A little while ago I posted a summary of my carbon footprint and noted that my New Years resolution was to spend an hour a week trying to do something about climate change. The main thing I have done since then is think about the sources of my carbon footprint and reflect upon ways in which I can reduce it. It is apparent that the major source of my footprint is transportation. My lifestyle, which is a fairly modest Western one, and my home energy consumption also contribute significantly to my carbon consumption.

The biggest single part of my carbon consumption is air travel. If I were to drop air travel from my lifestyle I would reduce my carbon consumption by almost half. If my family was to get rid of its car and I stopped traveling by air I could get my carbon consumption down to about 6 mtc. That is still three times the target goal for individual carbon consumption. Reducing my carbon consumption further would require me to essentially drop out of Western culture. This underscores my assertion that climate change can only be addressed at a societal level. Simply making lifestyle choices is not going to fix it.

I may decide to give up air travel. I am not ready to do so at this particular juncture. It would be a very dramatic, life altering step, that I would need to think through in depth. As an interim step, I have started investigating carbon offsets and whether they actually contain the possibility of reducing my carbon footprint. I have compiled a bibliography of about half a dozen scholarly articles on the subject. In the next couple of weeks I will post the summaries of their arguments and some sort of synthesis of my own thoughts on offsets.

as preached at the First Religious Society of Carlisle, January 12, 2014

This morning I want to begin with a story. It comes from Victor Hugo’s “Les Miserables.” The book, as you might remember, centers around the former convict Jean Valjean and his struggle to lead both a good life and remain free from prison. One of the major themes of the book is redemption and transformation. Towards the beginning of the novel Jean Valjean has an experience that allows him to transform his life from that of an outcast, a former convict, to a man of wealth.

Shortly after he is released from prison Jean Valjean travels to a small town looking for lodging. He has a passport with him that declares him to be a former convict. As a result, no one will give him food or a place to sleep. No one, that is, except for the local Bishop. The Bishop takes him in, gives him food and a bed to sleep in. In the middle of the night Valjean repays the Bishop by stealing his family silver.

Early the next morning the police catch Valjean as he slinks out of town. They ask him about the silver he is carrying. He claims that the Bishop gave it to him as a gift. The police take Valjean to the Bishop for questioning. When the Bishop sees Valjean, he confirms his story. The Bishop even goes so far to tell Valjean that he forgot to take a pair of silver candlesticks with him. These were the only items of value that Valjean had not stolen from the Bishop’s household. Before Valjean leaves, the Bishop takes him aside. I will let Hugo describe their final exchange:

“The Bishop drew near to him, and said in a low voice:–

“Do not forget, never forget, that you have promised to use this money in becoming an honest man.”

Jean Valjean, who had no recollection of ever having promised anything, remained speechless. The Bishop had emphasized the words when he uttered them.

He resumed with solemnity:–

“Jean Valjean, my brother, you no longer belong to evil, but to good. It is your soul that I buy from you; I withdraw it from black thoughts and the spirit of perdition, and I give it to God.”

The Bishop’s gift of silver to Jean Valjean was a form of grace. Grace is an unexpected and undeserved gift that transforms us, even if only for a moment. Grace is not something that we earn or create for ourselves. We can only receive it and try to give it to others.

The story of a thief who steals something from a holy man is an archetypal one. It occurs in many cultures. This morning I want to use it to explore different aspects and kinds of grace. In the version of the story found in “Les Miserables,” grace is something that one human being gives to another. It is not supernatural but natural.

After the gift of the Bishop’s silver, Valjean becomes a sort of holy man himself. He saves lives, brings up an orphan and ultimately tries to redeem his own great adversary, the policeman, Javert, who spends decades hunting him.

The profoundly transformative grace that Hugo describes at the beginning of his novel is rare. It is not an every day grace. It is something extraordinary, the stuff of fables, the sort of experience that we are lucky to have once or twice in our lives.

