed over the decades, but the mindset has not, and the reason we keep failing this land we claim to love, this fruited plain, is because it was not meant for enclosure.

What does this mean for Kansas history? What does this mean for “Bleeding Kansas” and John Brown? I’ve never been formally schooled in Kansas history, but what I’ve heard is that abolitionists and slaveholders fought violently over whether Kansas would be admitted to the Union as a free state or a slave state – as though admittance in one form or another were inevitable, manifest destiny. I celebrate the abolitionist legacy of Kansas, and the fact that this state entered the union “free.” But the truth is that this wasn’t just free land up for grabs. It wasn’t just the bloody deaths of pro- and anti-slavery folks that earned the early “settlement” of this state the nickname “Bleeding Kansas.” There were already people who lived on and loved this land we Americans were killing each other over – all in the name of abolition or slavery, depending on what side you were on – and we were just as brutal, and shamelessly so, about killing them and their means of survival. In my research for this sermon I discovered a verse of “Home on the Range” that I had never heard before, which at least acknowledges the price paid for us to call this land home. It goes: “The red man was pressed from this part of the West/He’s likely no more to return,/To the banks of Red River where seldom if ever/Their flickering camp-fires burn.”[2]

I’m going to stop myself before I go too far down the rabbit hole of hating American history. But I will say this: the settlers of Kansas, for all their violence, were pawns in a bigger game. Lives were lost not so much for the sake of abolition or slavery but for a deep imperial urge that ignored the sanctity of life.

We are warned about the tragedy of the commons, the idea that competition over limited shared resources leads to overgrazing, overhunting, overfishing, over-polluting. Climate change is certainly an example of the result of unregulated abuse of resources. But in most cases, climate change included, the true cause of tragedy is not individuals acting in their self-interest contrary to the common good but rather deliberate policies that encourage and reward the abuse and exploitation of resources.  The true tragedy of the commons was like the tragedy of the buffalo – a resource made scarce by deliberate avaricious policy. It is the outsider, the corporation, the wealthy landowner seeking to consolidate his wealth and power through privatization, who disrupts the agreed-upon social rules that serve to regulate the commons.

The enclosure of land in England in the 18^th century led to the consolidation of land and wealth amongst the rich, while the commoners were deprived of certain rights and access to land. In many cases, individuals who were closed out of land in England became landless laborers in the polluting industries of the industrial revolution, or settlers of North America, taking what land they could here and essentially closing out the indigenous people. The commons had been destroyed in practice and in mind, as settlers sought after the privatization of land and wealth they had been denied in Britain.

But it doesn’t have to continue in this way. By recognizing these truths about the commons we can restore faith in individuals’ abilities to self-regulate their consumption. I’ve been at enough occasions where no one wanted to be the one to eat the last cookie or piece of pie – at least not without the consent of the group - to know that our social instincts can often overpower our gluttony. And there are examples, like the Maine lobster industry, of successful self-regulation of a common resource.

I saw a picture on Facebook recently of some protesters at a Trump rally. They held a sign that read: “White people: what are we going to do to end our legacy of violence?” I can’t think of any more important question to ask. Our legacy has done violence to other peoples, the land, and ultimately ourselves. How do we undermine the power systems that are destroying us, and restore the commons for the benefit of ecology and humanity?

One way I’ve been working to restore the ecosystem at Heartland Farm is through holistic management. Holistic management is a decision-making framework designed with the grasslands in mind.  It starts from a point of recognizing that everything in life in a part of a greater whole; if you affect one part of the ecosystem, you will impact all of it in unforeseen ways. Key to holistic management is also the concept that not all environments function in the same way – particularly, it considers the brittleness of an ecosystem, based on both how much rain an area gets and the distribution over the year of that rainfall. In a nonbrittle environment, vegetation thrives in conditions of rest; in a brittle one, rest can lead to desertification. When it comes to implementation, holistic management starts with where you are, what you have, and what you want. The quality of life concerns of the people involved determine what steps are appropriate to work towards our desired ecological impact on the land. Unlike some approaches to sustainability that focus on minimizing our impact on the land, holistic management recognizes that ecosystems develop through the co-evolution of various species of flora and fauna and often having no impact can be just as detrimental as too much of one. The question becomes, how can we have a positive impact on this land such that a balanced ecosystem can thrive?

Historically, the buffalo were central to this ecosystem. Holistic management recognizes that reestablishing the buffalo commons, while potentially desirable, is not necessarily attainable. In the mean time, by managing our domesticated livestock in a way that mimics the behavior of large indigenous mammals across the prairie, we can begin to improve our ecosystems, sequestering carbon, reducing run-off, and encouraging biodiversity.

