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Apr
21
Bono–He can write more than songs
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My daughter sent me to this op-ed piece by Bono. Loved the last line and was challenged to be part of a church/para-church that makes the best soul music.–Jay
It’s 2009. Do You Know Where Your Soul Is? (NY Times)
By BONO
I AM in Midtown Manhattan, where drivers still play their car horns as if they were musical instruments and shouting in restaurants is sport.
I am a long way from the warm breeze of voices I heard a week ago on Easter Sunday.
“Glorify your name,” the island women sang, as they swayed in a cut sandstone church. I was overwhelmed by a riot of color, an emotional swell that carried me to sea.
Christianity, it turns out, has a rhythm — and it crescendos this time of year. The rumba of Carnival gives way to the slow march of Lent, then to the staccato hymnals of the Easter parade. From revelry to reverie. After 40 days in the desert, sort of …
Carnival — rock stars are good at that.
“Carne” is flesh; “Carne-val,” its goodbye party. I’ve been to many. Brazilians say they’ve done it longest; they certainly do it best. You can’t help but contract the fever. You’ve got no choice but to join the ravers as they swell up the streets bursting like the banks of a river in a flood of fun set to rhythm. This is a Joy that cannot be conjured. This is life force. This is the heart full and spilling over with gratitude. The choice is yours …
It’s Lent I’ve always had issues with. I gave it up … self-denial is where I come a cropper. My idea of discipline is simple — hard work — but of course that’s another indulgence.
Then comes the dying and the living that is Easter.
It’s a transcendent moment for me — a rebirth I always seem to need. Never more so than a few years ago, when my father died. I recall the embarrassment and relief of hot tears as I knelt in a chapel in a village in France and repented my prodigal nature — repented for fighting my father for so many years and wasting so many opportunities to know him better. I remember the feeling of “a peace that passes understanding” as a load lifted. Of all the Christian festivals, it is the Easter parade that demands the most faith — pushing you past reverence for creation, through bewilderment at the idea of a virgin birth, and into the far-fetched and far-reaching idea that death is not the end. The cross as crossroads. Whatever your religious or nonreligious views, the chance to begin again is a compelling idea.
Last Sunday, the choirmaster was jumping out of his skin … stormy then still, playful then tender, on the most upright of pianos and melodies. He sang his invocations in a beautiful oaken tenor with a freckle-faced boy at his side playing conga and tambourine as if it was a full drum kit. The parish sang to the rafters songs of praise to a God that apparently surrendered His voice to ours.
I come to lowly church halls and lofty cathedrals for what purpose? I search the Scriptures to what end? To check my head? My heart? No, my soul. For me these meditations are like a plumb line dropped by a master builder — to see if the walls are straight or crooked. I check my emotional life with music, my intellectual life with writing, but religion is where I soul-search.
The preacher said, “What good does it profit a man if he gains the whole world and loses his soul?” Hearing this, every one of the pilgrims gathered in the room asked, “Is it me, Lord?” In America, in Europe, people are asking, “Is it us?”
Well, yes. It is us.
Carnival is over. Commerce has been overheating markets and climates … the sooty skies of the industrial revolution have changed scale and location, but now melt ice caps and make the seas boil in the time of technological revolution. Capitalism is on trial; globalization is, once again, in the dock. We used to say that all we wanted for the rest of the world was what we had for ourselves. Then we found out that if every living soul on the planet had a fridge and a house and an S.U.V., we would choke on our own exhaust.
Lent is upon us whether we asked for it or not. And with it, we hope, comes a chance at redemption. But redemption is not just a spiritual term, it’s an economic concept. At the turn of the millennium, the debt cancellation campaign, inspired by the Jewish concept of Jubilee, aimed to give the poorest countries a fresh start. Thirty-four million more children in Africa are now in school in large part because their governments used money freed up by debt relief. This redemption was not an end to economic slavery, but it was a more hopeful beginning for many. And to the many, not the lucky few, is surely where any soul-searching must lead us.
A few weeks ago I was in Washington when news arrived of proposed cuts to the president’s aid budget. People said that it was going to be hard to fulfill promises to those who live in dire circumstances such a long way away when there is so much hardship in the United States. And there is.
But I read recently that Americans are taking up public service in greater numbers because they are short on money to give. And, following a successful bipartisan Senate vote, word is that Congress will restore the money that had been cut from the aid budget — a refusal to abandon those who would pay such a high price for a crisis not of their making. In the roughest of times, people show who they are.
Your soul.
So much of the discussion today is about value, not values. Aid well spent can be an example of both, values and value for money. Providing AIDS medication to just under four million people, putting in place modest measures to improve maternal health, eradicating killer pests like malaria and rotoviruses — all these provide a leg up on the climb to self-sufficiency, all these can help us make friends in a world quick to enmity. It’s not alms, it’s investment. It’s not charity, it’s justice.
Strangely, as we file out of the small stone church into the cruel sun, I think of Warren Buffett and Bill Gates, whose now combined fortune is dedicated to the fight against extreme poverty. Agnostics both, I believe. I think of Nelson Mandela, who has spent his life upholding the rights of others. A spiritual man — no doubt. Religious? I’m told he would not describe himself that way.
Not all soul music comes from the church.
Bono, the lead singer of the band U2 and a co-founder of the advocacy group ONE, is a contributing columnist for The Times.
