- Pictures from Peace Week 2007!

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

- Peace Week Events!

Peace Week at the Pacific School of Religion
September 17-21, 2007

Coordinated by PSR students and PSR Peace Particles
(Seminarians to End War and Sow Peace, a.k.a. SEW Peace)
All events are free and open to the public.
For more information, please contact sewpeace <at> gmail.com.

Schedule of Events for Education, Witness, and Action

All Week Growing Art Piece on PSR Quad

Monday

12:30 pm – Mudd Building Consecration of the Art, with music and free peace T-shirts

Tuesday
PSR Chapel Service 11:10 am, PSR Chapel — Luke 16:1-13, “Drop the Debt, not Bombs” – Robyn Morrison, preaching

Wednesday
Taize Worship 7:30 pm, PSR Chapel

Thursday
Healing Prayer Worship Service 6:30 pm, PSR Chapel — Psalm 79

Thursday-Friday
24-Hour Peace Pray-in Buckham Chapel – 6:30 pm – 6:30 pm

Friday – International Day of Prayer for Peace
Peace Teach-in – all workshops take place in the Mudd Building
10:30 am – Workshops:
1. Pastoral Care for Veterans, with VA Hospital Chaplain Carolyn Talmadge
2. Peace for Israel and Palestine, with the Network of Spiritual Progressives’ Nichola Torbett
3. Rebecca Ann Parker sermon, “Theological Education in a Time of Wars,” podcast and discussion
1:30 pm – Workshops:
1. Veterans for Peace, with Ted Arrindal and other PSR veterans
2. Creative Writing for Peace, led by Christina Hutchins
3. ENGAGE Training, with Pace e Bene trainers Ryan Baum and Robyn Morrison (session runs 1:30-4:30 pm)
3:00 pm – Workshops:
1. Peace Pilgrim – movies and discussion, led by Sheryl Butler
2. “Ground Truth” – movie about the Iraq war, hosted by James Leveque

Public Panel 6:30 pm – PSR Bade Museum, “Resisting Imperial Peace: Theological Reflections”

Worship Service 8:30 pm – PSR Quad, Preaching by Lynice Pinkard of First Congregational Church of Oakland, “There is a Balm in Gilead”
Party for the Peaceful 9:30 pm – Mudd 100

- Urban Peace with Tai!

+ H i P – H o P 4 Peace +

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OjVT-SKAxUs

K-OS

“Love Song” (lyrics below)

Contrary to popular belief, know what yo
This is not a lovesong
It’s a sonnett
Damn it feels good to have people up on it bu
I’m just a fool playing with the masters tools
Learning how to break the rules of this record company tool
Hallucination – I see with my eyes
But my heart’s telling me lies
Why do I fantisize?
Why am I telling lies to the people from the stage
Pretending it’s all good when inside it’s fire and rage
Cuz I can’t understand how a man lives off the life of another man
Tryin to pimp the universe – that’s a joke
I stay rockin the boat down on my last note
It’s murder she wrote
Assassination vocabulary
I see your termination is heavily necessary
I should have known – they do it for Forbes alone
I do it to break the walls if I fall off then let me know people

CHORUS
It’s funny how life can go
First you ride high then you might lay low
Don’t get high off your own supply
Someone said first before a fall comes pride
This is my message to the world
Just tryin to reach every boy and girl
Not tryin to say if it’s right or wrong
This is just a love song

Lyrical optometrists with 20/20 vision
Are serving rhymes like my granny used to serve provisions
Chaotical amneotical fluid
The rap druid is fluent in the art of onomatopoeia
Metaphysical microscopic topic dropper
When I was a kid I wanted rollerskates and a bike chopper
But alas, pop, pop never thought to keep me in style
Thats why I’m schizophrenic now
So God bless the child that has his own
The harvest we reap is what we sow
Chrome microphone – shoot it
Towards a dome of computer digital clones that mimic philosopher stones
Sayin a style’s their own when they bite like Mike Furounsville
The sounds ill
Relationship is a mirror
That you see yourself up in and the picture is clearer
Thats why I’m on the scene with a mike like Ernesto Guevara
Why I may exploit with lights like Geraldo Rivera, they just.