Holistic management can be used on the small subset of our 80 acres on which I plan to implement holistic grazing just as well as it can be used by someone managing thousands of acres. This adaptability is one of its strengths, but it privileges larger land bases, which closer approximate the whole of an ecosystem, which gets to one of my concerns, that agriculture needs to be for the people. How do we protect the ability of the public to benefit from the land, and the land to benefit from the people? Dan O’Brien, in his book Wild Idea: Buffalo & Family in a Difficult Land, writes: “Nobody knows how many protected acres is enough to ease the Great Plains ecosystem back from the abyss of industrial agriculture. But one thing is sure: while it is true that a small operator with a good heart can help set the tenor of the debate and the action to come, it takes an outfit with the ability to amass huge pieces of land to actually do something significant. To date, only government agencies, large conservation organizations, and very wealthy capitalists have the wherewithal to affect the future of the Great Plains. I had no access to, and little faith in, any of those entities.” (33)

The collective management of land, rather than the parceling out into sections according to an unnatural grid, is really the only way to impact an entire ecosystem. But in our current paradigm, that usually means the consolidation of wealth and land in the hands of a few. Our government and conservation groups, though well-intentioned, are subject to so many different sets of interests and conflicting scientific approaches that they become ineffective. Which leaves us with corporations and wealthy individuals, who even with the best of intentions are not accountable to the common good. An individual also cannot see all of and cannot know all that is best for an ecosystem, and we must recognize that humans are part of the whole that is our planet. We must manage with regards to the quality of life desires of everyone within our whole, our community, our ecosphere; if we don’t, we will suffer unintended consequences. We have to think about the social impact of our ecological decisions. Enclosure was the true tragedy of the commons, the loss of shared land and shared responsibility. Maybe we have to start to shift our ways of thinking about private property and land ownership. Maybe we need to find ways to more intentionally cooperate with our neighbors. Maybe we need to learn a thing or two from the indigenous people who lived here before us. Maybe we need to learn to work with them, to follow their lead. Maybe this is what we can do to end our legacy of violence.

While I was preparing this sermon my friend Aly shared this statistic with me: “According to a 2008 World Bank study, areas in which indigenous people occupy or control their traditional territory encompass 22 percent of the world's land surface and coincide with areas that hold 80 percent of the planet's biodiversity.”[3] Those are powerful numbers. Indigenous cultures tend to affirm biodiversity with a reverence that settler cultures do not. As you go forth today I invite you to think about, in the words of Pope Francis, “Care for Our Common Home,” but particularly the question of how we fight the imperialist urge, in our culture, in our government, and in ourselves. In 1854, James Griffing, a Methodist minister, wrote of “the consuming avarice of the white man” as they claimed land from natives in Kansas Territory.[4] We are clearly not the first generation to think critically about this wrong. But maybe we can finally change. We must.

---

[1] Quoted in Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States, 143.

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Home_on_the_range

[3]http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/02/12/cap-and-clear-cut/

[4] http://www.territorialkansasonline.org/~imlskto/cgi-bin/index.php?SCREEN=immigration&topic_id=88&search=American%20Indians

Worth, Dignity, and Environmental Justice

Sermon delivered November 8, 2015 at Prairie Unitarian Universalist Fellowship, Hutchinson, Kansas.

Now I know you are all expecting me to talk about climate change and climate justice, and I’ll get to that, but to start I’m going to talk about television and drugs. Last weekend I finished watching the first season of The Wire. For those of you who don’t know, The Wire was an HBO series of the last decade that looked at the drug scene in Baltimore from the perspective of the cops and the dealers. Hopefully I’ll be vague enough that I won’t spoil it for anyone who might want to watch it.

            Among those involved in the drug trade, there are some who are more sensitive, and have more of a conscience, than others. To be clear, none of them could care less about the addicts whose lives are destroyed by the drugs. But as bodies start adding up, of innocent and not-so-innocent alike, it starts to weigh a little too heavily on some souls.

            At one point a pivotal character in the drug trade, after arrest, finally turns and agrees to testify against the drug syndicate, in return for his own protection and chance to start over. But then his mother shows up and convinces him to rescind his statement and do his time for the sake of his family, whose wellbeing and privileges rest upon the money the drug empire brings in. The argument is clear: the system must be protected at all cost for the people who benefit from it. And the people who benefit most are not the ones directly involved. The kids who are actually selling drugs on the street are treated as expendable; they might gain some pocket change and respect but they are still poor kids just struggling to get by. It is people like the mother, who never touch the stuff, who benefit most demonstrably from the system.

