Obama’s Parliament
Posted on | February 3, 2010 | No Comments
In discussing our country’s Constitutional crisis last week I focused on the tension between our ideal of deliberative argument and conversation over against the realities of factional partisanship fueled by the desire for domination. Indeed, the ideal has always been a fragile, weak reed in the midst of the storms of human history. This Republic’s founders were more aware of it than most.
I have seen in this ideal a primary form of our spiritual longing for participation in God’s abundant creative life. In the structure of God’s purposes we find a “Constitution” – a covenantal bond — in which we can live toward greater mutual confirmation, affirmation, and care for our world. The practical form in which I seek to rehearse this life is the Roundtable experience of mutual nurture, conversation, and openness to God’s wider, transcendent purposes.
The assembly in which this fragile light is kept burning always exhibits some characteristics of the political orders in which we seek to live and work together, but it is also irreducibly different. This is the distinction we know as the difference between “church” and “state.” The question is to what degree our political orders might come closer to this deliberative ideal and how do we best live with the reality of our inability to achieve it.
In turning to a kind of Parliamentary interchange with the Republican Congressional delegation last week, President Obama can be seen as trying to institute aspects of this ideal in order to overcome the impasse in which we stand. Our strong executive and the way the founders divided the authorities of government have always been challenged by the Parliamentary vision, with its strong legislature. Senator McCain as well as President Obama have both expressed commitments to re-energizing government with this face-to-face argument, deliberation, and pragmatic problem-solving. However, they can only succeed in this effort if the broader American political culture is infused with the original ideal. This means publicizing the work of deliberative councils more than the raucous protests of so-called Tea-parties or impersonal internet movements. Both the little assembly of Roundtable Worship and the big assemblies of our general publics have crucial roles to play in this effort
Your comments are always welcome. For a practical start, check out www.everyday-democracy.org, one of many such efforts around the world.
Tags: democracy > Everyday Democracy > President Obama
Lie, lay, lain, laid, lied
Posted on | February 3, 2010 | No Comments
Beset for years by the popular destruction of English grammar (”lie and lay” being the bete noire) and dumbfounded by the sorry saga of John Edwards’ scandalous behavior, I wrote this little poem that speaks from my quirky wordplay side. I am not sure which is less susceptible to improvement — our grammar or our public morals — but it’s always worth a try.
Lie, lay, lain, laid, lied
For grammarians and scandalizers
He lies who says he never lies
where faithful men have never lain,
For he laid down his flowery words
when she lay down in conjugation’s loss.
Now, woman, lie in loss,
lay up some dreams for compensation.
Think not he lied to you,
for he has never lied to those with whom he’s lain.
Or did he lie when she was laid?
Earth Speaks in Haiti
Posted on | January 26, 2010 | No Comments
All our careful plans and fervent hopes are devastated by one brief shudder in earth’s crust. In the face of such appalling suffering and destruction, an offering of words seems an obscene gesture. Yet words must come, not only to spurn on our action, but to reconstruct the world of meaning which a cataclysm threatens. They must come forth like tears of babies crying in the night. Perhaps the words might act like little beacons for the dark voyage ahead.
“God has issued judgment.” But what kind of God would be so cruel to the innocent and those whose history is a putrid wallow of undeserved pain? And so some have said, “Earth has spoken.” Here, perhaps we might gain purchase on the scaffold of meaning we might erect to reconstruct our world. But what would that mean? Earth has moved. It is earth’s way. Without the molten mantle life itself would not exist. The earth would die, become a cold cinder. But has earth spoken? Has earth entered into communication with the human creatures? Has earth conveyed some meanings to the living scab that huddles on its crust? What could we be hearing even through the cries of people trapped beneath the rubble?
“Earth has spoken.” Earth says, Please, where I have rubbed my plates together do not settle and build homes. Where I have spit forth rivers of molten rock do not construct your workplaces and fields. And yet our memories are so short compared to earth’s. Our fear of insufficiency and our rampant overreaching impel us to claim habitat where earth has issued warning. Even then, we hardly know what hidden ruptures undercut the oceans and the seas. Earth will move in unexpected ways with consequences we cannot predict.
