Three observations on really shitty things: how medicine handled HRT, a massive sewage spill in Aotearoa and the way AI has actually destroyed search.
The Eternal Flame at the King Centre in Atlanta which I visited in 2013
I was born in Toronto two months after Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. The US civil rights struggles of the 1950s and 1960s were as distant to me as was apartheid in South Africa or the Vietnam War. Even as I grew up through my first 16 years, the heightened social justice actions and liberations struggles of the 1960s were mere whispers across time and borders. Neither the Globe and Mail or the Star, the CBC or CTV, offered us much in terms of what was really happening in the world. No internet. No videos. No social media.
On October 20, 1984 I participated in a huge anti-nuclear march in Toronto and that day met dozens of people who handed me pamphlets, bent my ears to their causes and opened my eyes to what was happening in the world from Kurdistan to South Africa, to the revolutions in Nicaragua and the resistance in El Salvador, and to issues at home, the recognition of Aboriginal rights, the pursuit of justice and equality for women and queer folks and people of colour. It was a carnival of struggle and hope.
A few weeks later the US held an election in which Ronald Regan won a second term. Jesse Jackson ran in that election, for the Democratic Party nomination, but it was Walter Mondale and Gearldine Ferraro who were on the opposite ticket. Nevertheless, Jesse Jackson had become a voice for the continued struggle for civil rights, turning his prophetic attention to the damage that Reaganomics was already starting to do in the world, decades before that economic philosophy had been debunked. (Even today, after 45 years of wealth inequality and economic violence, people seem to believe that trickle down economics is still worth a go – “cut those taxes!” they say, plunging us further into despair).
Jesse Jackson was my generation’s Martin Luther King Jr. His era as THE public face of civil rights and racial justice has been over for some time, due in part to his illness, but also due to the new faces of the struggle that have emerged in this century, speaking to and meeting this century’s challenges and needs. Nevertheless, reading of his passing today sent me to a state of nostalgic gratitude for how his work and voice and presence brought the spirit of Martin Luther King to a new generation of social change activists like me. We could see and hear him speak. We could catch the cadence of his voice and the relevance of his message to the times we were living in. When you heard him speak, you could look around yourself and confirm the truth of his observations, and take inspiration from his calls to action and his “perfect mission.”
I liked this obituary from the Guardian this morning. It contains some quotes that resonate.
“My leadership skills came from the athletic arena,” Jackson told the Washington Post in 1984. “In many ways, they were developed from playing quarterback. Assessing defenses; motivating your own team. When the game starts, you use what you’ve got – and don’t cry about what you don’t have. You run to your strength. You also practice to win.”
You work with what you have, and you play the field in front of you.
“The arc of the moral universe is long and it bends towards justice, but you have to pull it to bend. It doesn’t bend automatically. Dr King used to remind us that every time the movement has a tailwind and goes forward, there are headwinds…[in these times] he would have said: ‘We must not surrender our spirits. We must use [these times] not to surrender but fortify our faith and fight back.’”
I think that teaching is the one for our times, one for all of us, and one for the legacy that Jackson, King and others have delivered to us all along the long arc of the moral universe.
Rest in power.
There is a very weird thing happening Canada right now. If you spend any time on the algorithm driven social media and you live especially in western Canada you will have noticed that there is a tremendous amount of out of proportion outrage being generated around issues like “western separatism” and residential school denilaism.
It’s the reason I left Facebook and Twitter permanently. What was coming through my feed was pure poison. It is poison for democratic deliberation, it is poison for community cohesiveness and it is undermining governance and it is harming people.
And it’s serving someone, driven by a clear agenda which seeks to reduce government regulation, and do the bidding of large foreign corporations and investors. This isn’t new, but the capture of social media algorithms by these companies and their strategic initiatives are driving our communities and countries apart. RAPIDLY.
Craig Turner has a great piece on this and it’s worth a read if you want to get a grip on reality.
Ted Gioia remembers his first ever jazz show, seeing Yusef Lateef in LA. It changed his life.
17 seconds into the performance by the Yusef Lateef Quartet. I honestly wanted to jump up, and tell everybody in the nightclub:
This is the moment I’ve been waiting for.
I knew in that instant that everything in my life had been leading up to this. And I’d been wasting my time with rock and pop and classical music. My destiny was jazz.
I had a similar experience with jazz. It was perhaps 1986 in Toronto and my friend Winston Smith, who worked at my local bookstore, Writers & Co. Invited me to go see Mal Waldron and Steve Lacy at The Rivoli on Queen Street. Winston fed me a steady diet of novels and poetry by African American writers like John Edgar Wideman and Nathanial Mackey and he turned my head when it came to music. And while the records he leant me were one thing seeing two master improvisers at work live was another thing altogether.
