- Progress on international debt reduction

Meighan Pritchard and I had a great visit to Representative Barbara Lee’s office on October 17, 2007. After several frustrating weeks trying to grab the attention of the Oakland office staff, our meeting with Saundra Andrews, Director of Constituent Services actually sent us home with the tambourines. Saundra has promised to schedule an on campus (yes – here at PSR) appearance for Representative Lee while she is in the Bay area during the next Congressional break.

That gives our SEWPeace and Peace Week community an opportunity to raise the dual issues of ending funding for the war machine AND raising awareness of the implications of oppressive debt (international as well as domestic). I suggested that Rep. Lee try to schedule her visit for a Tuesday during the lunch hour so that we could have a larger contingent of students, faculty, and staff. We are most likely looking at a date in mid November to early December. I will keep you posted!

The other good news is that the companion Jubilee bill was introduced in the Senate on Tuesday, October 16, 2007.

- Drop the Debt not Bombs Follow-up

I am happy to report that our efforts to support Jubilee USA Network and International Debt Cancellation are continuing. Today Michelle and I attended a meeting with Jennifer Tang, Senior Field Representative in the San Francisco office of United States Senator Barbara Boxer. We are hopeful that Senator Boxer will consider being one of the first four co-sponsors of the Senate version of the Jubilee Act (HR 2634). We will keep you posted on this!

What can you do to get “active” in our efforts to impact global poverty through cancellation of odious international debt? Sign up on the Jubilee USA Network at www.jubileeusa.org. Sign up as a supporter, sign up for the blog, find out about the Cancel Debt Fast (act fast because the FAST ends on October 17th). You can find a guide for leading your congregation in becoming a Jubilee congregation (a spiritual leaders best form of grass roots organizing). You can find a plethora of resources to educate and inform yourself on this issue. If you are interested in being part of a small affinity group – a Peace and Economic Justice action/advocacy group, contact me at robynmorrison <at> sbcglobal.net.

- She Said, She Said – Reflections on Peace Week

She said:

Here’s a topic that you have all probably wrestled with for some time but that came up again at dinner tonight with a group of PSR students: This week we all reminded ourselves that peace is a good thing. What do we need to do in our own lives to make peace possible in the world? Signing paper plates and delivering them to Barbara Lee makes a statement of our will and intentions. Does it tangibly move us closer to peace? Perhaps, especially if she is able to act on it. Or is it just good show? Certainly she needs to know how we feel. What else are we doing? Are we reading books to learn how food supply, $5 Walmart tee-shirts from China, international debt, oil supply, and the arms lobby are perpetuating the current mess?

Two books mentioned at dinner tonight are Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma and John Perkins’s Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, both of which speak of forces larger than our small voices working for a different god than the one speaking for the poor. In the Dismantling Racism workshop at orientation in August, we first-year Caucasians were confronted with the question, What privileges are we as whites willing to give up/share so that all people, regardless of color, may live in equality? A similar question regarding peace might be, What are we as Americans willing to give up so that people around the world may have food, clothing, shelter, security, freedom from war?

Everything is so interconnected: how many lights we leave on, how long we shower, whether we drive or walk or take public transit, whether we buy organic and local or eat grapes flown in from Venezuela in January. Saying we desire peace is only the first step. How do we give that feet?

She said:

I appreciate your words, thoughts and challenges addressed to all of us. I am, in fact, so appreciative that I think the final paragraph of your email should be posted on our blog site. It appears to me that the questions you raise do not warrant a single answer, but in fact aim to slice through the very idea of single-answer solutions. I dig it. You have highlighted the “interconnected” nature of this war web we’re living in AND simultaneously asked us how we might fling the string(s) so to speak. This is THE conversation that Rev. Lynice Pinkard dared us to have on friday night. Why not take up this conversation as the next phase?

I have to admit I am tired of writing, reading and talking about activism. This is not all I do in the name of “peace,” but the institutions I find myself in highly emphasize these modalities and to a certain extent we academics are domesticated in the ‘house of language’ (Soelle, I think). Having said that, maybe some inspired-embodied-action will come from our dialogue. Besides, when will we ever get past this mind/body dualism? One truly makes possible and reinforces the other, no? Perhaps dialogue through blogging is a way you can keep connected to SEW Peace/Peace Particles. I certainly hope we can keep your voice with us in some way.

In closing, I want to lift up a concept that Rita Nakashima Brock laid down on Friday night at the “Resisting Imperial Peace” EATWT talk: the present moment-ness of love. She basically credited eco-theologians for driving home/bringing back the ‘mindfulness’ of spirituality by connecting our consumer habits with our relationship to deity. The love of a creaturely/earthly g*d now necessitates that we think twice (and hopefullly act different) before leaving the light on, or consuming another round of gas when we can take public transit. In this sense, the prospect of peace and the fulfillment thereof are always at hand…or in your face…and calling us outloud. This is exactly what you have lifted up in your email, Meighan.

What I’m trying to say is that many of us do (or try and fail) the work of peace in the present moment, in ways that are not trumpeted in chapel or celebrated on the wall of Mudd. We can do more, yes, but the SEW Peace got together, not b/c we lacked peace-full action in our own lives, but because we wanted to enliven the (then dead) campus around anti-war issues. Maybe our efforts this week seemed self-serving and narrow. However, the silence of a “progressive and bold” american theological seminary in the face of a corrupt, inhumane, imperialistic war waged by its government was too much for some of us last year. True, children in Iraq are still dying. True, many of us don’t even know the details of geography, ideology and decision making driven to end “terrorism.” But even more true, none of this atrocity will end if we stay posted up in our dorm rooms, heads in books, lips sealed shut and hearts iced over.  Peace Week was a birth-cry. Now, as I think you’ve eloquently pointed out: it’s time to shake. I look forward to your call taking us in new and important directions. May Her grace guide our feet.

