well thank you all for being here tonight i have been really looking forward to tonight i'm excited about tonight because i really i believe that all politics are spiritual and and i believe all spirituality is political and to meld them together is is quite the task and very difficult to do and tonight speaker is someone who has shown again and again and again the capacity to walk in both of those worlds understanding how the political dynamics of world and global economy work understanding the cry of the earth and also understanding that christian theology is not a cult or better place creating better people for a better world and cynthia is is our guest tonight and she teaches at c l university and she's pretty brilliant and that's my only introduction because she will do the rest so let's welcome  the lovely introduction i happy to be considered brilliant i i was going to say that i have spoken all over the place and many different continents and i'm never nervous but tonight i am because my people in this room you have given years some of you decades of courage and tenacity and spirit and wisdom to the work of building a more just and compassionate world and you have inspired and courage to me and many others and for that i offer profound respect saying that also makes my task a little more difficult because inspire and encourage are in many traditions including christian traditions works that are associated with the spirit which means that if you have been inspiring and encouraging that you are living in some way a very embodied spirituality whether you know it or not so it makes me wonder what i have to say to you about about a deep deep spirituality but what i decided to do was share with you a reality that i find haunting and then share with you a few of the paths that i have found to make a make a way through that reality first though i thought it might make sense just to take a minute to look at that word spirituality it has been used so often well it has been used to mean so many different things  anyone familiar with the name or just of settler kind of a renegade lutheran theologian he wrote once the word spirituality is sort of like an old barnum and bailey circus tent it covers so many various kinds of animals events acts in episodes that it is hard to pin down and i think that he is right in that the point though is important because what is meant by that word can have a life and death consequences to illustrate the word has often been misused in christian traditions and other religious traditions to mean a kind of separation from the world  signify removal from the material realities of bodily life of political economic engagement in the world bad idea of spirituality is not grounded in scripture it's grounded in york platonic philosophy that influence the developing christian traditions and a philosophy that as you probably know material reality down here and god up here and spirit appear with god so to be spiritual meant divorcing yourself from the material realities of life spirituality has also been misused to imply a kind of privatized relationship between me and god i would suggest that i don't use the term to mean either of those two things neither does most of christian tradition of though people often associate those understandings of spirituality with christianity they're extremely a biblical they're not biblical more biblical notion of well the apostle paul i think that christianity sometimes gets that separation of body and spirit from the reading of the apostle paul that that warns us to not live in the body in the in the flesh but live in the spirit and those two words really don't mean body and spirit they mean the difference between life in the spirit of god and life not in the spirit of god so i want to just began by suggesting that spirituality doesn't have anything to do with living in the spirit rather than the world i think of spirituality as the way in which people seek to hear and respond to that great mystery that christian and jewish and muslim traditions call god so inadequate called god because it is so much more to listen to that voice singing within us and singing in the world around us and then to respond to that out to me that is a way of thinking about about spirituality that would suggest that the spiritual quest and the quest for justice are not two different quests but are one in the same both being responses to  the call of god upon our lives well that said just to put aside a mis notion of spirituality what i'd like to do is take a minute just to acknowledge the moment in which we live and then suggest a framework for a spirituality of resistance and then it's a framework that has three parts and then i'd like to spend some time with a third of those parts so that's the twenty minutes so we'll work on that twenty minutes thing you are as aware as am i that we live in a haunting moment of history the power of social structural evil is unprecedented partly because human power is so advanced and partly because and more importantly human power is so concentrated in so few hands humankind i would suggest hovers on a kind of precipice at this moment corporate finance driven globalization the economy that is shaping the terms of life for all creatures on earth is hurtling us towards an economic and ecological disaster that we are all fairly aware of and as i said haunted by the ecological part of that disaster is pretty obvious our young and dangerous species has become a threat to earth's life generating capacities is anyone familiar with the warning to humanity that was written in one thousand nine hundred two by about sixteen hundred of the world's senior scientists it's called a warning to humanity you can google it it struck me because it's so old it's twenty years old sixteen hundred senior scientists including a majority of the living nobel the rats they wrote human beings in the natural world are on a collision course that may so alter the living world that it will be unable to sustain life in the manner that we know and call it that was twenty years ago so the economic aspect of the crisis is no less familiar to