            By now, you may have figured out where I’m going with this. The situation of this corrupt drug empire in Baltimore is totally analogous to our own climate-destroying systems – particularly fossil fuels and conventional agriculture. The loudest arguments in defense of these destructive systems are the ones that say we need them to keep living comfortable and secure lives. As though upper-middle-class respectability were the end all and be all and we could all achieve it if we just play our cards right.

            Both we and the drug dealer are caught in a Catch-22. How far are we willing to go to protect a lifestyle built on the exploitation of others, a lifestyle that gives us comfort and security but not necessarily meaning, a lifestyle that will always be threatened by the forces of good at work in the world? The character on The Wire took a twenty year sentence, because, as his mother reminded him, the alternative was too scary and lonely – to start over, all on his own, in a totally unfamiliar environment, and never be able to see his family again. We hopefully don’t have to make that choice – our families won’t kill us because we disagree with them about the environment and economics – but that doesn’t mean it’s easy. Who in their right mind, with their retirement tied up in the stock market, is going to rail against that institution? Who, who has worked tirelessly to provide for their family, to make a living in rural America off of oil or agriculture, is going to turn against the institutions that have fed them? It is only when situations become too horrific that we have whistleblowers from ExxonMobil or Monsanto.

I’m going to go ahead and assume that on some level or another, we all care about the environment. We like having clean air to breathe and clean water to drink. We like to go hiking or biking or hunting or fishing, to watch the sunrise or the migrating birds, to hear the wind through the grasses or see the snow on the mountain. And we all want a world where we can continue to enjoy these things, where our children and grandchildren, and future generations of humans, can enjoy such things. But it’s easy to take a livable earth for granted, because we’ve always had one. Likewise, it’s easy to take our own bodies and their abilities for granted until they are threatened. Earlier this week a ladder slipped out from under me. My body did everything right to save me from as much harm as possible and I am in awe. I eat well and get plenty of activity and generally speaking try to take good care of my body. But this incident reminded me how important that is. If my upper arm strength and balance and ability to land weren’t as good, I’d probably be lying in a hospital in a cast right now, instead of standing in front of you with some bruises and chipped teeth. Sometimes it takes having something dear to you, something essential to you, threatened, in order to remember how important and valuable it is.

And now the situation is dire enough that more people are starting to pay attention – powerful people. Even the Catholic church has taken a stand. Pope Francis’s recent encyclical, Laudato Si, has been a powerful contribution to this movement, in particular to the conversation on the connections between environmental and economic exploitation. In general, Christians and other people of faith are slowly starting to speak out in defense of the climate. And on Friday, President Obama finally rejected the Keystone XL pipeline. I’ll admit I haven’t been a part of this battle, but for my friends who have been involved in the struggle for years, this is huge. It’s huge for the rest of us too. The nature of our political system is such that a politician will usually only do the right thing if it’s politically viable. Obama blocked the permit for political reasons: to strengthen America’s position in climate negotiations, such as the upcoming Paris talks. But what this means is that it is now politically viable for a politician to take a strong, impactful, and controversial stand against climate change.

            To me, one of the most significant things about this victory, and the thing that has made this particular struggle more about justice than just mitigating climate change, is the leadership of indigenous peoples. In so many ways this is the heart of the issue. This planet may be our “common home,” but once upon a time this continent was not our home. My ancestors and probably most of yours showed up and decided that if we could exploit the people and resources here, we could claim the land. From the early colonists to the Homestead Act, the thinking has been that if you can make it work out there, find utility from the wilderness, it’s yours. As though there were no other people here already, people who found value from the land in ways we couldn’t even recognize.

            We know what we did to the Native Americans was wrong. We teach our kids that the Trail of Tears was a stain on our nation’s conscience. But when are we going to learn to listen to them, these people who first gave Europeans the knowledge and tools they needed to survive on the harsh shores of Massachusetts and elsewhere? Do we assume that we have so destroyed their culture that they are no longer capable of teaching us what we need to do to survive?

            Or are we finally learning to listen and let them lead?  Obama did not cite indigenous concerns in his statement on rejecting the pipeline. But the resistance of tribes, alongside that of ranchers and environmentalists, is what forced the issue.  The Keystone XL pipeline was more symbolic than anything; other pipelines exist, the tar sands are still being mined, oil is still being shipped. But something is shifting, and we need to keep pushing that shift in the direction of the world we’d like to live in.

So what do we do?

