Finally a date with my wife! But just to make it happen, both she and I wrestled with our demons and angels. In my case, Yesterday Thursday 7pm, mourning Somervillians for Palestine (S4P) were in my heart. Mourning--The immolation of Matt Nelson at the Israeli consulate in Boston. Mourning-- The shooting of Caleb Gannon, a pro-Palestinian Jewish lifelong Newton resident--allegedly by a man who had repeatedly harrassed S4P--including the daughter of a colleague of the Human Rights Commission on her way into Somerville High School. Mourning the failure of our Mayor to address the need of a plan for protest protection. All this heaviness as we proceeded to our date. We read James this coming Sunday at Mass--easily distorted into an abstraction on wisdom that begins and ends with purity. But today, our spaces map across and through global mess, and we are called into conversions of hope, daily persistant practices of love, solidarity, shouldering the reality of the oppressed. In her ...

Part I: Saints, as beacons of the Church. Part II: Cultic notes on Black Saints in Early Modern Global Capitalism Train tracks into the city crossed a bridge. Trash and foam marked the rocks of a stream well below. It was probably full of cats, the bag floating, bumping. A sudsy water from industry runoff By the time I walked the tracks with my father, shanties of aluminum roofs,  with cement blocks and masonry floors in some cases, actually strong enough to have survived an earthquake the year before. America was her name, a paraplegic who beamed and in her way welcomed me with a joke, pointing to a picture on the wall, an artist's conception of Jesus. There for half an hour and walking back to the Godparents program I followed the woman, my guide, Soila. I told my dad, in the country for a rotary water project, about America. Maybe he thought of Jessie Crow a 92 year old Lakota elder wasting away from cancer in her home isolated on the Pine Ridge Reservation who my mother would v...

A Time of Listening Listening. The ancient expect us to listen. The seven generations who will come expect us to listen. Prayer with the Early Church emphasized the twofold path of prayer and love as a conversation. Abba Poemen said, “Not understanding what has happened prevents us from going on to something better.” ( The Sayings of the Desert Fathers: The Alphabetical Collection, trans. Benedicta Ward, S.L.G., rev. ed (London and Oxford: Mowbray, 1981), p200. If we listen to the injuries of our neighbor, if we listen to the injuries of generations of trauma, we can begin to make change. And in this way, as I've written, we can become a church in the streets . We come to our advocacy for immigrants informed by outrage, lament, and renewed conviction. Charged to confront structural violence, police murder of George Floyd, endemic inequity, we carry in penance as a community a great task of moral import. For months, absorbed, allowing our advocacy to pause, we took up the scriptures...

 Consanguine--with blood... Why the blood, I asked.  By now we knew each other for five months, monthly meetings. The first by happenstance really, divinely obedient to an invitation for a peacemakers retreat. Sunny Birmingham outskirts, a conversation in the shade. She wore a t-shirt about the SOA Watch protest or equally possible the Nevada test site, both of which Sr. Megan had served as a resister, madly in love with the world, mystical and cosmic, she radiated a joy in her quiet and smiling nodding. I too had gone to jail for justice and was agreeing, joining, enlisting myself if I might borrow and repurpose that term. She and Greg only asked me one question that first interview, if it were that, how did I experience jail? I loved it, wrote, connected with the men in prayer groups, my Spanish employed as a translator for common requests, or as interpreter for a medical visit, finding myself almost useful strangely, and certainly I sang to anyone who wrote me, replies of m...

"Is the white church going to hell?" Cheri Mills asks on Day 38 of her Lent of Liberation. Steadily, day after day, she has pierced the assumptions of the white church. As a whole, salvation history has been passed down through white supremacist structural norms. On any given Sunday, still the most divisive day of the week, the underpinnings of church-going segregation remain intact. John the Divine's imagination of the trial of Jesus is a potent mystery: Pilate questions Jesus "Do you not know that I have power to release you and I have power to crucify you?" (19:10) Jesus has acknowledged that in the face of structural forces, his disciples disband and take cover. "If my kingdom did belong to this world, my attendants would be fighting to keep me from being handed over" (Jn 18:36) His followers would be fighting (Greek agoni-zomai, struggling with all their physical and mental energy like athletes) to keep him from being handed over to the religio...

People's Collective for Justice and Liberation brought together an extraordinary group last Saturday, a virtual platform addressing, healing, summoning us in the struggle and practice of solidarity with Asian-American Lives.  Lydia XZ Brown I think responding to all of the harms of white supremacy of heteropatriarchal gender based violence. I will be speaking of sexual violence in the next minute. Ableism enables the invisibilization of white supremacist violence, those who commit acts of violence against marginalized communities, saying "These people weren't misogynistic..they were crazy, only someone crazy could carry out this act" That ableism harms Black, Brown, Asian, Native people the most. The rhetoric coming out from the police--an institution that never makes us safe--that "someone was having a bad day, has a sex addiction" renders invisible the violence against sex workers, many of whom are disable exploited and fetishized by white people upholds a...

As of January 2021 over 300,000 prisoners have tested positive for COVID-19. "Imagine that in a cell" writes Mumia Abu-Jamal. According to the Sentencing Project, tracking COVID-19 Diagnoses in Juvenile Facilities, the number of known cases reached 3,753 youth February 22 . Their report finds, "Most troubling, facilities in Ohio, Louisiana, and elsewhere have placed youth into quarantines that is little different from solitary confinement in violation of international human rights standards." On Day 32 of her Lent of Liberation, Mills points to the prophet Amos's worship of the God whose love for Black Lives is today fulfilled in our hearing. "Are not you Israelites the same to me as the Cushites?" declares the Lord. "Did I not bring Israel up from Egypt, the Philistines from Caphtor and the Arameans from Kir?"--Amos 9:7 NIV Note: The Cushites are Black people. The word cush means "burnt face."   -*-*-*-*- "Is there hope for hi...