Sincerely, Your sister in the struggle.

- The Multitude and Peace Week

The Multitude and Peace Week

by Robyn Morrison

Peace Week at PSR has just ended and I am left to ponder the complexity of the intersection between academics and activism; or intellectual activity and praxis. As one of four women who sat around a table in July brainstorming a vision of how a small group of committed student peace activists at Pacific School of Religion should participate in the International Day of Prayer for Peace (September 21, 2007), today I am awe-struck with the end result. Being a typical human meaning making machine, I assume that there are no insignificant synchronicities. Everything that happens has significance and often the Spirit/God (or a power beyond the human-being) is actively at work within the context of what is happening. Therefore, I praise God for working within and through us in our Peace Week activities.

When we met to plan Peace Week, we also discussed a book that the group is reading, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri. I agreed to write a brief essay on the middle section of that book; the chapters describing their concept of the ‘multitude’. By its nature ‘multitude’ defies concise definition. Hardt and Negri describe the concept with these words, “A multitude is an irreducible multiplicity; the singular social differences that constitute the multitude must always be expressed and can never be flattened into sameness, unity, identity, or indifference.”[1] It is less a concept than a creative vision of the web of humanity as a powerfully complex tapestry of singular identities woven together through commonalities.

Hardt and Negri contend that the “multitude is the only social subject capable of realizing democracy, that is, the rule of everyone by everyone.” Part two of the book elaborates on the concept primarily from the socioeconomic perspective; the area that also intersects most closely with my experience working for economic justice. As they deconstruct older notions of dangerous concepts of economic class, they move beyond Adam Smith versus Marx polarities. Based upon my experience working with struggling small businesses and social entrepreneurs in rural areas, I found it refreshing that the discussion has moved beyond the ‘us versus them’ language of labor versus management. Instead we are invited to break open the box and think in terms of “human creative capacity.”

Neither capitalists nor Marxists have given adequate consideration to the poor of the world. The voices and creative capacity of indigenous people, rural agrarian communities, and migrant workers have not been adequately respected. Transnational capitalism has espoused the myth that industrial development and large scale production is the ideal for all people; a myth that we are now seeing as a life threathening farce. Hardt and Negri introduce the idea of the biopolitical and remind us that we share the earth and a common physiology; we are one body. As a person who struggles to address the complexities of dismantling the negative impacts of global capitalism while acknowledging that transnational corporate economic activity is both destructive and beneficial, I was particularly intrigued with their discussion of international debt and global financial institutions. Synchronistically as I read Part two of the Multitude, I was also deeply engaged in planning the PSR Chapel service for Peace week, and the Biblical text (Luke 16: 1-13) drew me towards the concept of the Lord’s Jubilee and the elimination of unjust and oppressive debt.

As I worked to pull together the liturgical pieces that would ground the Peace Week at PSR, I experienced first hand the concept of the multitude. My individual contributions to the communal project felt integral to my creative capacity. Three of the pieces I brought to the project were my knowledge of the connection between economic justice and peace-building, a passion for liturgies (the rituals that form and strengthen communities), and experience developing and deploying the leadership gifts of others. Other students would bring their unique gifts to the Peace Week community project; thereby allowing me to joyously contribute my creative capacity. That is exactly what I experienced, the power and creativity of the multitude.

Some of you reading this essay experienced the end result of the multitude of students coming together to create Peace Week at Pacific School of Religion. You are the fortunate ones. If you did not, you will simply be left to imagine or create your own manifestation of multitude. What occurred was a hap-hazard loosely connected diverse multi-cultural and powerful five days of activities focused on how people of faith (primarly but not exclusively Christians) can work collaboratively to lead peace and justice building ministries.

In a particularly divine moment for me PSR’s Chorale Director, Aeri Lee suggested a last minute addition to the music for the Tuesday service. The song, For One Great Peace, would be sung as a chorus of solos threaded together and eventually merging into a common voice. The following quote from Bishop Desmond Tutu was projected on the screen. “One of the wonderful things is how God depends on all of us… Each one of us has a contribution, each and every one of us.”

 

And that for me is the meaning of the multitude.

 

For One Great Peace[2]

This thread I weave,
this step I dance,
this stone I carve,
this ball I bounce,
this nail I drive,
this pearl I string,
this flag I wave,
this note I sing,

REFRAIN
One small part;
one small place;
one heart’s beat;
one great Peace.

This pot I shape,
this fire I light,
this fence I leap,
this bone I knit,
this seed I nurse,
this rift I mend,
this child I raise,
this earth I tend,

REFRAIN

This cheque I write,
this march I join,
this faith I state,
this truth I sign,
this is small part,
in one small place,
of one heart’s beat,
for one great Peace.

 

 

 

 

---

[1] Hardt and Negri, Multitude, 105.

[2] Music by Ron Klusmeier. Words by Shirley Erena Murray. Words Copyright © 1992 by Hope Publishing Co., Carol Stream, IL 60188

- Pictures from Peace Week 2007!

Check out our page of pictures and reflections from PSR’s Peace Week 2007 by clicking here.