Honestly, I think the biggest thing we can do is to talk about it. But not in the fear-mongering way, gosh no. In a here-are-my-ideas-on-how-we-can-create-a-better-world way.  Because we already live in a world with enough fear. Recently I was in central Missouri and picked up a local newspaper. One article featured the assignments of a fifth grade class talking about themselves by filling in the blanks: “I am _____ and ______. I feel ______. I see ______.” Etc.  And it was upsetting for me to read how many of the kids feared that the world would end soon. Is this what we are teaching our kids?  I don’t think we should be protecting them with lies, that everything will be all right when we have no idea, when in fact we know that we have been squandering their future. But it’s when people are scared that they start grasping and stop appreciating. If you are pretty certain that there’s no hope, you stop working towards a livable future, and it’s that lack of perspective that justifies extractivism, the taking of what you can get while it’s still there and before anybody else. But we don’t need to grasp for oil to have power, we don’t need to grasp for power to have light, and we don’t need to grasp for light to see. There are other ways. Learning to listen to other cultures, particularly native ones, is one way to explore how we can reorient our relation to the planet. Another is to learn from the natural systems already at work. Biomimicry. Permaculture. Holistic management. Natural systems agriculture. There are a growing number of approaches based on understanding ecosystems and life forms, rather than forcing them to work for us.

Feminist theologian Sallie McFague suggests the metaphor of the earth as the body of God. I’ll admit I’m not that familiar with her work, but it intrigues me. In general I do believe that our attitude to the land and to natural resources is symbolic of our attitude towards life overall. I believe that if we can’t treat the land with reverence and respect, as something of value in its own right beyond what it can provide to us, we will never be able to treat each other with that respect for inherent worth and dignity either. And to me, the land is essential because we are created out of it, Biblically and literally. We all need to eat, and the process by which our food gets to our mouths binds us to each other and to the planet.  To go a little sacramental on you, every bite is a communion, but whether it is holy or otherwise is up to us.

The UU community prides itself on its leadership on justice issues, and I think that despite our disparate views, theologically we have a lot to offer the climate justice movement. The Dominican Sisters that I currently work for often note that they’ve never heard a sermon on the environment, and I think it is safe to say that these women have sat through more sermons than almost anyone else on earth. Yet I think it would be odd to sit through a year of UU sermons and not hear about the environment. In his address at The Land Institute’s Prairie Festival this year, Wes Jackson joked that a Unitarian would care about even the poorest of soils, while a Methodist probably would not. And I think he’s on to something here. Mountaintops don’t have the best soil, but that doesn’t mean we should take them off to get to what’s underneath. And this, I think, has more to do with inherent worth and dignity than the traditional environmental principle of the interdependent web.

            There’s an element of some Christian thought that says, We are all unworthy, but God loves us anyway. And on my most broken feeling of days, this can be comforting to hear. But as a Unitarian Universalist, on a basic level I disagree. I believe that despite our brokenness, we are all worthy – of God, of life, of all the blessings of the world we might experience. This doesn’t mean we have earned these blessings, and we should feel humbled by them, but we are certainly worthy of them. Our worth is inherent. But it’s not just human worth that is inherent. It’s not even just animals that have worth. Everything that is, is important, regardless of if we can figure out a reason why.

            We’re still in a Catch-22. We’re standing where we are today upon the shoulders of others who don’t really like being stepped on. But what if we recognized that these people and things have worth beyond what they do for us? What if we stepped down, and moved forward together? Imagine all the places we might end up. 

Mark 8:27-38 and Climate Justice

I delivered this sermon (my first!) today, at St. John's Episcopal Church in Great Bend, Kansas. For reference, the day's lectionary reading can be found here.

 Good morning. Since this is my first time in this pulpit I suppose I should start with a little introduction. I work for the Dominican Sisters of Peace as the organic farm manager out at Heartland Farm, and I am not a Catholic nor even an Episcopalian but rather a Jewish Unitarian Universalist. But I am discerning a call to ministry and was invited to preach here. A week after receiving that invitation, I was at a climate justice organizers training where I was asked to go out and preach on the topic of climate justice. And so, here I am, which is kind of crazy in so many ways. A few months ago I would have avoided a conversation about climate change. The statistics, the fire and brimstone, the end of the world narrative turn me off, and I’m sure it turns most of you off. No one wants to think we’re doomed. And so I didn’t really think about climate change. I just thought about caring for the earth, and ways of living on this planet that were good for me and good for the environment. I rode my bike and grew my own food and tried to opt out of destructive systems as much as possible. But the systems continued.

