Cynicism and Hope

Now the sun is low
     and the sky is clear
          and I shiver only in the shadow of myself.

. . . my Provider, his grace is sufficient for me.

This is the song I heard when I entered worship on this anxious Sunday.

During the passing of the peace, several people who recently came to the U.S. as refugees were the first to embrace me.

The sermon was about God’s provision for Elijah, the widow of Zarephath, and the widow’s son.

After the sermon, a man who is preparing to move into an apartment after a long period of homelessness spontaneously sang “Great Is Thy Faithfulness.”

After worship a dear friend who was once homeless invited me to lunch.

When I returned home and opened my email, there was a message from a man who is a quadriplegic: “God is good. God is great . . . all the time.”

All the time.

I’d like to believe about my mother and me that the apple hasn’t fallen far from the tree. But I’m not sure that I deserve such a high compliment.

What I do know is that her legacy lives on in each of her five children. That’s why we nominated her for Cincinnati Woman of the Year for 2010. She didn’t win, but she should have. My nominating letter tells why:

On behalf of her five children and her extended family, I nominate my mom, Pat Sweeney, as a Cincinnati Woman of the Year for 2010.

I was told that in this nomination I should focus on my mom’s work as a board member—and now board president—of Greater Cincinnati Behavioral Health Services. She has made a great contribution there, raising the agency’s visibility and starting Champions of Hope to raise funds, recognize community leaders in the field, and educate the community about living with mental illness.

But to me, Mom’s role on the GCB board is not a standout accomplishment, something to set apart from everything else she does and is. Heading the board of the agency that has long served her youngest son is simply a logical next step in a lifetime of service to her family and the community. “GCB was a place I could go for help in a difficult situation,” she told me. “I wanted to help make that available to others.”

This is Mom. Practical, generous, and above all determined. Ask her how she made it through the early 80s—managing a house full of teenagers after she and my dad divorced—and she will say simply: “You do what you gotta do.”

A lot of people survive divorce. They do what must be done to keep their children on track and enough money coming in while they are suffering the greatest crisis of their lives. Mom did all of that too. But here’s why she’s a standout:

Mom knows that what you “gotta do” is a lot more than take good care of the people who live in your house. She knows that just as healthy families require time and commitment and hard work, so does a healthy community.

At every phase of her life, Mom has devoted herself to building the Cincinnati community. My memory is filled with snapshots of my mother serving others. As a preschooler I watched her cut out cardboard figures for my Montessori class. When I was eight years old we saw her on TV as she served communion during Archbishop Joseph Bernardin’s installation service. A few years later we chatted in her bedroom as she organized donations for an auction to benefit the Resident Home for the Mentally Retarded. When I was in high school she would hustle out of the house one evening each month for “Network”—the Cincinnati Women’s Network, which she and some friends founded. When one of my sister’s friends was going through a family crisis, Mom took her in as another daughter.

And she did much more that I didn’t see. Mom volunteered for the United Way for years and chaired one of its allocations committees. She served on the pastoral council and co-chaired the Family Life Bureau of the Archdiocese of Cincinnati. She served on the boards of 4Cs (Comprehensive Community Child Care) and the neighborhood homeowners association.

Mom had to cut back on her volunteer work during the years when she traveled frequently on business, but when her sixty-fifth birthday approached in 2005, she was all set to retire and take on a full slate of new commitments. Right away, she joined the boards of GCB and Women Helping Women, whose Sunday Salons she chaired in 2007 and 2008. She conducted architectural tours and served as a poll watcher and continued to devote a lot of time to parenting her youngest son.

Here is Mom’s lesson to me and my siblings: It takes time, hard work, and unflagging commitment to raise a healthy family—especially when all seems to be falling down around you—and you must give extra time to the ones who need you most. But if you steadfastly press on, someday you will see the fruits of your labor: a healthy new generation, interdependent and compassionate, carrying your legacy forward.

Likewise, building a healthy community requires time, hard work, unflagging commitment and extra care for those who need it most. But if we follow Pat Sweeney’s example and do what we gotta do, we will see Cincinnati make it through these trying times and emerge stronger, healthier, more interdependent and more compassionate, carrying on the legacy of the city’s most dedicated leaders.

I love you, Mom. Happy Mother’s Day.

“When you come after one part of the body, you come after all of us.”

It sounds like a threat, doesn’t it?

It’s the concluding sentence to Jim Wallis’s God’s Politics blog post on Arizona Senate Bill 1070, which may be signed into law over the weekend.

