2018 Final Reflection

These are the end-of-the-year reflection questions suggested by a daily inspirational text service (Shine) that a friend signed me up for, along with my answers. 

●︎ In the last year, what actions gave me the most energy?

• Solidarity
• Going to shows
• Championing leaders I believe in
• Reading great books
• Sleeping
• Spending time with people I love and who love me

●︎ In the last year, what made me feel most inspired?

• Hearing from passionate experts
• Hearing from loving spiritual leaders

●︎ In the last year, when did I feel the most proud?

• Pushing myself and succeeding
• Sharing my voice on issues I care about
• Creating opportunities for students to share their voices
• Organizing
• Reciprocal relationships

2018 Reading List

I'm not sure that there are clear themes for this year, but I certainly enjoyed reading fiction with friends, reviewing powerful nonfiction books, taking the recommendations of friends, quality spiritual reads, and poetry that made me think about the world in new ways.

I read Patricia Hruby Powell's Loving vs. Virginia: A Documentary Novel of the Landmark Civil Rights Case (2017) very quickly. It had been gifted to me, but with my long to-read list, I never thought I'd get to it. However, after reading The Invention of Wings over break, I wanted to further explore the complexities of US history; I saw Loving vs. Virginia on my bookshelf and I was intrigued. I opened it, saw that it was in the form of poetry and in the voices of the Lovings, and it is easily readable. I ultimately finished it about as fast as I've ever finished a book, and I appreciated the beauty of every page. There are few things that I love more than history with heart.

Rex Ambler's Living in Dark Times (2017) makes me feel like I'm on the right track in the way that I am living my life. He writes that although we cannot fix the whole world, we can use the model of our own lives to increase the light and love in the world. 

I read Toni Morrison's The Origin of Others (2017) because someone in my Meeting is very excited about it. Although I love exploring the topic of othering, this book was a bit esoteric for my taste. She uses novels to explore the topic, and because I have not read most of the novels, I had a hard time appreciating her arguments to their fullest extent.

I read The Irish Jesuit's Sacred Space for Lent 2018 every day of Lent. I loved having that evening reading as a part of my bedtime routine in the past few weeks. I love that each reading has questions to consider. I loved that I felt totally ready for the showing of Jesus Christ Superstar on Easter night. I could answer everyone's questions that arose from the musical!

A More Beautiful and Terrible History: The Uses and Misuses of Civil Rights History by Jeanne Theoharis (2018) taught me a lot I did not previously know about how the Civil Rights Movement happened. It shined a light on areas of that history that feel both important and hidden away. Lots of connections to current events!

Before the Next Bomb Drops: Rising Up from Brooklyn to Palestine (2015) is a gorgeous book of poetry by Remi Kanazi. The poems are bold and call all of us to bravery and to our best selves that center justice.

Injustice: The Story of the Holy Land Foundation Five (2018) by Miko Peled was a very interesting read in the weeks leading up to my Israel/Palestine trip. It was a good reminder of the responsibility that we have here in the United States to fight Islamophobia - an anti-Palestinian sentiment is not something one has to go abroad to address. Also, our justice system as a whole needs so much loving attention.

I went to Anthony Ray Hinton's book talk for The Sun Does Shine: How I Found Life and Freedom on Death Row (2018) this spring on a whim, but I was immediately drawn in by the power of his storytelling. This book did not disappoint. Anthony Ray Hinton is a model for us all in his capacity for love and forgiveness.

In the final weeks of the school year, Alison Bechdel's Fun Home (2006) was a great escape from the stress and pressure of the end of the year. It is a page-turner - hard to put down each time I would start reading it.  It also turned out that I had a totally false idea of what it was about based on what I knew of the musical. It is a deep and thoughtful memoir of loss and finding oneself and one's voice.

Getting Beyond Better: How Social Entrepreneurship Works (2015) by Roger L. Martin and Sally R. Osberg goes beyond the basics of social entrepreneurship that I had previously known. It is full of practical tips about social entrepreneurship and interesting and powerful case studies. There are examples of solidarity in the book that I used in a peace-building workshop days later.

I started C.S. Lewis' The Four Loves (1960) over a year ago, but just finished it because I promised someone on my Israel/Palestine trip that I would read it. I saw why he wanted me to - it was reflective of many of the conversations that we had in the Holy Land about the nature and responsibilities of love. Although the denseness of the book is what slowed me down from finishing it for so long, I am ultimately glad that I read it - much food for thought!

