The ardent air of Southern California (So Cal in the currency) creeps in easily enough, and unlike Cosmo Kramer, I’m fine with it. I should be; this marks 10 years of Russ Reid conferences for me.
Over the decade, my comfort at these things has increased. I’m becoming practised at rising above my introversion. But even if this wasn’t the case, I’d still enjoy coming. Yes, the setting is salutary, but most of all I enjoy meeting and listening to people from across North America who do what I do, who have come naturally or intentionally to the vocation of relieving certain aspects of human misery—which means raising resources to that end. And our partner here is Russ Reid, an organization (largest of its kind) dedicated to helping missions like ours flourish. In effect they’re partners in offering real hope to homeless and destitute people. Russ Reid, incidentally, was once an Edmontonian and an acquaintance of Herb Jamieson, a Hope Mission patriarch.
Coming here also restores a certain faith in American people for me. Well, it’s my own lack of reasoning and imagination that this occasionally needs restoring. But perhaps I’m not so different. While we Canadians—when stopping to think—know there are millions of grand-hearted people in the States, it sometimes slips away from us because of the caricature we get from the politicized broadcasts of FOX and CNN—not to mention the sudsy culture of Hollywood. But coming here, and hearing from and seeing hundreds of people who have invested themselves in caring for homeless people is always hopeful and redemptive.
Russ Reid is Hope Mission’s (and close to a hundred other mission’s) partner in the business of fundraising. Or as I prefer: the bizarre vocation of convincing people to follow their deepest desire—bringing them the joy of being the cause of someone’s welfare through the simple act of giving.
And as in every vocation, there are some virtuosos here. Some dazzlingly skilled women and men who have come up through the ranks of frontline inner-city work, or have cultivated a certain humility of mind and character, or both. Whose presence enjoins a particular open-handed posture and invites another into the vision of relieving human misery. And this presence—which is nothing other than a gospel presence—is aptly represented in the leadership and all the staff of Russ Reid.
Now I occasionally have caught myself thinking, and I suspect I’m not alone, that the nature of what we do has an elevation to it. A sort of mark that distinguishes. Of course this is a great danger. And if it’s not caught the "industry" of fundraising takes over and "technique" becomes the driving force; and a chasm opens between the thing we hope to happen and those we need to make it happen, and both it and we become an ugly thing.
This is how fundraising can loose its spirituality—the invitation to join in communal caring, if not continually nourished and pruned, can too quickly devolve into mere manipulation. Well, guilt works for awhile; and if it’s creatively-clever-guilting, it works better. But this kind of fundraising is momentary and has no lasting appeal, no vision.
Certainly, all the creative work is necessary, as well as the research, and too, the science. And when this is joined to a narrative compellingly relating the hard inhumanity of homelessness and the real possibilities of restoration, people connect and respond. What is happening here is that a vision for relief of human despair and the bolstering of liberty is being articulated’; and when the vision is articulated well it touches on something greater than either asker or giver, and a community of love forms and money—the great classifier—is relegated to its proper corner, and the important rises up.
This is the kind of ardent air I don’t mind breathing.
I cannot say as much as a blue butterfly,
I do not speak Nymphalidae,
and I cannot transform these few words
into a silver-washed fritillary.
But on this your 50th year,
I’d still kill to cocoon with you,
still thrill when enwrapped by you.
Happy that our love still finds leaf-shade
in the heat of the day,
finds a shawl and enswathes,
on those colder days.
Happy that your wings are still unfurling.
Happy you’ve picked me as flying companion.
Happy our migratory patterns still entwining
our road still unrolling.
We’ve worried the shape of passing clouds, have been glad of many horizons; and on night-time beaches and through lancet windows, our eyes have searched night stars and day moons—and still we dream—even as our dreams have long been answered in each other.
What do you do when your marital record has been somewhat elastic, your concupiscence keeps getting called up, your chaste is besmirched, you don’t have a solid evangelical base, and you happen to be Newt Gingrich? Well, you make it right—no wrong there. Then you go out and get a "rapture-ready seal of approval" from Tim LaHaye—Mr.
Won’t-be "Left Behind.” (Who’s already left behind 16 books, 65 million copies, three movies, three video games and counting). Then, for the coup de grâce, you go get an endorsement from someone who has already been called up yonder, flown to Glory, already singing and shouting the victory, and so someone who knows Newt never did knock over no Piggly Wiggly in Yazoo, and will rise straight from the river waters to Paradise, and so quite naturally be the most qualified president. That now-omniscient knower? The Reverend Jerry Falwell.
Like Tim said,
As my friend, the late pastor Dr. Jerry Falwell told me personally, ‘Speaker Newt Gingrich is the most qualified man in America to run as president of the United States.’
