A Desperate Need for Imagination

A Desperate Need for Imagination

The world is desperately in need of imagination.

I will never forget the words of an Iraqi doctor I met while I was in Baghdad as a peacemaker in 2003, protesting the “shock and awe” campaign. As the bombs fell on the city, the doctor held a young girl with missile fragments in her body. He raised his head to the sky and said, with tears rolling down his cheeks, “This violence is for a world that has lost its imagination.”


This is the country, world and global neighborhood in which we live.

 Where the average North American consumes the same amount as more than 400 Africans.

Where we have enough weapons in the U.S. alone to create more than 100,000 Hiroshimas.

Where 25,000 people die a day from poverty. Nearly 16,000 of those are children, which means every five seconds a child dies of a preventable disease like malaria.

Suffice to say, much of the death and suffering of our world is fundamentally caused by a lack of imagination.

It’s time to take the words of Romans 12 seriously, with the admonition: “Do not conform to the patterns of the world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.” Historically, the prophetic imagination has shown us that God’s people are holy troublemakers, rabble-rousers and mischief-makers. We are folks who refuse to accept the world as it is and insist on moving it closer to what it should be.

It’s time for fresh imagination. It’s time to reimagine the world.

Thankfully, God is good at dealing with a world in crisis — He has had a lot of practice.

And the human imagination flourishes when times get tough, because we are forced to innovate.

This is how I’ve seen it in my little world — the concrete jungle of Philadelphia.

Just this past year in Philadelphia, there was a congregation that was doing what Christians do — hospitality. As many congregations do around the world, they had begun opening their church building to the homeless so they could have a warm, safe place to sleep overnight. The city government got wind of it and began to crack down.

The pastor was told they were not allowed to run a shelter as they did not have proper permits, nor would they be granted them because the city did not want a shelter there. So the congregation prayed, and the Spirit moved. They announced that they would not be running a shelter, but they would have a revival from 8 p.m. to 8 a.m. every night. The city did not dare stop a revival. It was brilliant. I attended the revival one night. It began with great singing, worship and sharing, and transitioned around 10 p.m. to a 10-hour period of  “silent prayer.”

We see this imagination in friends in Atlanta who were met with anti-homeless laws that made it illegal to urinate in public. (In fact, some homeless folks have been arrested and charged with public indecency and exposure, which makes them registered sex offenders.) So our friends launched a “Pee for Free with Dignity” campaign, which insisted people could not be arrested for public urination if there were no public restrooms. They marched to City Hall carrying toilets and laid them at the mayor’s door. Soon Atlanta had some public restrooms.

This imagination is seen in the growing movement of urban farming. Vertical gardens tier food production with full-sun plants on top, working the way down to the bottom where there are fish cleaning the water that is then pumped back to the top to trickle down. One of these urban farms in Wisconsin boasts of being able to produce food for more than 2,000 families on two acres of vertical urban farming—and much of it is done by the people in the neighborhood.

I saw this imagination on a college campus that had created a “green dorm” where they recycled the water from their showers and used this “greywater” to flush their toilets, and where they had laundry machines powered by stationary bikes. Not only was it good for the creation, but it was good for their cardiovascular. After all, if you wanted clean undies, you had to work for it.

In Jesus, we see an invitation to join a movement that preaches the Gospel with our lives as well as with our mouths. For too long the Church has promised the world life after death, while a dying world has been asking, “But is there life before death?” I am convinced the Kingdom of God is not just about going up when we die, but about bringing God’s dream down to earth. It is time to reimagine the world. As Indian activist Arundhati Roy has said: “Another world is possible. Another world is necessary. Another world is already here … on a quiet day I can hear her breathing.”

The world is waiting, groaning, aching for another world—for the Kingdom of God to come on earth.

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Shane Claiborne is a prominent author, speaker, activist, and founding member of the Simple Way. He is one of the compilers of Common Prayer, a new resource to unite people in prayer and action. Shane is also helping develop a network called Friends Without Borders which creates opportunities for folks to come together and work together for justice from around the world.

This article originally appeared in the Summer issue of Reject/Apathy — check them out!