CHORUS(again)

It’s easy not to care what people say
It’s harder to pretend and try
Cuz they can only love you from yesterday
I’m looking at them now they pose high
I’m just a man who’s walking
They stand around and keep talking
They tried to clip my wings
But wisdom fills so many things
Say it again
I’m just a man who’s walking
They stand around and keep talking
They tried to clip my wings
But wisdom fills so many things
In LOVE (Fading)
It’s funny how life can go
Dont get high off your own supply
This is my message to the world…

- Saul Williams’ spoken word of hope

Saul Williams (the MAN!)…”not in our name”….

Poet Sharon Olds Declines Invitation by Laura Bush

Laura Bush
First Lady, The White House

Dear Mrs. Bush,

I am writing to let you know why I am not able to accept your kind invitation to give a presentation at the National Book Festival on September 24, or to attend your dinner at the Library of Congress or the breakfast at the White House.

In one way, it’s a very appealing invitation. The idea of speaking at a festival attended by 85,000 people is inspiring! The possibility of finding new readers is exciting for a poet in personal terms, and in terms of the desire that poetry serve its constituents–all of us who need the pleasure, and the inner and outer news, it delivers.

And the concept of a community of readers and writers has long been dear to my heart. As a professor of creative writing in the graduate school of a major university, I have had the chance to be a part of some magnificent outreach writing workshops in which our students have become teachers. Over the years, they have taught in a variety of settings: a women’s prison, several New York City public high schools, an oncology ward for children.

Our initial program, at a 900-bed state hospital for the severely physically challenged, has been running now for twenty years, creating along the way lasting friendships between young MFA candidates and their students–long-term residents at the hospital who, in their humor, courage and wisdom, become our teachers.

When you have witnessed someone nonspeaking and almost nonmoving spell out, with a toe, on a big plastic alphabet chart, letter by letter, his new poem, you have experienced, close up, the passion and essentialness of writing.

When you have held up a small cardboard alphabet card for a writer who is completely nonspeaking and nonmoving (except for the eyes), and pointed first to the A, then the B, then C, then D, until you get to the first letter of the first word of the first line of the poem she has been composing in her head all week, and she lifts her eyes when that letter is touched to say yes, you feel with a fresh immediacy the human drive for creation, self-expression, accuracy, honesty and wit–and the importance of writing, which celebrates the value of each person’s unique story and song.

So the prospect of a festival of books seemed wonderful to me. I thought of the opportunity to talk about how to start up an outreach program. I thought of the chance to sell some books, sign some books and meet some of the citizens of Washington, DC. I thought that I could try to find a way, even as your guest, with respect, to speak about my deep feeling that we should not have invaded Iraq, and to declare my belief that the wish to invade another culture and another country–with the resultant loss of life and limb for our brave soldiers, and for the noncombatants in their home terrain–did not come out of our democracy but was instead a decision made “at the top” and forced on the people by distorted language, and by untruths. I hoped to express the fear that we have begun to live in the shadows of tyranny and religious chauvinism–the opposites of the liberty, tolerance and diversity our nation aspires to.

I tried to see my way clear to attend the festival in order to bear witness–as an American who loves her country and its principles and its writing–against this undeclared and devastating war.

But I could not face the idea of breaking bread with you. I knew that if I sat down to eat with you, it would feel to me as if I were condoning what I see to be the wild, highhanded actions of the Bush Administration.

What kept coming to the fore of my mind was that I would be taking food from the hand of the First Lady who represents the Administration that unleashed this war and that wills its continuation, even to the extent of permitting “extraordinary rendition”: flying people to other countries where they will be tortured for us.

So many Americans who had felt pride in our country now feel anguish and shame, for the current regime of blood, wounds and fire. I thought of the clean linens at your table, the shining knives and the flames of the candles, and I could not stomach it.

