Nothing much gets my attention like the first appearance of purple asparagus spears poking through wintered garden soil or apple blossoms ready to burst with the indescribable colorations and mini collosos-ness I can only call Divine. These rebirth us! They keep us alive, right? But I have to say, in these particular times, people showing up in this time of turning makes also makes me look. Citizens poking sunward through the cold crust of denial and disdain, with crumpled cardboards and placards of all kinds, scribbled with the profane-profound messages of persistence awaken me. The hallowed humor of resistance and regeneration gives me goosebumps just like the promise of asparagus and apple. It is more than enough. And to see 1,ooos of people showing up for each other in 1,000s of places across our beloved nation—embracing the Planet. This is RESURRECTION. For most of us, it goes far beyond anything we said or did on Easter Sunday.
I’m writing this on Earth Day 2025 remembering the song I wrote for one of our children’s elementary school celebrations some Earth Day past. Have a listen:
Throw it away! Where’s away? There’s no such place as away!
Throw it away! Where’s away? There’s no such place as away!
Well wha’d’ya think? If you throw it out, do you think it disappears?
Oh me, oh my…some of this stuff will stay forever.
A good song, eh? But also: what has happened in the 40 years since my tune hit the charts? Where are today’s aways? Lots of us have become Kings and Queens of compost and advocates for oceans and reefs. We’ve learned it’s not nearly enough just to recycle if there’s no protest of the stinkin’ status quo that makes the junk, no re-shaping of codes, policies and politics, no clue the Emperor is buck naked. Who’s measuring the chain of disposable diapers we’ve thrown “away” this year to see how many times it stretches to the moon and back? (If you didn’t listen to the recording you may not get any of this.) How long has it been since you danced around your living room with diapers on your heads, or took mass transit along with a multi-hued diversity of folks instead of driving ethnically and actually alone in your EV? Or met face to face with your senator, representative, county commissioner or mayor?
I don’t want to wander too far afield of just celebrating the new season we’re in…where folks of good conscience are showing up everywhere. Just to remind my Christian allies that we are, after all, PROTEST-ants. And we need courage to keep nailing our theses to cathedral doors, marching our values to marketplace, stockholder meeting and bank; to court, Capitol and barn. We carry the signs of things to come. In concert with humans of all faiths, traditions, tribes and justice-seeking cohorts, we are the ones who remind us that there will be, one day soon, a rising tide that will lift ALL boats…or no one reminds us.
On the day FeloniousPOTUS was to address the joint meeting of Congress, when good folks across the union were showing up in street, courtyard and thoroughfare, we did so in Bend, Oregon. Debbie and I went with our signs. I kept counting the bodies to compare our turnout. I’m sure we made it to 350 souls, down at the corner of Greenwood and Wall Streets. It’s the so-called “Peace Corner” reserved in our community for peaceful rabble rousing. And then we started seeing folks from our congregation at Bend United Methodist. I counted 27 of us. “Holy Crap!” I thought. Do the math! “This is almost 8% of the protesters!” I don’t think I was proud to be from our church…pride isn’t quite it. I felt validated. We felt un-alone. It was just right. That this is where a bunch of us choose to be. We’re not mere pew-sitters. We know how to get off our butts. To acknowledge it, I did this collage of our UMC PROTEST-ants and passed it among us.
Thing is, we need to help each other keep showing up. We’re just getting started…again. This is becoming our newest new normal. A few days later we joined 1,000 at Peace Corner for the “Hands-Off” rally. So many messages in the street: Hands Off the Constitution…, We the People Are Pissed!, Let’s Make America Kind Again, Wake Up And Smell the Coup, IKEA Has Better Cabinets, When Injustice Becomes Law—Resistance Becomes Duty and one of my favorites—No Sign Is Big Enough To List the Reason I’m Here!
And once again, People of the Way, from our Bend UMC were visible. Note that John Pitney is wearing his special red and white MAGA cap holding the “I’m Here for Him” sign with pics of grandson Jackson. The MAGA cap was worn in public for the first time that day. It was quite the conversation piece. The inscription is “Make America Greta Again,” drawing on the super power of Swedish activist Greta Thunberg. At age 15, she stood for 3 weeks in front of the Swedish Parliament leading up to the general election, missing school and holding a sign “Skolstrejk för Klimatet” (School Strike for Climate).
She ignited the Fridays for Future and School Strike movements and famously spoke to world leaders at the World Economic Forum saying “I want you to act as if your house is on fire! Because it is!” In both the middle and right pics you see Debbie holding up the sign which, apparently, was one of the most controversial of the day. During an otherwise orderly 8-hour stand, hers was the only sign officially soliciting a sustained one-finger salute from a woman in a passing car representing the other MAGA. Justice, Kindness, Mercy and Humility are always offensive to the status quo. You get that, right?
Which brings me to the favorite sign of many around us: JESUS WAS WOKE! As people of faith, we are uniformly tired and disgusted as those of power and influence co-opt one of the most fundamental practices of faith shared by all the world’s credible religious traditions, Jewish, Christian, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, indigenous tribal religions and beyond—at least when they function at their best! It’s the practice of awakening…to what is beautiful, peaceful and just. It’s the routine of making better the lives of the most marginalized and endangered. An early use of “woke” was Black American folk singer-songwriter Huddie Ledbetter, a.k.a. Lead Belly, when he used the phrase “stay woke” in a spoken afterword to a 1938 recording of his song “Scottsboro Boys”, which tells the story of nine black teenagers and young men falsely accused of raping two white women in Alabama in 1931. What the wokers rail against is, by definition ”the belief that there are systemic injustices in American society and the need to address them.”