I also promised someone on my Israel/Palestine trip that I would read C.S. Lewis' The Horse and His Boy (1954), the third book in the Narnia series. It's interesting reading it after knowing more about C.S. Lewis because his Christian philosophy shines through so clearly.

Jennie Isbell and J. Brent Bill's Finding God in the Verbs: Crafting a Fresh Language of Prayer (2015) is a book that I've been reading slowly over the course of a couple years. I brought it on my Israel/Palestine trip because it seemed like the kind of topic that would be fitting for the Holy Land. Given the daily prayers that we shared in my group, I was deeply grateful to have this book as a grounding presence. I love that it is both Quaker and focused on building one's relationship with God broadly, with Jesus specifically, and with Scripture. It felt like a bridge and it deepened my spirituality.

Enough As She Is (2018) was our summer reading book and was written by Rachel Simmons, whom I first worked with in 2000, and whose career I have followed with great joy. She is thoughtful about how to best support adolescent girls as they develop in their competence, confidence, and connection and navigate their way to adulthood and defining their own success.

Resistance, Rebellion, Life: 50 Poems Now (2017) was a book that I needed when it came out in early 2017, but then it turned out its poems were not quite as easily understood as I hope. There are certainly many gems within it, and each work is clearly written with care, but it definitely took more a year and a half to read for a reason.

Sing, Unburied, Sing (2017) is a stunningly beautiful novel by Jesmyn Ward. The novel weaves the past and the present together seamlessly. It is like a literary version of the Bryan Stevenson's Legacy Museum and Peace and Justice Memorial.

I absolutely loved Krista Tippett's Becoming Wise: An Inquiry into the Mystery and Art of Living (2016). The chapters were on words, the body, love, faith, and hope. The book is made up of interviews that Tippett did over the course of over a decade, and it beautifully puts into words a lot of the ideas that I have been reflecting on recently about how we can be the change we wish to see in the world.

I finally read Steve Chase's Pendle Hill Pamphlet Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions? A Quaker Zionist Rethinks Palestinian Rights (2017), which I've been meaning to read for a year. Like Steve, the book is extremely thoughtful and authentic. He models his process for coming to BDS very similarly to how I modeled mine in my article "A Loving Quaker Journey to BDS." Steve is coming to my Quaker Meeting next week, and I'm happy to be able to use this text in my introduction of him.

A Kind of Freedom (2017) by Margaret Wilkerson Sexton was my first ever audio book as I prepared for my "Women Reading Women" book club. It reminded me in some ways of Homegoing, but circled back through the generations multiple times. I cared about the characters, but kept waiting for major revelations that never came.

Home Fire by Kamila Shamsie (2017) is my new favorite novel. It is a modern reimagining of Antigone that features a British family of Pakistani origin. It is from the perspective of the characters who represent Antigone, Haemon, Polynices, Antigone, and Creon.  It's absolutely gorgeous.

My most recent book club book was Trail of Lightning (2018) by Rebecca Roanhoarse. It is Indigenous dystopian futurism and I thoroughly enjoyed it and its three-dimensional characters. At first the literal monsters in it turned me off, but they definitely did not end up being the focus of the book, and instead it is full of meaningful relationships.

Final book of the year was Becoming by Michelle Obama (2018). Her story is remarkably relatable, and I found it very interesting to hear her insider take on events that we all saw happen on the news. She calls us all to consider how we can use our voices and share our gifts.

Why I Loved Becoming Wise

Krista Tippet's reflections on her twelve years of interviews touched my spirit. So much of what she shares resonates with my own life experience:

