Previous Meditation

Intelligent Person's Guide to Disaster

The tsunamometer has gone off worldwide. Tidal waves of the current proportion get our attention. They may even get our attention in a large enough way to replace the last attention getting mystery, 9–11. The proportions of this disaster, over 150,000 dead and counting, are so large that they defy explanation.

The first thing an intelligent person does in response, therefore, is to resist explanation. Someone asked me if this was global warming at work. Someone else assured me this was God’s will. (!) There is no need to blame God. “The Lord passed by, and a great and strong wind rent the mountains, and broke in pieces the rocks before the Lord, but the Lord was not in the wind.” (I Kings 19:11) Yet another person told me she could no longer enjoy her Christmas gifts. They had lost meaning in the great ocean swell.

Explanation is not nonsense but it is no sense. Explain to me why Suzie’s 18-year-old daughter and her boyfriend died in the car crash, caused by the 78 year old driver who survived it. I dare you to satisfy my curiosity. Explain Iraq to me, for that matter, or Sarajevo, or the Sudan. Give me the reason for Aids while you are at it. Catching meaning sometimes strangles it. We live as disenchanted people, with or without tsunamis, because we put reality in too small a box. If there is a gift in this unexplainable horror, it will be in a renewed respect for mystery, a new respect for the untamable sea and the dry land.

It is no accident that Providence is the name of more than one American city. Providence tries to tame fate and bend it towards hope. When we experience a great disaster, even as bystanders, we go providential. We act towards hope. We do something. We send money, not canned goods or used blankets. The intention in the food and blankets is good but it is finally impractical and sentimental. I will never forget the cranberry scare in New England in the nineties. There I learned a lot about practical mercy. Our church’s food banks filled up with cranberry sauce. Sending money is what intelligent people do to help with disasters. We use charities we trust, with long histories in the work of mercy. We SPEND money – and may even give more than we have rather than give the cranberries we don’t want. There is nothing wrong with excess when the suffering is excessive. That principle applies to thinking nations as well as to thinking individuals.

Simultaneously the act of measurement is crucial. Grandiosity is a real problem in acts of mercy. I remember a woman in China on my tour bus. She stopped at every site and jumped off the bus to give pennies to the peasant children. She always asked someone to photograph her so doing. Scriptures argue that the widow’s mite is as good a gift as any. We cannot help the whole situation. We can help a little. We get acquainted with our own smallness and insignificance in disaster. This is no time to over function but it is time to function. This is no time to take a Pilate. Instead it is a time for lament, the great wail that knows very little can be done. Lament dislikes Mr. Fix It. Lament keeps us from numbing and lets us act if modestly.

“I have come into deep waters, and the flood sweeps over me …
Rescue me ...
let me be delivered …
Do not let the flood sweep over me,
or the deep swallow me up
or the Pit close its mouth over me.”

(Psalm 69. vv. 2, 14-15)

The psalmist’s lament recognizes that we are not just concerned for others in the Tsunami. We are also concerned for ourselves. We may as well admit it.

Ancient laments and affirmation point us back towards life. Many don’t know what we have when we have it. Many ignore the graces of the day and focus on the fears about tomorrow. Tsunami may bring us back towards life by helping us enjoy the Christmas or other gifts we have in a way we might not have been able to do before the great sea. We lament, we act, we care, we weep, and we go on. We head back towards life whenever and however death chases us.

Previous Meditation

What is Simplicity?

Simplicity is living as though the spiritual, artistic, intellectual or just plain fun matter as much as the material. The Benedictines would call this the art of washing dishes. The Marxists would call it the eroticisation of everyday life. William Wordsworth described simple living as "plain living and high thinking." I say we are living simply whenever the inner world has an edge on the outer world. We are enjoying, appreciating, seeing, experiencing something-living a life-as well as earning a living. All the things that make a life a life come to us clear. Then we go to work, hassle traffic, worry about retirement. It's not that taking care of business is not important to us. It is. It is just an inch less important than the inner world, what some call spirituality, which is unfortunately too long a word to be simple.

This morning I took my new dog on a walk. He had come to us from Miami and never seen snow, never seen stairs and never felt cold. In each experience he resisted, as in sitting at the bottom of the stairs and refusing to climb, in first feeling the snow on his feet and trying to jump up in the air, in putting a dumb look on his face when he climbed out of the airplane carrier in Connecticut after leaving the tropics only three hours earlier. What impressed me was that he was only afraid once. After he managed each cold and fear, he went on. He didn't repeat the fears over and over. He just had to do them once. I have declared him brilliant, another companion on the road to simplicity, where we don't have time for repeat fears of the cold. He reminds me of materially poor people whose inner spirit lets them sing in refugee camps at night. There they are free of the poverty of the rich many of whom have forgotten how to sing.