Waldron and Lacy were a phenomenal duet. Together they spanned the history of the genre. Waldron was one of Billie Holiday’s accompanists and Lacy played with the likes of Cecil Taylor. Their set was full of Monk tunes and original compositions that strayed wildly from the head as they entered into free music together. It was my introduction to this kind of jazz.
Unlike Gioia this performance didn’t make me want to play the music. I found it raw and intimidating and had no way in with the limited guitar technique I had. There were no guitar players making this music other than Sonny Sharrock and so what it did was light a fire in me for this music and art that approached this kind of intensity and thoughtfulness.
Life changing.
Go read this amazing blog post about these two musicians and their long history together.
Yesterday was Transfiguration Sunday in the United Church of Canada and it was my turn, as it is once a month, to lead worship at our little church on Bowen Island. This is the sermon I gave. Tl;dr this is about seeing and listening and honouring people, especially trans people, queer people and those in recovery who are living examples to us all and teachers of how to see.
The Transfiguration
17 And after six days Jesus took with him Peter and James and John his brother, and led them up a high mountain apart. 2 And he was transfigured before them, and his face shone like the sun, and his garments became white as light. 3 And behold, there appeared to them Moses and Eli?jah, talking with him. 4 And Peter said to Jesus, “Lord, it is well that we are here; if you wish, I will make three booths here, one for you and one for Moses and one for Eli?jah.” 5 He was still speaking, when lo, a bright cloud overshadowed them, and a voice from the cloud said, “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased; listen to him.” 6 When the disciples heard this, they fell on their faces, and were filled with awe. 7 But Jesus came and touched them, saying, “Rise, and have no fear.” 8 And when they lifted up their eyes, they saw no one but Jesus only.
9 And as they were coming down the mountain, Jesus commanded them, “Tell no one the vision, until the Son of man is raised from the dead.”
I was once working in South Africa. We were hosting a workshop on participatory leadership on a small safari west of Johannesburg and the participants were a mix of community organizers from Midvaal, a township south of the city, and mostly white, middle class professors from the University of South Africa who were working together to put together online programs. This was back in 2010.
It was Ian interesting mix of people and we had initially thought of doing to separate workshops with them, but decided that the learning and conversations would be richer if we did the work together.
The safari was more set up for leisure and relaxation – these are resorts basically – and it had decent meeting spaces for us but they didn’t have great audio visual support. We were a group of 40 or so people and some people had quiet voices which made it hard for everyone to hear. At one point one of the University professors called out impatiently “Can you PLEASE speak up?” To a Black woman who was trying to find her thoughts on a sensitive topic.
Now of course it can be kind to ask a person to speak up, or it could be the kind of thing that is delivered with a little frustration and perhaps some passive aggressiveness, and that was definitely the tenor of this exchange. And there were layers upon layers of context to that little outburst. It was delivered by a white man with no physical hearing issue sitting very far away from the speaker to a black woman who was in an incredibly vulnerable moment. One of the Midvaal organizers immediately stood up and very kindly said something like this “Hello. I would like to make a suggestion. I would like to suggest that instead of asking our sister to speak more loudly, that we make the effort to listen lmore oudly. Come a little closer and let’s make our ears bigger so that she can continue her thought and we can open her heart to her.” Those weren’t his exact words, but that was the feeling and the expression “Listen Loudly” has stayed with me ever since.
Today we are given the story of the Transfiguration. What do we know about this story? I want to suggest that this story is not about Jesus changing in any way, but rather it is a story about the disciples seeing Jesus in a different way. Like that sister in Midvaal, Jesus is just doing his thing, being himself, and he had something he wanted to tell these disciples, specifically these ones, the ones who would witness his suffering and carry his story afterwards. He was revealing what was going to happen to him, in a space that required trust and vulnerability and privacy. And so this year I am reading this story as a story about how to act in this moment. Imagine if you were one of the three chose to go with Jesus to the top of the mountain. You might think you were privileged, or about to be told something special. You might think that the experience will validate a story you have about yourself being the MOST trusted disciples.
In other words, probably all of us would initially make it about ourselves. Or, let me be most honest, I would probably first make it about myself. I know I would. I would be like Peter trying to figure how I could help, what could I do? And then God interrupts and says “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased; listen to him.”