Reading it, I imagine many thousands of documented people committing the newly created crime of transporting their undocumented brothers and sisters, prompting arrests of documented and undocumented people together. They will fill the jails, singing canciones de libertad. The law will become unenforceable and other states will cancel their plans to enact similar legislation.

What the world needs now is threats like this.

I believe in the healing power of homemade soup.

And conversation.

And friendship.

And dear, praying people who chop onions and cry so you won’t have to.

There is perhaps nothing more painful than to reside in a place where hope is nearly dead.

We hope because hope encourages us, but when we begin to realize that what we hope for is probably unattainable, hope turns wicked.

What to do then? Live in the torture of dying hope? Walk through the fire of abandoning hope, dreading what we will find on the other side?

Or throw a Hail Mary pass, giving hope one last crazy try?

Of course this is all about hope in temporal things. Our eternal hope is certain.

Our eternal hope—and the living reality of the beloved community that is its pale reflection—is the best source of courage for that crazy try. And it is the best promise of a safe (though painful) landing if the pass falls short of the end zone.

Ours is a congregation of many languages. We are slowly learning how to communicate and to be one body together.

Two of the most important lessons I believe we will learn together are the value of songs in the heart language, and the value of music as a form of expression that transcends language.

This morning we enjoyed musical offerings in Nepali and Swahili. Toward the end of the Nepali song, one of our Bhutanese sisters was standing with hands upraised, shouting hallelujah, while a Burundian sister joined in with ululations.

I believe that both expressions were firsts from our Bhutanese and Burundian sisters on a Sunday morning at Living Water.

Tonight my friend and former pastor Sally Schreiner Youngquist, now community leader of Reba Place Fellowship, showed me some pictures and documents that belonged to her father, C. Bryson Schreiner, a Pittsburgh-area attorney who passed away earlier this year at the age of 96.

One of the treasures she shared is a statement that he and two other members of a peace committee submitted to their congregation before the U.S. entered World War II. They warned about the “imperceptible poisons of propaganda, prejudice and passion” that make can us act contrary to our better judgment about the effects of war. The statement appeared in the Pittsburgh Press on November 12, 1939, as a letter to the editor from the peace committee’s chair, Daniel R. Carroll.

Read on …

WHY WE DO NOT WANT WAR

No one wants War. But in addition everyone owes it to himself, his country and his fellowmen to think out clearly why he does not want War before the imperceptible poisons of propaganda, prejudice and passion make it difficult or impossible to do so. To help in this task your Christian Peace Committee has prepared the following brief list of reasons why we are convinced that the United States should not engage in any war except as a very last resort and in self-defense only. For these reasons also we should constantly thank God for thus far sparing our country and implore his mercy upon all of the unfortunate belligerents.

WE DO NOT WANT WAR BECAUSE:

ECONOMICALLY -

1. War is a non-productive use of capital and labor.

2. War destroys property and man-power.

3. War is expensive to wage.

4. War dislocates the economic system, stifles initiative and competition.

5. War creates future burdens; debts, taxes, disabled veterans, widows and orphans.

6. War is followed by economic depression, unemployment, poverty.

BIOLOGICALLY -

1. War kills human beings.

2. War produces starvation and malnutrition.

3. War wounds and disables, often for life.

4. War spawns new plagues and increases the virulence of diseases.

5. War throws off balance the ratio of the sexes.

6. War causes deterioration of the human race by leaving the less fit to survive and propagate.

POLITICALLY -

1. War results in confusion of loyalties and shifting of boundaries.

2. War disturbs international and domestic law and order.

3. War creates subject nationalities and oppressed minorities.

4. War sows the seeds of future rebellion and revenge.

5. War requires centralized regimentation which is the death of individual liberty.

6. War subordinates democratic processes to military despotism.

CULTURALLY -

1. War distorts the reason and warps the mind with passion and prejudice.

2. War debauches science into an agency of destruction.

3. War stifles the arts, and destroys works of art.

4. War perverts institutions of learning into bureaus of propaganda.

5. War sidetracks education from pursuit of the true and useful.

6. War interrupts cultural progress.

MORALLY -

1. War cheapens the value of the human individual.

2. War breaks down moral standards and right inhibitions.

3. War brings out and inflames the worst in human nature.

4. War deepens the grooves of national and racial egotism and selfishness.

5. War breeds crime waves and trains gangsters.

6. War is an incompatible means for attaining the goal of moral perfection.

RELIGIOUSLY -

1. War disobeys the Sixth Commandment: “Thou shalt not kill.”

2. War usurps the judgment seat of God to whom alone vengeance belongs.

3. War violates Christ’s command: “Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you. ”

4. War transgresses the Golden Rule.

5. War contradicts the Brotherhood of Man, and Fatherhood of God.

6. War exalts the national state above the Kingdom of Heaven.

Respectfully submitted,
Christian Peace Committee of the Mt. Lebanon United Presbyterian Young Peoples’ Forum

Daniel R. Carroll, Chairman; C. Bryson Schreiner, Frances E. Mayne.

