On the day of the memorial service for the victims of the Boston Marathon bombing

Today, behind the mourners in public places, the rescuers, the demonstrators, the loud speakers, there are --always, still-- those who clean and scrub, those who cannot get away from work, those caring for the very young and the very old, those who cannot get easily from one place to the other, and the artists, the writers, the poets, who need the quiet solitude and the unsung space and time before the singing, and who, in their own way, hold up and reweave the world. Remember them.

(c) Jane Redmont

Moi?

My Liberal Identity

You are a Working Class Warrior, also known as a blue-collar Democrat. You believe that the little guy is getting screwed by conservative greed-mongers and corporate criminals, and you’re not going to take it anymore.

Take the quiz at
About.com Political Humor

Stations of the Cross of Globalization

My friend Luiz Coelho has made his Stations of the Cross of Globalization available as a free download. You can find the download link here with some information. Or go directly here.

The Stations were just selected as runner-up in the Edinburgh 2010 media competition. As Holy Week approaches, you may want to consider them for your devotions if you are a Christian.

A Labor Day op-ed

A good Labor Day essay by my friend Algernon D'Ammassa. The punctuation problems, by the way, are courtesy of his editor; they're not his doing. The essay was published in the Deming (New Mexico) Headlight.

Solidarity forever!

Yes, I remembered that today was International Workers' Day

I just didn't have anything new to say about it.

I do have lilies of the valley in my garden, though.

What's the connection between labor and lilies? See my post of two years ago. (A follow-up on this.)

A little bonus on Haymarket and May Day from the Encyclopedia of Chicago History.

Photo: The Haymarket Memorial, Chicago. (Erected only in 2004!)

Life with the old liberals, revisited

The title of this post comes from here. I remembered it because once again I am here on a Friday night, watching Bill Moyers with my parents.

Moyers has an excellent show this week (I'm sure it will be archived within a few days and you can watch it on the website) with guests Patricia Williams (of "Diary of a Mad Law Professor" fame) and Eric Foner (author of a noted book on Reconstruction --which I gather not everyone in the field likes-- and a new book on Lincoln). Interesting interview with Foner here. Announcement of Williams's MacArthur Fellowship here.

I am in the Boston area for the weekend to celebrate my father's 90th birthday (tomorrow - he is thus one day younger than Billy Graham) and the big news, besides the birthday, is that my mother now has wireless and I can blog from my parents' living room. Oh dear. (But my time belongs to my parents while I am here, so I suspect this will be it for blogging.)

Moyers also interviewed Kevin Phillips, whom I had never heard before.

He also paid tribute to Studs Terkel and John Leonard, both of whom died in the last week.

Watch those Moyers interviews. Really.

Tick, tick, tick...

... Mid-semester grades are due at 8:30 a.m. on the college registrar's secure website...

Action alert: letter re: Rosemary R. Ruether dis-invitation

The recent dis-invitation from the University of San Diego will not hurt Rosemary Radford Ruether personally or professionally; she is internationally known and has plenty of work to do.*Far more troubling (besides the insult of the rescinded invitation) are the issues of 1) academic freedom and 2) narrow definitions of the Catholic tradition. *Dr. Ruether is a practicing Roman Catholic who works theologically within the broad Catholic tradition and who happens to hold positions different from formal teaching by the church hierarchy.

And all you Anglicans out there, the issue of who defines the church tradition and who belongs (who is in, who is out) should ring a bell, no?

The public letter to sign is rather long, but you can see it via the link. I'm just posting the cover letter here.

**ACTION ALERT**

FROM:
Women's Alliance for Theology, Ethics and Ritual (WATER)
Women's Ordination Conference (WOC)

Dear friends and colleagues,

The University of San Diego recently rescinded its invitation to Professor Rosemary Radford Ruether, Ph.D., to be the holder of the Monsignor John R. Portman Chair in Roman Catholic Theology for 2009-2010. We consider this a matter of serious concern with regard to academic freedom in Catholic institutions.

The Women's Alliance for Theology, Ethics and Ritual (WATER) and the Women's Ordination Conference (WOC) invite you to join us in expressing our views by signing onto our letter to USD President Mary E. Lyons and Vice President Julie Sullivan.

Please sign the letter by close of business on Friday, August 8, 2008 by clicking here or by emailing Erin Saiz Hanna. Please include the name of your organization, affiliation, or university if applicable.

Thank you for taking action with us.

Cordially,

Mary E. Hunt
Co-director
Women's Alliance for Theology, Ethics and Ritual (WATER)

Aisha Taylor
Executive Director
Women's Ordination Conference (WOC

And now, a visual comment from the resident feline bishop, who favors feminist theology.