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The Safety Net Frays (cross-post)

Commentary The Safety Net Frays Morally and economically, it's wrong for federal budget makers to go after the poor. By Elizabeth Palmberg

[ mmk Note: All Emphasis Mine ]

In the past two years, the social safety net has helped more Americans than any time in a generation. So why are so many people trying to tear it to shreds? The recession brought on by Wall Street's casino speculation has pounded Main Street hard; unemployment has hovered near double digits for two years. Ordinary people are searching for jobs day after day, week after week. At a national hiring day in April, McDonald’s got more than a million job applicants, and rejected more than nine-tenths of them. The House of Representatives' budget, which would cut Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, foreign food aid, health-care reform, and unemployment benefits -- while sparing military spending and giving tax breaks to wealthy corporations and individuals -- would be a moral disaster for every American. It's clear (even to rampaging liberals such as the economists at Goldman Sachs) that the proposed federal budget cuts would be a drag on the economy as it digs out of the hole caused by the recession. During the Bush years, Congress handed out big tax breaks to the rich -- cuts that originally had an expiration date so legislators could avoid talking about their long-range budget folly. Congress and the Bush administration also green-lighted a $1.2 trillion bender of unneeded wars, a splurge that will keep on spending, due to our responsibilities to veterans. Now Congress is shocked -- shocked! -- to discover that deficit spending has been going on, and is pointing fingers at the scapegoats that seem least likely to fight back. Introducing his slash-and-burn budget, Rep. Paul Ryan predicted that without such gutting, America's safety net was in danger of becoming "a hammock." A hammock? News flash: This is mass unemployment, not a siesta. Food stamps, for example, are a safety net that people use for a limited period -- nine months, on average -- to feed their families while they get through what is often the worst economic time of their lives. It's worth mentioning that, when the U.S. is not in a recession, the Federal Reserve intentionally aims to keep unemployment above a certain level, in order to fend off excessive inflation. You read that right: The government makes sure that at least 3 to 5 percent of Americans seeking work at any given time are unemployed. It's not necessarily crazy for it to do this, but it is crazy to scapegoat the poor afterward. This is particularly true because, for three decades in the U.S., the rich have been getting richer and the poor poorer. This is no accident; it's from years of trade agreements that ship working-class jobs overseas, government policies that let union-busting employers break the law with only a slap on the wrist, and tax and contracting giveaways to big business. Redistribution? You're soaking in it -- the kind of redistribution that shifts still more wealth to the wealthiest. The House's proposed budget is just the latest and most shameless installment. Last year, Manhattan hedge fund manager John Paulson took home $4.9 billion in pay. Before the crash, Paulson helped inflate the housing bubble by designing junk mortgage-backed securities for Goldman Sachs -- and then profited from the pop by betting that those very securities would fail. Yet instead of being run out of business, last year he made about a billion and a half more than the federal food stamp program spent in all of New York City. The economic evidence is clear: Inequality this stark kills jobs. When people in the middle and working class make a decent income, their purchases fuel the real economy. When all the wealth is pumped to the top few percent, they pour money into dangerously volatile speculation. The moral evidence is clear: It's wrong to make false implications that people are poor and unemployed because they are shiftless, and that the level of national shiftlessness inexplicably doubled about the time the housing bubble popped. And it's wrong to intentionally target the most vulnerable in society. None of us knows when we might need that social safety net -- and all of us are lessened when we yank it out from beneath our fellow human beings. Elizabeth Palmberg is an associate editor of Sojourners.

From the UCC Network: 07/07/2011 "Atheists"

Atheists

Excerpt from Romans 2:12-16

"When Gentiles, who do not possess the law, do instinctively what the law requires, these, though not having the law, are a law to themselves.  They show what the law requires is written on their hearts . . ."

Reflection by Quinn G. Caldwell

I like atheists.  They tend to have considered the issues.  They tend to have asked themselves the holy questions about the origins of the universe, about happiness, about what constitutes the good life, about good and evil, injustice and mercy, about how to live.

Of course they and I disagree on at least one fundamental point.  Of course many are grumpy, judgmental, and dogmatic (certain public intellectuals come to mind).  Of course many have chosen atheism out of laziness.  Then again, those things are true of many Christians, as well.

By and large, my experience has been that the average atheist has arrived at her position through careful thinking at some cost to herself, and lives a life marked by kindness and generosity.  Which is saying something in a world where many people's vision of the good life is spending half their time watching TV and the other half shopping—precisely so they don’t have to think about big questions or make sacrifices.

Paul wanted to convince his co-religionists that God is at work everywhere, even in those with religious convictions different from Paul's.  So it is, I believe, with atheists—though most would not thank me for saying so.

If what Paul says is true, then God is shown forth more fully in the life of a careful-thinking, good-living atheist than a lukewarm Christian-by-default.  If what Paul says is true, God might even prefer the (former) to the (latter).

Prayer

God, thank you for working through all kinds of strange people—even me.  Amen.

Quinn G. Caldwell is Associate Minister of Old South Church in Boston, Massachusetts, and co-editor, with Curtis J. Preston, of the just-published Unofficial Handbook of the United Church of Christ.