buddhism

Rev. Dr. Katharine Rhodes Henderson: Helping Each Other Find The Way At Occupy Wall Street

by on October 19, 2011

Huffington Post…

“How can there be a march and I’m not there?” This was the question that came from my mother, a feisty but proper Southern lady, when I told her I was headed downtown to see Occupy Wall Street for myself. Her question was rhetorical since being in such a crowd would have exceeded the limits of her strength. And yet, it is what she, a civil rights activist in her day, has been asking for some time now: “How long will it be before people are marching in the street?” Marching for her was a default in times of national crisis, an appropriate collective cry of anguish “when the earth groans in travail and we ourselves” (Romans 8:22-23) and, in the same moment, an opportunity to draw energy and courage from the shared experience of being together. “You make the way by walking,” the saying goes. My mother, a Depression baby, remembers meeting her father on the streets of Wilmington, N.C., right after the 1929 stock market crash, when he reported that $100 was all the money they had. She knows something of the fear and want that many Americans are experiencing today. I guess it’s in my DNA because at Occupy Wall Street I found the crowd energizing and welcoming. “Tell me what democracy looks like?” “This is what democracy looks like,” was the through line of the chants and songs. And it was an apt description: a panoply of marchers of all colors and sizes, union members, nurses, students and organizers, talking about living wages, tax codes, corporate greed and the observation on a poster held by children who seemed to know from firsthand experience that “shelters are not family friendly.” The crowd was purposeful but not goal oriented, which seems right given the complexity of our current situation to which there are no easy solutions. We are beyond winnowing it all quickly down to bullet points and a neat list of demands. And it was heartening that though movements are aided by Facebook and Twitter, people need to be together in real time. What I fantasized about mid-march was a surprise appearance by Warren Buffet. I am aware that some of those who have made their millions on Wall Street have actually traveled to Occupy Wall Street, perhaps incognito. And I have spoken to other Wall Street people who are fearful, curious, disdainful or defensive about Occupy Wall Street, not knowing how to engage it. Many across the economic spectrum are wrestling with how to find our way back to valuing the public good over individualism; a just economy over unbridled greed; compassion enacted through public policy. The Christian tradition offers insight into the proper relationship to wealth: No one can serve two masters; for a slave will either hate the one and love the other, or be devoted to one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and mammon.” Wealth is not to be hoarded, either by individuals or institutions, but used productively for the common good. In a world of enormous poverty, wealth is relative, and we all have to make peace with how we define generosity individually and how we enact justice collectively. Whatever you think about Occupy Wall Street, people are talking about it — a lot. This was true for my colleague and her husband. Their conversation with their two kids was how was it that Dad was working on Wall Street when Mom was marching in Occupy Wall Street? It made for a complex, ethical, soul-deep conversation at the breakfast table. My hope is that the protest will be a rallying cry for all Americans to remind us of our shared values, not simply the occasion for replicating the political polarization that already grips our country, our neighborhoods and even our families. At a time when there are 46.2 million people in the U.S. living in poverty , we cannot afford to demonize, stereotype and dismiss each other. We need everyone to come to Liberty Square and help each other find our way to a future where abundance is shared, no one is in need and the future looks brighter than today.

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Rev. Dr. Katharine Rhodes Henderson: Helping Each Other Find The Way At Occupy Wall Street

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The Rev. Jacqueline J. Lewis, Ph.D.: God’s Economy