• "Until the Wall actually broke open on November 9, 1989 . . . no one imagined that it could fall or the Iron Curtain crumble." (7-8)
•  "New generations . . . instinctively grasp the need for practical disciplines to translate aspiration into action." (9)
• "Naming brings the essence of things into being." (15)
• Elizabeth Alexander: "And if we don't do that with language that's very, very, very precise -- not prissy, but precise -- then are we knowing each other truly?" (19)
• Rachel Naomi Remen: "The world is made up of stories; it's not made up of facts." (26)
• Frances Kissling: "Politics is the art of the possible." (32)
• Frances Kissling: "You've got to put yourself at the margins and be willing to risk in order to make change." (34)
• " . . . the axial question: can human beings come to understand their own well-being as linked to that of others, in wider and wider circles, beyond family and tribe?" (35)
• "Might beauty [or God or love] be a bridge we can walk across occasionally to each other, a bridge that might help humble and save us?" (78) 
• Those who represent "wisdom incarnate" are "an embodied capacity to hold power and tenderness in a surprising, creative interplay." (85)
• "Strangest of all, on this planet, is the way we continue to idealize romantic love and crave it for completion." (107)
• "good questions, generously posed, seriously held, are powerful things." (108)
• "Martin Luther King made one of the most radical statements I've ever encountered: 'At times life is hard, as hard as crucible steel. In spite of the darkness of the hour, we must not lose faith in our white brothers." (113)
• john powell: "Whether it's a community or a nation, there's no such thing as sovereignty. We are in relationship with each other." (120)
• Sr. Simone Campbell talks about "being for 'the 100 percent.'" (129)
• Sr. Simone Campbell: "Having the curiosity to see their perspective allows for finding new solutions." (129)
• "'Deep listening' is a virtue that anchors every kind of love relationship and it is the compass Sister Simone cites again and again as a creative, openhearted anchor to her life of strong passions and advocacy." (130)
• Paul Elie on Dorothy Day: "she thought that we're naturally oriented toward love." (134)
• on Anthony Appiah: "Change comes about in part . . . simple association, habits of coexistence, seeking familiarity around mundane human qualities of who we are." (135)
• on John Paul Lederach: "Here are specific qualities in the lives of yeasty groups he's seen transform realities in places from Northern Ireland to Colombia to Nepal: they refuse to accept a dualist approach -- us against you. They are armed with love and courage, and these things in action are closely connected to creativity." (136)
• "Lovers are artists" (136)
• "Love demands much more" (140)
• On Marie Howe: Art Helps us to let our heart break open." (147)
• "For me now, faith is in interplay with moral imagination." (162)
• Nathan Schneider: "We decided that we were going to stop complaining about the church that we'd experienced and try to become the church that we dreamed of." (177)
• "The very notion of objectivity is an illusion." (180)
• "As uncertain as I grow about some of the fundaments of faith, in a way that would have alarmed my grandfather, I grow if anything more richly rooted in one of the most inexplicable things he taught me: God is love." (181)
• On Anne Lamott: "Faith is a verb, not a noun." (210)
• Reza Aslan: "We have to remember that fundamentalism is a reactionary phenomenon, not an independent one." (219)
• "It doesn't have to be faith in something" (229)
• "Hope, like every virtue, is a choice that becomes a practice that becomes spiritual muscle memory." (233)
• Vincent Harding: "What is needed, again and again, are more and more people who will stand in that darkness, who will not run away from those deeply hurt communities, and will open up possibilities that other people can't see in ay other way except through human beings who care about them." (235) [This is how I feel when I work with for justice for Palestine and BLM]
• "A civic aspiration is a powerful thing -- it gives moral imagination someplace to go." (246)
• "failure and vulnerability are the very elements of spiritual growth and personal wisdom." (247)
• Brene Brown: "hope is a function of struggle." (250)
• "Resilience" is "a shift from wish-based optimism to reality-based hope . . . It doesn't overcome failure so much as transmute it, integrating it into the reality that evolves." (252) 

Some of the book reminded me of messages I share in my work with students, both as a history teacher and a social action leader:

• Xavier Le Pichon: "I would call it companionship, walking with the suffering person who has come into your life and whom you have not rejected, your heart progressively gets educated by them. They teach you a new way of being." (143)
• john powell: "We're constantly making each other . ..  If we do it right, we're going to create a bigger 'we,' a different 'we.'" (119)
• John Lewis: "You have to be taught the way of peace, the way of love, the way of nonviolence." (111)
• "History always repeats itself until we honestly and searchingly know ourselves."(3)
• "We are still, and again, face to face with the unfinished work of love." (113)
• "Love, muscular and resilient, does not always seem reasonable, much less doable, in our damaged and charged civic spaces." (114) [A student once wrote me that "Your passion - genuine, real passion, uncomfortable because of its strength, at times, perhaps, but beautiful, regarless - has taught girls a most valuable lesson."]
• L'Arche represents a "cross section of humanity testing the most paradoxical of spiritual teachings -- that there is light in darkness, strength in weakness, and beauty in the brokenness of human existence." (80)
• On Eve Ensler: "you were held by love." (144)
• Kate Braestrup: "I look for God's work always in how people love each other." (150)
• "Our kids want us to finally get this right. They have injected the language of transparency and authenticity and integrity into our civic vocabulary." (169)
• "we need to be attentive to what our children can teach us, as well as what we want to impart to them because some of this they know and they actually know more immediately than we do." (222)
• Shane Claiborne: "In the south, where I'm from, you know, we have a saying that you're 'the spittin' image' of somebody . . . and it's shorthand for the 'spirit and image,' you know. And it doesn't just mean you look like them but that you have the character of them In a lot of ways, I guess what I hope that we are seeing Christians who are beginning to be, again, the spitting image of Christ, you know, that are starting to look like and do the things that Jesus did and not be totally distracted by those which have proclaimed the name of Christ and done so many other things." (226)
• On Shane Claiborne: "Faith is not a state of mind, but an action in the world" (229)
• "learning to be reflective and activist at once, to be in service as much as in charge, and to learn from history and elders while bringing very new realities into being." (254)

