Deletions, Fear, Reconciliation and Becoming Human

From the Reverend John Merz
This note expresses my personal opinion. My core sense. I speak on my own behalf. I represent no group or church. This is a matter of conscience

On October 7th I made a simple request, 1 paragraph asking that Trinity Wall Street put 6 porta potties on the portico of St. Paul’s. It was indeed needed and in the end what was Bloomberg’s rationale for clearing the park?  “It was becoming unsanitary”, the press mentioned the existence of buckets of urine in one section of the park. My post, the first one speaking a word of request, word of encouragement was deleted in 14 or so minutes.

Late last evening, Bishop George Packard after many conversations with the Rector Jim Cooper posted this on the Facebook Page of Trinity Wall Street, I underline particular line that is extraordinary and prophetic, at has to do with experiencing future possibilities even in the present, a domain for visionaries. Bishop Packard’s note follows:

I have this great worry that this venerable parish will be on the wrong side of history in a few weeks. Surely there’s some consummate wisdom in the leadership that can offer Occupiers a chance to express their prophetic destiny in these days. It’s a matter of record that the church is good with the provision of service and succor for the neighborhood; they are unable, it seems, to understand their dynamic needs. Plainly said, this means looking afresh at lease arrangements for a season regarding the Duarte property. Think of it as offering hospitality to travelers from our future who bring the message of “no injustice, no more.” If we really saw OWS for who they are rather than putting up roadblocks in their path we’d truly delight in their coming!
—-Bishop George E. Packard

Many things extremely critical of Trinity Wall Street have been up on their site. Yet this deeply generous, kind blues note was deleted this morning. This note has been on to the House of Bishops. Do at TWS people understand that Bishop Packard is not a “radical” easily dismissed by those that seek to discredit? Bishop Packard is a long steady voice, a decorated war veteran, a Bishop in the Church, Bishop to the Armed Forces, a good man. Or is this indeed why such a voice was removed. It is heartbreaking that this This pattern of dissembling has been recurrent since late September.

The following is a piece written by Rev. Donna Schaper Senior Minister at Judson Memorial Church:

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Dear Rev. Dr. Cooper,

We have not yet met in person but you have been kind enough to return my calls. Normally, I would be calling you for money because you have it and we don’t. But instead, I have been calling without an “ask” and you have returned my calls without an ask. My goal has been to keep you informed about what your fellow OccupyFaith NYC. is saying and thinking about you at Trinity. I didn’t want you to hear anything before you heard it from me. It is a question of Christianity and collegiality and also non-violence, all three matters about which each of us cares deeply. I thank you for returning my calls. You didn’t have to..and you did.

Just to keep you up to date, after the petitions on line, I wanted you to know that tonight I did an interview on WBAI and mentioned the word “Eucharist” on air. I could hear the reporters scoffing. You will want to know how and why. How? Because it came up with regard to the hunger strikers, who say they won’t breathe until they eat at a certain place, over which we imagine you have control. Why? Because it seemed the only appropriate thing to say. Diego won’t eat till he eats at a certain place. I think that place is larger than any one-city block, whether in Mumbai, Prague or New York. It is also a particular place. Thus the word Eucharist.

I will continue here less personally and more theoretically. We are not really in a personal conversation but actually one that matters to our different communions.

It is time to occupy sacred space. Not just that owned by Trinity Wall Street – although it would be great if your democratic institution would do what it could do and open something up to the occupiers. They have it, the occupiers need it, now is the time, this is the city.

But why push Trinity harder than we push ourselves? My congregation, Judson, opened for five nights and closed. We couldn’t handle the human destitution that walked through the doors. We COULD handle the hope, with 40 volunteers by the end. But the hope had a shadow. Now we hold a day shelter, in which a computer or a cell phone occupies just about every plug. We also have ever so modest a night shelter. We packed the house with the Council of Elders as a torch passed from a group of older activists to a group of younger ones. We sound just like Trinity, don’t we? “After all, we have been opening Charlotte’s place since day one…and giving out a lot of hot chocolate.” We are not doing enough, Trinity is not doing enough, and all God’s children are not doing enough to keep this movement alive. What does it need? It needs space. Even more, it needs Eucharist, that great feast that shows us what time and space could be in the broken body and blood of the one some of us call Christ and all call Jesus and some just call the great feast. To speak the word Eucharist, with respect, on WBAI, does not mean something controlling or that others have to see it. It means that we have a great symbol, whose time and space is now.

