Things that happened while I was gone

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Over the weekend, Andy and I celebrated our five year wedding anniversary. We were out in the woods on a small island off the coast of BC, building small cabins that will serve as “hermitages” for people on silent retreat who need a place for deep solitude and prayer. It felt good to do some manual labor, to see tangible progress as we worked, and to feel good and tired by the end of the day, in a sore-muscle rather than a screenburned-eyes or overwrought-mind sort of way. Our motley construction crew was made up of people from all over the place, some in their teens and some in their fifties, and it was fun hanging out with people of all ages—that doesn’t happen very often outside of family reunions, and intergenerational friendship is one of the things Andy and I had enjoyed so much about living in India. After spending a long Saturday on the work site, we enjoyed a brisk swim at an isolated beach. There were Canadian geese sitting on the water around us, so it definitely stretched my idea of what summer at the beach looks like!

Apparently while we were hammering away in the woods and sleeping in rustic cabins without electricity and running water, a lot was happening back in civilization, and particularly in the country of my birth.

There was the courageous act of protest by a brave woman named Bree Newsome, who scaled the flag pole in front of the state capitol building in South Carolina to take down the symbol of white supremacy and racial violence that had flown over the seat of the state government there for more than a hundred and fifty years. Civil disobedience is intended to show the moral absurdity of laws through breaking them and willingly suffering the consequences of one’s actions. Bree’s action did exactly that: South Carolina police (including a black officer) were forced to arrest a peaceful black woman, who quoted scripture aloud as they handcuffed her, for the “crime” of removing a banner under which black Americans have been enslaved, raped, murdered, beaten, intimidated, and systematically oppressed for over a century. No scene could have more pointedly demonstrated the righteousness of her cause: the law was against her, but justice was certainly on her side. She now faces up to 3 years in prison and a fine of up to $5000 for her heroic act. All of us who follow Jesus can learn from this woman’s sacrificial example.

Also over the weekend, President Obama delivered a eulogy for Clementa Pinkney, a black pastor who was among the slain in Charleston on June 17. I don’t know what opinion you hold of Obama as a person, or a politician—I can’t think of him without remembering the countless drone attacks he has authorized against innocent civilians in the Middle East—but his eulogy for Pinkney is one of the best sermons I have ever heard, and is probably THE most powerful speech I have ever heard from a head of state. Perhaps the fact that, as President, he has made important public decisions with which nearly every one of us has disagreed at some point or another makes him exactly the kind of flawed, imperfect human being who can speak with authority about grace. Seriously, if you haven’t yet listened to the speech, please, please do. It is a heartfelt lament of the ways that we have deeply wounded one another in America, an inspiring reminder of the resilience and love that have continued to grow even in the midst of violence and oppression, and an eloquent call for us to move forward together as a nation towards forgiveness and justice, extending God’s grace to one another in every facet of our lives.

“Justice grows out of recognition of ourselves in each other,” he remarks at one point. “My liberty depends on you being free, too.” One can hear in these words the echoes of both Jesus’ call to love our enemies, recognizing our neighbor-hood with them, and MLK Jr.’s assertion that injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.

The other big national news of the weekend was the legalization of same-sex marriage across the United States. The reactions of many American Christians have already become an embarrassing adventure in missing the point, but I still hold out hope that we as a Church will be able to let go of our fearful siege mentality and recognize this opportunity to love and extend grace to people who may not share our sexual orientation or our theology. I’ve always been confused by the political kerfuffle over trying to legislate a Christian lifestyle into the laws of the state, since God has never called the Church to control the government. We have been given the task of modeling the Kingdom in our own lives, creating a community that images God’s hospitality and love, and inviting others into freely-chosen, loving relationship with God.

Using legal means to force non-Christians into choices and behaviors that Christians have specifically chosen as disciples of Christ seems not only pointless, but controlling and counterproductive to our true mission in the world. If we send the message to the people around us that we are more concerned about policing their sex lives than about caring for them as people, then we’ve not just lost the “culture wars”—we’ve lost the respect and trust that would have laid the foundations for any relationship with people outside the church to grow. We’ve lost our credibility as God’s ambassadors of love. We’ve lost our purpose as a community.

I’m not saying that we shouldn’t be involved in wider culture—we certainly should. But even in the realm of sex and relationships, why not concern ourselves with the destructive forces of pornography, trafficking, sexual abuse, and domestic violence that are destroying vulnerable individuals and families and marriages? Which will give a clearer picture of God: a Christian reacting with fear-mongering and angry statements in protest of same-sex marriage, or that same Christian instead demonstrating a mature ability to be gracious with people who disagree with them, whose lives and choices are different from his own? Some Christians have compared homosexuals with Hitler, referred to them as “Gaystapo,” or likened the court’s ruling to the 9/11 Terrorist attacks. Regardless of what we believe about homosexuality, angry antics like these should offend our consciences as Christians. Would Jesus be stirring up fear and hatred at a time like this? Or would he be inviting a same-sex couple over for dinner to hear their story and get to know them as people, refusing to reduce the complex beauty of their humanity down to a single political issue or life decision? I get the sense that he’s probably prompting us to do that right now.

