I am spending hours at the Moffitt Cancer Center in Tampa, Florida this summer. This is a major research and treatment center for cancer, they are are on the cutting edge of clinical trials. But there is also a recognition that the person is mind, body and spirit, and so addition to chemotherapy, radiation and surgery there are many other ways of treatment, and supporting treatment. These include chaplaincy, art programs, support groups, and programs based on some ancient spiritual disciplines. The Mediation and Guided Imagery offered at the Moffitt go beyond distress and anxiety management, they include harnessing the healing power of the human pysche through the power of visioning that is guided by mediation. This is one of the most ancient ways of healing, known to the shamans of old.
But the Moffitt is a scientific institute and gets its funding for its science, so this is the way it talks about this program.
Meditation and Guided Imagery Sessions
Weekly meditation and guided imagery sessions for patients and family members are facilitated by trained staff in the Psychosocial Clinic. These sessions are offered to enable participants to learn successful tools for managing distress and anxiety effectively.
Earth is our home: July 2006 Archives
In most of the world, bicycles are utility vehicles, that is they are used for commuting, shopping, and for the pick up and delivery of packages. In Europe, Africa and Asia the postal workers use bicycles to deliver the mail, or groceries, and the social and health care workers find bicycling a good way to get around town.
Automobiles and trucks are too expensive to purchase and operate, but bicycles are relatively inexpensive to maintain and the energy to power a bicycle comes from feeding the cyclist. So for organizations and individuals looking for ways to aid a developing country and its people donating bicycles is a natural. Church groups, and charitable organizations all over Europe collect used bicycles, fix them up, and ship them off to Africa as a way to help people get a transportation.
Bicycle Magazine which fills most of its pages with advertising for expensive recreational bicycles, and articles on how to ride faster, faster and still faster has a social service project called Bike Town. Bike Town supplies free new bikes to people both in the USA and in Africa. Then they run human interest stories on the new riders. The U.S. riders gain health and discover the pleasures of using a bike for commuting and recreation. The Africans stories include the women's movement outreach organizer who is able to get out to remote villages and extend her organizing. The BikeTown project targets AIDS outreach workers and supplies them with new bikes. The nurse who can now visit many more people needing her services at home. The student who can now work his way through school making deliveries. About half of the Americans who get free bikes become utility riders (shopping, getting around town, commuting) while many save their bikes for the recreational ride on weekends. All the Africans become utility riders, in addition to shopping and commuting, not a few are able to begin a small business, and all are able to be more productive in their work a day lives.
I was inspired, and was thinking that this was a social service project I might introduce to liberal churches. It would be a Heifer Project for vegetarians. But then I read that Africans would prefer to manufacture their own bicycles, to many of the American and Europeans used bikes are unsuited for the unpaved roads of Africa, and having a single standard of manufacturing would facilitate spare parts supply and training users in repair technique.
Africa needs bikes, the easiest way to get them to Africa is for voluntary organizations to collect used bikes and fix them up and ship them in mixed lots to distribution points. A better way for Africa might be for voluntary organizations to raise money to buy specially designed utility bicycles with tough frames, wheels and tires, with coaster brakes and no fancy gearing. These could be manufactured in Africa, South Africa has the industrial base to do this now.
How do churches do social service projects? And for what purpose? If we wish to aid a developing country perhaps we need to think twice before shipping used bikes that were built for American recreational riders.
Rebecca Parker writes in "Love First" as sermon given at the Opening Convocation of Starr King School For The Ministry in September 2005.
"We must learn again to live with reverence. Reverence is a form of love. It is a response to life that falls on its knees before the rising sun and bows down before the mountains. It puts its palms together in the presence of the night sky and the myriad galaxies and recognizes, as poet Langston Hughes tells us, "beautiful are the stars, beautiful too are the faces of my people." Reverence greets all humanity as sacred. It genuflects before the splendor of the grass and the magnificence of the trees. It respects the complexity, beauty, and magnitude of creation and does not presume to undo its intricate miracles. Instead, it gives life reverent attention, seeking to know, understand, and cooperate with life's ways.
Reverence for life has to be learned. It is not just a feeling; it is a way of life that is manifested in more than an isolated moment of appreciation for nature or awe before its destructive or creative power. Reverence involves full-fledged devotion enacted in deeds of care and responsibility. It involves knowledge, study, and attention."
Reverence for life is a spiritual attribute, and spiritual attributes are acquired through practice, by what has been called spiritual discipline. Unitarian Universalists has experienced an increased interest in spirituality, but the interest appears to be stronger than the willingness to commit to a discipline. Parker argues that reverence for life involves knowledge, study and attention. Acquiring reverence for life requires practicing deeds of care and responsibility for our earth and for animals and plants of our earth. It requires practicing deeds of care and responsibility for human community, for seeking not only ways to aid each others immediate needs, but to seek ways to overcome oppressive systems that restrict the full unfolding of life. This may require the theological task of overcoming an oppressive world view.
Parker continues:
"Our society is currently guided by a worldview that is insufficiently grounded in reverence. Religiously, it is a worldview that regards the world itself as trash-a planet that God is soon going to discard in a plan to wipe this world away and create a new one. Economically, the dominant worldview regards human beings as self-interested individuals, motivated only by their personal desire to consume. And scientifically, it sees existence as devoid of value, atomistic, disconnected, and mechanistic. Such inadequate views are tearing our world to tatters by lack of regard for the communal character of life."
Parker argues throughout this sermon for a connection between what we do in the world, and our spiritual, theological and intellectual understanding of that world. Reverence for life must be learned and that learning involves transformation, taking on a new identity and a new worldview. Transformation to becoming a person who loves life in practice is more than a simple matter of doing some non controversial projects of aid to the less fortunate, or thinking some good thoughts. It takes practice, and theological work.
(This raises a question for me, why did the UU World cut Parker's sermon just at the point where she critiques the current religious, economic and scientific worldview? Is it because her critique is a challenge to the views of many Unitarian Universalists who are content to spin feel good religion on top of the dominant worldview? It can't be because of space, there is much they included that is incidental to her main point.