Another collegial friend of ours, a United Methodist congregation, St. Peter and St. Paul, sent out a winsome email a few days ago, saying “are we the only ones still housing occupiers? “ Yes, they were. The other half dozen that did open had already closed, along with mine, because truth is we have renters and contracts and concerts and lives that didn’t imagine occupier’s need nor know how to satisfy it. We offer quiet space. What is needed is loud space. You, for better or worse, have loud open space.

Occupy says it wants physical outdoor space. Most of us in the city are land locked. So we plug on, with whatever kind of conversation we can get, including hastily called meetings that helped pressure the governor to see the light on taxes for the rich. As one of our seminarians said, “we aren’t fooling around here.” That’s not exactly what she said.

OccupyFaithNYC is in conversation with the Cathedral of St. John the Divine and the Ethical Cultural Society and with you – all places with chairs, heat and large capacity – to have a daylong conversation with journalists, fellow clergy, occupiers and more. Such a conversation would also be Eucharistic. Why? Because we have to talk. We have to talk in time and space about this time and the need for space. Again, the body broken open.

As Chris Hedges put it so well in his talk last weekend at Liberty Square, “Where were you when they crucified my movement.?” We were there; we were hoping to eat together. To talk together. To live together. I believe that is also your hope.

The mayor’s eviction didn’t compute because you can’t evict the spirit but you can evict the body. You can eviscerate Christianity and the Eucharist. You can even delay the communion’s fruition into genuine economic change. The need for conversation in time and space, in sacred space – the last free, unsurveilled public spaces around – has become acute. By the way, the police do try to surveil but fail when they sneak into churches and synagogues and mosques. They are probably surveilling you. But they just embarrass themselves, while violating several constitutional amendments at the same time. You can’t evict the spirit nor can you stop the Eucharist from spilling into reality, in blood, wine, bread, and body, Sixth and Canal.

Let me repeat the rational, pre Eucharistic, reasons for Occupy’s need for physical space. Most space is privatized: sounds like the economy, doesn’t it? Most space is surveilled or self-surveilled by Facebook: sounds like the airport, doesn’t it? Plus it really bothers people when people get together to make a movement. That bother alone causes us to want to get together in ever widening circles. We simply have to eat.

I have been recalling my tour of Prague endlessly since Occupy began. We went on a “Velvet Revolution Tour”, seeing the places where 1500 18 year olds, attacked by the state, still changed a country. Our tour guide was Ludmilla. “The demonstrators kept opening their hands, saying “We have nothing in our hands.” That nothing openness was everything, so much like the words of institution and the prayer that bids the spirit to inhabit time and space. They jangled their keys to make a little noise. Still the state surrounded them on four sides – and did not defeat them. Communists hate other people’s mass spectacles. I found that encouraging! It is also convincing regarding physical space. Capitalists appear not to like mass spectacles either. (I am not saying you are a “capitalist.” I know you are a Christian.)

Church basements, many say, are one of the last free spaces in America. Let’s open many spaces up, every nook and cranny, every unpopulated lot, every great-unfinished cathedral. When we get together, let’s talk. And jangle the heaven out of our keys, the very keys which keep us captive in a false security and which we appear to have in our own pockets. Eucharist is now. You could imagine a great one at Sixth and Canal.

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This is the reply from the Rector Trinity,m and the public statement concerning the space:

From time to time people of goodwill may disagree. We disagree with those who argue that Trinity should–indeed, must as a matter of conscience–allow Occupy Wall Street to liberate its Duarte Square lot at Avenue of the Americas and Canal Street for an open encampment and large scale assemblies. In all good conscience and faith, we strongly believe to do so would be wrong, unsafe, unhealthy and potentially injurious.

Trinity has probably done as much or more for the protestors than any other institution in the area. We have provided OWS with meeting rooms and offices for them to assemble, plan and hold private discussions. We have provided pastoral services. We have provided a place of refuge and tranquility at our neighborhood center during open hours where they can rest, use computers, charge cell phones, and use bathrooms. Hundreds avail themselves of these facilities and services every day. It is one simple reflection of Trinity’s inherent concern for our community and for social and economic justice which has been at the heart of the church’s mission for more than 300 years.

