Shine on You Crazy Diamond

I always thought of him as relatively obscure, but Syd Barrett's passing is receiving huge attention among bloggers. Says something about the staying power of a good tune. Since I heard this on the midday news, his tunes and those of Pink Floyd about him have been bouncing in my brain. I see it was noted that the other members of the band always made sure he received his royalties. Would that society at large so reliably take care of her casualties.

"I'd give it to you if I could, but I borrowed it."

Widening Our Circles

In the sixties Paul Simon sardonically wrote and sang:

I have no need of friendship
friendship causes pain
Its laughter and its loving I disdain
...
I touch no one and no one touches me.

I am a rock, I am an island
And a rock feels no pain, and an island never cries.

Of course, no one is truly an island, yet there is no denying that widening our circles of friendship and love does invite more pain into our lives. This weekend, my own beloved community experienced the brutal shock of that truth as two were lost to senseless tragedy and two more injured and orphaned. We could shrink into our shells in a futile attempt to insulate ourselves from further pain, but no instead we reach out and invite even more. For it is within our beloved communities that we find healing, which is so much more important than the avoidance of pain. In faith we widen our circles even further. As one of those so tragically taken from us said two years ago:

We all have the power to create a positive life. When you look within and find the glimmerings of what brings you energy and joy, say yes to those inklings, even though you don’t know where that path will take you. Faith and trust are qualities we must all embrace if we are to hear our directions from God or our guiding spirit.

The wounds from two such positive lives ended far too soon will not heal quickly for the very many souls whom they have touched. But they will be best honored if, in time, we can say yes to those glimmerings, those inklings, to joy and to hope.

Goodbye Ken
Goodbye Kathy

Brutal Truths & Bridges of Hope

Truth wears no labels.

Truth shows up in surprising places.

Truth cannot be cornered and packaged.

Of course, we all have our own truths, and we get comfortable with the set of truths we know; we hang out in certain crowds; we can't resist packaging the truth as we understand it; but we all get blindsided from time to time.

I suppose I take it as a point of pride that I repeatedly question my own assumptions. Why do I think that? How do I know that's true? What does that person with the opposite opinion know that I may not? It turns some people away. They think I'm wishy washy - a flip-flopper. But it hardly means that I don't have deep convictions.

One such conviction is that it is wrong to judge someone for a trait over which they have no control. Always. But it does not follow that someone who does so wrongly judge others is himself always wrong about everything. He may see a brutal truth to which I am blind. Still I'll more often look for truth among those who first demonstrate the most compassion. It just stands to reason that the odds are better there. But occasionally close examination will reveal them to be dead wrong - about some things.

So we need to confront the brutal truths which come from disparate perspectives. But hatred can sometimes come disguised as brutal truth, so healthy skepticism is necessary to accompany that willingness to listen to opinions which challenge our assumptions. But with no willingness to listen then all is reduced to argument and divisiveness will reign.

Hmm. I can imagine someone reading this as a lot of airy nothing. But humor me, and stick with it for just a little longer. Because I'm not just saying that we need the brutal truth tellers from all sides (and we do) - even as we need the listeners who will help filter out some of the accompanying nonsense and expose it as chaff. We need the doubters like me, and we need those who are really sure of their paths and will not waver - and sometimes I'm like that too. But we need something else.

We need the bridgers. Those who can show us the bridges of hope. The bridgers are my heroes. Bridgers are no strangers to the brutal truths - but they find brutal truths on both sides of the divides and can speak to groups of people who find it difficult to speak to each other.

Today I bought myself a birthday present. A Call to Conscience: The Landmark Speeches of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. On 7 audio CDs. King was the consumate bridger. Such bridgers are rare, but there may be more of them than we sometimes imagine. Few attain the profile that King did in his too short life.

Can a wealthy, idolized rock star be a bridger? It doesn't seem likely. But then there's Bono. I've long liked U2's music, but then I like a lot of rock and roll. What I really like is what Bono has done with his celebrity. Thanks to Bob Wratz of BrightEyesDimView for pointing me to Bono's homily (free subscription required) at the National Prayer Breakfast one week ago. I want to excerpt some highlights, but it's hard - it works best as a whole. You know the old "read the whole thing" exhortation. But here's a little after he is talking about how churches came around to confront the AIDS epidemic after a slow start born of judgmentalism:

But in truth, I was wrong again. The church was slow but the church got busy on this the leprosy of our age.