the people here never has the world's wealth been so heavily concentrated in such a minute minority of people and as you know that concentration of wealth for many means brutal poverty i think the implications of that were spoken to me in a way that hit home more than any other in a meeting with father john sobrino you know that name jesuit priest in el salvador one of the members of the community of martyr jesuit priests and a small group of people was meeting with a group of people in a delegation that i had helped to lead to el salvador and guatemala and he said he said and in  and people here are not poor by chance they are poor because of the economic systems that make you rich  vat i think is really the most disturbing and soul shattering aspect of the economic crisis in which we find ourselves to me obviously if we're hovering on a precipice one side of it the continuation of unchecked corporate environments power is not so pretty the other side of it however is the potential before us and that is moving toward that vision that people here gathered have we have it in different forms but it's a vision of a world in which all people have the necessities for life with dignity and earth's ecosystems can flourish there is an old chinese proverb that says if we don't change direction we will end up where we are headed and fix them truth to that obviously the question before us and question that is always before my mind is what kind of spirituality what form of spirituality enables us to be moving toward that change direction what spirituality enables that reverse in direction what will lead us toward in reverend dr martin luther king's words the blessid community what is the spirituality capable of guiding us in our times to me it has to be a spirituality that affirms and honor is the mixture of rage within me and the mixture of profound gratitude i feel like i wake up in the morning and soon am furious at what is happening to people on the planet and at the same time i'm overwhelmed by the beauty that is is just pulsing around us in people and in the world and just the glittering magnificence around us so spirituality i believe has to be able to hold both of those and name them as important in the work of love  it has seemed to me as time has gone one of the potent factors that works against a radical change in direction can be a sense of despair or hopelessness and i think that that is often very subtle unspoken tacit not right there i think it can be despair that despite our efforts despite the way we throw our lives into just us making maybe things just won't change i think it can also be a kind of despair that comes with knowing that much as we struggle against structural evil we're still won't be up in it  that the clothes on our bodies and the food you know the ingredients in the cookies in the kitchen and the roads that we drove on and the bikes that we may have road ridden are dependent upon petroleum all over place and dependent upon exploited labor where wound up in it all and to me bad is that is also something that can eat away and build a kind of subtle subtle powerlessness so i think that a spirituality of resistance must fortify us against despair and hopelessness of both of those kinds and yet can't to lure us into ignoring realities that we are so aware of it's tempting to be lurd into a kind of privatized morality where i'll be as good as i can a love my neighbor in terms of my students and my friends and maybe the people in my city but but but quit attending to the social systems that are beating people do code word and that would be a code word for seeing always three things at one time and like seen through three limbs i know that there are only two in most of our and most of our faces but seen through three lenses and the first of those is the lens that does see what is what is going on indeed took on hoffa's words the vision that sees systemic evil where it parades as good that refuses to not see to ever more clearly analyze and react realize what's going on for instance one of the things that's become important for me to see that i hadn't seen a couple of years ago was the extent to which white privilege and white racism are fundamental to the earth crisis that the current the climate refugees the people that are dying are not white the descendants of the tribes of europe are much more protected than the descendants of the tribes of asia and africa so that that reality needs to be known and named so saw an eye for what's going on seeing ever more clearly but i've often warned my students in fact i always warn them don't see what's going on don't he'll burn you it'll lay you flat it'll wipe you and it did me once when i was a young person actually i actually wasn't going to tell this story but i guess i will tell this story when i was about fourteen i saw film that i think was called it was in my luther lee group luther league it's like they're like the wesley club i suppose it's a youth group of lutherans and there was a film called i think it's called guess who's coming to breakfast and it was has anyone seen that i'm not sure that was the name of it but it showed the impact of us corporate exploitation in the dominican republic the blood that covers our breakfast cereal our sugar our orange juice e iraq and it just laid me flat to think that my life was that wrapped up in evil and so i worked on organizing and young real development hunger hikes and teach ins and etc etc etc but the long and short of it was i think i became hopeless and for about four years lived that hopelessness and it was because i was seeing what is and that's it so to me it's it's a moral imperative not to ask people to see what is unless we also see two other things and one of those is what could be these are terms of my discipline is christian ethics so we talk about the difference between what is and what could be but what could be that is the incredible the magnificent alternatives that are in the making the people on this continent but the world over that are committed in every day practices public policies vastly new princip economic theories and ideas and and