We want to be responsive, while also being responsible, to our residential and business neighbors, partners, visitors and tenants-our entire community. There are no facilities at the Canal Street lot. Demanding access and vandalizing the property by a determined few OWS protesters won’t alter the fact that there are no basic elements to sustain an encampment. The health, safety and security problems posed by an encampment here, compounded by winter weather, would dwarf those experienced at Zuccotti Park.

Calling this an issue of “political sanctuary” is manipulative and blind to reality. Equating the desire to seize this property with uprisings against tyranny is misguided, at best. Hyperbolic distortion drives up petition signatures, but doesn’t make it right. Those arrested were not seeking sanctuary; they were seeking to be arrested. Trinity will continue our responsible outreach and pastoral services for all. We appreciate the many expressions of support we have received from so many in the community.

–The Rev. Dr. James H. Cooper

Rector

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Do you hear the contempt for the movement in those words? Do you hear the patronizing stance about the possibility of an “encampment” and the inability for those in it to solve problems of self sustenance in in the winter? It is illogical that the desire for outdoor space is driven by the desires of a “few”.     Are these same “few” fueling the desires of the encampment outside of St. Paul’s in London which the Archbishop of the entire Anglican Communion Rowan Williams has come out in support of? Are these same “few” the ones who drove the desire for Liberty Square and the Occupy movement in lower Manhattan, and the rest, the many thousands, not those staying there, but those of every age race and class that descended on that park every morning, noon and night for 2 months to tell their stories and begin to hallow a public square in a country where public assembly is so utterly proscribed as to become meaningless, are we to imagine that a few drove them and motivated them to be there?

There is such a patronizing and embarrassing contempt for this phenomenal expression that began with the Arab Spring, and made its way to our shores, that it is painful to read.

I was a college Chaplain for 5 years and I gathered one of the largest Chaplaincies in the Episcopal Church at NYU. I pastored, preached, married, cared for and sat with hundreds of young people in those 5 years. They were paralyzed. They were not apathetic, and absorbed in social media as a symptom of some pathology. They expressed the mourning of the psyche (soul) for our nations disembodiment. The sense of public belonging, and future’s hopeful body that Packard spoke of earlier has been dis-incarnated. Not so with OWS. I have recieved so many emails from former students, I have talked to so many others down there when it was vital and it was transforming people with hope in a way that I must say, church never could. I am not saddened by that because I know that the spirit blows where it will and movement towards compassion and justice is holy, point blank.

As I said in a ealrier posting in a blog I keep that it was never on Trinity to save this movement, it is bigger than them, or us. However it was on them to leave their buildings and find out about it. They did not. They do not. It is all damage control, and PR and was from the beginning.

There are 1000 major artists signed on to a petition to talk about the canal and 6th space (see Philip Glass endorsement at Lincoln Center after Satyagragha Opera

There are well over 12,000 signatures, over 1,000 Episcopalians signed on to this

There is Occupy Faith with over 1200 faith leaders standing in solidarity with OWS

There are the words of the Archbishop of Canterbury aligned with the sharper edge of the movement

The issue is one of Justice and not Charity. They said over a decade ago, the world changed after 9/11/01

I submit that with increasing intensity we will see that the world has changed after 9/17/11
And the learning curve will be fast now.

For faith communities this means the old rules and roles will not apply. We can safely say that this next spring as the weather warms, as the underlying conditions in our economy do not improve we will face serious challenges. What we need to do is to pre-adapt in real time through faithfully hearing the words of the Gospel that asks for a practice of self emptying now. This is for all of us and it is a blessing of the highest order, the shekinah in the middle of the camp.

Think about this. These huge demonstrations have been incredibly peaceful. The only means people have had, in this nascent Satyagraha is their desire, their love, their bodies, and often, signs and puppets, and art thrown into public space to create a room for just dialogue. They have, in every city, been met by a brutal force, police in riot gear, and pro active beatings and arrests. See Cal Davis pepper spray of kneeling college students, this is no joke. See the section 1031 of the Defense Authorization Act. Can we understand that something different is happening here?

The rationale for public space is about the fact that public people (citizens), acting freely in public space, to articulate publicly critical views is becoming marginalized almost criminal behavior. That is why this space was so desired, to keep this space, the space for being a human, social, creative political animal open and well in the public imagination and psyche. It is not a conversation that happens virtually on facebook. If you think the limitations of these rights are not happening you are in a waking dream. The phenomenon at Tahir, the phenomenon at Liberty in NYC was in every sense the most earthy incarnated expression of spirit the country has known since the end of the civil rights and anti war movement. It is just beginning to galvanize the spirit of the majority of this nation, and so naturally the powers that be are deeply threatened while being equally mystified.

