moving

we're moving blog providers. I've been thinking about doing this for a while and the babe seems like a good excuse to branch out into some new things.

I've started working with wordpress and I'm already a little frustrated that none of my widgets are supported here (goodreads, accuweather, babystrology). The pictures also seem to download painfully slow. But I'm going to try it out. If things get too frustrating, back to blogger we go!

Our new site:

http://signonthewindow.wordpress.com

oh baby.

Time to come clean. I'm 13 weeks pregnant.

Today baby came back with a clean bill of health and a solid sounding heart (140 BPM).

We're excited, and have no idea what we are doing.....

God help us.

Amen.

p.s. Enjoy our creepy baby widget

health care on the ballot

If you're reading this blog, chances are good you have health coverage either privately or from the state. If you don't, it's likely you're a student or someone who thinks they are healthy enough that they can take a chance on not being covered. If you are on a state sponsored plan like our Oregon Health Plan, you are well enough and educated enough to manage the massive bureaucracy surrounding this system. I get my health insurance from my work. We actually have the choice of two health insurance plans, one from J's work and one from mine.

While I'm sure there are some readers who are exceptions, the socio-economic/education level of my friends is such that they know how to find out their options, work with what they've got, budget and get it done. For me, my experience with the ease of health care options has made the issues of medical coverage reform a bit hard to grasp.

L'Arche certainly changed my perspective on that.

The year I lived in the community one of our core member's mother died. She had been the primary care taker, paper handler, form signer for Marilyn for over 60 years. When she died we had to go back and track down everything in Marilyn's life and redesignate, reassign and reassess. There was a two week period in which we were scrambling to figure out the specifics needed to support our friend's very complex medical care.

It so happened that Jane died within a few days of when a "vital" piece of paperwork was due to the Medicare office. That same week Marilyn chipped one of her teeth fragile from years of pre-l'Arche neglect (adult institutions for the disabled tend to be places of horrific abuse and lack of attention. Estimates are that 3/4 of all adults in these institutions are sexually abused by their usually female caretakers). By the time we got this paper in we were told she had been suspended from the plan.

The next week we spent hours on the phone explaining what happened and getting corrective paperwork to the department. In the end she was put on a lesser plan for a month until they could sort through everything.

My job was to find Marilyn a dentist with the "lesser plan." Folks, I called over thirty-five dentists and found not one who would be willing to treat her. They said the paperwork on the other side took too long and that they rarely saw the money within a year. I got to the point of asking these dentists to do it "just this once." I was flat out begging. By my last phone call I just put down the phone and started crying.

When I called DHS for some back up they said they couldn't help me. They didn't keep a list of dentists accessible through the plan. I called other group homes, I asked people in our community. I had the perseverance and time to try and sort this out and still couldn't make it happen. Imagine a single mother working two jobs or a man with a disability who lives on his own. In the end, M didn't get her teeth treated for another 2 weeks. If you've ever chipped your tooth, you can imagine what this was like.

So, yes, I feel hopeful when I hear the first presidential candidates in my lifetime talk about "quality, affordable, portable health care." I can't help it. Although my expectations are low for the beginnings of a program like this, the idea that someone is actually making this a mainstay of their platform is remarkable to me. Likewise, I am discouraged John McCain voted against expanding the enrollment date for Medicare, increasing the prescription drug benefit or allowing prescription drug benefits at all under Medicare. His vote is the reason why one of our severely disabled, non-verbal core members now has to pay $5 per prescription. This doesn't seem like a lot until you're on five meds and don't work.

I understand that it's not just about getting everyone covered; it's about the quality of coverage. But until we have a president who is genuinely invested in the former, there will be little attention to the former.

But enough blogerizing. Time to enjoy the beautiful day.

heresy

We're getting towards the middle of Christology. A lot of what we're working on now is primary text on the Incarnation of Christ. What has stuck out to me through Apollonius, Origen, Athanasius, Irenaeus is the deep entrenchment of the early church and Patristic fathers in Platonism/Gnosticism. I'm discovering that a lot of the ancient heresies around Incarnation have to do with protecting God from the flesh. Thousands of pages are spent refuting the sects and heretics who couldn't stand it that Jesus came out a slimy baby from a woman's vagina, blew his snotty nosed, urinated on the ground and smelled bad when he sweat.

Even the church fathers who defend against Arius, Nestorius and Eutyches have a hard time with the real dirt and grime of Jesus' earthly being. Tertullian is just classic with his discomfort. After going through a long description of the disgusting nature of childbearing and the foulness of infants he explains that even God redeemed this through taking on birth. (Tertullian was also a misogynist. Go figure.)

Hans von Balthasar to the rescue. In wisely summing up the relationship of Jesus' self abandonment and exaltation, he quotes extensively from Barth.