by on October 18, 2011

Huffington Post…

I grew up in the Black Church, where the milkman and the accountant sat together on Sunday. Singing spirituals and hearing scripture rooted us in God’s vision to end discrimination, share resources and promote peace. It was the vision that gave my parents and their parents hope; it inspired their struggle for civil rights. They taught their children how to be leaders on Wednesday, marched for racial justice on Saturday, and gave what they had of their time and their finances to make the church run. Once enslaved Africans were freed, there was always an economic gap. Some went to college, others took up the trades, and still others worked in menial but necessary jobs. As wealth increased, folk did not forget from whence they came; they reached back and pulled someone up and helped someone out. I have not forgotten those lessons of community and caretaking and pulling together as a village. The early church was like that as well, learning from its Jewish leaders -⎯ including Jesus himself -⎯ that in God’s Economy, the poor, the orphaned, the widowed, the sick and the lame were the responsibilities of the community. In our country, there are divisions and anger around class. I want to change the conversation from class warfare to class collaboration. A faithful coalition of people can have a greater impact toward a more just society when they pool resources, enact strategies, build bridges and challenge the status quo. In the early church conflicts arose about who should be first and who should go last, but they were resolved by evoking the teachings of Jesus: In God’s Reign there are new rules. Everyone is invited to God’s banquet, the first will be last and the last will be first. These radical teachings guided the first congregations; they shared what they had with one another and took care of the least among them. I think we need to resurrect these ideas and ideals and not waste time on us-vs.-them tactics. God’s Economy does not have to be a dream in our faith communities. This is, to my mind, what it means to be faithful. On several occasions, members of my congregation at Middle Collegiate Church have made donations directed to benefit someone else. “Give this to someone who really needs it,” they tell me as they quietly pass me a donation. All of us know someone out of work. Fifteen percent of Americans live below the poverty line. No one of us can do all of this, but churches and other faith communities, non-profits, private citizens and our government can partner to care for one another. We can adopt a family or a classroom. We can create jobs for teenagers and help them get ready for college. We can put people back to work as we build our infrastructure and create new technologies. We can restore the American Dream. But more importantly for me as a Christian pastor, we can live into God’s Vision, God’s Economy. The prophet Isaiah reminded the atoning faithful that the true fast that God desires is for us to share our bread with the hungry, to take the poor into our home, to clothe the naked and to not ignore our own families (Isaiah 58:7). When Jesus was teaching his disciples about the reign of God, he told a parable of an owner of a vineyard who hired laborers at various times during the day. At day’s end, he paid the ones hired early in the morning, the ones who were hired at noonday, and the ones hired at the end of the day the same wage (Matthew 20:1-16). The workers who came early were angry that those who came late to the vineyard received the same pay. How dare that landowner treat everyone the same! How outrageous is the kind of love in God’s Economy! I must admit the state of our present economy outrages me. And the Occupy Wall Street movement has our country talking about class and financial inequalities again. Many children eat only one meal a day through their school lunch program. It is not acceptable for a nation with this much wealth to threatened that program with tax cuts. Older people should not have to choose between medicine and food. I am less concerned about how we got here or whose fault it is. I am focused on what can we do now and how will we pull together to do it! The questions before us are not just economic, they are ethical and moral. Middle Collegiate Church is incredibly diverse around race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender identity and finances. Some of our members own several houses, some bring their belongings to church in a bag. Most of us are in the middle, struggling to make ends meet, or saving a little for our future and our children. No matter where we are on that continuum, we pool our resources to make sure we provide more than 1,500 meals every month to people who are hungry. We provide warm coats and back-to-work clothing for hundreds of people as well. We partner with programs that address homelessness in our city. But we want to do more. We want to change the systems and structures that make our programs necessary. In this rich nation, we have enough resources to care for all of us and then share with our global neighbors. We are calling for an interfaith coalition of caring people to join us. Students and senior citizens, homemakers and the homeless, brokers and bakers, clergy and computer software designers, teachers and technicians — if you are out of work but ready to work for systemic change, if you are tired of the bickering and ready to broker God’s Economy, we want you with us. Let’s put our minds and hearts together. Let’s talk and blog and ask the hard questions. Let’s recommend courses of action and then hold our leaders accountable. Let’s fuel our revolution with prayer and Spirit. It is too simplistic to demonize all of the people who make more money than we do. Good people with wealth share it every day. Wealthy people share my middle class critique of a system that allows lobbyists to protect corporations from the appropriate tax; a tax code with loopholes that poor people will never find or fit through; and a bailout that benefited banks while the poor are still poor. There has to be some accounting for that, some rectifying of this situation. Let’s turn our restlessness into revolution, our anger into action, our despair into demonstration. And let’s never forget the Power at work within us that is able to do more than we can ask or imagine. That Power is Love. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. once said, “Cowardice asks the question — is it safe? Expediency asks the question — is it politic? Vanity asks the question — is it popular? But conscience asks the question — is it right? And there comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular; but one must take it because it is right.” On Sunday, Oct. 30, join us online as we stream worship at 11:15 a.m. (EST) at MiddleChurch.org and then stay as we stream a town-hall conversation about God’s Economy. You can add your questions and ideas to our Facebook page or tweet @middlechurch for a town-hall conversation about God’s Economy. Let’s change the conversation.

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The Rev. Jacqueline J. Lewis, Ph.D.: God’s Economy

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David Nichtern: Is Karma To Blame?