I hear in the words of Trinity Wall Street’s response, and their absolute refusal, in private and in person, to meet with anyone about the canal and 6th street space, the hardened voice of vested interests, of caution grown cold and aloof. I hear power’s sad sister fear. I hear in Rev. Donna Schaper’s letter honesty, I hear a space for real conversation, real conversation, real conversion in real time, I hear a space for love. I know that many Bishop’s have tried to convince and cajole, to prod and encourage. It is a revealing thing, this note that came out today. It is a very sad thing. I await the next act of dissembling. I sadly await the next photo op. The next spin.

Our Lord turned over the tables of the money changers. So many in our church–and I deeply respect our humanity, our challenge snf weakness in this work set before us–yet so many of us, in this great time of possibility, hold those tables of power and security fast. We hold them down with patronizing words of contempt, and disdain for the budding flower of this powerful movement. This is God’s movement bending history’s arc toward justice, it is the body politic in a spasm of self preservation. It may not be in a day, a week, or a year, but I know His hand will be in the flipping, it was and always will be. Imagine if we could be there too.

Rev. Cooper, there is a song tag that I place after all my emails, it is by a preacher of the Gospel of enlightened love: the very reverend Leonard Cohen, monk, musician, and brother. What bells can you still ring, and without cracks from where does your light come in?

Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack in everything
That’s how the light gets in.
–Leonard Cohen

An Open Letter to Trinity Wall Street (posted on their website)

 

An Open Letter and Posting to Trinity Clergy (posted on the Website)

I have questions for the Trinity clergy:

Since you have been involved with this movement, by your own admission supporting it, how many working group meetings have you attended?

I do know that in 2 months there was one aborted Spokes Council meeting held at the 2nd floor meeting space but how many working groups meetings did you attend at the many atrium locations?

Please cut out the nonsense about Charlotte’s space being enough. When people were raided you did not provide a SINGLE BED.

I am interested in knowing that since Liberty square is in your “parish” and you operate on the parish model that “all your neighbors are your responsibility”, why it was that you did not have the occupy alert text that about 1200 other clergy had. It is an alert text sent from the Occupiers that goes off when occupiers were threatened by a very real brutal police force.

Do you all think police brutality is and the violence reigned down upon protesters is/was not real? In other words, the night the park was raided, do you realize that it is amazing that you did not know about it, and yet people from all over, and other clergy did. Yet you work right there and you knew nothing?  In the midst of your listening and support for this movement you neglected to actually leave your building and connect to the movement in any real way.

I am interested in how you feel about the fact that the Police came into your parish space, blocked off the whole area within your direct locale and beat people up and down the block between St. Paul’s and Trinity? How is it that NOBODY at Trinity has issued a seriously strong statement about police brutality when the Times shows a man with his arms out stretched on the gates of Trinity and a police officer poised to hit him with his Billy Club and then did. Where else have we seen state power arrayed against a man advocating for the least, the lost and the left behind be treated in such a way, his arms splayed in such manner? Where: perhaps around your neck, above the altar, traced in the sign we make every time we recite the Gsopel: dead Silence on that.

Why is that this Church has hid behind its patronizing claims of “doing enough” in the midst of this movement when you did the bare minimum and then lauded yourselves without shame on your blogs etc, a claim that almost every occupier I have spoken to thinks regards as a joke, yet you cling to that fantasy.

I have heard the Rector say to my face with great pride that he believes in the inviolate nature of private property, and that this is an unshakable belief. I have heard other clergy say of the desire of occupiers to use 6th and Canal, “it will never happen” again and again, even to the point of saying “that spot is for developers”. I have seen that despite the fact that Trinity clergy made no statement about police brutality, despite the fact that they knew that the space on 6th and Canal was being eyed by the Occupiers–that is a fact established 6 days before Tuesday the 15^th in conversation with one of their staff—and that once the space was entered upon they allowed people to be hit and stomped on by police even as the director of communications was on the phone with an occupier.

Let me set this straight for the naive straight. Trinity knew six days before the space was moved on that it was being eyed for occupation and a massive real estate company was surprised when it happened? No, that is not the way these things work. Lawyers were called, decisions were made, liabilities were considered and a decision was made as to how to proceed. Nice try gang but you ain’t got a leg to stand on.