While the Bishop’s grace might be extraordinary, its essence was not. The core of the Bishop’s gift to Valjean was that of the kindness of strangers. This should not be a foreign experience to any of us. Who has not felt the warm smile of a stranger as they walked down the street? Such moments can sometimes stick with us. They can bring a heightened awareness to us and cause subtle shifts in our perception, sometimes allowing us to see the world around us as beautiful, which is its own form of grace. Ezra Pound tried to capture the sense of such a moment of grace in his two line poem “In a Station of the Metro”:

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.

Pounds’ poem shows how, for him, the faces of a subway crowd were momentarily infused with deep beauty. This is a much more mundane kind of grace than Hugo describes in “Les Miserables,” but it is grace nonetheless.

These moments of mundane grace, small kindnesses, gentle looks and unexpected beauty can be fleeting. On occasion they remain with us for a while, but most of the time they are forgotten almost as they occur. Such mundane grace can come from almost anyone, be they strangers or our most intimate friends and family, and at any time.

We can give grace just as easily as we can receive it. Another version of our story, this one from the Hasidic Jewish tradition, illustrates how.

It seems that once there was a Rabbi who encountered two thieves in the process of robbing his home. He was not a rich man and they were about to take everything he owned. When he saw them he did not grow angry or try to stop them. Instead he told them, “take these things as a gift from me.” The thieves fled in confusion. Being a Rabbi, he was concerned about the souls of the potential thieves. So, from that night forth before going to be bed he would say “All my possessions are held in common. They belong to everyone.” He wanted to make certain that if other thieves came they would not be guilty of theft.

In this version of the story the Rabbi gives grace to others indiscriminatingly. They may be coming to steal his possessions but instead of committing a crime, they end up receiving a gift. The Rabbi denies himself ownership over his possessions so that if someone steals them they won’t be guilty of a sin.

For the Rabbi the giving of grace is a spiritual practice. Every day he reminds himself that what belongs to him does not really belong to him, but belongs to everyone. He is indiscriminate in his well wishing. He gives it to the stranger as easily as he does to members of his community.

Each of us is capable of giving grace in the same way that the Rabbi does. We can do it by being kind to those around us. You never know when simply smiling at someone might change their mood, or even save their life.

A few years ago I read about a young man who survived a suicide attempt. He threw himself off of the Golden Gate Bridge and into the San Francisco Bay. Before he jumped he sat on the bridge for a while. He felt alone in the world and told himself that all it would take to stop his suicide was someone simply talking to him while he sat on the bridge. Many people passed him. No one so much as said hello to him. After an hour or so he leapt off the bridge. Someone could have stopped him if they had given a stranger the simple gift of a hello. But no one did. All he needed was a simple act of grace. No one gave it to him. Yet anyone could have.

This reminds me of how easy and how challenging it can be to give grace. It easy: sometimes all it takes is a smile. It is hard: it requires us to move out of our comfort zones; to reach out to those who surround us; to be aware of those who surround us. And that can be a great challenge. It is one I fail to meet almost everyday. When was the last time you smiled, and I mean truly smiled not just nodded in recognition, at a stranger?

This brings me to the third version of our story. It comes from the Zen Buddhist tradition.

Many years ago there was a Zen Master whose life was very simple. He lived by himself in a small hut at the foot of a mountain. One evening, while he was away, a thief snuck into the hut only to find that there was nothing to steal.

After a little while, the Zen Master returned and found the thief. “You have come a long way to visit me,” he told the burglar, “and you should not return empty handed. Please take my clothes as a gift.” The Zen Master stripped off his humble garments. The thief was bewildered, but he took the clothes and ran away.

As the thief fled into the distance the Zen Master sat naked, watching the moon. “Poor fellow,” he thought, “I wish I could give him this beautiful moon.”

Of the three versions of the story, this is the one that I like the best. It raises questions about what grace is and who is capable of giving it. It suggests that the reception of grace is facilitated by a person’s attitude. To look up at the moon and think that it is a gift to give might seem ridiculous. On the other hand, being able to look at the moon and realize that it is beautiful is a gift. Not everyone has that capacity at all times.