Love was on the move.

Mercy was on the move.

God was on the move.

Moving people of all kinds to work with others they had never met, never would have cared to meet...conservative church groups hanging out with spokesmen for the gay community, all singing off the same hymn sheet on AIDS...soccer moms and quarterbacks...hip-hop stars and country stars. This is what happens when God gets on the move: crazy stuff happens!

Popes were seen wearing sunglasses!

Jesse Helms was seen with a ghetto blaster!

Crazy stuff. Evidence of the spirit.

It was breathtaking. Literally. It stopped the world in its tracks.

When churches started demonstrating on debt, governments listened - and acted. When churches starting organising, petitioning, and even - that most unholy of acts today, God forbid, lobbying...on AIDS and global health, governments listened - and acted.

I'm here today in all humility to say: you changed minds; you changed policy; you changed the world.

Look, whatever thoughts you have about God, who He is or if He exists, most will agree that if there is a God, He has a special place for the poor. In fact, the poor are where God lives.

Check Judaism. Check Islam. Check pretty much anyone.

I mean, God may well be with us in our mansions on the hill. I hope so. He may well be with us as in all manner of controversial stuff. Maybe, maybe not. But the one thing we can all agree, all faiths and ideologies, is that God is with the vulnerable and poor.

God is in the slums, in the cardboard boxes where the poor play house. God is in the silence of a mother who has infected her child with a virus that will end both their lives. God is in the cries heard under the rubble of war. God is in the debris of wasted opportunity and lives, and God is with us if we are with them. "If you remove the yoke from your midst, the pointing of the finger and speaking wickedness, and if you give yourself to the hungry and satisfy the desire of the afflicted, then your light will rise in darkness and your gloom with become like midday and the Lord will continually guide you and satisfy your desire in scorched places."

It's not a coincidence that in the scriptures, poverty is mentioned more than 2,100 times. It's not an accident. That's a lot of air time, 2,100 mentions. (You know, the only time Christ is judgmental is on the subject of the poor.) 'As you have done it unto the least of these my brethren, you have done it unto me' (Matthew 25:40). As I say, good news to the poor.

Here's some good news for the president. After 9/11 we were told America would have no time for the world's poor. America would be taken up with its own problems of safety. And it's true these are dangerous times, but America has not drawn the blinds and double-locked the doors.

In fact, you have doubled aid to Africa. You have tripled funding for global health. Mr. President, your emergency plan for AIDS relief and support for the Global Fund - you and Congress - have put 700,000 people onto life-saving anti-retroviral drugs and provided 8 million bed nets to protect children from malaria.

Outstanding human achievements. Counterintuitive. Historic. Be very, very proud.

But here's the bad news. From charity to justice, the good news is yet to come. There is much more to do. There's a gigantic chasm between the scale of the emergency and the scale of the response.

And finally, it's not about charity after all, is it? It's about justice.

Let me repeat that: It's not about charity, it's about justice.

And that's too bad.

Because you're good at charity. Americans, like the Irish, are good at it. We like to give, and we give a lot, even those who can't afford it.

But justice is a higher standard. Africa makes a fool of our idea of justice; it makes a farce of our idea of equality. It mocks our pieties, it doubts our concern, it questions our commitment.

Sixty-five hundred Africans are still dying every day of a preventable, treatable disease, for lack of drugs we can buy at any drug store. This is not about charity, this is about justice and equality.

Ok, it was more than a little - but wasn't it worth it? At the National Prayer Breakfast, with Bush and Congressional and religious leaders in attendance.

From Holly Near's - Edge

I've long been predisposed to like Holly Near, but acquiring music has taken a back seat to other interests over the last decade. Thankfully there's no reason I cannot enter a new discovery phase. Besides, there is no shame in tardy discoveries of music, art, or literature that's been around for centuries - or for six years. My wife's Christmas request for 1000 Grandmothers and I Ain't Afraid by Holly Near, led to my giving her the 2001 album Edge, which I've happily discovered is chock full of wisdom which is at once radical and hopeful. The opening song, Fired Up!, features Near's beautiful anger, because hers is an anger that refuses to deny hope - the possibility of a yet better world which she paints in the second song, Planet Called Home

Can you call on your imagination
As if telling a myth to a child
Put in the fantastical, wonderful, magical
Add the romantic, the brave and the wild

Once upon a time there was a power
So great that no one could know its name
People tried to claim it and rule with it
Always such arrogance ended in shame.