I lived and farmed for four years in Arkansas, and my community there was passionate and dedicated, but among those of us wanting to farm and to care for the earth in a meaningful way, I felt a creeping spiritual malaise. In part that discomfort led me back to religion, and in a desire to connect with my fellow Unitarian Universalists engaged in a struggle for a better way of living, I found my way, a month ago, to that climate justice organizers training. I expected to be a voice saying, enough of the fire and brimstone, we’re not going to move people, reach people, if we scare them. But I found, among that group, that I did not need to be that person because everyone understood, everybody understood that this is about more than polar bears, this is about environmental justice, about the fact that poor people and people of color are more likely to feel the negative consequences of climate change as they have negatively felt the consequences of our continuous methods of exploiting people and the environment. We build trash incinerators in poor neighborhoods, we let our pollution float downstream, we extract resources from the parts of the country that don’t have the wealth and power to say otherwise. And it’s frustrating and depressing. And I don’t want to stand up here frustrating and depressing you all this morning. That’s not my point. My point is to provide hope, and another way, a way forward. And at this organizers training I found hope, hope that there’s a future for us on this planet, and it may not look like what life looks like now, and in some ways it can’t look like the world looks like now, but there are enough people who care enough that we can make a difference. And maybe I’m just naïve. But I’ve studied enough of social movements to know that change is possible. It is possible for us as a culture to break free from our habits of excessive consumption, to break free of a way of life that is destructive towards other people and the environment, that there are a growing number of people who care about the earth and how we relate to it in our lives. Every few weeks another young person comes to stay on our farm for a little while, wanting to learn more about growing vegetables and caring for animals and totally willing to work hard and get dirty in exchange for room and board. Most of these folks won’t go on to become farmers, but I’m confident that after the experiences they are having they won’t stop caring. And hopefully they’ll have seen enough alternatives to build better lives for themselves. I’m fully aware that I am speaking to you in an oil town, but the price of oil isn’t reliable and thus neither are the jobs. Climate justice doesn’t just mean preserving nature and organic farms. It also means providing reliable and meaningful jobs for all of us. It means supporting farmers so that they don’t feel compelled to drill on their land in order to make any money off of it. It means identifying ways in which we can support each other, and the environments in which we find each other, at the same time.

I was back in Arkansas this past weekend visiting farmer friends in the Ozarks and I stood there, talking to them while they worked, and I remembered that there’s something that these farmers get that most people don’t seem to get, there’s an understanding and an urgency that governs their lives and how they face the world, how they interact with the world, why they do what they do, despite the fact that they don’t have any retirement saved up, despite the fact that they have no idea how they are going to put their kids through college. And I think what it is, is that they realize, on a deep and intuitive level, that land care is a life or death matter. That, not caring for the earth might not necessarily kill them, as individuals, but to do otherwise is to destroy the future and to devalue and depreciate our present. There are things besides money worth valuing. I think the fact that the hardest working people I know are struggling isn’t justified by the fact that their lifestyle has priceless benefits, because they do still have to put their kids through college, and they do still have to worry about their health, and they do still have to be able to pay their employees. So there are bigger systemic problems that need to be fixed. But in their struggle to survive and provide quality food for their community they are embodying an ideal that I think we all ought to move closer to. That of creating a better, meaningful life for one’s self in such a way that enriches the life of the environment and the people around you. And I think the response to climate change has to do that, has to enrich our lives and enrich the earth. And I know it’s possible. I’ve seen it and experienced it in small places, and I think it’s one of the biggest miracles on this planet, that we don’t have to choose between one and the other, that the earth gives forth richness when we put into it, and when we have faith.

So what does today’s gospel reading have to do with any of this? A lot, I think. This is the first time when Jesus really explains what’s going to happen to him and what it means for him to be the Messiah. And Peter rebukes what Jesus says because Peter has a very specific idea of what Messiah means. He’s coming from a traditional Judaic understanding of what the Messiah is, someone who is going to lead the nation of Israel to greatness and redemption as a political and military leader. And Peter also thinks that following Jesus, who will be this great leader, will be easy, it will be a life of miracles and glory, and he can be alongside that. But the truth is that salvation isn’t easy, it’s not just about following the leader who is going to get you there. What Jesus tells us is that salvation comes at a price, that his future will be one of suffering and persecution. But then there will be resurrection, there is hope, there is redemption. But we need to first turn our minds away from human things to divine ones. Which means the solution probably won’t come where we expect it. It probably won’t be some simple cure-all technological innovation. It certainly won’t be as simple as just switching from oil to solar power. It’s going to be something that takes sacrifice, that takes change on our behalf in the way that we live now. But then, there’s hope on the other side of that.