A theologia gloriae, celebrating what Jesus Christ in his Resurrection, received for us, and what he is for us as the Risen One, would have no meaning unless it also contained in itself the theologial crucis: the praise of what he has done for us in his death and of what he is for us as crucified. But no more would an abstract theologia crucis have meaning. One cannot celebrate in proper fashion the passion and death of Jesus Christ, if this praise does not already contain in itself the theologia gloriae: the praise of him who, in his Resurrection, receives our justice and our life, the One who rose from among the dead.

I love what Barth is saying here. The heretics (and most of the Fathers) were getting their ideas about god from the Greeks: transcendent, impersonal, untouched, untainted and unmoved. Barth is saying that they got it all wrong. What it actually means to be God, the definition of god-ness is to be "in the work of the world's reconciliation." Balthasar has a nice gloss on this statement: "once we realized that even the most extreme Kenosis, inasmuch as it is possibility in the eternal love of God, is englobed in that love which takes responsibility for it, the opposition..... is fundamentally overcome."

careful, I'm feeling a little punchy today.....

Today I was ecstatic to learn that a federal appeals court struck down the EPA's plan to cap and trade mercury from coal burning power plants instead favoring a straight cap on emissions. Now, to be fair, the EPA plan would have reduced mercury by 70%. The problem is this would take TWENTY FIVE YEARS.

I can't figure out why seven years later I am still shocked when I hear that our government continues to try things like this. Living in the Northwest I am especially aware of the battles with the EPA appointees from the Bush administration. Trying to take salmon off the endangered species list. Allowing logging in areas with spotted owls. Permitting snow mobiles in Yellowstone. Drilling in Alaska's protected areas.

But those are minor issues compared to 60,000 children (mostly low-income) being infected with mercury poisoning every year. I've been to the pier in San Fran where poor migrants from China still fish off the docks to feed their kids despite it being in Bay View Hunters Point, the worst polluted area in the city. Those are also minor issues compared to the immediacy of change necessary to halt the affects of climate change. Our current administrations says it has gotten the message, but it certainly has not.

So I have some questions/thoughts for the non-voting crowd. How are we going to address global climate change if the science says we need immediate macro-solutions controlled by the feds? All the suggestions from the policy side say cap and trade is too slow. We need to have emission regulations on the two polluters that contribute 80% of our output - cars and factories. This isn't something that is going to change with lightbulbs and recycling, these are policy issues. And we need to implement these solutions quickly.

There are a lot of reasons non-voters are able to sleep easy not participating in national political issues like these. Halden describes voting as "pure theatrics" where you get to decide between two undesirables. His alternative to voting is participation "in the re-shaping of human social relations in Christ." He provides no framework for what this actually means but I have a guess. When Christians take this particular line they often are saying, "If every one in the church built hospitals, cared for the disabled and loaned each other money we wouldn't need to vote. We would be doing the work of the government."

These are particularly naive statements first, because Christians haven't been doing these things, and certainly not to the extent to let us think we don't need the help of our government. Second, this kind of thinking fails to address funding from the government (Christians also don't give money), state provided health insurance for the poor or the big one we just mentioned, regulation of the environment. To me, this way of thinking represents one of the great Hauerwasian sins: treating the world as you want it to be, not as it is.

A more nuanced perspective comes from Sheldon Wolin and his concept of fugitive democracy (via Isaac). On his great, lengthy piece on Wolin, Isaac provides a quote on voting.

“The citizen is shrunk to the voter: periodically courted, warned, and confused but otherwise kept at a distance from actual decision-making and allowed to emerge only ephemerally in a cameo appearance according to a script composed by the opinion takers/makers”

Wolin talks about voting as luring citizens into the belief that they have particular controls over the democratic system while a whole different reality is happening all around us. The Superpower, “an expansive system of power that accepts no limits other than those it chooses to impose on itself,” is at work of its own accord. I won't sum up any more; you will do better to read it yourself.

While Isaac doesn't get into any specifics until he starts answering posts, one result is a move to the local as the space of production for discordant democracy "rooted in the ordinary." There are a lot of people doing great work in the particulars of grassroots advocacy of this kind. Rom Coles, who has a most pleasant mustache, is one of these theorists/activists. His work has centered on Durham CAN, our local IAF affiliate. They work on local and state issues organizing congregations, neighborhood associations, unions and like-minded groups to bring about change at a most basic level.

The necessity of the local, of our involvement on behalf of those who sweep our city streets, work in our schools and are put to death under our capital punishment systems makes Eugene McCarraher's comment about the last election one of the most "ugh" comments of the past year:

I stayed home on election night, watched a movie on the couch with my beloved wife, and retired in the knowledge that the empire would remain in someone’s untrustworthy hands.