Should the latest version of the National Defense Authorization Act, signed by Obama Dec. 31, come into effect March 3 as scheduled, civil liberties in the USA will take a “catastrophic blow.” And so perhaps it is fitting that yesterday, Martin Luther King Day, Chris Hedges filed a law suit against Barak Obama.
The supine and gutless Democratic Party, which would have feigned outrage if George W. Bush had put this into law, appears willing, once again, to grant Obama a pass. But I won’t. What he has done is unforgivable, unconstitutional and exceedingly dangerous.
Curiously, even the FBI, the CIA, the director of national intelligence, the Pentagon and the attorney general didn’t support it. They believe it may hinder their ability to investigate terrorism, “because it would be harder to win cooperation from suspects held by the military.”
But it passed anyway. And I suspect it passed because the corporations, seeing the unrest in the streets, knowing that things are about to get much worse, worrying that the Occupy movement will expand, do not trust the police to protect them. They want to be able to call in the Army. And now they can.
Here, in commemoration of Martin Luther King Day (USA), are a few of his lesser known quotes taken from, The Words of Martin Luther King Jr. – selected by Coretta Scott King (1984). Many of his quotes—not just these—sound so thoroughly current they could have been penned yesterday instead of the 50’s and 60’s. And of course his encouragements and challenges are timeless.
“A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.”
“A religion true to its nature must also be concerned about man’s social conditions….Any religion that professes to be concerned with the souls of men and is not concerned with the slums that damn them, the economic conditions that strangle them, and the social conditions that cripple them is a dry-as-dust religion. Such a religion is the kind the Marxists like to see—an opiate of the people.”
“I have the audacity to believe that peoples everywhere can have three meals a day for their bodies, education and culture for their minds, and dignity, quality and freedom for their spirit. Many people fear nothing more terribly than to take a position which stands out sharply and clearly from the prevailing opinion. The tendency of most is to adopt a view that is so ambiguous that it will include everything and so popular that it will include everybody.”
“All too many of those who live in affluent America ignore those who exist in poor America. 
In doing so, the affluent Americans will eventually have to face themselves with the question that Eichmann chose to ignore: How responsible am I for the well-being of my fellows? To ignore evil is to become an accomplice to it.”
“Let us say it boldly, that if the total slum violations of law by the white man over the years were calculated and were compared with the law breaking of a few days of riots, the hardened criminal would be the white man.”
“There is nothing that expressed massive civil disobedience any more than the Boston Tea Party, and yet we give this to our young people and our students as a part of the great tradition of our nation. So I think we are in good company when we break unjust laws, and I think those who are willing to do it and accept the penalty are those who are part of the saving of the nation.”
“The straitjackets of race prejudice and discrimination do not wear only Southern labels. The subtle, psychological technique of the North has approached in its ugliness and victimization of the Negro the outright terror and open brutality of the South.”
“Everybody can be great, because anybody can serve. You don’t have to have a college degree to serve. You don’t have to make your subject and your verb agree to serve. You don’t have to know about Plato or Aristotle to serve. You don’t have to know Einstein’s theory of relativity to serve. You don’t have to know the second theory of thermo-dynamics to serve. You only need a heart full of grace. A soul generated by love.”
Loneliness is just a place.
A branch on the leafless tree
in the median,
the square of grey grass
beneath a transmission tower,
a condominium called Quest,
yet for that, half-empty—
but for those who sit
at winter morning windows
and dress for deserted dawns,
and weekly walk the avenue
past a thousand strangers,
to arrive back at the window
and find asylum
in a gloaming branch,
and the evening—
softer with a candle,
and morning far enough away
from the crumpled cereal box,
the cold milk and ceiling tiles.
Dawn, far enough away.
“Orion,” according to the Boston Globe, “is America’s finest environmental magazine.” In 2010 Orion again won the Utne Independent Press Award for General Excellence, and was a finalist for a National Magazine 
Award in the Essay category.
“Orion’s mission is to inform, inspire, and engage individuals and grassroots organizations in becoming a significant cultural force for healing nature and community.” Orion also understands that “cultural transformation cannot happen without personal transformation.” (Although, I would add that transformation and change is not as linear as this suggests—there is still mystery here.)
Why do I tell you all this? Well, because Orion is an advertising free, beautifully crafted, literary magazine devoted to bringing people and nature closer together—and therefore dedicated to bringing people closer together with people—and so worthy of support. This year, Orion is also celebrating its 30th anniversary. And at the bottom of the list is the happy fact that I had a small piece published in the January/February edition. Pick up a copy at your newsstand, or better, purchase a subscription.