ways of living them out in public policy and in everyday life that are building a world that is not grounded in concentrated power they but that is far more shared power and democratic and we here in the u s are added disadvantage because we don't see those movements as clearly i was at a meeting in geneva of it was a un based meeting with the world council of churches it was the tenth meeting in anniversary of the world summit and social development the ground was covered with little booths of more than a thousand groups and organizations from around the world that were defiantly bring it into the public discourse our lives are involved in those groups but it's easy not to see that what we're doing is connected to what people are doing all over the globe i was just in india for a last year for about a month working on eco justice fierce determination of social movements just kind of put me to shame and i think that we must watch always that alternatives are in the making yeah i think there's a third thing so the first is what is the second is what could be the third i believe is always seeing the power and the presence of god coursing through all of creation bringing us to learning us calling us from the way things are to the way things ought to be i believe that a spirituality for our time needs to look at all the films these sessions in this common good cafe have focused i would say on the first and the second maybe especially on the first but also on the second so i'd like to spend a little time focusing on the third  and by that i mean i'd like to just talk with you about what on earth it would mean i ask myself this what would it mean if i took seriously really seriously the idea that god and however you for some people that word doesn't work it's a word that i don't particularly like anymore because it carries profound baggage i mean to some people it's a white guy in the sky and we know it's not awaken in the sky but it still sometimes means a kind of limited notice that is not the reality of the magnificent unnamable mystery of intimate life and love that pervades the universe so so i don't know the right word to use for it  i do know that well we could talk more about that i don't want to playa negating of a personal life sense of god because i think that great reality manifests itself in many ways and one of those is in a personalized form god so i there's a lot more to talk about there but i don't want to i don't want to put down that idea because i wouldn't put it down but the point is what would it mean to seriously think that this force of life the source of all that is known in our limited human language perhaps most profoundly as love justice making self honoring earth honoring love what would it mean to believe that that force was in luther's terms flowing in point through all things it's easy to say i wonder what it would mean to take it seriously and if i as i have sort of been teaching myself to take it seriously over time there are three things that have appeared to me and one of them is that if i hold that in my heart as true it has an influence on my understanding of who i am what i would say what we would call moral anthropology the sense of who we are as human beings and i would suggest a spirituality that holds a kind of paradoxical moral anthropology that yes when we are honest and see what is we know that we're wrapped up in where the beneficiaries of empire we are wrapped up in a kind of structural evil that began at least five hundred years ago when europe started taking over the world so we are caught up in that most of us here are beneficiaries of white privilege which is a massive reality but the paradoxical moral anthropology is that we are also someone else that we work hated and called into being for a purpose that we were called into being to be friends of god but more specifically to receive and trust a kind of unbelievable love a life affirming a life saving love and ban to live it into the world  that's a sense of who we are that that i have a life work and that is to bask in to trust to receive that love and then to breathe it out and we know that love as we learn it at least from a biblical sense is profoundly seeking of justice love didn't just bind up the wounds of the slaves it tried to end slavery so when i am somewhat overwhelmed by the reality of being implicated in empire and other forms of injustice it helps me to know that i am also this creature created to live in to wri relationships and moreover empowered by that i would i claim that god doesn't call us to anything that god doesn't empower us to although with great mistakes i'm very much a realist and lutheran enough to know that we do it all  is a source of hope i think there's a second implication of believing that the force of the source of all that is flowing through us and that has to do with our power our moral power to resist systemic domination to seek the good despite the risks involved from the time of the ancient hebrews jewish people and christian people have claimed that there is a power breathed into us and it's the power of the living god called spirit that we know by this name of spirit the ancient hebrews believed that  when i say filled with the spirit of the living god an image that comes to my mind there is the image of what you would do has anyone taken the act done the exercise of taking a bible and snipping out all the places where it talks about justice or serving the well being of the of the underside of history has anyone done that i know so it's like a bible in tatters so to be filled with this spirit of this god is to be filled with something that is going out there to to seek what is right i also spent some time studying the spirit in the robot and he would text in the new testament in the hebrew translates to numa in the greek which is slightly more domesticated than and then that translates into the latin as a speech at which point it becomes much more a theory and much more domesticated so you can see it and we could talk a lot about there's a progressive progression of us sort of getting away from the world shaking impact of the