Do you see the basic fact that at some point you can’t sit on all sides of the fence. It is a specious and gutless position to position yourself as a mediator, a “conversation partner” when your institutional capacity to act locally as a church to those in real time need, real time duress betrays a VERY serious impotence.

As an aside one thing I honestly did love is that you closed on the morning of the big wall street action and then the clergy were outside in Anglican cassock greeting the action as if they were supportive, standing behind them were closed doors. That move was defended as the “same thing we do when the Giants won” the super bowl!! LOL as they say.

Wow, so a global movement for social and economic justice is to be treated like the Giants winning the super bowl?! To my young clergy colleagues who stood out there we have a New York saying for what you were doing, “you played yourself”. You might have well as just stood out there in a monkey suit or something because that kind of buffoonery when done would at least betray some imagination, make it playful!

Lets face it guys, you dropped the ball big big time on this, two months as the only big church surrounding the Liberty square, all that real estate to boot and a few bathrooms and Charlotte’s space.

Lets be straight, it wasn’t on you to save this movement, rather it was on you to actually be in it if you supported it in any real way.

You made the classic trinity mistake…you took to your blogs and your media without considering the real stuff that was going happening on your doorstep. One imagines that you decided that in order be a witness you could some how do it virtually or from a distance, maybe webcast it or something. You tried to be all things to all people and failed miserably.

The civil rights leaders had to move there meeting away from your site Sunday because it just wasn’t right to be on your property, but rather be in solidarity with the movement. Who would partner in dialogue with people who were not actually involved. I chatted with Phil Lawson from the elders council from the civil rights era. Do you know that he was involved, at 79, in shutting down the port in Oakland? That is being involved.

What I look forward to is the Trinity Institute event that is going to be called some thing like “The Arc of Social Movements” or perhaps “Being Church in Troubled Times”. That would be an interesting evening of invigorating explanation and I am sure it will be coming down the pike well produced, oiled and for mass consumption in about 1.5 or 2 years.

You got exposed…accept the gift. So John why critique Trinity so hard? This movement is about exposing the relationship between money, power and disenfranchisement of ordinary people. So my colleagues have found out what a challenge it is to serve mammon and God right at home on their doorstep, right at the center of it all. The altar at Trinity sits 900 feet from the US Stock Exchange, who is being sacrificed?

To be honest after my first post urging porta potties on the porticoe of St. Paul’s 2 months ago was deleted I never expected much more, though I can say that honestly I did hope for much more.

My last three encounters with staff have left me deeply compassionate in some sense: what a bind to be so beholden to your job, to your standing that you lose all sight of our call to Justice and that you will just come up with any rationale to protect your instituion, not serve that deep still voice coming up out of conscience or the Gospel but rather serve religion, and then private property interests.

I ask only one thing of my brothers and sisters at Trinity. The day I let people being chased and beaten and slammed against my church gates go unrecorded please let it be the day you come after me with serious ire. Come straighten me out, remind me of the high calling we share.

In conclusion may  May I suggest you google C.R.E.A.M. by the wu tang clan http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=15lmrWx8lLU …it lays bare the dilemma as music often does.  Sometimes the sword of Christ makes us move from the middle, you can’t be all things to all people.

Good Luck, maybe we can partner sometime down the road.

By the way I look forward to the conversation you recorded without my knowledge being on your website in its entirety, I take the accusation of being a “troublemaker” by the Rector to be a pretty solid compliment. At least send me the clip to put on my facebook page. Thanks! Rev. John Merz, Episcopal Priest on November 21, 2011

Meetings: going up or going down

Amidst my regular church work I had an early morning meeting with others in the occupy faith nyc crowd as well as some folks from rainbow push and some people from OWS working groups. One of the wonderful things about moments like this is first to experience the intense commitment everyone in the room has not to abstract ideas but to really bringing resources to help support this movement. In addition there is the fact that so many people of so many diverse backgrounds can see the common thread that brings us all there: the social and economic fairness and equality for all, a more holistic environment not for 99% but really for all.

Sustainability is another word for justice, what is unjust will not hold and is therefore  unsustainable, not for one but for all. I reference that single garment of destiny idea and it is true. If we go up and down together that is one thing but if one segment goes up, another goes down, what happens to the center? it is thinned, it breaks.