I imagine that most of you have had the experience of seeing a breathtaking moon rise. You are driving down the highway and then, over the next ridge, it catches you unaware, seemingly out of nowhere, a brilliant yellow moon. The craters stand out and the orb of the moon appears larger than it should. A cloud drifts by, the stars shine brighter, and everything in the world suddenly seems impossibly beautiful. On occasions like that, the moon itself is a sort of grace. You did not do anything to deserve it. It came unbidden and on its own, but there it is. To cultivate an awareness of the grace of the moon is to become more aware of the profound grace that surrounds us at all times.

Maybe we have to strip ourselves naked like the Zen Master to truly experience the grace that surrounds us. Perhaps it is only once we have shorn our minds all of the distractions of materialism that we are able to truly experience the world around us as a kind of grace. Life itself is its own unasked for gift. This is something that I think most people forget from time to time. Especially in the chaotic hustle and bustle of our consumer culture. Who has time to appreciate, or even pay attention to, the moon amidst cell phones, computers and televisions? When was the last time you looked at the moon?

When the Zen Master gave away his last clothes to the thief, he might have been thinking that he was removing the last of his material distractions. In that moment, as he stared up at the moon, maybe his absolute lack of material possessions made him acutely aware of the simple gift of life. Did he understand that each breath, each moment, is a form a grace? Did his own nakedness make him even more conscious of the beauty that surrounds us all?

And what about the thief? What was the thief thinking as he fled the Zen Master’s hut? Did the gift of clothes transform him somehow? With his material needs met, was he able to see the moon? or did he remain the same old vagabond after the encounter?

Between the Zen Master and the thief the question must also be asked: who is giving and who is receiving grace? Perhaps both give and receive in their own way. Perhaps the theft of the clothes is as much a gift to the Zen Master as the clothes themselves are to the thief. Each brings the other a new sort of awareness.

The Zen story also suggests that we are most aware of grace when we cultivate the right attitude towards it. This is a spiritual practice. The Zen Master was able to do without his clothes and appreciate the beauty of the moon precisely because he was a Zen Master. Not everyone would have the same experience in a similar situation.

Not all of us, and probably none of us, will ever become Zen Masters and be able to both give and receive grace in the way that Zen Master in the story does. But we can cultivate the right attitude for giving and receiving grace. This is the attitude of gratitude.

Our lives are their own forms of grace. It is proper that we respond to the unexpected gifts in the world with gratitude. As Elizabeth Tarbox said in our reading this morning: “The world is full of blessings.” When we express gratitude we become aware of the grace that exists in our lives. Tarbox suggests this when she expresses gratitude for having a heart that can break while at the same time remembering “the sunrise over the ocean.” For the complicated world we live in–with all of its blemishes–even gratitude is not enough. But cultivating gratitude can make us more receptive to the grace around us. It can cause us to be thankful for even the pain in our lives. Such pain makes us human. A spiritual practice of gratitude can cause us to expand our definition of grace to encompass all of life itself.

Grace is something we receive and it is something we give. Each version of the story tells us something about grace from a slightly different perspective. The story from “Les Miserables” reminds us of just how transformative grace can be. The Hasidic tale teaches us that grace is something that we can easily give each other. And the Zen Story complicates the picture and tries to remind us that grace can be found in nature and when we cultivate the right attitude.

Let us then be aware of the grace that exists in our lives. Let us be grateful for the sun, the moon and the stars. Let us appreciate the cracks in the sidewalk, the weed flowers that come up through concrete and the shine of broken glass. Let us remember the miracles found in an orange. Let us be thankful for the kindness of strangers and of our friends. Let us be ever open to the unexpected and the grace that we may receive at any moment.

Thank you for listening to me. I am grateful for that.

Amen and Blessed Be.