Some of the book spoke specifically to my faith, which is rooted in love:

• "Love as muscular, resilient." (103)
• "Love is something we only master in moments. It crosses the chasms between us, and likewise brings them into relief." (103)
• "We've lived it [love] as a feeling, when it is a way of being." (103)
• "John Lewis asked a 'what if' question as a tool for social alchemy: what if the beloved community were already a reality, the true reality, and he simply had to embody it until everyone else could see?" (110)
• John Lewis: "If you visualize it, if you can even have faith that it's there, for you t is already there." (111)
• John Lewis: "In the religious sense, in the moral sense, you can say that in the bosom of every human being, there is a spark of the divine." (111)
• John Lewis: "You try to appeal to the goodness of every human being and you don't give up. You never give up on anyone." (112)
• Sr. Simone Campbell: All of creation is one body." (127)
• Eve Ensler: "There is the love. The paradise is here." [Kingdom of God] (145)
• Desmond Tutu: "at the center of this existence is a heart beating with love." (181)
• Kate Braestrup: "If someone asks, 'Where was God in this' I'll say, 'God was in all the people that came to try to help, to try to find your child." (182) [Pain, grace, hope]
• Father George Coyne: "faith is love." (209)
• Brother Guy Consolmagno on Anne Lamott: "The opposite of faith is not doubt. The opposite of faith is certainty." (210)
• "Vincent Harding told me about being with young African American men and women in an inner city, telling him they would like to have 'live human sign posts' to helpt hem see and trust in changed possibilities for themselves." (234-5)
• "intellectual life was a form of spiritual survival" (256)
• Maria Popova: "we need to bridge critical thinking with hope." (257)
• On Maria Popova: "both timeliness and timelessness." (257)
• On Emily Dickinson: "hope inspires the good to reveal itself." (258)

I learned so much from spending my summer with people who are very different than I am. Several times in the book I saw reflections of the lessons I learned from that experience: 

• "Generous listening is powered by curiosity, a virtue we can invite and nurture in ourselves to render it instinctive. It involves a kind of vulnerability -- a willingness to be surprised, to let go of assumptions and take in ambiguity. The listener wants to understand the humanity behind the words of the other, and patiently summons one's own best self and one's own best words and questions." (29)
• "It's hard to transcend a combative question." (30)
• "There is a value in learning to speak together honestly and relate to each other with dignity, without rushing to common ground that would have all the hard questions hanging." (31)
• Frances Kissling:". . . when people who disagree with each other come together with a goal of gaining a better understanding of why the other believes what they do, good things come from that. But the pressure of coming to agreement works against really understanding each other." (32)
• Sr. Simone: "Am I responding in generosity? Am I responding in selfishness? Am I responding in a way that builds up people around me, that builds me up, that is respectful of who I am?" (130)
• Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks: "To be true to your faith is a blessing to others regardless of their faith." (190)
• "Light can be a particle or a wave, depending on what question you ask of it. It's kind of a way of demonstrating something we all experience, that contradictory explanations of reality can simultaneously be true."(212-213)
• "Humility is  . . . a companion to curiosity and delight." (266)

Carne Y Arena

Yesterday I had the honor of participating in Carne Y Arena, a virtual reality simulation of the experience people have at the border. I was horrified by the many similarities between the border experience and what I teach about the Holocaust:
- The waiting room is full of shoes. It is hauntingly reminiscent of the shoes at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum.
- The separation of women and children by the border police makes me think of a similar scene in the memoir we read of a Holocaust survivor.
- There are videos of immigrant stories after the virtual reality experience. One of them described immigrants being put in dog cages. That makes me think of the dehumanization that was central to the Nazis.
These similarities underscore how important it is for all of us to speak up and say that we will not allow anyone to be stripped of their dignity in our United States.

