10 Signposts of Renewal
from Diana Butler Bass:
* Hospitality
* Discernment
* Healing
* Contemplation
* Testimony
* Diversity
* Justice
* Worship (or embracing awe)
* Reflection
* Beauty
I invite remarks that riff on any or several of these, how or why they might be important, and examples of them in our daily, tangible lives. HINT: These are all practices. SAMPLE Question: What are good reasons for and good practices of hospitality? How can and does it enrich our lives?
(Boer) Tom:
Could you expand on beauty? The first thing that comes to my mind is Nikki Craft’s “Beauty is painful” poster (on the right)…
As for reflection - I find that North Americans as a general rule are very averse to reflection, and especially the study necessary in order to have something to reflect on - half the problems or more on the NA left seem to be related to this - I’ll stop there, as the rest of my thoughts are more cruel - to even mention certain repulsive social realities leads to charges of reactionary attitudes. (And mainly on the left do people read, and then only to bolster their consciences - how many people read to attack a problem?)
14 November 2009, 10:21 pmStan:
There’s no reference here to judging beauty, or to the objectifying notions of beauty in sexist ads, for example. Beauty as practice could mean making beauty (adding a flourish to a garden or landscape, singing, setting a beautiful table), seeking beauty (I used to keep a feather in my office to look at as a momentary escape), behaving charitably, performing a play.
The key to reflection - from where I sit - is patience, a precondition of reflection. We don’t have to have our answers right away. We are not involved in a contest to come up with totalizing answers… first, before anyone else. This lack of passivity, of patience, and the devaluation of reflection, seems to be… gendered (gotta say it). It doesn’t fit the Hobbesian paradigm of ceaseless competition. It’s too touchy-feely, too passive, too female. Reflection seems to me to be the quiet receptivity that precedes discernment, quiet on the outside, that is. On the inside, new impressions and information are crowding into consciousness like the traffic at a major event cramming into a parking lot.
PS - The djembe jam is beautiful, inviting everyone who hears into a common experience of the beauty, into a common spirit.
15 November 2009, 7:13 amr graves:
hosting the first in what i hope will be a series of sunday evening group meditations and potluck dinners at our place in brooklyn tonight. inspired by a mentor of mine involved in the buddhist peace fellowship in hartford, ct. if our evening goes anything like those evenings in hartford, we’ll be able to put a modest check next to just about all of these items on butler bass’s renewal list before the evening is over. aiming for what ivan illich used to call conviviality.
15 November 2009, 9:50 am(Boer) Tom:
I’d like to test the gendered aspect of perception of reflection - but if it is, is that the totality of it? I’ll try genderbaiting some of my leftist friends on reflection and see if they fall in the trap, but it really strikes me as being a broader social problem, e.g. the “I’m here to work/solve problems, not to study!” mentality that defines north american engineering… I have a west-African friend who complains regularly about the wastage that occurs at his work because study on the job is actively discouraged.
But to bring it back to the left, I’ll use the example of street crime: The perception that poverty produces (street) crime is still very current, even though several studies have shown that rich youths tend to commit similar amounts of street crime, with similar violence, as the poor (in USA) - the problem being the use of police data, which incorporate all the police biases against the poor (arrest, booking the arrest, denial of bail or its cost, etc) - several studies using anonymous surveying asking about participation in street crimes have been done, and they find modest (50% more among the poorest than among the richest groups) to no connection between street crimes and wealth/income - see the book “The rich get richer, the poor get prison“. Now with tools like web 2.0/etc, i.e. what we are using now, leftists have the opportunity to make an argument, receive critical feedback, research for even a day or more to thoroughly understand the critical feedback, find errors in it etc, but they still try to make a first strike/pound the opponent into the ground/ad hominem based ‘victory’ - also no notion of moral development of one’s opponent through the interaction (again rhetoric - getting your audience to do what you want them to, e.g. develop morally, e.g. by condemning their statements, while asking that they not be removed for the transgressions thus far, or pointing out in the genderbaiting above, that the person was successfully genderbaited into foolishness). A similar problem with the on-again off-again solidarity with Serbs - no where is there any negotiation, much less fundraising, to finance say name searches for Bosnian Serb victims, at least that I’ve been able to find - only Tokaca’s group has done any work, and with the ethnic/political situation in Bosnia, that has produced very limited results.