Which is what Jesus is telling us when he explains what is required to be his disciple. Mitigating climate change is going to take sacrifice on our part, as individuals. We need to adjust our living habits and ways of thinking to move away from materialism and consumerism, away from a way of life that demands energy and fossil fuels. For what will it profit us to gain the whole world and forfeit our lives? There are lots of lists of green living out there so I’m not going to go into it and I don’t want to tell you what to do because there is no one right thing, but if we want to save our lives, to have a future for humanity, we need to be willing to change. And allow ourselves to be transformed as we learn to listen to the world around us. In the transformation, of individuals and of culture, lies salvation.

Tonight is Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New year, which commemorates creation, which God has asked us to care for. As a new year, it may be an opportunity to make a resolution for a change in your own life, such as recycling or using cloth napkins or drinking fair trade coffee or buying local food. It is also the first of the High Holy Days. Ten nights from now is Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. The interim days are for individuals to ask forgiveness from those they may have hurt in the past year. And on the eighth day the Jewish community gathers together and collectively ask for forgiveness from God. Because sins against God are a collective responsibility, and I think responding to climate change is a collective responsibility. Individual actions matter and I don’t want to disempower anyone, but it matters more when it’s an organized effort. Boycotting Taco Bell to raise how much the tomato growers get paid makes a much bigger difference than the fact that I just don’t go to Taco Bell. Monsanto doesn’t care that I don’t spray Round-Up. And so, while our personal actions matter and I think they are totally transformative to our lives, collective actions matter too. As a group we have the power to sway policy and create institutions. And I think we all agree with that or we wouldn’t be here today, gathered together in a group for worship of God.

I don’t know the solution. And I do know that it won’t be easy. This morning’s reading from James asks, “Does a spring pour forth from the same opening both fresh and brackish water?” No. And similarly, a solution that seems to helps humans at the expense of the planet in reality helps neither, and vice versa. But a solution that truly does help one helps all. Everything is connected. This natural order gives me hope. And I have hope because I see a lot of people with a strong desire for work that has meaning we can feel in our bones. And I see a lot of examples of people like my farmer friends doing such work, and living lives of beauty and generosity and abundance where others might see only scarcity. If we learn to change our perspective, if we set our minds on divine things and recognize the abundance before us, we will see, perhaps, what the future truly might offer.

On Marriage

I was never really into marriage. Oh, I think weddings are a blast and it would be fun to have a big party with all my friends and family to celebrate and honor my love for another person. But I've never fantasized about what I would wear, or what it would be like, or what it meant. And I don't have a fully articulated opinion of the institution of marriage. A boyfriend once asked what I thought about marriage, and all I could say was, "Well, Wendell Berry says some interesting things about it in this book I recently read…" And he does, about marriage being a social institution, about it being not just between two people but between them and their community. Berry writes from the perspective of a heterosexual marriage, but what he says applies to all marriages. Today's Supreme Court decision is all the more powerful understanding marriage in this context - that communities must recognize homosexual relationships as social institutions that can serve to strengthen society. (Berry recognizes the destructiveness of his white, heterosexual, male, Christian privilege, on himself, others, and the world, but he has been silent on homosexuality, something that has frustrated me. But anyway, that's a side note.) I never really thought seriously enough about marriage, and its relevancy to my own life, to decide what I thought about it.

When this gay marriage fight began, I took a moderate stance. If the church wanted to claim providence over marriage, then I figured we could compromise and let "marriage," in whatever form, be the domain of the church, while limiting the state to issuing civil unions, to heterosexual and homosexual couples alike. If states went for gay marriage, that was great and I thought highly of their people and their politics, but I wasn't an advocate for it. The Defense of Marriage Act irked me, and made me dislike Bill Clinton, not just because I thought it was a piece of intolerant legislation but because I thought it violated the full faith and credit clause of the Constitution. As for states that responded to the "threat" of gay marriage by explicitly limiting marriage to between a man and a woman, that made me livid, but I eventually realized they were digging their own graves on that issue.