I am currently taking advantage of the UUMA’s excellent coaching program to work with a coach on my preaching. We have decided to read a book on preaching together and I have been tasked with drawing up a short list of possibilities to select from. So… I am looking for suggestions on the good books on homiletics. In particular, I want a book that is written for experienced preachers, not for seminarians just learning how to preach. Three books that either friends have written or suggested that I haven’t read might make the short list: Matthew Johnson Doyle’s “Newborn Bards: A Theology of Preaching for Unitarian Universalists,” Kay Northcutt’s “Kindling Desire for God: Preaching as Spiritual Direction,” and Barbara Brown Taylor’s “The Preaching Life.” I would leave to know if readers of this blog have other suggestions.

I have started to study for my general exams, which take place at the end of May. As part of my study process I am writing notes on all of the books on my reading lists. I plan to post the notes on a few books that I think people I am in regular dialogue with might be particularly interested. Here’s this morning’s notes on Karl Marx’s The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte:

Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, translated by Terrell Carver in Marx’s ‘Eighteenth Brumaire’: (post)modern interpretations, ed. Mark Cowling and James Martin (London: Pluto Press, 2002)

This is Marx’s analysis of the rise of Louis Bonaparte in the wake of the 1848 February revolution and abdication of King Louis-Philippe. It covers the period of 1848 to 1852, when Bonaparte assumed dictatorial powers. Marx divides the era into three periods:

1. The February period or the overthrow of Louis-Philippe, which ran from February 24 1848 to 4 May 1848;
2. The Constituent Assembly period, May 4, 1848 to May 28, 1851;
3. The Constitutional Republic, May 28, 1851 to December 2, 1851.

He identifies these periods largely with the classes who held power in the country during them. Only in the first period was the proletariat in charge. After that various bourgeois parties held power. Louis Bonaparte skillfully manipulated them until he was able to consolidate his own power at the end of 1851, beginning of 1852.

In the text Marx lays out a theory of revolution and political transformation. It is summarized in the first two sentences of text: “Hegel observes somewhere that all the great events and characters of world history occur twice, so to speak. He forgot to add: the first time as high tragedy, the second time as low farce” (19). By this he means that during times of revolutionary struggle revolutionaries always look to the past for inspiration. They begin by imitating the past but only succeed in creating revolutionary change when they move beyond imitation. The first example he gives of this is the way in which revolutionaries during the French Revolution looked back to the Roman Republic for inspiration. The second example he offers is the way that the revolutionaries of 1848 and Louis Bonaparte both looked to earlier struggles and figures, in the revolutionaries case it was the French Revolution and Louis Bonaparte is was that of his uncle.

Another important theme that Marx takes up is how during revolutionary times people, particularly, the bourgeoise, prioritize order above progress. People are not often aware of this tendency within themselves which leads Marx to observe, “Just as in private life one distinguishes between what a man thinks and says, and what he really is and does, so one must all the more in historical conflicts make the distinction between the fine words and aspirations of the parties from their real organization and their real interests, their image from their reality” (43). What’s really going on is always class struggle. That struggle may be veiled, from the participants themselves, by words.

Towards the end of the book Marx provides a description of class in relation to his discussion of the French peasantry. It is worth quoting in whole:

Thus the great bulk of the French nation is formed by simple accretion, much as potatoes in a sack form a sack of potatoes. In so far as millions of families get a living under economic conditions of existence that divide their mode of life, their interests and their culture from those of other classes and counterpose them as enemies, they form a class. In so far as there is merely a local interconnection amongst peasant proprietors, the similarity of their interests produces no community, no national linkage and no political organization, they do not form a class. They are therefore incapable of asserting their class interests in their own name, whether through a parliament or constitutional convention. They cannot represent themselves, they must be represented. (100-101).

I am not a big one for New Year’s resolutions. This year, however, I have decided to make one. I intend to spend at least an hour a week trying to do something about climate change. Climate change probably presents humanity with an existential crisis. I suspect that part of my efforts will be split between advocacy and organizing, research and personal transformation. Climate change is a collective problem without individual solutions. That is to say, I, by myself almost certainly can’t do anything about it. Addressing it will require change on the scale of the whole species. However, that isn’t an excuse for inaction. Most problems are social in nature. Their solutions usually begin with individuals. And while I have no illusion that my efforts will contribute significantly to addressing climate change I would like to at least make a minimal effort towards being part of the solution.