If I have only one complaint about my experience, and it's that I felt overly coddled before and after. The pre- and post- experience rooms are welcoming spaces with couches and coffee, and the post-experience room includes cookies. It makes me think of the time I saw a play that featured horrific sexual violence and at the end there were Georgetown Cupcakes for the entire audience. I think I'd like us generally comfortable folks to be pushed to sit with our discomfort. Hopefully, we not only survive it, but we use it to shape a more just and loving world.

Farm Worker Solidarity March

As part of my time representing the Society of the Sacred Heart at the National Farm Workers Ministry Board meeting, I participated in a 12-mile solidarity march (to represent the 12 hour average work day for a farm worker).

Members of the National Farm Workers Ministry Board

There was an art build the day before to get all the materials ready

We started out with 150 people, which impressed me. Community to Community Development, the organizer of the march, has an impressive support base.

Cows marched with us for a while

We began at 5:30, so we got to see an incredible sunrise.

We marched along the Canadian border, which you would never know was a border!

Interestingly, our planned first break point, a casino, would not take us. Thankfully, our first break included food from the local Democrats.

We had a powerful protest at an ICE facility along the way. We traded out our farm worker signs out for immigration-focused signs.

We held a people's tribunal at Sarbanand Farms at which the farm was found guilty for the death of a farm worker, Honesto Silva, who was denied medical treatment last year, as well as for their use of pesticides and lack of respect for the dignity of their workers. Everyone present got to write a note to the farm. My note said, ""Remember that all of our humanity is connected. Act with 💜"

At the end we all got a button to commemorate our participation in the march and it was given to us by Ramon Torres, President of Familias Unidas por Justicia and 2018 James Beard Foundation Leadership Award Winner, who is one of my new heroes (see why here and here).

What a day. What a movement!

My Kind of To-Do List!

I had a very diverse to-do list leading up to my trip to the Pacific Northwest. It went from the practical - laundry, car inspection, catching up on work and email - to the political - doing a text banking shift for Beto O'Rouke, calling Eleanor Holmes Norton about supporting the No Way to Treat a Child Act and Violence Against Women Act, and calling the Senate Judicial Committee about releasing Kavanaugh's records - to the more thoughtful - writing a summary thank-you note to everyone who donated to my Palestine trip and writing an article about Optimism in Genocide Studies. It was a microcosm for my life as a whole!

Notes from Getting Beyond Better: How Social Entrepreneurship Works

There was so much I gained from reading Getting Beyond Better: How Social Entrepreneurship Works (2015) by Roger L. Martin and Sally R. Osberg that the book deserves its own post. 

- Stages of Transformation: 1. Understanding the world. 2. Envisioning a new future. 3. Building a model for change. 4. Scaling the solution. (18-20)

- "government is pushed by individual citizens to make revolutionary changes and, often, by organized social activists advocating for fundamental change on behalf of fellow citizens." (40)

- Transformation happens when "orthodoxy is challenged, a new way of thinking is introduced, and a different model is established." (47)

- "In order to intervene in an existing equilibrium, one must first recognize it for what it is: a condition established over time and held in place by members of the society who take its existence, and their role in perpetuating it, largely for granted." (79)

- "Social entrepreneurs must navigate three powerful tensions in understanding the world they wish to change: abhorrence and appreciation; expertise and apprenticeship; and experimentation and commitment." (81)

-"Active negotiation of opposing ways of thinking and acting is key to understanding the world enough to change it." (81)

-"Contextual immersion is often key to this process." (92)

-"A vision can set direction, mobilize followers, align activities, and galvanize the will required by an individual or team to accomplish something significant." (110)

-"This vision will only be credible if it is specific." (118)

"A number of successful social entrepreneurs generate positive equilibrium change by increasing the willingness or ability of government to invest in a given offering, by reframing the way its value is articulated." (141)

- Characteristics of of social entrepreneurs are "creativity, perseverance, and faith." (197)

-"Within every social entrepreneur is a belief that even the most intractable problem offers an opportunity for change." (200)