But still, was marriage for me? I didn't know, and didn't think I cared. An older gay friend of mine once said, "I thought being gay meant you didn't have to get married!" Not that many months ago, a co-worker casually asked if I thought I would marry the girl I was dating. "I couldn't here, if I wanted to," I responded, not so much angry with the questionable legal status of gay marriage in Arkansas at the time as I was relieved that I didn't have to actually answer the question. In general, I think my generation sees marriage a little differently than those before us. Although my parents are still married, as are the parents of very many of my close friends, we live in a world where half of all marriages fail. At 29, a surprising number of my friends are already divorced!  Marriage certainly has its benefits, but that doesn't mean that it is the right choice for a relationship. Long-lasting gay relationships are a perfect example of making things work without marriage. But just because marriage isn't necessary, per se, doesn't mean that it isn't a right, and I'm crying tears of joy in celebration of this day.

If I was born ten years later than I was, I would have explored and come to know my sexuality in a whole different world, one in which I imagine I would have been able to see myself more clearly, simply because the extension of marriage makes homosexual relationships more visible. Sure there was Will & Grace, and The L Word, but none of those stories resonated with my story. While something will be lost in moving away from the margins, the mainstreaming of homosexuality is a good thing for America. For those out there concerned about the "gay agenda," here it is: We want your children to grow up in a world where they can be their true honest selves, where they can love who they want to love without having to worry about sacrificing the rest of their lives to do so, and where they don't suffer the psychological repercussions of denial, shame, and ostracism.

I remember when gay marriage became legal in New Hampshire. At the time, the only person I could imagine marrying, if I had one of those pacts where if you are both still single when you're 35 you get married, was my closest female friend. And suddenly that was an actual possibility. We never made such a pact - it was a pretty gay idea, in retrospect - but that such a thing was possible! Doors were opening. Liberation was coming. The world was changing.

And now, here we are, a blink of the eye later, and the Supreme Court has declared gay marriage the law of the land! I shared an article on Facebook that reminds us that the struggle continues, that we must remember the margins. The margins are constantly changing, and we must keep learning from and leading from them. To quote my haggadah, which I seem to like to do here:

The struggle for freedom is a continuous struggle,

For never does man reach total liberty and opportunity.

In every age, some new freedom is won and established,

Adding to the advancement of human happiness and security.

Yet, each age uncovers a formerly unrecognized servitude,

Requiring new liberation to set man's soul free.

In every age, the concept of freedom grows broader,

Widening the horizons for finer and nobler living.

Each generation is duty-bound to contribute to this growth,

Else mankind's ideals become stagnant and stationary.

There are days when I struggle to believe that "the arc of the universe…bends towards justice," but on days like today, I have hope. The legalization of gay marriage in no way means that homophobia is dead and equality is the law of the land. The legalization of interracial marriage didn't mean the end of racism, nor did the election of a black president. But these are still victories. Victories that allow us to advance to the next and greater battle. Victories that need to be celebrated to sustain us for the continued fight.  I celebrated by putting a rainbow bow tie on my puppy, cuddling with him in the hammock, and then coming inside to eat ice cream and write this essay and feel brave enough to share it with the world. We had three inches of rain last night, and today I'm seeing rainbows everywhere.

The Ten Plagues, Change, and Creative Adaptation

One thing I have come to love about Passover is the creative variety. Although the celebration is liturgical and involves telling a particular story that is observed through specific rituals, no two seders are alike. There are countless haggadahs available and many, many families have adapted their haggadah of choice over the years. I fondly remember the Aaronson family's wine-stained haggadahs, in which many of the masculine pronouns and nouns had been whited-out and changed to make the service more inclusive. Occasionally new material was inserted as well. Every year, we debate if we have accidentally skipped one of the glasses of wine, and argue over whether we read through all of this part or that.  The stains and the changes and the conversation are, to me, as much a part of the holiday as the matzo and the horseradish.

I am a lover of tradition, which is part of why I love Passover, but since I started hosting my own seders I have come to see the seder as an opportunity for change, to take the haggadah my family has traditionally used and continue the tradition of editing and adding to it. Not only is there a glass of water for Miriam, and an orange for inclusivity, but now there is liturgy and ritual to incorporate these modern feminist elements into the seder. In doing so, I make the seder more my own, while keeping with family tradition.

At some point in my youth someone introduced the modern plagues to our seder. In addition to spilling wine for the blood and the boils and the slaying of the first-born, we now add:

Each drop of wine we pour is hope and prayer
that people will cast out the plagues that threaten everyone
everywhere they are found, beginning in our own hearts:
    The making of war,
    the teaching of hate and violence,
    despoliation of the earth,
    perversion of justice and government,
    fomenting of vice and crime,
    neglect of human needs,
    oppression of nations and peoples,
    corruption of culture,
    subjugation of science, learning, and human discourse,
    the erosion of freedoms.

I have encountered this at other seders. At one, the recitation was followed by an opportunity for anyone present to share, and pour out a drop of wine for, any other plagues they recognize in our society.