As a starting point for reflections on personal transformation I thought I would try to figure out my carbon footprint for 2013. A pretty through carbon calculator can be found here. According to it my total carbon footprint for 2013 was 13.80 metric tons of carbon (mtc). That places me below the U.S. average, which is 20.4 mtc, and way above the global target for combating climate change, 2 mtc.

My calculation is based on the following information:

I live in Massachusetts and my household (family) has four people. We own one car, a 2007 Honda Civic Hybrid, and I generally bike or take public transit to school. As a household we used 1666 therms of gas and 6239 kWh in electricity. That equals 12.6 mtc for the household or 3.15 mtc per person. I took the following flights in 2013: Boston to Phoenix (1.36 mtc); Boston to Los Angeles (1.39 mtc); Boston to Madrid (1.81 mtc); Boston to Louisville, KY (.49 mtc); Louisville, KY to Minneapolis, MN (.36 mtc); Boston to Lansing, MI (0.41 mtc); Boston to Washington, DC (.12 mtc); and Boston to Detroit, MI (.37 mtc). That equals a total of 6.31 mtc. Our family drove our car 9,000 miles this past year (1.36 mtc) and we drove a rental car a further 1,000 miles (.36 mtc). My portion of the household car usage then accounts for .43 mtc. Other kinds of transportation: long distance train travel 1085 miles (.02 mtc); bus travel, both local and long distance, about 300 miles (.05 mtc); and subway travel about 185 miles (.02 mtc). My secondary lifestyle choices accounted for another 3.82 mtc (pescatarian, eat some organic food, mostly local produce, buy new clothes occasionally, some packaging, buy new electronics but keep them, recycle most of my waste, occasionally go out, own a car, and use the regular range of financial services).

On Sunday January 5 I begin a two month term as the sabbatical minister of the First Religious Society in Carlisle. I will be preaching January 5th, 12th, and 19th and February 2nd, 9th, and 16th. This Sunday’s sermon is entitled “Let’s Have a Jubilee” and calls for the elimination of debt based upon the biblical concepts of sabbatical and jubilee. 

Check out Liberte Locke’s new piece for Workers Power “When Organizing Your Workplace Feels Utterly Impossible.” I think it is one of the better pieces I’ve run in awhile, in part because Liberte write about some of the emotional and personal issues that radicals rarely talk about.

Every year I keep track of the books I read and post the list to my blog. This year my six year-old son started to get into graphic novels and so I read quite a few of those with him. I read a lot of great books over the year. A few that stand out for particular praise are: Debt; The First 5,000 Years, David Graeber; Speaking in Parables: A Study in Metaphor and Theology, Sallie McFague TeSelle; Orlando, Virginia Woolf; After Virtue, Third Edition, Alasdair MacIntyre; Local Histories/Global Designs, Walter Mignolo; and, of course, Don Quixote, Miguel de Cervantes. I have read Don Quixote before, in 2003 or so when I was staying in a Zapatista community in Chiapas, Mexico, and it remains one of my three favorite novels (the other two are The Brothers Karamazov and Moby Dick). This year I read Cervantes while walking the Camino de Santiago. Someplace in me is a long essay about Cervantes, pilgrimage, social justice work, colonialism and decolonial theory. Maybe someday I’ll write it.

The two books I was probably least impressed with were: The Spanish Civil War, Stanley Payne and En La Lucha/In the Struggle; Elaborating a mujerista theology, Asa María Isasi-Díaz. I disliked Payne’s history of the Spanish Civil War because I read it as having a right-wing bias. He claimed that the civil war and the right-wing uprising were reactions to social chaos brought on by the rise of the Popular Front government. Such an explanation is line with the story almost every right-wing coup leader tells about why he organized a coup against an elected government. As for Isasi-Diaz, I wanted to like her book. I was engaged by her methodology (enthnography), inspired by her commitment to remain in dialogue with and accountable to her community and liked her writing. Her theological argument, however, was completely disconnected with the work of latina theorists like Gloria Anzaldua, who were her contemporaries. This disconnection was unfortunate. I find Anzaldua’s work, and that of those who respond to her, much richer than Isasi-Diaz’s. If Isasi-Diaz had integrated some of the work latina theorists into her own work I think she would have written a powerful text. As it was, I was left feeling like her text was rather flat, not particularly useful and not part of the same dialogue of many of her contemporaries. 