July 28, 2011

What is the law of karma? In Buddhism, the law of karma describes how causes and effects interact in our world. The point of understanding how karma works is to see the nature of things as they are, beyond any kind of delusion or wishful thinking. What does the law of karma have to do with the current economic crisis? Maybe our national economic policy could use a good healthy dose of seeing “things as they are”. In our individual meditation practice, there is no magic bullet, no fantasy transformation, no gimmicks — we have to work through our karma, brick by brick — it is manual labor. With meditation practice, we can see how our mind works — what creates positive karma (compassion and wisdom), and what creates negative karma (aggression, attachment and ignorance). That is how we get clarity about how certain causes create certain conditions — how did we get where we are and what we can do about it. With the same approach, with real scrutiny, perhaps our current debt ceiling crisis can be seen to be nothing other than our national money karma coming to fruition. There are some basic principles at work here, immune from any kind of fancy talk or manipulation. Certain basic causes and conditions have created the current situation: 1. We have borrowed too much money. Just as many of us have done as individuals, as a nation we have simply borrowed too much money, and now our creditors are knocking at the door. I don’t think you need an advanced degree in economics to figure this out. Sometimes common sense is more valuable than intricate theories. It’s time to pay some of this debt down, just as we would (and as some of us have) if this were our individual problem only. 2. We have been too greedy. As a nation (and many of us as individuals) we have been willing to sacrifice long-term prosperity for short-term gain, over and over again. Many of us are addicted to a hyper-extended materialistic lifestyle (certainly by global standards) and have been willing to go deeply into debt to maintain it. Additionally, a tiny percentage of extremely wealthy people are now in a position to manipulate our entire economy to further their own self-centered, limited agenda, which they are now doing on a global level. Gordon Gekko said “greed is good,” but now we will get to see if that will be his “final answer.” 3. Our national political arena has become overrun with personalized agendas and bad manners. We seem to have a chasmic divide amongst our so-called “leadership.” Creative friction can sometimes be very effective in flushing out different points of view and perhaps reaching a higher fusion. But we seem to have gone well beyond that kind of creative friction in our national politics to the level of some kind of permanently feuding mentality. Like the Hatfields and the McCoys, we now see our two “parties” immersed in an ongoing tit for tat, with nobody being very clear about the origin or the point of it all. There seems to be a crescendo of personalized agendas in the public sector. Temporal leaders, just like good spiritual teachers, could be invited to check their ego at the door. Wouldn’t that be refreshing? The solution? We need bigger vision. Let’s think about what would be good for ourselves and others. Are these really two completely different things? Perhaps we bring out the best in each of us and are also happier individuals when we have a feeling of contributing to a common cause beyond self-aggrandizement. If we are arguing about what would be the best outcome for the larger good, that could be a healthy argument to have. If we’re going to keep playing the “me, me, me” game, we might be spinning on this particular wheel of karma forever — like a giant Ferris Wheel with all of us on it. Follow David on his website ( www.davidnichtern.com ), facebook ( facebook.com/davidnichtern ), twitter ( twitter.com/davidnichtern ), or youtube ( youtube.com/davidnichtern )

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Eve Tahmincioglu: Beware the Brit Humes in your office

January 7, 2010

What if you were having trouble finishing a major project at work and your boss suggested you “come to Jesus” because it would help you deal with your challenge? And let’s say you were a Muslim, a Hindu, a Buddhist, or an atheist, and you really didn’t want to come to Jesus? In the workplace my friends, this is a big fat no no. Legally you are not allowed to push your religion down anyone’s throat at work. You also can’t put down a colleague’s religious faith and you can’t hinder an individual’s right to practice their faith if it doesn’t impede day to day business. Pretty simple, no? Well, not quite. Discrimination in the workplace is alive and well. Actually, it’s at record levels when it comes to religion and the disabled, according to a report on 2009 bias charges released yesterday by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. And I recently wrote about how religious expression in the workplace is frowned upon. Are you surprised? Probably not if you had the pleasure of hearing Fox News newsman Brit Hume’s comments recently to Tiger Woods. Hume put down the golfer’s faith of Buddhism and suggested he turn to Christianity to help him deal with his philandering problem. “I don’t think that faith offers the kind of forgiveness and redemption that is offered by the Christian faith,” Hume said. “So my message to Tiger would be, “Tiger, turn to the Christian faith and you can make a total recovery and be a great example to the world.” The fact that a journalist — and I use that term loosely as it pertains to Hume — would go on a national news show and put down another high-profile individual’s faith should tell all of us that religious bigotry, and bigotry as a whole, is a growing problem in this country. The numbers released by the EEOC yesterday are disheartening. Religious bias charges increased to 3,386 in 2009, the highest number in the last decade. And charges for disability discrimination jumped to a record 21,451 last year, up from 19,453 in 2008. National origin bias is also on the rise, with charges climbing to 11,134 in 2009. I asked EEOC spokesman David Grinberg why he thought bias was on the rise. “The increases in national origin and religion charges may be an outgrowth of the fact that the American workplace has become more ethnically, linguistically, and religiously diverse,” he said. Clearly, people like Hume don’t seem to much like the diversity. And have you listened to the constant anti-diversity rhetoric oozing from a host of commentators since the Christmas Day attempted airplane bombing. This from Retired Lieutenant General Thomas McInerney: “If you are an 18-28-year-old Muslim man, then you should be strip searched. If we don’t do that, there’s a very high probability that we’re gonna lose an airliner.” When I hear stuff like this, I’m not surprised there’s discrimination in the workplace. Isn’t the workplace just a reflection of the country as a whole? If it is, it’s looking like a pretty ugly mirror image right now.