Apr
21
A Challenging Thought
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“…the Gospel had become too shaped by modernity and packaged to make decisions. There is a serious shift in our thinking and in our praxis toward the development and preaching and teaching of a gospel that encompasses all the Bible says about the Gospel – and that means an expansion to a robust Gospel, one that is both personal and corporate, spiritual and social, inner and outer, sudden and progressive, and individual and cosmic.”–Scot McKnight
Apr
18
We’re All in This Together
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Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you drink? When did we see you as stranger and welcome you, or naked and clothe you? And when did we see you sick and in prison and visit you?
And the King will answer them, “Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me.”
– Jesus
Apr
3
Steps Toward Understanding the Poor
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I ran across the following post, written by Tom Smith and related to his South African context:
Thot the suggestions might help us—staff, students and faculty–take some steps toward understanding the poor and developing a greater sense of solidarity with the poor. Many of us are wrestling with balancing our organizational mission — “building spiritual movements everywhere” with our Christian responsibility for compassion (widows, orphans, poor, … the marginalized). Unfortunately, few of us have ever crossed the socio-economic divide and interacted with the poor–although at least 50% of the people of the world live on less than 3 dollars a day. Hard to imagine us “fulfilling the Great Commission in the context and power of the Great Commandment” without learning to cross this divide. Tom’s suggestions might help us learn how to cross that divide.
Tom writes:
In an effort to move us (myself included) towards a deeper solidarity with the poor a few of us started compiling a list of things we could actually do to make a difference. Some of these could take less than a minute; others could change the rest of your life. This list can be critiqued in a hundred ways but I’ll ask you to suspend your reservations for a while and to choose to engage. The idea is to keep on engaging with this expression of love for our neighbors (a lot of us are indeed already engaged). It’s not meant as a legalistic list, rather a list that could get the creative resurrection juices flowing!
Please feel free to add to this list by commenting extra ones, telling stories or by sending links to ways to engage.
1. Visit the apartheid museum with some friends and discuss it afterwards [if you can try to do this with an interracial group].
2. Study Scripture and see what it says about the poor.
3. Build a relationship with domestic workers/garden workers / security guards / cleaning ladies / bus boys etc.
4. Tip at least 20% at restaurants.
5. Discover the humanity of the car guards at malls.
6. Learn from someone else about their culture.
7. Take a ride in a taxi for a day.
8. Attend a cultural awareness course.
9. Visit www.globalrichlist.com and discuss your experience with a friend.
10. Learn another language.
11. Discover local heroes like Beyers Naude, Desmond Tutu, John de Gruchy, David Bosch, Nelson Mandela.
12. Go on a mission trip with a local church.
13. Give 10% of your income away.
14. Learn from people who are already involved with the poor.
15. Eat lunch with a beggar and ask them about their story.
16. Pray for the poor and be attentive to the thoughts you have when you pray.
17. Give beggars your attention and make eye contact admitting their humanity.
18. Allow a poor person to provide a meal for you.
19. Open up your home for the poor and make them a meal.
20. Beg on the street for an hour.
21. Eat a squatter diet for a week and give the money you saved away.
22. Sign up for a poverty simulation.
23. Walk everywhere for a day.
24. Visit churches with different socio-economics than the one you’re attending.
25. Write down your rationalizations for not being involved with the poor and discuss it with friends.
26. Join churches / NGO’s who are already involved in being with the poor.
27. Fast a luxury (like DSTV) and sponsor someone’s education with the money.
28. Spring clean your house and give usable items away or sell it and give the money away.
29. Sponsor old magazines to poor schools.
30. Work on your racism by getting to know a person from the race you’re discriminating against – SAY NO TO XENOPHOBIA.
31. Drive with non-perishable food in your car and give it to beggars.
32. Empower beggars to give and not always to receive.
33. Support soccer by going to a local game or playing and discuss your observations with your friends.
34. Diversify your friendships – start by praying that God would open up new friendships and expect Him to answer.
35. Always give to the disabled.
36. Move into a poor(er) neighborhood.
37. If (36) is too tough for you support businesses in poor neighborhoods (groceries, restaurants)
38. Buy the Homeless Talk AND read it.
39. Give away blankets and gloves in wintertime (preferably to people who already have relationships with the poor and would know where the needs are).
40. Fast food for a week and give what you would have spent away.
41. Keep track of what you’ve spent in a Restaurant for the year and at the end of the year match the amount by giving it away.
42. When you buy a new car go for a lower option and give the money away that you would have spent on the dream model.
43. Downsize house or car in order to give more.
44. Be transparent about the details of your budget with a friend.
45. Work out what your household need (not want) and give the excess away, resist the urge to always upgrade you lifestyle.
46. When you get a new cell phone give your old one (or the new one) away.
47. Go through your closet and notice which clothes are in perfect condition that you don’t wear at all [the same goes for shoes …. especially for the ladies].
48. Oppressive structure cause a lot of poverty … get a group of friends together who research and engage with this level of involvement.
49. Pay your taxes.
50. Share stories of where you or others have engaged in the journey towards the poor.
51. Buy fair trade coffee (here is a great place for those living in SA).
52. Resist brand names and give the money you saved away.
53. Spend the same amount on the poor that you do on dog/cat food.
54. Equal money spent on gifts for the non-poor with gifts to the poor.
55. Build friendships with a church in the squatter camps.
56. Teach someone some of the skills you’ve acquired in your education.
57. Get a group of friends together and read Trevor Hudson’s book (A mile in my shoes) and then follow through on what you’ve learnt.
You might want to visit Tom’s blog often–good stuff.