I should probably also mention that I had a real love hate relationship with David Hall’s A Reforming People: Puritanism and the Transformation of Public Life in New England. On the one hand, it is one of the best intellectual histories of 17th and 18th century New England Puritanism. On the other, it made almost no mention of said Puritans relationships with the indigenous peoples of New England. I would like to say that I found this to be inexcuseable. But truthfully, I find it more perplexing than anything. Hall is a great scholar and I simply don’t understand how he could make such an obvious omission. I imagine that most people would just chalk it all up to some form of unconscious white supremacy but I have a nagging suspicion that explanation is deeper than that.

Here’s the full list of my 2013 books:

The Signal and the Noise; Why So Many Predictions Fail—But Some Don’t, Nate Silver
Debt; The First 5,000 Years, David Graeber
From Here to There; the Staughton Lynd Reader, Staughton Lynd
The Intellectual Origins of American Radicalism, Staughton Lynd
Accompanying: Pathways to Social Change, Staughton Lynd
Stepping Stones; Memoir of a Life Together, Alice and Staughton Lynd
Speaking in Parables: A Study in Metaphor and Theology, Sallie McFague TeSelle
Rumpole a la Carte, John Mortimer
Transmetropolitan: Year of the Bastard, Warren Ellis
Transmetropolitan: back on the street, Warren Ellis
Transmetropolitan: lust for life, Warren Ellis
A Machiavellian View of the Ministry, Brandoch Lovely
A Theology for the Social Gospel, Walter Rauschenbusch
Parish Parables, Clinton Lee Scott
Transmetropolitan: the new scum, Warren Ellis
Rumpole and the Angel of Death, John Mortimer
The Cosmic Race, Jose Vasconcelos
Elfquest Vol. 1, Richard and Wendy Pini
Elfquest Vol. 2, Richard and Wendy Pini
Elfquest Vol. 3, Richard and Wendy Pini
Elfquest Vol. 4, Richard and Wendy Pini
Elfquest Siege at Blue Mountain, Richard and Wendy Pini
Elfquest Kings of the Broken Wheel, Richard and Wendy Pini
The Spanish Civil War, Stanley Payne
Transmetropolitan: one more time, Warren Ellis
Transmetropolitan: the cure, Warren Ellis
Transmetropolitan: dirge, Warren Ellis
Transmetropolitan: gouge away, Warren Ellis
At the Same Time, Susan Sontag
Local Histories/Global Designs, Walter Mignolo
En La Lucha/In the Struggle; Elaborating a mujerista theology, Asa María Isasi-Díaz
Red Rackham’s Treasure (Tintin), Herge
The Seven Crystal Balls (Tintin), Herge
Contentious Politics, Charles Tilly and Sidney Tarrow
Tintin and the Picaros, Herge
Ethics for a Small Planet, Daniel Maguire and Larry Rasmussen
Under the Net, Iris Murdoch
Los Borgia Intergral, Alejandro Jodorowsky (Spanish)
Don Quixote Vol. 1, Miguel de Cervantes
El Señor Cocodrilo Está Muerto De Hambre, Joan Sfar (Spanish)
El suspiro, Marjane Satrapi (Spanish)
The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Century: 1910, Alan Moore
The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Century: 1969, Alan Moore
Nemo: Heart of Ice, Alan Moore
Don Quixote Vol. 2, Miguel de Cervantes
The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Century: 2009, Alan Moore
Orlando, Virginia Woolf
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, J. K. Rowling
When You Are Engulfed in Flames, David Sedaris (audio book)
Thank You Jeeves, P.D. Wodehouse, fiction (audio book)
Private Lives, Noel Coward, drama, (audio book)
MacBeth, William Shakesphere, drama (audio book)
When Jesus Came To Harvard, Harvey Cox
Rumpole Misbehaves, John Mortimer (audio book)
Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, J. K. Rowling
The Names of the Lost, Philip Levine
The Time of the Doves, Merce Rodoreda
A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian, Marina Lewycka
Take the Cannoli; Stories from the New World, Sarah Vowell
The Star Thrower, Loren Eiseley
Good Omens, Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett
The Ocean at the End of the Land, Neil Gaiman
Utilitarianism, John Stuart Mill
Utilitarianism: For and Against, J. J. C. Smart and Bernard Williams
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, J. K. Rowling
A Reforming People: Puritanism and the Transformation of Public Life in New England, David Hall
Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, Immanuel Kant, translated by H. J. Paton
Living for Change: An Autobiography, Grace Lee Boggs
The Sources of Normativity, Christine Korsgaard
The Next American Revolution; Sustainable Activism for the Twenty-First Century, Grace Lee Boggs with Scott Kurashige
The Creation of the American Republic: 1776-1787, Gordon Wood
Chico & Rita, Javier Mariscal and Fernando Trueba (Spanish)
The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery, Eric Foner
Bridget Jones’s Diary, Helen Fielding
After Virtue, Third Edition, Alasdair MacIntyre
Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, Bernard Williams
Attack of the Deranged Killer Monster Snow Goons, Bill Watterson
They Feed The Lion, Philip Levine
Revolution and Evolution in the Twentieth Century, James and Grace Lee Boggs
Bertie’s Guide to Life and Mothers, Alexander McCall Smith
Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard, Kiran Desai
The Days are Just Packed, Bill Watterson
Nervous Conditions, Tsitsi Dangarembga
Homicidal Psycho Jungle Cat, Bill Watterson