15 November 2009, 1:21 pmm.c.:
I’ll try to find my Robert Oppenheimer quote about Style. Its very good.
“It is style which makes it possible to act effectively, it is style which enables us to find a harmony between the pursuit of ends essential to us, and a regard for the views, the sensibilities, the aspirations of those to whom the problem may appear in another light; it is style which is the deference that action pays to uncertainty; it is above all style through which power defers to reason.”
~Robert Oppenheimer
15 November 2009, 4:40 pmM. D.:
What are good reasons for and good practices of hospitality? How can and does it enrich our lives?
Trade soul-connection with someone who isn’t a family member, someone new, a stranger. Reciprocal self-enrichment.
Cultivation of TRUST. And discernment.
Joy. Merriment. Entertainment. Laughter. Communion. Breaking bread. Bards. Minstrels. News. Ideas. Way stations.
Learning to share. Learning reciprocity. Circle of friends. Interdependency. Exchange.
Learning how Loaves and Fishes works.
I recall reading some years back about the nearly ancient tradition of a trust in hospitality in Afghanistan. Because everyone knew the needs of travelers. I suppose now it’s not easy to unbar the door to anyone, there, nowadays. One aspect of that culture likely forever lost.
Your visitor might be an angel. Or like St Michael, giving his cloak to a beggar, which turned out to be the Christ. This is how you help humanity, do your part.
There once was a time around here that you didn’t have property insurance. You knew if your barn burned down, your neighbors would help you build a new one.
Practices. Offer a room for visiting students, ministers, guest speakers, organizations gathering for conferences, demos. Every child that comes by on Hallow e’en. Breakfast for your group so they don’t lose momentum. Your neighbors’ kids after school. Neighborhood potluck/BBQ. Take dinner to a shut-in and visit for a while. Open your doors and spread the stew pot a bit more with extra toast and gravy.
In some circumstances, you make sure no one in the community is left out of the BBQ… isolated. So, this is peacekeeping.
15 November 2009, 6:52 pmMichael Anderson:
Beauty can be gendered, but not necessarily so. As a musician, I find beauty in music that is definitely considered feminine by males, and also music that is dissonant (which is also embraced by women). I think reflection, contemplation, and embracing awe are prerequisites for finding beauty, inside and outside of ourselves.
These concepts, however, may well be gendered, if the you reflect and contemplate on mechanistic devices and concepts, and the awe is only of power—power derived from the machine, and from dominance and subjection.
16 November 2009, 10:27 amCurt Kastens:
Witness-From Bullets to Ballots- 2 Years On
17 November 2009, 4:04 pmI just saw this on Al Jezzera. It is the most inspiring documentary that I have ever seen.
You can see it too at Youtube. It is about 4 women Maoist Guerrillas who survived the 10 year civil war in Nepal and their continuing struggle in that country. This should be required viewing for every member of the US military. It brought tears to my eyes when one of the women who was imprisoned talked about running in to those who had tortured her on the street after her release.
m.c.:
“In these times, in these years, the atom bomb and nuclear weapons preside over our anxieties. This is an accident. It was, of course, done by design, but it was an accident that it could have been done when it was. The knowledge that we find in nature, whether it is of life, or of ourselves, or of chemistry, this knowledge could have produced, has produced, may yet produce very terrible instruments of major war different than the bombs, perhaps not more terrible, but just as ineluctable. These instruments will not really go away; I hope they will be dealt with. In a society which remembers what it has learned and how to do things that it has done, which is incredibly rich in potential and in fact, these weapons are as present as the desire to have them and to use them. We can only hope that they will increasingly appear irrelevant and thus in the end preposterous, that some day we will look back ashamed of how stupid we were.”
Robert Oppenheimer, 1963
23 November 2009, 4:21 pmCurt Kastens:
A very good piece at ICH today titled In Search of Morale.
5 December 2009, 6:38 pmseb:
Maybe “sublimity” would be a better word than beauty, per the discussion above.
15 December 2009, 5:53 am