+ Maya Pavlova has always had impeccable theological taste and I did not ask her to sit on this book several weeks ago when I took this picture. She chose it of her own volition. Because this book by Rosemary Ruether is called Gaia and God, I have called this photo "Maya and Gaia."

+Maya believes in your freedom of conscience and in the power of the laity, however many or few legs the laity may have, so she will not bully you into signing this letter. She does, however, invite you to read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest its concerns.

Quaker Dave flags Trader Joe's

Okay, foodies, here is a little social responsibility post. We loves us our Trader Joe's, but as Quaker Dave points out, isn't the life of a farm worker as important as the life of a chicken?

Read about it here, and do your thing.

"Unequal America"

Meanwhile, Harvard Magazine has discovered the gap between the rich and the poor...

Worth the read, though, in the July issue. Here.

Workers in the vineyard: the Gospel for the day

... according to the Daily Office of the Episcopal Church.

For the kingdom of heaven is like a landowner who went out early in the morning to hire laborers for his vineyard. After agreeing with the laborers for the usual daily wage, he sent them into his vineyard.

When he went out about nine o'clock, he saw others standing idle in the marketplace; and he said to them, 'You also go into the vineyard, and I will pay you whatever is right.' So they went.

When he went out again about noon and about three o'clock, he did the same.

And about five o'clock he went out and found others standing around; and he said to them, 'Why are you standing here idle all day?' They said to him, 'Because no one has hired us.' He said to them, 'You also go into the vineyard.'

When evening came, the owner of the vineyard said to his manager, 'Call the laborers and give them their pay, beginning with the last and then going to the first.'

When those hired about five o'clock came, each of them received the usual daily wage.

Now when the first came, they thought they would receive more; but each of them also received the usual daily wage.

And when they received it, they grumbled against the landowner, saying, 'These last worked only one hour, and you have made them equal to us who have borne the burden of the day and the scorching heat.'

But he replied to one of them, 'Friend, I am doing you no wrong; did you not agree with me for the usual daily wage? Take what belongs to you and go; I choose to give to this last the same as I give to you.

Am I not allowed to do what I choose with what belongs to me? Or are you envious because I am generous?'

So the last will be first, and the first will be last.

Matt. 20: 1- 16 (NRSV)

Prayers for Robyn

Dear prayer posse out there,

Please pray for Robyn Few. I met Robyn in the Bay Area when she was founding SWOP-USA, the Sex Workers Outreach Project-USA, of which she has been a brave and feisty leader. I have just heard that Robyn is in hospital at San Francisco General and has just been diagnosed with B Cell Lymphoma, a non-Hodgkin's disease. It is, Robyn writes, "a very aggressive form of cancer and grows quickly which makes it more vulnerable to treatment."

The physicians are saying Robyn will be on chemotherapy "for at least 4 to 6 months or possibly 1-2 years ( if I can stand it. )." If Robyn is all right after this first stay in the hospital, she will be able to go home on or around Tuesday and rest up till her next round of chemotherapy. The chemo treatment is every 21 days.

As Kirstin has so movingly noted about her own experience and as Caminante often reports about the people for whom she so lovingly cares as a pastor, every cancer story is different. Robin writes about what is helpful to her right now. "We know everybody has a story about cancer but for now if they'd just keep the stories to themselves, we'd truly appreciate it." She does have a good support system in San Francisco. On the aesthetic front, she reports that her hairdresser is going to visit this weekend and shave her head and that when she gets through the first bout of chemo and feels better, she will write again and send pictures.

Carol Leigh, a good friend of Robyn's, intervened to get her to the hospital and the doctors say she saved Robyn's life.

Robyn is sad that she will miss attending the Barcelona International Harm Reduction Conference, which she was going to attend this month. In honor of her work, have a look at the link. (What is Harm Reduction? See here.)

Please pray for Robyn, for strength, for healing, for endurance. Pray for her advocacy work on behalf of sex workers. And pray for all those whom we stigmatize because of their occupation, their sexual practices, their drug use, or their health status, and for all those who stigmatize them and see them as less than human and unworthy of love -- and pray in thanksgiving for Jesus, who never hesitated to have dinner with the sex workers of his day.

(And I am still kicking myself for forgetting to post last December about the International Day to End Violence Against Sex Workers.)

I commit myself to praying daily for Robyn, and I just wrote her telling her I was enlisting my prayer posse. Thanks, friends!

Photo: Thor Swift for New York Times

A year ago, part II (calendar year: International Workers' Day - Labor Day)

A year ago according to the secular calendar I was pondering labor and lilies of the valley.