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The Charleston Church Shooting Is Nothing New

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photo credit: nola.com

Two days ago, a young white man gunned down nine African Americans at a church in Charleston, South Carolina.

When confronted with such a brutal, violent act, it is tempting to dismiss the killer as an anomaly—mentally ill or emotionally disturbed, perhaps—instead of recognizing the roots of his behavior in the shared history, culture, and institutions of our society. But viewing these murders as an isolated incident obscures their connection to a larger pattern of racial violence that is as old as the United States of America.

I recently read the memoir of a lawyer named Bryan Stevenson who spent years working to free innocent men on death row, and advocating for children and individuals with mental illness or intellectual disabilities who are serving life sentences or awaiting execution. His book Just Mercy is a heartbreaking look at mass incarceration and extreme punishment in America, and his decades of personal involvement in the criminal justice system reveal the blatant influence of race in determining how Americans are treated by police, courts of law, and prison authorities.

Stevenson illuminates the concrete effects of racism on the lives of black Americans by explaining “four institutions in American history that have shaped our approach to race and justice”:

  1. Slavery. African Americans were considered property rather than human beings with rights.
  1. The “Reign of Terror” between Reconstruction and World War II. After 9/11, it was common to hear news anchors and politicians alike referring to this attack as the first time Americans had experienced terrorism within our own country. But as Stevenson explains, the fear of violence was nothing new for African Americans who grew up in the South between the Civil War and the Civil Rights movement. As one man told him, “We grew up with terrorism all the time. The police, the Klan, anybody who was white could terrorize you. We had to worry about bombings and lynchings, racial violence of all kinds.” Stevenson argues that “America’s embrace of speedy executions was, in part, an attempt redirect the violent energies of lynching while assuring white southerners that black men would still pay the ultimate price.” Today, the pairing of a black perpetrator with a white victim still results in the death penalty more often than crimes involving a white perpetrator or a black victim.
  1. Segregation and human rights violations under “Jim Crow.” The Supreme Court didn’t strike down laws against interracial marriage until 1967 in Loving v. Virginia, but marriage between whites and blacks remained illegal under the Alabama state constitution until the year 2000 (and even then, 41% of Alabama voters cast their ballots in favor of upholding the ban). In 1945, Stevenson points out, “the Supreme Court upheld a Texas statute that limited the number of black jurors to exactly one per case,” and after the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965, many southern states continued to exclude African Americans from serving on juries at all.
  1. Mass incarceration today. The United States has the highest rates of incarceration of anywhere in the world, and the vast majority of the 2.3 million people currently in prison are black or brown. People of color are often arrested and sentenced for the kind of nonviolent drug offenses that white teenagers and college students engage in without consequence, and frequent police harassment increases the likelihood of black and Latino teenagers developing criminal records. Stevenson argues (as did Michelle Alexander in her 2010 book, The New Jim Crow) that mass incarceration functions to control and disenfranchise African Americans in much the same way that Jim Crow did in the past. Some states permanently take away the right to vote from anyone with a criminal conviction, which means that there are now several states in which a higher percentage of African American men are barred from voting now than were disenfranchised before the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

These institutions stretch from the birth of the American nation down to today, showing that racism is not an imagined problem, a historical phantom long since put to rest, or the extreme ideology of some fringe individuals in society. Racism is embedded in our history, our culture, and our civic institutions. It’s not something that will fade out automatically—it’s a glaring problem that all of us need to confront as a nation and in our own hearts and minds.

Recognizing our fears or ignorance about people who are unlike us does not make us bad or hateful people. If we want to walk in the truth and to love our neighbors well, then we must be willing to acknowledge the ways we subtly buy into untrue assumptions about people of other races, or support policies and institutions which negatively impact their lives. An ongoing process of critical self-reflection is necessary for anyone who wants to live a just and compassionate life, and it is especially important for those of us in the racial majority who have never experienced discrimination.

In the wake of yet another tragedy, I am grieving with the families of the slain. But grieving is not enough. White America has two choices: we can continue to look away from the festering wound of racism in our society, or we can confront our past and our present in order to pursue a different future on the basis of truth and reconciliation.

Gambling Together

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This week’s CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) package was “slim pickings” as our neighbor/urban farmer told us when she dropped it off this evening. With so many days of unseasonable heat, she told us, lots of plants are going straight to seed instead of following their usual growth cycle and developing into the mature veggies we depend on for food.

