the love of change
As of this morning, Tropophilia has officially been added to the “Twenty Something” section of Alltop! This is big. Alltop aggregates feeds around a diverse array of topics, and it’s often the starting point for lots of people when they head out onto the internet to research or pleasure read. An honor, to be sure!
We’re at the bottom of the page now, but expect to see us slowly rising to the top over the course of 2009!
Today is Blog Action Day, a moment for everyone across the blogosphere to pause and consider a topic collectively. This year’s topic is poverty.
Thinking about poverty brings up all sorts of feelings within me: the shame I felt leaving the developing world, full of abject inequality, for the security of an airplane, a shower, and a life of privilege; the guilt I feel every time I notice that a recent purchase was made in China or Bangladesh or Nicaragua…enjoying my new thing while knowing that the sales price didn’t at all approximate the probable lost dignity and humanity of the person who stitched or manufactured it under horrendous conditions; the pain I felt, when I arrived in Argentina weeks after Hurricane Katrina, to see a headline on the front page of a Buenos Aires daily over the now infamous picture of an African American woman who drowned in the rising waters: “This Happened…In America?”
But while shame and guilt and pain can be useful emotions, can spur us to act when we would rather not or convince us to care when ignorance is simply easier, we can’t genuinely help out of shame, or love out of guilt, or act out of pain. We need to hope, and listen, and recognize that our lives and ambitions are imperfect but capable of improvement. That our interrelatedness with one another means that there’s always a chance to reach out and touch someone else, and that no day is too late to improve a rapidly changing world.
I’ve had the pleasure and privilege of spending a number of months in Central and South America. Those experiences have necessarily revolved around poverty in the developing world. I was given a prayer once that is attributed to Archbishop Oscar Romero, a priest who proclaimed a theology of liberation for the world’s poor and who was assassinated in El Salvador in 1980 because of his worldview. I’ve since learned that this prayer was not written by Archbishop Romero, but rather in his honor; it does not matter, since the sentiment is certainly consistent with Romero’s message. I’ve carried the prayer in my wallet for almost 4 years now, reading it from time to time, and I thought it would be appropriate to share today:
It helps, now and then, to step back and take the long view.
The Kingdom is not only beyond our efforts,
it is even beyond our vision.
We accomplish in our lifetime only a tiny fraction of
the magnificent enterprise that is God’s work.
Nothing we do is complete,
which is another way of saying that
the Kingdom always lies beyond us.
No statement says all that should be said.
No prayer fully expresses our faith.
No confession brings perfection.
No pastoral visit brings wholeness.
No program accomplishes the church’s mission.
No set of goals and objectives includes everything.
This is what we are about.
We plant the seeds that one day will grow.
We water seeds already planted,
knowing that they hold future promise.
We lay foundations that will need further development.
We provide yeast that produces effects far beyond our capabilities.
We cannot do everything,
and there is a sense of liberation in realizing that.
This enables us to do something,
and to do it very well.
It may be incomplete,
but it is a beginning,
a step along the way,
an opportunity for the Lord’s grace to enter
and do the rest.
We may never see the end results,
but that is the difference
between the master builder and the worker.
We are workers, not master builders,
Ministers, not messiahs.
We are prophets of a future that is not our own.
Amen.
What follows is a recollection of what I remember from 9/11, and how that day changed me. We have little right asking for your participation since we’ve barely been participating in the blog ourselves, but I want to open the comments section of this post to your recollections of that day and how it changed you.
It’s hard to believe that September 11, 2001 was seven years ago. I was a high school junior sitting in French class when our headmaster, Mr. Hames, came over the intercom. Mr. Hames was a highly eccentric man, given to exaggeration and flowery language. So when his impassioned voice communicated to us that “a plane has hit the World Trade Center”, we shook our heads. “Probably a Cessna doing an aerial photo shoot or air tourism”, we all thought (which still would have been a tragedy, but hardly worth interrupting class for).
When the bell rang after class, we turned on the TV in the classroom and saw a picture of the famous smoking scar the plane had punctured in the first tower. The angle and zoom of the camera were such that the size of the hole wasn’t immediately evident; this was certainly a terrible accident, but it was still odd that Mr. Hames has chosen to announce it to our entire school during class. In addition to his eccentricity and proclivity for hyperbole, he was also an academic purist. Our small private school was his domain, and any interruption of the ordinary — from backpacks strewn in the hallway to proposed curriculum changes — was met with an unenviable, one-on-one tirade in his office.
Following my French class, we had a thirty minute “activities period” to have club meetings, attend assemblies, etc. I had lingered a little in the French classroom, and had learned there that it was in fact an airliner that had hit the tower. “What on earth was an airliner doing that close to the city?” I thought, still not knowing that it wasn’t an accident. I made my way to the library, where almost all 350 students and the dozens of teachers at the school were crowding around a row of televisions.
I have pages of notes from the conference this weekend that should become blog posts in the next few days. In the meantime, a few links:
Gore plays up the political difficulties of advocating for vegetarianism, but there’s a smarter, middle path: If you price carbon, and you rob meat of the massive corn and grain and land subsidies that make it artificially cheap, the market will begin to correct itself in a way that naturally balances the facts that folks — myself included — like burgers and the fact that producing burgers is pretty energy intensive. The problem isn’t that people eat meat, but that we’ve made meat much cheaper than it actually is. Make meat cost what it should cost, and diets will shift to reflect that. [...] You can deal with meat without advocating vegetarianism.
A valid reason for never getting back to all those social webapps you signed up for is that updating them all with big news—or just a funny moment—requires a lot of logging in, typing or uploading, and then switching over. switchAbit, a free social syndication tool, offers the tools to create multiple “switches” for all your cool tools. So you can, say, upload a photo on Flickr, then have a link or thumbnail of it show up on your Blogger, Twitter, and your Facebook page.
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