And, in another post, honoring Mother Jones.

Later in the month, I posted a May 1-related post I had promised back then, on the origins of Labor Day and the link between labor and lilies of the valley in the land of my birth.

The woman at the well

When I was Social Justice Minister at Boston's Paulist Center, a welcoming and lively Catholic community, back in the 1980s, I preached the one homily that folks told me they remembered for years afterward. (They also laughed when they talked about it.) This was way, way before computers, but I did save my homilies or sermons from those years, typed up and filed away, and this past Sunday, after hearing one fine sermon about the Samaritan woman and reading a few other fine ones online, I went into the files and lo, there it was, the old Samaritan woman sermon. I could hardly believe I preached it back in 1984 when I wasn't even 32 years old. Twenty-four years ago! Good heavens! It seems like the day before yesterday.

So it has taken me a few days to type this thing into my computer, but it has been a nice break since I am meditating on parts of the Gospel of John because I am preaching this coming weekend (at last -- I had taken a break because of the pressures of academe, but a couple of weeks ago I decided I couldn't stand it, so back in the pulpit I go).

Enjoy.


The Third Sunday in Lent (Year A), 1984.

I came out in a long loose dress and shawl carrying a big jug and spoke these words:

I still come to the well.

I come here to remember.
What it was like that day.
It was high noon – so hot,
even the crickets were tired.
The wheat fields down in the valley were shining
in the sun.
Up here
you could smell the herbs and the hot dust,
and sometimes you heard
just the tiniest rustle of wind
in the olive trees.

Give me a drink,
he said.
I didn’t know whether to get angry
or laugh.
Get your own water, I felt like saying,
I’m tired.
Isn’t that just like a man.
They sit in the shade,
telling stories and watching
as we women go by, carrying
buckets and jugs
up and down
the steep paths.

But of course he was different.
He was
a stranger—a Jew;
I could tell.
And I was so surprised
I wanted to laugh out loud.
Jews don’t talk to Samaritans;
and men don’t talk to women
in public.
It’s just not done.

No, he wasn’t like other men –
and I’ve
known plenty of them.
He wasn’t
like other men,
and he was more of man
because of it.
Not a coward, for sure,
but gentle, as if he could feel
what a woman feels.
Strong though.
I could tell.
He could have picked me up if he tried,
water jug and all.
And then the power
of what he said..
and the way that he said it…

Living water, he said,
I’ll give you
living water.
All I could think of at first was thirst
and heat
and breathing in dust day after day
and my aching feet on the stone path
and my arms heavy from the water jugs,
and how much I would love
to get away from the well.

I didn’t realize he was speaking
of another thirst
and another
water…

We talked
about my men.
You know they called me a bad woman
down there
in the town.
Not just because I had had
several men.
But because
I was bold.
I talked back.
I wonder
if he liked that.
I think he did.

He did make sure I knew
who he was,
though.
And that he knew the truth
about me;
and that
what we were about up here
by the well
was truth –
plain truth.

I was confused about the truth–
their mountain and our mountain,
their worship, our worship.
But he got me thinking
in a whole new way.

Thinking – that’s another thing I do
when I come up here
to the well.
I come here to think
about the things he said.
About living water
and God the Spirit.
That’s what I felt inside me when he spoke
and I had to go and tell everyone…
Spirit…
As if my life and the world
were changing, as if
they could really change.

I think about what keeps me
from the living water,
too –
do you think about that? At first what kept me
is that I didn’t even know
my own thirst.
I think he knew
my thirst for truth
and for hope
and for
a new world.
He helped me to know it
and name it.
Before him, I wasn’t sure
what to call it.

Sometimes what keeps me from the living water
is that water in the jug.
The sheer weariness,
the burdens of every day.
The men who still laugh at me,
and the women who are still suspicious of me
and my children’s demands on me.
I get tired and forgetful
and discouraged.
I get to feeling
trapped.
What keeps you
from the water?
What keeps you
from his truth?

I’ve got to tell you again,
when I realized the truth,
when I realized who he was,
I left my jug right here
and ran off to the town.
I felt a power I had never felt,
God’s power and mine all mingled together!

I often wonder why he chose me, of all people,
to tell
who he was.

Did he think people would listen to me
because I was different?
He said himself
“salvation is from the Jews,”
and then he went and picked
a Samaritan,
as if anyone in the world
could know the Messiah
and talk about him!
Did he know I was smart and bold
and he could trust me?
Did he know
that we women aren’t afraid
to feel what we feel
and say what we mean
and go and do
what needs to be done?
Why didn’t he send one of his buddies to tell my townsfolk?
Of course a Jewish man from Galilee
wouldn’t have gotten very far
with my people.
I, on the other hand, had nothing to lose
by being outspoken.
They’d already
called me every name they could.