I like the ribald poems of sloggers and shufflers, their sweeping hands and glint-eyes, the meat still in their teeth as they tell it loud. I like swaggering poems—poems that have a pack of Players rolled up under the short-sleeve of a white t-shirt. I like bawdy, libidinous poems, flowing flowering Song of Solomon poems; I like a full-lipped-Flaubert of a poem. And I like the balanced elegance of a plaited poem; a filigree of Frost. I like the surprise poem—the one that at the end of a perfect day happily pushes you in the pool; and I love the one that steals you away to a slow river with broad grassy banks, and lets you lie there and breathe. Such permission in a poem is like roughed-in plumbing—all you need to do is choose your tub, fill and bathe. I like poems that are unsure of themselves; a teacher will say these are weak and deficient poems, but I like them because they are so much like people. I like a carefully-wrapped poem, and inside something turquoise and without purpose—something you’ve always wanted but would never buy for yourself. I like care-less poems, poems that sleep-in, then leave you notes under your windshield wiper while you’re in church—telling you when and where to meet them. I love a free-verse small epiphany poem—like a friend skipping class that hangs outside of your schoolroom window madly waving her arms and grinning, waiting for you to notice her, and the clear sky behind. I also like the ones that take you seriously, respect your mind and your time—and if not your time, at least your mind. I don’t like freighted teleological poems or big cosmic ontological poems. They are like model rockets—all decals and plastic—that topple over in a minor gust, spark and fizzle and spin in circles on the pavement. I don’t like poems that tousle you, because I hated being tousled, and even hate the word tousle. And I don’t like hail-fellow-well-met cowboy poems, although I’ll admit to smiling through a few. At the same time, I don’t like elevated poems, pointy poems, God-bless-’em poems, poems that talk too much and don’t listen or look—those kind don’t have ears, which means they can’t have a heart. I don’t care for poems that support a thesis, unless the poem came before the thesis was conceived, in which case it can be brilliant and beautiful. But I do like poems that spitball you, chase you and chide you with their slant rhymes and bumpy meter and screwy trochee—and you sit there and take it because they’re saying something important. But the poem that breaks me open, the one that hurts without doing me harm, oh, give me this; give me your signet, your sonnet, your elegy or epic, and I’ll climb, kneel, open my hands, eat the host and drink the wine; trust me, I’d wait through any black night with you.
Welcome to Grow Mercy’s revised and expanded year-end list of unfounded propositions, or things I believe but can’t prove:
Time, love, quarks, discrete math, other minds, healing touch, the efficacy of hugs;
that words, as Elie Wiesel says, in moments of grace can attain the quality of deeds;
that our deepest desire is to be each others joy;
that an inner void must not be leaped over but into;
that both Kierkegaard and Nietzsche were necessary;
that you can love the earth and not love God, but you can’t love God without loving the earth;
that God with a cherry-bomb equals a big bang;
that mycelium will always remain mysterious;
that there is life on Gliese 581 C, and Harvey Pekar and Peter Popoff live there;
that the mind is not separate from the body, except perhaps for Benny Hinn, augurs and certain certified psychics;
that a sock prefers the single life;
that if scientists were mere sceptics we still wouldn’t know about the Copernican system of planetary movement;
that extraordinary claims do not immediately need extraordinary evidence;
that beauty is its own proof;
that if everything was verifiable life would cease to be;
that doubt is necessary and healthy but that the spirit of scepticism is a sickness;
that most things we hold as true are by way of other authorities;
that it was exalted certainty that sent the boxcars to Birkenau and not iffy disconsolate minds;
that to live without faith is impossible and to attempt it is a castration of life;
that there are more than a few fish swimming around with coins in their mouths;
that desire is triangular, and its nature is mimicry;
that a cultural obsession with sex is not a sign of social depravity but an indication of deep loneliness;
that if and when we humans become fully real we will no longer impose ourselves upon creation but see ourselves as one aspect;
that Gary Larson and Al Purdy are pure tellurians—and each in their own way;
that science is humble in theory but not so much in practise and that this is what it has in common with religion;
that faith needs a frame, and reason needs a trellis;
that we are not born with an existential void but develop it over time;
that the non-existence of God can be proven by symbolic logic;
that a formally valid argument can nevertheless be false;
that the argument of infinite regression is absurd;
that the earth rests on the back of a turtle…and that there are turtles all the way down;
that positive universal claims and negative existential claims are not testable in all possible worlds;
that all ravens are black, except for one or two, maybe;
that presuppositions are held viscerally and emotionally and half-consciously;
that God is a verb and not a noun and that existence is not a property;
that the word piffle can be appropriately applied to a plethora of propositions;
that when the Mayan Calendar is up, we’ll just switch to the Dan Brown Calendar;
that our deepest and dearest beliefs are not logically verifiable;
that miracle is still the best term to describe life’s origin;
that hope and mercy are stronger than hate and violence;
that Holderlin was shining in his wooden tower when he said, “But where danger is, grows the saving power also.”
That at the end, heralding a true beginning,
comes not the apocalypse but apocatastasis;
that instead of escalation toward extremes,
the possibility of universal hope, reconciliation and restoration.