This is our first summer in Canada, so Andy and I have been enjoying the warm weather and the sunny, blue skies, amused by our northern friends’ extremely low tolerance for heat (they get the last laugh when winter rolls around and we are comically unprepared). But locals tell us that while these summer days are great for the beach, what we should be experiencing right now is “June-uary,” a return of colder weather and–most importantly–rain. Since Vancouver is located in a temperate rain forest, rainfall is extremely important for the plants, the animals, and, ultimately, the people who live here.

Because we’ve already had cloudless skies for so long, forest fires which would usually be a possibility in August are happening right now, and trees with shallow roots that depend on a certain level of moisture in the ground to keep them structurally stable are likely to be uprooted and fall. A changing climate means that growing seasons change, and many plants that might have thrived in the past are no longer viable.

It’s unfortunate to receive fewer fruits and vegetables through our CSA membership than we had expected, but that scarcity in itself demonstrates why community shared agriculture is so important in the first place, especially in light of the unpredictable effects of climate change on local ecosystems. When they pay for seed, labor, irrigation, and other inputs ahead of time, farmers are financially investing in their crops before knowing what the yield will be. They may put in months of work and go into debt for a harvest that is either to small to be profitable, or too plentiful to earn fair prices at the market. Either way, the conventional system expects farmers to take this gamble alone, even though every one of us depends on their hard work and investment in order to survive.

In community supported agriculture, consumers share the risk of agriculture with the farmers who feed us by paying for a share of the harvest at the beginning of the growing season. However things turn out, we’re in it together, and no single person will be economically devastated no matter how weather, pests, or economic forces may influence the harvest.

Is Free Trade Fair?

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Migrant farm workers in California. (photo from Google images)

Last Friday, Andy and I attended a panel discussion about how to create a sustainable food system. We learned about the ways that farm workers here in Canada have been shipped in as cheap labor through temporary foreign worker programs, but are denied the basic protections that most people enjoy at their jobs—like paid vacation time, or overtime pay. “Piece rates,” rather than minimum wage, determine their income, and these rates are so low that half the workforce can’t pick produce fast enough to even make minimum wage! Workers are also at the mercy of unscrupulous contractors who function as the middlemen between farms and laborers, retaliating with job termination if workers complain about their housing, working conditions, or pay.

A priest running a migrant worker shelter two borders south, in Tijuana, Mexico, described the even larger problems facing agricultural workers in the United States. The U.S. economy depends on foreign labor, but unlike Canada, has no program for temporary workers at all. The result, he says, is an immigration system in chaos. 600,000 workers were deported from the U.S. last year. Many of them end up at the priest’s shelter, bewildered by their sudden twist of fate, separated from spouses and children, and—in many cases—finding themselves in Mexico for the first time in their lives. The priest told us about a surprising new industry popping up in Tijuana: call centers to employ the growing number of new deportees who speak better English than Spanish.

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A small-scale farmer in Mexico (photo from Google images)

Ironically, it was an American-led free trade agreement which created the surge of illegal immigration from Mexico in the first place. When the North American Free Trade agreement (NAFTA) went into effect back in 1994, farming markets were opened so that peasant farmers in Mexico were suddenly competing against large, government-subsidized corn growers in the American Midwest. These small farmers couldn’t compete with the cheap imports from large-scale commercial farms in the U.S., and many of them went bust. Failed farms forced people to migrate first to Mexico’s cities, and then north to the U.S. looking for work. In the last ten years, narcotics cartels have intensified the problem by pushing even more Mexican farmers off their land and causing even urban dwellers to flee the threat of violence.

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Corn had been the staple crop in Mexico for centuries. (photo from Google images)

Finally, the director of the Domestic Fair Trade Association (DFTA) in Seattle, Washington, discussed the connection between the plight of small farmers in the U.S. and migrant farm workers from Latin America. Both are losing out against large-scale agribusiness, she says, and their best hope protecting their livelihoods is to band together to defend their rights against corporate giants like Monsanto. The DFTA is hoping to create these kinds of mutually beneficial partnerships all along the supply chain, connecting workers, farmers, suppliers, retailers, and consumers to work for the common good rather than pursuing their own economic benefit at the expense of others.

I have long been aware of the importance of buying fair trade when it comes to products imported from the developing world, such as coffee or chocolate. But this panel discussion opened my eyes to the reality that the agricultural sector here at home is hardly different from the unethical systems that prevail in other parts of the world.

The U.S. and Canada are wealthy, developed nations, but we are still depending on an underpaid, overworked labor force for our cheap, abundant food. Our laws do little to protect farm workers from exposure to harmful chemicals, abuse at the hands of their employers, and nonpayment of wages, and our legal system similarly lags behind in protecting the rights of small farmers.