“Earth has spoken.” Does this mean Earth has consciousness, intent, design? The earth religions say it/he/she does. It has persona that can speak and act with us, dance with us. No longer able to say God is “he,” we turn to Earth as “she,” as mothering urge of Life. But how can Mother say to kill and destroy? Is Mother only Kali, the great Hindu god of destruction? Is Her only word to die and be the fodder of rebirth? Is the voice of person-Earth the end of voicefulness for all her creatures? Or is Earth’s voice a call to deeper reconciliation with the Earth and Earth-life, known in quake as well as quickening? In this conflagration are there seeds of reconciliation? Of new relationships among the people and in how they live upon their part of earth?
Perhaps our path of meaning in the face of Earth’s destruction is to wrest from resignation a sense of reconciliation with Earth’s ways. Let us listen more carefully through seismographs and observation where and how we ought to live. Let us seek a deeper harmony, not one that drains our life of awe and even fear, but one that asks for active collaboration in the work of Earth life.
In the land of slavery, of violent liberation, of suffering for sugar’s sweetness and decay, of patient faith and brutal oppression, maybe, perhaps, we might reclaim some sense of working with this fragile earth in all its force and ravishing fecundity. Maybe, then, we might be able to say that we have listened as Earth speaks.
Our Constitutional Crisis
Posted on | January 15, 2010 | No Comments
The widely recognized dysfunction and paralysis of the US Senate is creating a Constitutional crisis in our country analogous to the fault-line that has created the devastating earthquake in Haiti. Like that quake, this one has been building for some two hundred years. Our Constitution envisioned the Senate as a deliberative body relatively insulated from the turbulent passions of the people that found voice in the House of Representatives. However, the partisanship that the drafters feared has now created an institution so hamstrung by its own rules that it cannot proceed by the majority vote assumed by the Constitution except in a few specific cases. Senators representing as little as 10% of the population can stymie action desired by the 90%. As if a grotesque parody, the Senate now functions as a Quaker meeting run amok. What has gone wrong?
The Constitution authorizes the Senate to develop its own rules. Among them has been the filibuster that delays votes until 60 (formerly 67!) senators vote to call the question. These and other practices are embedded deeply in the fundamental appeal of the Enlightenment to self-government through reasoned deliberation. The Founders wanted to establish a protected sphere for reasonable debate, deliberation, and negotiation over against the mind of a single monarch or an impassioned mob. Instead of a hierarchy of subject-lord-monarch-God they devised a “machinery” of competing sovereignties bound together in a covenant – the Constitution.
However, this tri-partite machinery – this confederation of deliberative orders – could only function if indeed there existed a tangible possibility of consensus based in a common knowledge of the situation. What has always threatened to derail this deliberative order is the cauldron of passions, loyalties, greed, and blind lust of ordinary people, especially people in groups. The formation of political parties – that is, governments in waiting – along with the inevitable factions of economic interest and regional affections now threatens to immobilize our Republic.
My own work in ethics (God’s Federal Republic and other writings), restorative justice, and worship (the Roundtable Worship Project) has taken the enlightenment ideal of public wisdom, conversation, debate, and reconciliation very seriously. I have come to see the circle process of collaboration and the search for a peace-building consensus to lie at the heart of the creative process shaping all life. At the same time, this search is always endangered by our anxious desire for power over others, for escape from the system of earth’s dynamics, for the absolute of our own claims over any others. The authors of The Federalist Papers as well as theologians like Reinhold Niebuhr knew this problem well.
So the Constitutional crisis is also a crisis in our ideal of a deliberative democracy bound in constitutional covenant. Whether there is a “we the people” who can both amend the Senate’s ways as well as rekindle the commitment to deliberation for the common good is the question before us.
Tags: Federalist Papers > US Constitution
About William J. Everett
In my teaching career I authored eight books and numerous articles in social ethics and religion. After over thirty years of academic work — in Germany, India, and South Africa as well as in the United States — I wanted to turn my hand to a poetically written novel to probe the issues of ecological and human reconciliation.
When I am not writing, I create furniture for worship settings. For more about my work, go to www.WisdomsTable.net, where you will also find galleries of artwork by my wife Sylvia, whose ancestors were the original inspiration for Red Clay, Blood River. Click to read my complete bio...
About Red Clay Blood River
Red Clay, Blood River
is a story told by Earth about two brothers from Germany and an enslaved
South African woman whose lives bind together America’s “Trail of
Tears” and South Africa’s simultaneous “Great Trek” of 1838.
Memories of their journeys through oppression, estrangement and reconciliation
reverberate in the lives of three contemporary students brought together
by their interests in ecology. Through their often difficult friendship
and a surprising discovery they begin to unravel the mystery of their
estrangements, struggles, and deep connections to each other and to
the earth.
Click to read more...