spirit and there's good reason to come back to that but what i also noticed in reading the texts is something that you all are aware of probably long before i was and that's that heeding the bidding of the spirit can be very dangerous daniel berrigan once said you all know that saying if you want to follow jesus you better look good and wo i think that reality though leads us to see something about the role of the spirit in our moral power and i want to share with you the idea that the spirit of the living god brings courage i was also studying martin luther and it was during a time actually when the things were going on here and i noticed that luther economic ethics sounded the same as the protesters and so i decided to test that out and i took i wrote down some of what he said critiquing the liberal market economy of his day and the protesters and then i was giving a talk in south dakota and i asked people to vote and what they thought was who and they couldn't tell the difference so i i i i i remember the current mean he was a bad guy in some ways but he was an incredible guy in some other ways and he he  he lived out some courage in defying systemic domination and one of the things that i treasured in what i read in him about the spirit was this he says the most powerful courage known to humankind is generated by the spirit living in the faithful the spirit brings into its human abode true courage boldness of heart the hebrew word for spirit he goes on to say might well be rendered bold undaunt courage that bold dauntless courage will not be terrified by poverty shame sin or the devil or death but is confident that nothing can harm us that empowering courage is more powerful than anything on earth according to luther it lives in us it bears recalling that it makes a home in us and then very briefly i want to mention a third way that i think the power of the living god indwelling all things can be a source for us of hope and that is shifting our mentalities the mentality of the west into taking seriously the idea that the things  r but other than human things of earth also bear the divine that god is indeed living in all things even the tiniest leaf too to quote one a god and if the word of god where ever it comes comes to change the world then that power is present in the things of this earth in ways that we have not learned to see or to receive what would it mean if we did take seriously that the mountains of biblical texts that in which god calls upon the winds and the mountains and the seas god indwells them god works with them what if we took seriously the ancient claim and it is an ancient faith claim throughout the centuries of christian history that the earth screeches and elements bear god our abode of god i'm not sure what all that would mean one thing that i think about is that that means that when we crucify the earth were crucified in christ again and how might that impact the way we treat the earth another thing i think it means is that some of the moral wisdom and the spiritual wisdom that we need in order to not fall over that precipice but go the other direction may be  offered to us from a source that we are not well equipped to hear from and that we are invited to hear from and that is the earth itself what can we learn about moral courage for resistance what can we learn about moral courage for life giving life from the things of the earth i was talking about this with some scientists at one point and someone talk with me about some of you probably know th exact this better than i do but there's a kind of tree is at the ash tree where it lives maybe it lives down here by the water and way up the hill like way miles away also and when the drought comes roots of the ash tree down by the water past the water on up to the ash tree way up there miles away it might not be the ash tray and i might be getting ashtray as terry and i might be getting the details wrong but it's just a way of thinking about what might we learn if we learned to hear the voices other than the human you're standing up and i'm almost done that was really good timing so anyway these are a few what i would say wells that i drink from and they are wells that not ours alone but that the source and power of life in the universe is working and through us for the well being of all of creation including our tiny part  and thank you for an easy question oh hold my gun right give me a little more that first it's a really really good question i think it's a dangerous word because it it too can be misused i think it can be misused in a couple of ways if we say something is evil and other things are good i actually don't hold that to be true i think that good and evil inhuman things are always mixed up i think nothing is purely evil but one of the demands of using religion in the public discourse is not to demonize anything as evil or anything as totally good and i think it's also can be a dangerous word from a feminist perspective if evil is seen as something  is seen as out there and therefore needing somehow superhuman power to deal with rather than evil being a part of life and that our human power can can address it but that said evil to me i use evil to signify  see it's a very important question because i'm just finishing a book in one week called with resisting systemic evil love as economic ecological vocation the logically evil has meant different things i mean some would say evil is absence of the good gust and would say evil is absence of the good i tend to think otherwise it's a question debated all throughout the theological history i do tend to think there is a reality of evil which may be created by a broken nose there is a reality let me put it this way there is a reality of humans countering absolutely the ways of god the love of god  the right the good and there is a there reality of when that is not just individual but won't together when it systemic when when things bad are happening not because any individuals are doing them bad but that things horrible are happening because of our collective lives together that there needs to be a word for that horrible wrong and i guess