This past summer I had the opportunity to spend a few days with members of the Confederación General del Trabajo in Barcelona. With a membership of about 60,000, the CGT is the largest anarcho-syndicalist labor union in the world. It split with the more famous Confederación Nacional del Trabajo in the late 1980s over the issue of participation in government sponsored works councils. Without getting into the details, this means that the CGT can be thought of as the more reformist minded of the two unions. Its members see themselves as trying to build an anarcho-syndicalist capable of threatening 21st century capitalism.

The people in CGT that I met with were generous enough to give me a rather large pile of their literature. I’m hoping to translate some of it into English over the next couple of weeks, while I am on break from my studies. My initial offering is the CGT’s 2013 platform of demands in response to the financial crisis in the European Union. I speak, read and write pretty good Spanish but I am not an experienced translator. I apologize for the bits of the translation that aren’t super clear.

The CGT’s Proposals and Alternatives to the Crisis

Repeal all legislation and reforms that take away rights from the population (Labor Reform, Easy Firing, Collective Bargaining, Pensions, Constitutional Reform, Immigration Law, the projected law about abortion…)*

Divide the wealth. Economic protection, including a social salary, sufficient for the millions of unemployed persons to live with dignity.

Protection from the evictions. A moratorium on them until the end of the crisis and the creation of a social program that guarantees access to housing. Assistance for the social spaces of autogestion.**

Divide the work so everyone has work. Reduce the working day, reduce the age of retirement, prohibition of the EREs, of contracts and subcontracts, of overtime, piecework and grants that hide jobs. Elimination of the ETTs.***

Autogestion for the workers in the factories recuperated from capital.

No to the privatization of Health, Education, Transportation, Communication, Energy, Water… Expropriation of the factories that were public before and that provide the basic needs of society.

Guaranteed universal access to the public services to all people with and without papers. [i.e. whether or not they are citizens or legal immigrants]

The right for all people to move freely.

Equal distribution of municipal civil work. Development of the help to the dependencies.****

The right to free time and a balance between work life and family and social life.