Sincerely,

SHARON OLDS

Got Vision?

A mini sermon by Emily Joye McGaughy

M-Div Candidate, Pacific School of Religion

You can learn a lot about a place by its bumper stickers. I remember the first time I saw the bumper sticker “Iraq is Arabic for Vietnam.” Startled by the sharpness of that statement, I thought surely it was an over generalization. After all, wars have different contexts—different times and places and most importantly, different faces. Vietnam was about the spread of communism; Iraq is about terrorism. During the Vietnam era there was a draft; today ours is a volunteer army. Democrats Kennedy and Johnson waged war on Vietnam; whereas the Iraq invasion has been a neo-conservative, republican project.

I went to South East Asia with a curiosity about war. Born in 1981, I was the child of two Vietnam era activists. Anything I knew about the war America waged in the 60’s, I heard through the voices of privileged, white, middle class protestant parents. I heard another voice about war, perhaps from the whispers & screams of history, on the 17^th of January when my PSR colleagues and I took a trip to the Cu Chi Tunnels of Vietnam.

The Cu Chi Tunnels were built by the National Front for the Liberation of South Vietnam. They are located 30 kilometers from Saigon and exist today as a tourist site. They are an elaborate tunnel system stretching 75 miles. The NFL used these tunnels as a place to retreat from and organize against US troops who were occupying Vietnamese territory just a few feet above.

I was apprehensive about descending into those tunnels when given the opportunity because they were small and once you passed a certain point, you could not see a thing. Wanting to get out of my comfort zone on this trip, I chose to go down anyway. Besides, I was following Jeffrey Kuan and I knew he’d help me if I needed it. 30 seconds into my descent I froze with sheer terror. My eye-sight and hearing afforded me nothing. Professor Kuan was far enough ahead of me that he might as well not have existed and I was completely void of sight. I panicked—couldn’t move or say anything. The prayerful place in me cried out for help. The voice of wisdom came in response and I knew it was safe for me to retrace my steps. I had the choice to back out of this situation.

When I finally got above ground I began to cry and couldn’t stop when I thought about all the women and men, boys and girls that spent days in those tunnels without the option to surface, who could not see their homes or dads or friends—who could not ‘back out of this situation.’ And then I began to think about all the Iraqi civilians who turn their lights off—and without sight—wait for American soldiers to raid their homes and bodies.

There is a similarity in every war: a lack of vision—literally and figuratively—takes away our power.

Today, we are not allowed to see the bodies of our dead soldiers coming home—a visual right stripped by the government in cahoots with corporate media. Those of us with white skin and money are not seeing our Ivory Tower brothers and sisters shipped off to war anymore because military recruitment targets (literally and figuratively) poor people and people of color. Our veterans are behind decrepit walls, where the injuries and lasting effects of PTSD go unseen by the majority population. As such an apathetic culture, I wonder if our levels of spiritual empathy are determined by whether or not a potential victim looks and talks like us? Or worse, are we only motivated by the things we can literally see?

PSR historian Harland Hogue writes that PSR was founded by a group of people who acted out of “courage bordering on rashness” as they “worked for a world they could not see.” Here on Holy Hill, one hundred plus years later, we too work for a world we cannot see. AND yet, after having visited Vietnam I know one of the imperatives of justice ministry in the 21st century is bringing reality into full view. Be it through bumper stickers, blogs, sermons, demonstrations, classroom education, and/or relationships, may we always denounce the visionless monstrosities of violence.

My prayer is that in this future we cannot see our bumper stickers won’t say “Iran is Farsi for Iraq,” but “I helped close Livermore Labs.” May it be so.

Dulce et Decorum Est Pro Patria Mori: the Old Lie Alive and Well

Dulce Et Decorum Est

by Wilfred Owen

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of disappointed shells that dropped behind.

GAS! Gas! Quick, boys!– An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And floundering like a man in fire or lime.–
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,–
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.