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Yakuza Bosses Sell Sex, Drugs, Finagle U.S. Liver Transplants: Book Review

November 24, 2009

Review by Rocky Swift Nov. 25 (Bloomberg) — For the opening scene of a book, it’s hard to beat a hardened gangster calmly threatening to liquidate the main character, who’s furiously smoking clove cigarettes as he ponders his strategy. That’s how Jake Adelstein starts “ Tokyo Vice ,” his memoir of working as a police reporter for Japan’s Yomiuri Shimbun , the world’s largest newspaper, and how his snooping landed him in hot water with a particularly violent faction of the yakuza. The story follows Adelstein through 12 years covering everything from roadside shakedowns to serial murder as the only American member of the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department’s press club. “Tokyo Vice” is bookended by Adelstein’s investigations into how a sickly crime boss named Tadamasa Goto and three other yakuza managed to get lifesaving liver transplants in the U.S., abetted by U.S. authorities. This story turned out to be the reporter’s savior, since once he published it Adelstein became too high profile to kill. Before he was “pissing off yakuza,” Adelstein was a student at Sophia University , a Jesuit-affiliated school in the center of Tokyo. On a whim, the Missouri native took a battery of tests to join the Yomiuri, a media leviathan that also owns a television network, a theme park and the Giants baseball team, Japan’s equivalent to the New York Yankees. Very Organized Crime Adelstein’s first glimpse into the world of organized crime comes from a mob boss worried that the local police won’t drink tea at his offices anymore. “Tokyo Vice” is a primer on such complicated relationships between Japan’s cops and criminals. The yakuza emphasize the “organized” in organized crime, earning toleration from the authorities and public by keeping violence low and providing the prostitution and drugs that some parts of society secretly desire. In the years Adelstein worked the crime beat, the yakuza evolved from extortion, prostitution and drugs to high finance, orchestrating real estate scams and manipulation of the stock market. Even now, the Tokyo Stock Exchange obliquely acknowledges the yakuza’s meddling in markets, calling them “antisocial” forces in official documents. The most famous case detailed in the book is that of Lucie Blackman , a British citizen found partially dismembered near the home of a man later convicted of multiple rapes. She had come to Tokyo to work as a hostess in Tokyo’s Roppongi entertainment district, and investigating the case drew Adelstein deep into the rabbit hole of Japan’s sex industry. Through it all, Adelstein was able to use his otherness as an advantage. Fear among the yakuza that a crackdown might result from wiping out an American probably saved his life, he writes, as did the mistaken suspicion that he was an undercover agent for the CIA or — because of his Jewish heritage — Israel’s Mossad. Backhanded Compliments Much of the book is made up of reconstructed, movie-like dialogue, with a jarring number of backhanded compliments for Adelstein, as when a thug says the American is “stupid, obtuse, stubborn and reckless,” but “I guess that’s what makes a good journo.” While his tale is gripping, it shows the strain of a writer rushing to the finish line. The Goto transplant saga, the most compelling part of the book, is teased in the beginning and doesn’t return for some 250 pages. Goto’s priest says the gangster has renounced his former ways to study Buddhism, Adelstein reports with skepticism. Still, that might be enough to rest a little easier in Tokyo. “Tokyo Vice: An American Reporter on the Police Beat in Japan” is published by Pantheon (335 pages, $26). It will be published by Kodansha in the U.K. on Jan. 1. To buy this book in North America, click here . ( Rocky Swift writes for Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are his own.) To contact the writer on the story: Rocky Swift in Tokyo at rswift5@bloomberg.net .

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