Financial reform for those that are paid the most and who have the most. An increase on the taxes on large businesses and those with great fortunes. Persecution of financial fraud. Reduction of IVA.*****

A public bank owned and under social control that allows families to have access to its resources.

No payment of the debt or its interest. Audit of the debt by a participatory process under civic control with a first step to the annulment of all of the illegitimate debt. Demand of penal responsibilities for those that caused the crisis.

Use of public money for meeting the needs of the people and not for rescuing the banks.

The closing of the financial casinos and tax havens.

Liberty for all militant syndicalist or anarchist political prisoners. No to repression and criminalization.

Their model of democracy is not good for us. Our position is for a new model of direct democracy, participatory and from below.

Rejection of the European Union with its institutions that drive the politics and policies of neoliberalism.

Abandonment of a political economy aimed at the unlimited growth. It needs to be replaced by another that follows the limits of the planet’s natural resources.

A solution to energy, climate and biodiversity crisis that threatens the survival of millions of people.

*This is a list of laws that have been passed that reduce the rights of the population in response to the economic crisis. I didn’t translate the phrase “exigencia de las 35 peonadas para cobrar el subsidio” because I am not sure exactly what it means. I think it refers to a reduction in guaranteed wages or minimum wage.

**Autogestion is a word with no exact English equivalent. It could loosely be translated self-managed. But it implies an act of self-creation as well. The last sentence of this paragraph might alternatively be translated: Assistance for self-managed social spaces or self-managed cooperatives.

***ERE is a particular aspect of Spanish labor law. Here, I think, it refers to laying people off as redundant. ETTs are Spanish temporary agencies.

****Not sure of the last sentence. The original reads: Desarrollo de las ayudas a la Dependencia.

*****IVA is value added tax. It is kind of like sales tax.

Dan Harper recently penned an open letter to the UUMA Board describing why he is dropping his membership in the UUMA. I was moved to write a long comment that I thought I would repost here:

I admit to being more than a little disappointed with reading this post. Over the last year and a half that I’ve spent as a semi-itinerant minister I have grown increasingly appreciative of the UUMA. I left the parish ministry in the autumn of 2012 to begin working on a PhD and have been supporting myself and my family partially through pulpit supply and officiating rites of passage. The experience of not having my own pulpit has helped me to understand exactly how much the UUMA does for me (I discuss this realization at length here). My membership in the UUMA has provided me with connections that have allowed me to earn higher wages and find more opportunities than I would have otherwise found. In addition, I have been taking advantage of the UUMA’s excellent coaching program this year. The cost of the program is $100 for ten sessions. I’m getting far more from the peer coach that I’m working with than from the professional speech coach I paid close to $700 for a couple of sessions a few years ago.

Frankly, I tired of hearing settled ministers with good salaries and housing allowances complain about how much UUMA dues are. When I was a parish minister I simply paid for my UUMA dues out of my professional expense account. I suspect that most of the settled ministers who complain about the cost of UUMA dues do the same.

These days, I pay for my UUMA dues out of pocket. I live in the Boston area, which is close Silicon Valley cost-wise. My wife and I support our family on my graduate student stipend, pulpit supply fees and her very part-time DRE salary (we are food stamps and receive other forms of public aid). Yet I still think supporting the UUMA is worthwhile.*

In my experience, most of the people who complain about UUMA dues are fairly highly paid and skilled workers (Dan earns almost twice the median wage in the US, and 140% the median household income in California). One of the reasons why UU ministers earn relatively good wages is because of the advocacy, over time, of our professional association.

As for the community minister who makes $200,000 and doesn’t want to pay .5% of his income to the UUMA, all I can say is that maybe he doesn’t value his identity as a UU minister enough. He certainly don’t seem to feel a need to support the organization that helps minister maintain professional standards and wages which, at the end of the day, is what the UUMA does. Those standards are crucial in maintaining the viability, if that is possible in this changing religious landscape, of our profession.

*As a graduate student I also belong to a number of professional academic associations and a labor union. I don’t complain about paying dues to those groups either.