One of the multitude of gifts to me at the Hands-Off rally, along with being surrounded with so many of our own church folks, was the presence of our local pastor, our ordained clergywoman Jen. I mean Debbie and I were there and a couple of other retired clergy and we wore our vestments, the stoles that identify us as faith leaders. We want everyone to know there are Christians who care about diversity, equity and inclusion. So we love this pic of Jen in her collar inscribed with words of MLK: “I have decided to stick with love, hate is too great a burden to bear.” Our clergy are too often silent and there is good reason to keep a sock in it in these times. But they need to know how wondrous it is when THEY show up. Jen and our church worship leaders begin every Sunday worship with these words, “Welcome to our church where we do not believe in Christian Nationalism, rather that every human being is a beloved child of God. Amen? Amen!” This takes courage of the kind we so crave. Thanks Jen.
At Easter every year Debbie will repeat the words of Rev. Clarence Jordan (founder of Koinonia Farm in Americus, Georgia koinoniafarm.org and author of the Cotton Patch Gospel translation of the New Testament): “Jesus’ resurrection is not to convince the incredulous nor to reassure the fearful, but to enkindle the believers. The proof that God raised Jesus from the dead is not the empty tomb, but the full hearts of the transformed disciples. The crowning evidence that he lives is not a vacant grave, but a spirit-filled fellowship. Not a rolled-away stone, but a carried-away church.” I have said these people showing up for diversity, equity and inclusion across this country and around the world is the best evidence there is, of Resurrection, not a “rolled-away stone” but a carried-away church, indeed a carried away public, where justice is what love looks like in the streets and the halls of power.
If we can keep getting carried away for love in public, we have a chance. These gatherings aren’t random acts of kindness though they certainly are infused with the kind and joyful. They are vigils, in the deepest sense they may be worship. What wrapped it up for me at the Hands Off rally was the tribal family who joined us midway through the morning. I stopped and spoke with the elder of the clan who said they had driven down from Yakima Nation. She said they were there because they want people to remember…this violence has been going on for eons and far more than tariffs and the price of eggs and lost jobs, it’s about colonization, generational dehumanization and genocide, the loss of place and wealth. And it’s a call to reparations.
We were all gathered at this major intersection at one end of downtown…cars and trucks honking, people moving, signs waving, megaphones blaring. Every 15 minutes or so, our Yakima neighbors and their young family circled the intersection through four lights and four crosswalks with their quiet dignity and their flags: Indigenous, Solidarity, Land Back. The hardest truth for we of privilege is that it’s not about us. Unless it’s about all of us. That’s why they were there.
I hope you all are showing up for all of us. While I once again procrastinated on getting this blog out, we attended our annual camp site committee meeting at our United Methodist Camp at Wallow Lake, near Joseph, in the wondrous “Alps” of far NE Oregon. There’s such audacious brilliance in that place. Like the Fairy Slipper (Calypso) orchid dancing by the river in early summer and the fox that plays among the solar panels on the camp’s lower edge. At any turn a spontaneous song of gratitude can be drawn from the throat of even the most clueless believer by what springs forth there.
But once again, my jaw dropped this time, not at these obvious gems but from our human sharing around the fire, just a few nights ago. We had acknowledged the illogical chaos of our moment and invited folks to share something good in the midst. One of our crowd is a veterinarian. She shared her delight in neutering five male kittens of the same litter at the shelter a few days ago. She giggled at how they were all spooned up together in recovery. The foster family had named each of them after a nut. After she removed the particular organs in question, she proclaimed, “No nuts here!” So there was that.
But then 81-year-old Carol, who doesn’t talk often, spoke her outrage at what’s happening to us and the pain and injustice she sees in her community. She knows real history. She’s lived through some of it. She says this is the worst. Her ‘something good’ was showing up, at 81, for her first protest…at 81 for her first rally. As all the shit comes down, this…she…we rise up. Goosebumps. Jaw drop.
I finish my thoughts this time with the words of Stacey Abrams who, along with all else, just happens to be the daughter of two United Methodist preachers and a devoted, carried-away churchwoman:
DEI is not something new. It has been woven into the American fabric for centuries, expanding the rights and freedoms of more and more people. Those of us who have been denied rights to vote, marry, work, care for our own bodies, shop, own homes, adopt children, hold credit cards in our names — we embody diversity, equity and inclusion. Our ancestors paved a way out of no way so that we might walk with dignity and freedom.
(from her podcast: “Assembly Required with Stacey Abrams”)
You all probably picked up on this long ago, but I just now awoke to it. Dei is latin for God. DEI is English for diversity, equity and inclusion. They kinda seem the same to me. Imago Dei is “Image of God.” We’re all made in God’s image. Not just humans. Everything. That’s DEI. There is God-ness and Divinity in our quest for a world of DEI. Imago DEI, a world in God’s image. Hmmm. That could be another sign. We could carry that in the street, right? But Love Your Neighbor pretty much says it all anyway. Love is always worth
showing up for.
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