It is good to name these things, and to have the opportunity to sanctify our opposition in ritual. But how many plagues will it take for change to occur?

I write out of sympathy for Pharaoh. We pour out wine for each plague because, to quote the haggadah, "our triumph is diminished by the slaughter of the foe." Nevertheless, Pharaoh is the bad guy. But for one moment, let us imagine ourselves in his shoes.

You have, in Egypt, an economy and social order built on slavery. Pharaoh, the guy in charge, did not create this system, though he certainly benefits from its privileges. Still, it is not his fault that he inherited such a system, and even less so that certain overseers are needlessly cruel to slaves, right? So when some dude, even if it's an adopted son, comes in and says, "Hey, you should free these people, and oh, if you don't, our God is going to make bad things happen to you," he's not really in a position to agree. Granted, he's the only person in a position to make that decision carte blanche, but it would be political suicide. The situation is so much bigger than him. He, and his entire society, would have to change their essential nature. That is not an easy decision or change to make. No wonder it took ten plagues. Egyptian society was better equipped to deal with frogs and flies than total economic upheaval. It took the slaying of the first-born, a loss that caused direct injury to the patriarchal economy and must have torn many hearts to pieces in the process, for the Pharaoh to make the otherwise politically catastrophic decision to free the Hebrew slaves.

The experience of the Egyptians, in suffering the plagues, reveals something of how systems of oppression hurt everyone, even those privileged by it. It was not just Pharaoh's heart that was hard, but a whole culture, numbed by the fact that their whole economy was built on slavery, because how else can you live with that knowledge? They felt their culture was threatened by a growing minority population, and turned to violence to subdue it. I cannot help but be reminded of modern parallels in American history - I'm not just talking about the Civil War and emancipation, but also the way we deal with racism and immigration in 2015. And rather than allowing our culture to be enriched by diversity, as the orange brings refreshing new flavor to the seder, we suppress it and exploit it. Like the Egyptians, we accept devastation again and again, whether it be in the form of murrain killing our cattle or the making of war, in order to maintain our position. But one cannot be stable standing on the backs of others who do not want to be stood on.

Which leads me to the question I've been thinking about for months. How many plagues does it take for us to make changes in our own lives? How much will we put up with before we say, enough is enough? Be it a frustrating job, an unhealthy relationship, a pursuit that is going nowhere, even acknowledging a truth about ourselves. Certainly there is value in resiliency, and in facing the challenges life throws at us. If we can stick through it, we will hopefully be stronger on the other side. But at a certain point, do we start inviting adversity upon ourselves, as Pharaoh did when he refused to free the Jews?

Pharaoh, like many of us, having finally made the decision to change is immediately plagued by doubt. He tries to take it back, to stop what he has put in motion, but it is too late. In his attempt to hold back the currents of change, he perishes. Who cannot relate to this doubt, which in its tragedy reveals the Pharaoh's humanity? In resisting change sometimes we, too, kill pieces of ourselves.

Change is hard. Sometimes every ounce of our being seems to resist it, if only because we don't know who we are on the other side. Liberating slaves brought down the entire system they supported, and liberating ourselves can have the same effect. It is easy to fall into similar patterns, as our American history illustrates in the shift from slavery to sharecropping, much easier and more palatable than building a truly egalitarian society. In our own lives, at least, it is only ourselves that we destroy and try to rebuild, and there, perhaps, true liberation might be possible.

Exodus is ultimately a very human story. It is commanded: "In every generation, each Jew must look upon himself as though he, personally, was among those who went forth from Egypt." We tell this story year after year to remember the suffering and the liberation. But we are not just the Jews, the victims-turned-heroes. In every character there is something we can relate to. May that be a warning, that in our liberation, let us take care not to become despots, over others or over our own souls.

Which brings us back to the modern plagues quoted above, and the question of what it will take for us, as a society, to finally say, "Enough is enough." Words alone do not bring about liberation and an end to environmental and human exploitation. Can we change our own lives for the better? Are we willing to pay the price to change the world?

I approach Pesach with these heavy questions on my mind. In some ways, perhaps the haggadah can serve as a guide, not so much for being a history lesson but rather as an example of creative adaptation. The evolution of the seder reveals a path to liberation at a lower price, less violent and more celebratory. The recipe for my seder is one part ancient Hebrew prayer, one part Midrashic commentary, one part modern feminist adaptation, one part family tradition, one part wine, one part food, and one part the gathered community.  Combine and simmer, and in consuming, perhaps come to know God.