So there we were, many people working together, and many more committed but unable to be there, focusing with clarity and directness on the work that lay ahead. Oakland happened and the power of this movement, the multivalent and dangerous nature of power contested has come to the fore with terrible consequences. I pray for that man who had his skull cracked and for those that could act out in such violence. This may be just the beginning of a harder new moment.

Jungian Digression

There is an archetypal struggle going on here, as in all these movements between the puer and the senex, the eternal youth who would soar to new possibilities and new heights, who will not take no for an answer, who sees possibilities where others see peril. Then there is the old man, the senex, the limiting principle in the psyche, wise, prudent, conservative, careful, this one want to use use force if needed to save the young from upsetting the whole apple cart and the puer will use force or other strategies are there to upset that cart because what is unknown is part of the adventure. The puer is the dreamer and justice making requires both these archetypes. What a struggle we have indeed.

The late afternoon

Rev. Michael Sniffen and I had a late afternoon meeting at General Theological Seminary with students eager to find out more about our involvement, to share their experiences, speculations, concerns and fears. I really appreciated the way they opened up being very honest about the many emotions and reactions that have coursed through them. It resonated with my experience. It is hard to know at some moments how or what to think when things are being contested like private property, clashes between or tense moments between police and their fellow citizens, general disruption of daily life and all the rest. I think we established that there really is something to be taking quite seriously and that we don’t need to know probable outcomes to get deeper into this if inclined.

It is not an easy position to be in, in fact far harder in theirs than it is once one is ordained because in seminary you have a ton of work to do, and the very nature of it tends to be cloistered, and no matter how much time you have you always have more work than time. That said it did seem that my fanatical friend and I did support that the inclination they expressed by showing up to talk and explore their experiences (some had been down) would be deepened by further involvement and commitments. There were already requests in for use of showers for occupiers at GTS and the possibility of finding places to sleep as Occupy Faith NYC puts out the calls for resources this next week. They have not been met but that is today. Who knows what tomorrow will bring. I do know one thing, that the place from which I type this is warm and dry and the persistence of those who occupy that increasingly cold park as we move toward winter is something to be honored. They keep not a park occupied but a space occupied for a national conversation, as long as they are there and people are holding ground elsewhere in the name of the same principles it is like someone jamming the elevator door open, allowing others time to get on. Up or down, where are we going? Depends on whether you have a puer orientation or a senex one.

Tipping the Sacred Cows

What follows is something I posted on Trinity Wall Street’s blogs this morning. There is only so much one can take when it comes to reading articles like the recent one in ENS and other Trinity Posts where that Church defends and then even lauds it own “ministry of presence” in relation to the OWS movement. (read these….and perhaps have in hand a copy of Edward Said’s Orientalism)…if you don’t know the book click here . It describes a cultural stance where dominant narrators, “authors” describe how the wretched of the earth in their far off places need help, need description poor savages that they are, but when the empire we are all complicit in shaping “strikes back” what do we do?

Oh what a pickle for Jesus most humble servants.Before I post what I wrote let me give  a little background and a proposition.

There are some moments that define us individually and communally and even as I write these words I realize I am defining myself in some sense in relation to the events of the past month or so…I can live with that, will live with it. Something monumental, historical is happening 350 feet between three of Trinity’s structures, and they have been all but silent. I don’t want to hear what Trinity does around the world.  Lets not talk about outsourcing charity abroad, lets begin right at home, where the heart is, as they say:

Background

A few weeks ago I posted an urging on a Trinity blog which was  a paragraph long urging Trinity to “step out in faith” and act in solidarity with the movement on Wall Street. That was after reading Rector James Cooper tepid moral circumnavigation of the issue and their commitment, using all kinds of episco-code for inaction.  My post was pointed, generous and asked that they realize that “history has fallen on there doorstep, and that indeed buildings need not fall for them to act”.

My call was for taking the step to place 6 porta potties on the porch of St. Paul’s, which I believe is a site for The Society of Cross and Nails for peace and reconciliation. The porta potties would be a practical response to a need for all down there. It would be an image of Church present and responding to basic human needs. The second was that perhaps they could work with other organizations in order to promote the discipline of peace and witness. The third, which I did not state at the time, was that they should be open right now as a place of public prayer 24/7.  Trinity, though “partnering in dialogue” with anyone and everyone, deleted my post.