Just listen. Just be a loving witness. Shut up and listen loudly to this humble carpenter who is sharing something incredible about his brilliance. It’s not about me at all. In fact, making about me means that it is no longer about Jesus.
I want to call us to witness today. I have a theory that the angels in Bible who are revealed are just regular people who are made into angels by how they are received. The angels that appear all through the Bible whether they appear to Lot or Mary or Abraham and Sarah or Gideon, they all come as regular people. And it only through an act of hospitality or an act of being open to reciprocity and relationship do they suddenly become revealed as angels. Paul – who is not always my friend! – has my back here as he writes in the letter to the Hebrews: “Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for by doing that some have entertained angels without knowing it.” That was probably the quote that turned my on to this theory. Host strangers, and let them be their brilliant selves. On their terms. In their own way.
This is not easy. It requires us to de-centre our own experience first and to centre the person we are with. It requires us to be calm and collected and hold space for what is happening. The angels always say “Do not be afraid.” God says it in this transfiguration story. It’s an invitation and a request. If you are afraid when someone is revealing themselves to you, the air is charged with anxiety. You will not be able to receive them with compassion and joy and support. You will still be the centre of the situation, deflecting your honest feelings of confusion and worry and channelling them into busy work. As Peter does. As Martha does. As we all do.
Sitting with the strange-to-us and the stranger-to-us is not easy work. And sitting with a person in the midst of change, of complete transfiguration, when their brilliance is coming to the front and their form is changing, when they are shedding our images of who we think they are, when they are living in truth ever more deeply, this can be unsettling. And yet, there is no greater gift than the love and friendship of a person who has changed to reveal more of their deepest and honest self and who has trusted you with that transformation and invited you to witness and stay in relationship with them.
When I realized last week that this was Transfiguration Sunday and I got to share some reflections, I got excited because I wanted to honour my friends who are gay and lesbian, who are in recovery from drugs and alcohol and especially those who are trans. My trans friends are like superheroes. As they move through their journey, as we stay in relationship, I get to see people who are more of who they really are. They are beautiful, loving, brilliant, aware, alive and full of care for a world that inflicts pain and cruelty indiscriminately. I feel the deepest honour to know these friends, to love them and be loved by them. They humble me, they lift me up, they enrich my world, they make our communities a better place to be. I know some bad-ass warriors of joy and courage and I am proud to call them my friends.
And I get it. It’s hard. I have friends who are parents of trans kids who grieve the little girl or boy they raised. Who love their children with all their hearts and still get their pronouns wrong. Who worry for the journey their child is going on. But those friends are the example, because they love unconditionally and their love is returned to them reciprocally. You can make mistakes. You can be worried for a person’s future. You can be uncomfortable with change. That’s fine. That’s natural;
We few who are gathered here, we call ourselves Christians. We follow the teachings and the example of a divine man of deep spiritual power, who took three of his closest friends into his most intimate confidence and STILL needed a safe space to reveal himself. When we sign on to this religion I believe we are called to love, witness, and support others as deeply as we can. Not perfectly, not as an example to others, but as best we can. To meet our friends and neighbours and strangers with love and curiosity and respect and most of all to “not be afraid.”
And I think we need to declare that this is a Christian thing to do. This is what we train for, because there are also people who call themselves Christians who use this religion as cover – or even a justification – for their fear. Xenophobia, homophobia, transphobia. To me, the fear of the other is a direct violation of the invitation of angels, and the most sacred teaching about how to love our neighbours. God says “Do not be afraid.” Jesus says “Rise and have no fear.”
If you know a person in recovery you know that it is a blessing for them to tell you not to be afraid. If you know a person who is coming out to you, or who is transitioning in this world and in this time, where they will face persecution and hatred and cruel generalizations and contempt, and THAT person tells YOU not to be afraid, you are receiving a blessing. These are people who should anchor your idea of what courage looks like..
Friends, I don’t think I don’t get to have a relationship with the teachings of Christ if I am not making progress on listening loudly to the cries of suffering and pain in this world; if we are not witnessing the cracking of eggs as people we love become even MORE of the people we love. We are the ones who host the stranger because we know every stranger is just an angel that we haven’t met yet.
Our job is to be authentically ourselves and then act not out of fear, but out of love. Out of togetherness. Out of knowing that each of us is a beloved child of God, doing our best and needing our friends and family to hold us up and love us in our transitions through life. None of us leave the world the way we came. We are all transfigured at some point. How do we want to be witnessed in those moments of deep transformation? How should we witness and love the other?
Listen loudly. Witness deeply. Do not be afraid. Rise and have no fear.