These are serious problems that should concern anyone who eats food. The United States has an aging farm population, and we have reached a point as a society where we have more people in prison than we do on farms (an absurdity on both counts). According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the general population has a life expectancy of 73, but the average migrant farm worker can only expect to live to the age of 49. Furthermore, EPA safety standards for farm workers haven’t been updated in twenty years.

It’s obvious in our laws and in the way we have structured our economy that we don’t value the people who produce our food. We have come to see them as just another inanimate, economic input; something to be squeezed for as much productivity on as little pay as possible, to keep profit margins high and prices low for consumers like us.

There is currently no federal regulation for fair trade.

Think about that for a moment.

Farms—companies of all kinds—are under no obligation to prove that their products have been created without exploiting the people or the natural landscapes of the places where they were produced. There’s no way for us to know whether the food that we’re eating has poisoned a river, poisoned someone else’s body, or relied on slave labor to make it to our plate.

It’s high time fair trade came home to North America. We have a responsibility as North Americans and as Christians to care for the people who are sustaining our lives while barely being able to eek out a life of their own in the most prosperous nations on earth.

The video below features interviews from small farmers and migrant workers in the American South, and follows the story of a farm in Florida that is becoming part of the solution:

Crash

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Friday night on my way back from dessert with friends, I was riding my bike along the dark, empty streets of east Vancouver, relishing the quiet, the cool wind on my face, the glow of the streetlights cracking through the thick, dark canopy of leaves arching across the road. Just a few blocks from home, I was speeding down the big hill on tenth avenue when I hit something—I couldn’t see what—and the next thing I knew I was continuing down the hill at an even steeper incline, balancing on the front tire with the back end of my bike in the air.

Continuing to hurtle toward the roundabout at the bottom of the hill while doing an accidental, reverse wheelie was not a good idea. Neither was clamping my hands around the brakes, but that was what I did—either out of my instinctive desire to slow down or because the weight of my entire body was already on my wrists and trying to hold on for my life was an unconscious decision. Then I was flying past the handle bars, floating over the pavement, hearing a scream that must have been mine, and feeling the impact of the cement against the heels of my hands and then my shoulder blades.

Thank God I was wearing a helmet. I ended up on my back as I slowly rolled over and stood up, I saw blood on my hands and slung across my purse, but could hardly feel any specific cuts. I had the good sense to stumble out of the road myself, but not to move my bike. I stood in the grass staring at it in the street, red and white lights still flashing.

Then things got melodramatic. A couple of neighbors came outside to check on me; in shock, I sunk down to my knees and started to cry as I fished out my phone to call Andy. The two women who found me were nice enough to move my bike out of the road, make sure that I knew my name and what day it was, and begin helping me walk my bike in the direction of my apartment.

I don’t handle blood very well. I am absurdly, comically overwhelmed with wooziness by the sight of it. These were not life threatening injuries: scraped hands and shoulders and foot; bruised hip and sore neck muscles. But if I lived by myself, I likely would have gone to sleep on the couch still covered in blood and with gravel in my wounds, because looking at them–much less trying to clean them–made me feel lightheaded and weak like I was about to pass out. Fortunately, I live with a loving husband who has a stronger stomach than I do. He doctored my wounds and patiently put up with my need to sit on the  bathroom floor and take deep breaths every couple minutes throughout the process. (Seriously, it’s embarrassing how I react to blood. Pain tolerance: HIGH.  Blood visibility tolerance: ZERO.)

Without the use of my hands, I felt like an invalid all weekend. I couldn’t bathe or even change clothes without help. Andy did the gardening we had planned to do together, cooked all the meals, bandaged my hands, helped me dress myself, and even washed my hair for me.  I am married to a stellar human being.

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Andy planting leafy greens in the garden

Three days later, my cuts are scabbing over, the soreness is receding, and I’m going in to the chiropractor in a few hours to reset my skeleton. Looks like I’m gonna be just fine.

I spent all last week revising the manuscript of my book, and I finished just a few hours before my crash–good timing, since typing would have been a lot more difficult over the weekend. Andy put it in the mail to my editor the next day, so hopefully it will soon be polished and ready to submit to an agent or a publisher.

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My completed manuscript

Throughout the process of writing this memoir of my time in India, I have received so much helpful advice and input from other writers and editors. Every time I reach a point of not knowing what to do next, a conversation or a connection with someone pops up and illuminates the next step. It sometimes seems I’m bushwhacking my way through the wilderness, but I’m beginning to trust the journey, and that the grace which has carried me this far will continue. I know that this story is bigger than me.

I’m looking forward to sharing the book with all of you. Meanwhile, for those of you in Vancouver, watch out for the unmarked mogul on 10th!