That is a very problem from a lot of points of view, especially since my post was no more critical, no different than many others that have appeared since. I had texted it to a friend who had called me just after I wrote it. It turns out he was out to dinner with Amy Goodman from Democracy Now and some other media types. They wanted to interview me but I figured it was beside the point, which are the larger issues raised. And so many people of good will are joining together in OWS.

Finally though, I had to return though to comment on this when it got outlandish the kind of snow job and spin Trinity is doing with themselves and their channels; even as our executive council issued a clear resolution on the national level, in essence, supporting and giving its own kind of stamp to various local clergy across the country who  who step alongside their people in this, in peaceful non violent witness, even as the outcome is as yet unclear. In fact there have been moments where it has been quite tense down there and a strong moral witness, a peaceful witness which many are supplying  but the closest church can project in more sustained way and can use its resources to speak the truth alongside this and to express perhaps how extraordinarily nonviolent (as yet) this has in fact been, is missing.

A Modest Proposal: A Digression on Pastoral Terminology

I ask that the phrases “ministry of presence” and “radical hospitality” be banished from the lexicon of religious people. I have come to the conclusion in my years of ministry both in the college and parish setting that these two phrases are actually code for the inability to connect in any meaningful, common and human way with people. The phrase radical hospitality is a nonsense phrase and is in fact pornographic to my ears. I would never seek or desire to be with or around anyone who wanted to perform such an act or interaction with or upon me; if you welcome me in the name of radical hospitality I will assume you are operating out of such a truncated and provincial sense of our common humanity, that the very need to express your reaching out in such terms makes the joining self serving.  No thanks, don’t want to be part of your project of you feeling better about yourself.  Lets ban that phrase. Secondly, “ministry of presence” means in code, I do not know how or what to do so I will just be there. I have a substitute word or concept: care if you  do; care, not about people in the abstract, but for real, and if you don’t care– you know what? It is ok to admit it, you are human. If you’re institution makes it impossible to for you to be a public witness when you express to be one, then make a stand and many more colleagues will support you than not.

I have encountered again and again clergy who do nothing and then when you ask what they are doing they say a critical part of their work is a “ministry of presence”. That talk is the heart of narcissism. Loving is being present, it is active and it is expressed in real terms, real love is hard, and it costs.   Again, lets vow to clean up our vocation and scrap this  term. Let’s get to a vital language that describes something actual and when we are doing nothing own up to it. I left my last job because I was starting to think I could dial it in, and the young people I worked with deserved something more than what I could give anymore (I was Diocese of NY Chaplain to NYU and the surrounding campuses).  I was indeed ready to launch my ministry of presence, thank God, through talking with friends, my wife, my Bishop at the time, I discerned a call to move on to a new challenge. It is a natural and forgivable thing when it happens that we lose our mojo for something but it is also a good thing to, as best we can own it. There are days I do nothing, there are times I fall well below my responsibility, and that is all it is. It is a lack of presence and awareness. I am human.

This is in essence what I posted on Trinity’s site with a few other points following

My last critique of Trinity on one of its blogs was deleted by the moderator…I received an inquiry from Democracy Now to give an interview of that and I declined out of respect for this ministry that we share. I will not decline to be interviewed there and elsewhere if this post is deleted. I must submit that in all this OWS stuff Trinity Wall Street is acting with a lack of nerve and disguising it as faux Angican circumspection. Providing what you do at Charlotte’s Place is not enough AT ALL given your proximity to the site (some resting space and a bathroom for people who can’t find it).

Providing a room for a local meeting of Interfaith clergy which I attended, and which we could have held at any one of our churches is not enough. The fact that the meeting was 3 hours long and not ONE member of the Trinity clergy deigned to spend so much as a second there to listen or take part in a meeting with over 40 local and national clergy leaders discussing and creating strategies around this issue is troubling. Dialogue with whom? Thanks for the room, a room at the inn when their were others but, no “presence”. If nobody from an institution is in the room but they gave the room, are they present? Tricky