9:54 Obama on businesses laying off or not able to hire because of health care costs. And this is only going to get worse as costs go up.

9:57 This will be interesting, having a moderator (Obama) who is the chief representative of one side …

9:58 We have included a lot of Republican ideas in the Senate bill.

9:59 “We have tried to take every single cost containment idea that’s out there” and tried to include them in this bill. I’d like to find out which of your cost containment ideas are not in the bill and see whether we can include them. Alexander, you named some ideas you’d like in a bill that are already there.

10:02 McConnell points to poll numbers unfavorable to reform. (Of course, he doesn’t say is that a lot of the opposition is from people who think the bills are not strong enough.)

10:05 Coburn-R: Get rid of fraud. Tort reform.

10:07 Coburn-R says we can incentive healthy eating for users of food stamps and make school lunches healthier because right now food stamps and school lunches are causing diabetes. He forgot to mention massive subsidies for corn-growing.

10:10 Obama: Every good idea we’ve heard about eliminating fraud and abuse in government health care we’ve incorporated. So that’s an area where we agree. But that doesn’t account for rising costs in private marketplace. Sebelius is working on tort reform. There are a lot of preventive measures in the bill already.

10:12 Hoyer-D: Americans hope we’re here talking about them, not about us.

10:15 Hoyer-D, to Coburn-R: We agree with you about cost containment, and a lot of what you suggest is in the bills. You may have a better way of doing it, but we do have wellness as a focus. We agree with your premise on food stamps and school lunches; let’s find a way to get there.

10:17 Hoyer-D: You agree with us on preexisting conditions and caps on coverage, but it’s not in your bill (I think I heard that right). We agree on coordination of care.

10:18 Hoyer-D: Public option! Would open competition. Our caucus didn’t all agree on that.

10:20 Obama: I’d like to hear Republican objections to allowing individuals and small businesses to be able to become part of a large group like government employees have so they’ll have negotiating power–which would drive down costs. (Is he talking about a public option?) Some have agreed in the past on this. Is there something about the way bills have been structured that makes you concerned?

10:22 Republican response doesn’t answer Obama’s question but suggests Republican proposal re allowing association health plans. This would be better than the exchange that’s in the “huge bill.”

10:25 Baucus: “Gaps, in my judgment, are not that great.” We allow buying and selling across state lines in exchange.

OK, I need to break for some work-work.

9:25 Mr. Alexander, how will taxes and mandates cause premiums to go up?

9:29 Mr. Alexander, passing components of health care reform via reconciliation is not the same as abolishing the filibuster. (I guess this is live-arguing on a blog, not live blogging, huh?)

9:31 The administration’s BATNA–best alternative to a negotiated agreement–is probably reconciliation. Alexander is suggesting that this summit will be fruitless unless the administration deep-sixes its BATNA from the get-go.

9:35 Pelosi: “They don’t have time for us to start over.” Amen, Sister.

9:39 Pelosi is talking about potential entrepreneurs being locked down because of their reliance on employer-provided health care for a family member with a pre-existing condition.

9:40 Pelosi: “Who can say ‘ram’?” We started this effort just a few days after the inauguration–with an effort to do it in a bipartisan manner.

9:43 Reid, to Lamar Alexander: “You’re entitled to your own opinions, but not your own facts.” We need to talk about facts here.

9:45 Reid: Of course reconciliation is not the only way out. But reconciliation has been used for many things, especially by Republicans, for Contract with America and tax cuts for rich people.

9:45 Reid: Talking about many Republican amendments in Senate bill. “So let’s look at the facts a little more, ’cause they can be stubborn, y’know?”

9:49 Reid brings out the tired If you have a plan, let’s see it. That’s not going to help. Republicans will say, we gave you a plan!

9:51 Obama talking to Lamar Alexander about process: A lot of the elements you mention are in the Senate bill. So let’s talk about what we do agree on, then what we don’t agree on, and whether we can bridge differences. I don’t know if we can bridge differences, but I hope we can. Before we talk about legislative process, let’s talk about substance. Maybe we’ll surprise ourselves and find out we agree more than we disagree.