Thousands of years would pass in a moment
Hundreds of cultures would come and go
Each generation with a glorious calling
Even when they were too busy to know

Then one day after two millennia
Which after all was a small part of time
Hundreds of souls found their way out of no where
To be on earth at the threat of decline

Let's all go, they moved as one being
Even though each would arrive here alone
They promised to work in grace with each other
To brave the beautiful planet called home

There was no promise that they could save it
But how exciting to give it a try
If they each did one or two actions beautifully
Complex life forms on earth might not die

And so they arrive in a spectrum of colors
The population on earth did explode
Some threw themselves in front of disaster
Others slowly carried their load

Some adopted small girls from China
Some lived high in the branches of trees
Some died as martyrs, some lived as healers
Some bravely walked with a dreadful disease

They mingled among each class and culture
Not one of them could be identified
But together they altered just enough moments
To help the lost and the terrified

To step outside our egos and bodies
To know for once that we truly are one
Then quickly we would forget to remember
But that's OK, their job was well done

And earth went on for another millennium
And now its time for my song to end
This magical story of hope and wonder
Invites you all to wake up and pretend to be

Fabulous creatures sent from the power
Souls that have come with a purpose in mind
To do one little thing that will alter the outcome
And maybe together we can do it in time

Can you call on your imagination
As if telling a myth to a child
Put in the fantastical, wonderful, magical
Add the romantic, the brave and the wild

The Souls are coming back

Copyright 1999 by Hereford Music (ASCAP)

Near's indictment of human error is matched by her celebration of humanity and its potential, transforming anger into hope by stating that which is obvious to her, and inviting us to join her in a transformative hope for a better future. Her words are a fitting complement to my mission here at Choosing Hope.

Those more familiar with copyright law, do let me know if quoting lyrics in full runs afoul of any proscriptions against that.

Music & Politics; Disillusionment & Dissent

The Shona music of Zimbabwe is anything but dissonant. It was the early eighties when I was first infected. My Seattle housemate coaxed me into tagging along for an evening of music and dance at a local community hall where Dumi and the Maraire Marimba Ensemble was performing. Previously unaware of the charismatic Dumi Maraire who had single-handedly spawned many a marimba band from Vancouver, BC to Eugene, Oregon, it took hardly a minute for me to be lost in the infectious rhythms and melodies which seemed to overtake one's motor functions while transporting the soul to a place of pure joy. Dumi soon left for Zimbabwe, but his influence remained as the infection spread from musician to musician in the Northwest United States.

Fast forward twenty plus years, and my son is playing in his grade school marimba ensemble, Rufaro!, one of Maraire's many compositions to which I sweated with great joy in Seattle community halls way back then. Though clearly not as accomplished as the adult bands which I remembered, these 5th and 6th graders quite compellingly bring the power and joy of this wonderful music to the present day.

Maraire, especially renowned for his mastery on the mbira (thumb piano), moved back and forth between Seattle and Zimbabwe in the eighties. I recall once being told he was returning to become a minister of culture in Robert Mugabe's government there. Recent web searches have revealed that he actually returned to "develop an ethnomusicology program at the University of Zimbabwe", but I recall feeling a bit of shock at the news at the time, for though I had once

naively believed Mugabe to be a benevolent liberator of Zimbabwe from oppressive white rule, I had learned enough in the meantime to realize that he had proved to be a tyrant far worse to his enemies than Ian Smith had ever been. I wonder how it all played out, but have discovered that as Mugabe's tyranny has heightened, his censorship of any expressions of dissent against his government in this music -- that had once been an inspiration to idealists fighting against minority rule in former Rhodesia -- is now utterly complete and chilling.

It appears that only outside of Zimbabwe, are ex-patriot musicians like Thomas Mapfumo able to marry a meaningful message of dissent with this joyful music which once carried the dreams of a younger generation, such as young Mai Chi Nemarundwe (later Dumi's second wife) longing for political independence and freedom, with Mugabe as their charismatic leader. Inside Zimbabwe, dissent within the musical community has been muted or squashed, with Dumi's own daughter kowtowing to Mugabe's propoganda machine.

Sadly both Dumi and his wife died in the late nineties, but Mapfumo, still quietly respected within Zimbabwe, must now live in exile for his artistic expression to remain free. I'll have to look for some of his music where the spirit of chimurenga (struggle) must still live. Perhaps my son will be playing it someday.