I would feel a lot more comfortable if he'd passed up the movie to write literature for a janitors strike.

Grassroots organization and advocacy is likely the best way for Christians to take seriously our claim to advocate for the alien, the orphan and the widow while being wary of the soothing voice of your every-four-year vote. But also vote in national elections. Don't vote because there's no hope outside our government or because it's your patriotic duty. And don't think voting gets you off the hook from participation in local movements. Vote because its a small contribution, hopefully your smallest contribution to helping our government behave.

prophets of a future not our own

Yesterday I taught a 3 hour in-service to Catholic elementary teachers in the Salem-Woodburn area on Catholic Social Teaching (CST). At times like this I am acutely aware of how often I am called to live between the worlds of Evangelicalism, Anabaptism and Catholicism. My work often takes me into situations like this where I am asked to articulate to a community not my own their social tradition in a way they can (hopefully) embrace its challenge.

It was an interesting day with a few road blocks I didn't expect. First, I forgot that most of them didn't want to be there. They have to go to these in-services and most of them would rather be doing something else on a Friday. I also misinterpreted their level of self- and ecclesial-reflection. I started to notice in their small groups discussions that they weren't talking about the assigned questions ("what are some barriers for embracing CST as a central aspect of faith?" "What is challenging for you about CST?" "What are the steps for you to take social justice deeper in your own life or the life of your church community?"). They really didn't want to go there. And even though I was open to objections and questions (I myself don't find the theme of Rights and Responsibilities particularly compelling) I got nothing back.

At one of the breaks a younger teacher came up to me and said, "just so you know, I'm the odd one out at my table." She went on to explain that everyone at her table "already knew this stuff" and thought the church was already doing everything I talked about. It was a good review but there wasn't much more to say.

Huh?

For those of you unfamiliar with the social tradition of the Catholic church, its pretty radical and directive stuff. In my more bombastic moments I'm apt to say that the term Catholic Social Teaching is weak sauce. Essentially we're talking about the Gospel.

CST's documentary history started in 1891 with Pope Leo calling for the formation of unions and just wage scales during the labor and human rights abuses of the industrial revolution. In other words, there is nothing abstract of theoretical about these works. They are writings in ethics that have very specific policies and agendas attached. The teaching documents from the USCCB explicitly state that capital punishment is as much a degradation of human dignity as abortion or euthanasia. And if you pushed CST to ts logical conclusion, it strongly calls into question the just war tradition.

Not only that, CST isn't something you can choose or not. The bishops explain that living out the Catholic social tradition is as obligatory as Mass attendance or Confession. While Catholics are like every other Christian tradition in picking and choosing, I know a lot of "to the book" devotees who don't believe social justice is a root matter of faith.

At one point I asked them, "do you think that being Catholic means you have to take a certain position on social/political issues like immigration and capital punishment?" The answer, of course, is yes. I saw some heads nod but I'm wondering if they were hearing what I was saying. My goodness, how different the world would look if Catholics demanded immigration and criminal justice policies that honored the God-imaged-ness of each person in the same way they demanded an end to abortion.

Overall it was a fairly discouraging experience. I kept reminding myself that most of my work comes to fruition in my students long after they have been with me. For some it's the time when they discover that the janitors in their work place don't have health coverage or that there's a whole section of their new city where only white people live. Sometimes word of these revelations and their resulting actions makes it back to us. Most of the time we live in hope.

in harms way

At church today the flowers on the altar were given in memory of the Tet offensive in Viet Nam. Tomorrow marks the 40th anniversary of the start of the Tet under General Westmoreland. 58,000 Vietcong were killed and 1,400 U.S. troops over 3 months.

While I know it's important for Christians especially Mennonite Christians to keep catastrophes like this before us, I was a little suspicious. I get worried when we arbitrarily pick "social justice" moments to commemorate in ways that otherize those being remembered. I feel like this is a staple of liberal Protestant churches.

But then our pastor Rod explained a little more about the flowers. They were purchased by a member of our parish community who served with Mennonite Central Committee in Viet Nam 1968, during the offensive.

As Rod reminded us, the 60s were a time when a lot of people were trying to stay out of the service and away from Viet Nam. Instead of running away, MCC ships off its own people at the height of the Tet offensive to preach the Gospel of Jesus Christ, to tell people the Good News of the one who taught us to love our neighbor unto death.

I think that people who don't know a lot about Anabaptists are often discouraged about pacifism because it seems, well, passive. Jessie's story is a reminder to me that being a Christian is closely linked to martyrdom. Rather than laying down our lives for freedom or the state or an amorphous "safety," as Christians we've been called to lay down our lives for our enemies.

It sounds crazy, going into a war zone armed with food and water and medicine, not carrying a gun because you oppose the war your country is fighting. But what a witness to the kingdom breaking in around us.