i put evil to that word i mean i  that part of the call to love neighbor as self and to do that in ways that seek justice is to always stand alert to that force of evil but never ok yes i think that one way i'll respond to that in terms of how i work with my students because many of them are suspicious of words like god or or pray or christian or whatever and to me what's really important is naming from the beginning that those words affiliated with a religious tradition in this case christianity that to me it's a matter of naming from the beginning that christianity has done horrible wrong i mean to talk about disgraced and the greatest aspects of the tradition i find it really opens people's minds to think that i'm going to a knowledge that christianity has been one of the forces of evil on earth but that bat doesn't in any way lessen the fact that it also is seeking to communicate and reveal the living god so i guess saying out front the way when  someone asks me you know i remember all these times on the soccer field when i'd be watching my kid's soccer game and someone would say oh oh what do you do or where have you been also i'm a theologian and they'll say oh my god christianity and so i  i instantly tell them i am a christian and i'm and then i say something about what it means to me so i guess to just cut through the the false uses of those words right from the beginning can can be useful yes yeah might my response would be i do not attribute everything we do to the power of god working in  i would say that the ways in which we as human beings or as a particular culture within humankind are doing destructive things to other people on the earth is not believing of god i would say that is the  our failure to to hear and follow the leading of god so to me to have an eye for the power and presence of god is to have the ear the for the believing that would take us away from those death dealing death oriented ways now i'm really aware that it's really dangerous to claim that i'm going to listen to what god tells me to do because because the worst things on earth have been done because people claim the power of the spirit of god is within me in telling me to go and burn other people at the stake so we know that to be true so i don't say at all blithely that we ought to heed the beckoning of the spirit i think that would be horribly romanticizing to suggest that however there is a paradox because claiming to be acting on the will of god according to the will of god ok on the one hand it does things like maybe make people fly airplanes into the twin towers and it makes people do things like rage warfare against iraq because they say they flew things this this will of god is a very ridiculous claim on the other hand we would be nuts not to i mean if we believe in something beyond that transcends singularly the material that is up power of good however you want to say it then we'd be nuts not to try to hear it so the question becomes what our our tools and our criteria for discerning what is the beckoning of god and what isn't that that becomes of tremendous import  becomes so important when we think about how we read scripture you know of all the places that people misread the beckoning of god it's through the bible you know people kill people because of what the bible tells them to do  so developing our ability to discern to read this scripture and read the tradition and read the signs of the times discerning really is of paramount importance if we're going to claim that we listen to the power of god and we could talk about what those criteria are and what that we could talk about that right now i'm not going to go there immediately unless there's a desire from people to go there  so what makes it happen for you is recognizing what is and recognizing what you would want to be and the call to move that way is that what you're saying and that from my perspective that's what we call moral agency that's the power to move from the way things are toward the way things ought to be that that is moral agency and what feeds our moral agency is a question of utmost importan today especially for people like the people in this room who have dared to see a lot of what is you know most people in our society i will say run i mean we all  all run from really recognizing what is going on we run fiercely but the people here gathered have dared to see a lot more than is probably normative so when we've seen some of the  brutality of the every day life that we live and we have a vision you know a vision that's a promise of a different kind of a world we're a world we're some people don't accumulate at the cost of others we're all have life and have a life abundantly when we see that then how we direct how we move from here to here and what feeds that capacity what keeps us from running away from c or what keeps us from believing this isn't possible or what keeps us from getting stomped in the middle is is is the question what feeds our moral agency is the question to me it's fed in part by by the things that i just said i find it's fed in part by believing we're not alone that we are not alone that some something that we in our incredibly limited capacities to speak reality that we just give the name of god but that that is an amazing pulsating source of profound goodness and beauty and life in it creates the universe  creating and the promise to me the promise of the resurrection doesn't have to do with my life after death the promise of the resurrection the promise of the resurrection i guess we're supposed to stop  that we're not alone is really important to me and the promise of the resurrection came to me when i told you i was in such despair as a young person well i finally realized i needed to talk to somebody who had seen as much structural evil as i had gotten existed in in terms of the military industrial complex and who had not given up hope and so i had the inspiration to go and see a lutheran pastor believe it or not named john nelson who was an active person in there in the resistance to the trident submarines and had adopted thirteen kids and they're all special needs kids