Goethe's Faust is a story about the conflict between self-development and economic development. What Faust wants is a dynamic process that will include every mode of human experience, joy and misery alike, and that will result in the self's unending growth. The search for simplicity is clearly Faustian-or more of us would refuse the repetition of fears. There is a characteristically modern kind of evil: indirect, impersonal, and mediated by complex organizations and institutional roles. We can't' even touch its stairs so as to climb them. The very process of development, even as it transforms what moderns call a wasteland into a thriving physical and social space, recreates the wasteland inside the developer himself or herself. We lose the capacity of the inner. We forget how to enjoy. We forget how to see. We forget how to live in a place. Our minds are as colonized as countries once were.

I was warned this morning by deer tracks in the snow outside my door. I was warned of enchantment, of the animal spirit. I was warned of the arrogance and farfetched dangerous fantasy of "thinking locally and acting globally." What could any of it mean compared to deer tracks in the snow or remembering to sweep off that dark front porch which, once iced up, stays iced all winter? So much of our lives ice us up all winter. So much of fear refuses to be tamed by the animal within us.

Sacred Chow: Looking at Food in a New Way

I have read the signs, "Buy Local Food." I have grieved for the loss of the family farm - while simultaneously enjoying a coy cynicism about it. Of course I wish my food came unpackaged, fresh, local, natural - and of course I know that way of life is gone forever. I am not naive. I am sophisticated if romantic. I have changed. I am renewed in my hope.and a little tender about telling you about it. You will surely make fun of me because I am about to break one of the big rules. I am about to be optimistic about the future of the planet.

Attending the Slow Food "Salone de Gusto" in Turin Italy, October 20-25 changed my cynical nostalgia to robust hope. The 5000 producers of goat cheeses and heirloom apples, the choclatiers and mushroom gatherers, the duck hunters and the fish catchers from around the world who there gathered restored my hope. Food might still taste good. Little people might not be crushed by something called "Free trade" or globalization. A new glocalization is possible-especially if those of us who enjoy chocolate remember how to make it fairly. Of course it is fine if trade is free. But it is magnificent if trade is fair.

The 5000 producers who showed their wares in Turin were joined by international activists from around the world in "Terra Madre", the gathering across the street that founded a Latin American coop, "Sin Fronteras", without borders. "Semillas", a Mayan cooperative from Mexico who save the old seeds and who don't know what biodiversity is, except in their spiritual guts, joined them. They have not forgotten that when the Spanish invaded and colonized they tried to destroy the seed corn. These women are saving the seed corn. They were joined by Vandana Shiva of the Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Ecology in New Delhi. She too saves seeds, forms coops and keeps women at the heart of local agriculture in a country that fantasizes it will be saved by agribusiness. Prince Charles who champions the slow food movement and Terra Madre joined them simultaneously. He gave a speech based in a John Ruskin line, "Industry without art is brutality" I shall not tell you how hopeless the tomato from the supermarket has made me over the years. I can now tell you that there are people in every country around the world who are keeping "Gusto" alive.

The food was the base of an emerging culture of people who refuse to major. They know that only growing coffee, only growing bananas; only depleting soil will kill us. In what is a disaster of biblical style and depth; industrial agriculture in the US is taking away soil faster than it is producing food. We lose 2.5 tons of topsoil for every ton of grain or hay harvested, according to the US Department of agriculture. This is a disaster because topsoil-like oil-is renewal only in a geological timeframe. The people of Terra Madre, led so eloquently by Carlos Petrini of Bra, Italy, are building soil. People who build soil give me hope.

My hope persists even in the face of the higher prices that such food will cost me. Thank God I am paying for what the food is worth-instead of destroying the land and the food so that I can afford it. (By the way I feel similarly about gas prices as the only possible taming of my personal participation in the destruction of the ozone layer. Let us pay for the earth and the air.) These measurements of price and food are terribly important, no where more important than to the poor of the world.

As I left my friend at the final feast of Terra Madre, she--a Jewish Foundation Exec who has her nails done every Saturday morning-was dancing the polka with an organic turkey farmer from Maine. I had danced an Italian jig with a Kenyan man. What we cherish from any journey is the inward shift that takes place in us; physical travel is merely the gateway to inner travel. When we "hit" the road, we hope to throw ourselves absolutely overboard. We hope to spread ourselves thickly-and we hope not to understand all that we have seen. We want Morocco or Korea to remain a mystery to us. We also want our food and our land and this spiritual matter called nature to remain a mystery to us.

I had spoken of myself as possibly burnt out on the environmental movement. Now I know that I don't 'even know what I was talking about. I was never lit. How could I (industrial age metaphor) be burnt out? I am no longer an indifferentist about the source of my food. I know it as deeply eucharistic in form, shape, taste and toll. We ARE part and parcel of nature and if it sickens, so will we. It is more than a little embarrassing that I needed to go to Italy to learn local. It is also embarrassing that I am in such need of support for the love I have for land. I needed to see these people. I needed to hear them. I needed to eat food and dance with them. I now hope again that chow is sacred.