The thing was, when I came
barreling down the hill
they listened,
Oh, did they listen.
They were so fired up that they ran to him and begged him
to stay for a while.

He stayed two nights and two days,
and more and more people believed in his word
and his power,
and in that Spirit God.
Even the children --
especially the children.
My daughter acted as if she’d known all along
who he was
and who God was
and how fine she was.
She’s only
seven, and bolder than I am
already.
Smarter, too.

She comes up here with me most of the time
now.
That’s the third reason
I come to the well.
We still need the water,
and women
still draw it.
Oh, things did change
when he came
and after he came.
It felt
like an old world coming to an end
and a new one being born.
I could feel it. I still can.
But
he left,
and we stay on in the village.
It feels
like the middle of time.
People look at me in a new way,
but they haven’t forgotten
the names they called me.
They still have a little trouble
with the people on the other side of the hill.
Women still draw the water.
I think it will take us a lifetime
to change our ways
Maybe longer.

But I can still see
him.
When he left, a crowd
walked him to the edge of town.
I walked down the road a piece with him.
We didn’t say anything.
I was all talked out, for once,
and
so was he.
We grinned at each other.
I never thought of the Messiah as smiling
that way.

Sometimes
when my daughter looks up at me with her dark eyes sparkling
I see him too.
I pray
that she will know more than the water jug
and the laughter behind her back.
I think she will –
and so does she.
She will know a new world
thanks to him.
And so will you.


Copyright (c) Jane C. Redmont
PLEASE DO NOT QUOTE IN FULL OR IN PART WITHOUT PERMISSION AND ATTRIBUTION.
Bloggers may link freely.

Istanbul photos: Turkish flag over Bosphorus; woman climbing city steps

Click to enlarge and see detail.

Photos: Jane Redmont

Meanwhile, back in Paris...

There is a major strike which has completely disrupted the city. Read about the practicalities and the politics here. Thank you, BBC.

Child labor: Gap Kids sweatshops in India

Latest is in this from this story in The Guardian.

The Gap is investigating now.

Here's a related story, same day, same publication, on the role of consumers in all this.

Basic rights for immigrant domestic workers: ¡ Si se puede !

Well, hurrah. Domestic workers --the mostly immigrant women who clean your houses, diaper your babies, take care of your children, cook your dinner, serve as companions to your elders, and much, much more-- want dignity, decent wages, benefits... in other words, concrete, public, legal, and financial recognition of the value of their work.

Janinsanfran has the scoop on the newly-formed alliance of domestic workers here. Labor Day isn't just for barbecue. (With all due respect to bbq makers and eaters nationwide.) I am pondering why and how I find this a lot more worthy of attention and energy than the latest shenanigans in the Anglican Communion. A lot more worthy of my attention and energy in general and a lot more worthy of my attention and energy as an Anglican Christian.

Take away the immigrant domestic workers holding up the daily lives of all the people in this country who are currently embroiled in various Episcopal/Anglican tugs-of-war and see what happens.

Labor links

Janinsanfran has posted some good Labor Day images (with song) and updates. Have a look and a listen.

Solidarity forever.

Which reminds me, I need to re-up my membership in the National Writers' Union (NWU - UAW Local 1981, AFL-CIO).

Interfaith Worker Justice: the new labor-religion alliance

This organization, one of my favorites, has been around for a decade and a half (it used to be called the Interfaith Committee for Worker Justice) and is based in Chicago, a long-time center of labor activity, and indeed labor-and-religion activity (think Monsignor Jack Egan, Monsignor George Higgins, and the Chicago Jewish Labor Committee). Interfaith Worker Justice (IWJ) has branches and chapters all over, including in the Oakland/ SanFrancisco Bay Area, where I was involved with it, and where there is now also an affiliated group called Seminarians for Worker Justice.

On Labor Day Weekend IWJ also has a "Labor in the Pulpit" (and yes, in Muslim and Jewish, not just Christian, congregations) event,* which I think is how I first encountered this group.
*******I see it's now "Labor in the Pulpits, Labor on the Bimah, Labor in the Minbar."

Have a look. You need to know this group exists. Have a look at the resources and information in the left-hand column. You'll notice items related to immigration, the Katrina aftermath, Congress and the minimum wage, and the recent IWJ national conference.

The dreaded Wikipedia is pretty accurate on the subject of IWJ and has some interesting information.

But do go to the primary source.