and actually his mother who was like eighty five was out there you know her story she was out there resisting the submarines when the coast guard came in the coast guard going to squirt her out of her boat and she goes she waves their little flag and says not i am erik are you won't and they did this quarter but but but anyway i said john how do you keep up your hope and he said you know i don't remember these are his words this was what i took away he said you know cindy i know the end of the story and what that said to me is that their promise of the resurrection is that ultimately in some way we can not because we've read the news  that the world is in god's hands and that life will reign and that our job is to is to have that power of the life force working in the us towards and so i'm giving up even though i don't get top possibly life could rain because i've been reading about global warming i believe it and it's because of the story of the resurrection and so that's part of that what enables me to keep what you know martin luther king jr said beautiful you said the arc of the universe is toward justice which is another way of saying in secular terms where you knew theologically and that all we're supposed to do is try to get ourselves into th talents well i've lived here since one nine hundred twenty three all my life you've known several people in the area that have died of cancer and other radiation related illnesses when did you first  and then i lost a dear friend in one thousand sixty six and people were just dying pretty fast so karen garn still had an article in the paper in the spokesman review in and eighty six march one thousand nine hundred eighty six and she listed all the missions that had taken place from hanford and out of curiosity i went and checked back on the deaths because dr kaufmann says at ten years after any mission we would use people to cancer these were atmosphere emissions yes through the stack and so i went back and checked on our gas and they were increasing ten years after each emission and were they deliberate emissions as far as you know or accidental sam or accidental but the green round was deliberate and that was done on december the second one nine hundred forty nine and forty years after that a mitchell commission which d kaufmann says her cancer will peak forty years after a group of people been irradiated and forty years after that emission we had seventy people here it's filled with cancer and of those seventy seventeen and it and for what you know about the rate cancer was that number much higher than the average through the normal rate of care definitely because we were losing on an average of two annually before hanford started out and now our our average has increased to eleven annually how many people do you know of in the area of actually died of cancer that could be attributable to write close living seven hundred seven hundred since nineteen forty three forty three yeah i've been keeping track and i'm making a list of the people that have died of cancer the type of cancer and their age when they died think the big cancer rate hit increased to seven where here it's eleven and three mile island had a lot less radiation dumped on it than we've had dumped on us  one of the fellows is doing research on it claims that we had over six million curies of radiation dumped on and the people that have died many of them have been family members or friends i have lost twenty six cousins seven aunts and my mother all downwind of hanford and these and some of them were step manson some are more amps by marriage and some of the cousins were not blood relations but they were so it's not genetic how have people reacted to  this over the years and or it's still i mean it's a farming community and now you are saying that there are a lot of retired farmers living in the area of of your generation how have they reacted to this information it's happened so what can we do about it that's what most of them think that and now since the atom bomb a spin just spread to india and pakistan i don't know what we can do we should have never ever ever made the atom bomb will of the deliberate exposures that have happened the green room being the first that we know about why do you think they done this what's how do you explain the mentality that went into this well i think it was an ego trip for the scientists and our politicians is my own feeling on it i mean look at this horrendous weapon we have developed maybe i'm cynical and bitter i don't know but i've lost so many loved people that loved ones that i could very well be weak radiator water all night this water is coming from the reactor you know it's called the act which make up area and that was above my office and they have tanks that they also oh yes like what kind of work did you do in your office well i was a secretary for a long time and then they tried to bribe me and made me this exempt person because they thought i would go away i so actually i was in there nine years in that you know in that vicinity and then they moved me out in and out whenever i get really sick they both me and then he my my major had melanoma he was dying of it and i had this cough and the walls were wet so i started putting two and two together that they were exposing me on a daily basis you know as long as i was there now  computer in a pool water came down and eat my feet and it came out from that closet and i didn't know it and so the only reason why i knew it was there because my feet wet so my shoes and so i was running  computer you know i could've been what q did you know and so i picked my feet up because they were itching you know by then and i had to try to push my chair over to where the telephone was to try to get help and i called it's routine full control technician so she came running up there and here i was sitting in this pool water taking this dose you know and it was mostly chemicals they say but i  you know brain can't so there was four secretaries in that office while i was at the plant they're all gone terminated they all were exposed days they call that writing on my coat tails everyone