Community Board 1, in which you reside, passed a resolution supporting the first amendment rights of the protests and they called for local solutions to the issue of bathrooms etc. I will again make a clear call to you at Trinity to provide and manage 6 porto potties on the portico of St. Paul’s. This is the very least you can do to help your neighborhood and this movement which is galvanizing the spirit of a nation long ailing under economic policies that favor the wealthy. This move is the VERY least. You cannot hide behind words like conversation when you are not actually in them and acting. You can not hide behind words like “ministry of presence” when you are not taking pro active steps to alleviate the most basic needs, the most basic needs, of people demonstrating for the very goals and ideals that you and I preach about every weekend. Accountability, transformation, justice. Trinity: you can join the conversation but through your publicity wing please stop perpetuating in your blogs and interviews that you are doing anything significant to aid, support or be present to this once a generation movement. You are quickly missing this bus, you are invited on, but do it with integrity and honesty. This post is placed here to remind you of your high calling, a calling we share. If this is deleted yet again, it will appear elsewhere. With great hope, your colleague in faith

Fr. John Merz

 Added to this journal

One of the women pepper sprayed was asked to leave St. Pauls’ chapel when asking for a bathroom. She and her fellow demonstrator recused themselves to what they people at Zuccotti have begun to call “the bathroom of the revolution”, at McDonalds. Who would have known we would find “radical hospitality” and a “ministry of presence” alive and well at the home of the Golden Arches…it is truly “come as you are” as is the faddish phrase in our churches.

If Trinity wants to put the toilets out there I will spend a day a week cleaning them every 20 minutes just to make sure they are sanitary. My ordination didn’t elevate me above dealing with urine and excrement. In fact it may have prepared me to help out in such a practical manner. We are called to, and many have called for something better than what we have seen at one of our most prominent institutions in the middle of an upheaval we have not seen for decades. One of the wonderful things about our Gospel message is that it has a prophetic aspect but the heart of it is also restorative forgiveness. We can always change; we can always change course: the future is wide open.  I may find I need to change and take a different course, and view in the coming days and weeks.

 

For those that are finding themselves railing against the leaderless method and mode of this movement, who see in that quality the exact reason it is no movement at all, I offer  a book that I read a few years back that explains this phenomenon. It was recommended to me a Priest, Nathan Speck Ewer who was applying the principles in this book to his church, and almost impossible proposition–i think it blew up. It is about what this movement is calling horizontalism. Basically networks rather than hierarchies. Had George Bush read this book and ingested it, understood it, perhaps we would have understood that attacking a nation, searching for a “head” to Al Qaeda is futile. You need different strategies when trying to deal with a network. The network model is what made the early church so effective before it joined forces with the Imperial powers under Constantine.

Even in spite of my yesterday observations about marketing etc, I think this movement will resist being commodified and thus destroyed…As Americans we have to do that, buying, consuming is one of the only ways we come to understand anything…..world forgive us, it our congenital defect (deeply sorry if you and yours have ended up on the slave labor end of this proposition–do know we love what you make).  Even bought aspects of this, I do not think, will be able to tame the spirit within it which is a cry of conscience welling up, not reigning down.

Sunday Oct 23

I went down there 2 times this weekend. The first time was because I had to drop a friend off in lower Manhattan. The second was as part of the Interfaith Coalition service.

There is something classically American happening and you cannot besmirch this movement for it, though it needs mentioning I think  There is attempt to brand, sell, exploited and I think, diminish its capacity to be felt, in very small ways. I remember a number of years ago I was entertaining a Nigerian Priest and we went down to ground Zero maybe 1 year post attack or less. There were people hawking magazines and other trinkets about 9/11 and there was a large platform built so that people could gaze into the site. He was both stunned and appalled. He said it was incomprehensible to him that at the site of a tragedy in Nigeria people would be selling memorabilia and gazing on it in such a way as if it were somehow entertainment.

Think about that, America, a nation that has no memory, that runs from its own history, that cannot live with the its unpleasant past would come to grips with it by selling and consuming sanitized versions of it history and present in the form of these talismans:  trinkets, tidbits, tshirts, booklets, political (un)self consciousness in drips and drabs. It is like something Umberto Eco wrote many years ago in his book Travels in Hyper Reality, that the absolutely fake, the simulacrum, is more appealing to American’s that the real. Therefore, he noted, to the American mind, the absolutely fake everglades at Disneyworld are more satisfying and “real” than the real everglades  because in Disneyworld the alligators pop out of the water at regular 4 minute intervals while in the real everglades one could wait 6 hours to see one, one may need a discerning and keen eye to catch a sight.Reliability and consistency, is that not the heartbeat of mass culture and mass production?  In some sense the clutter around, and attaching itself to this occupy movement seems like a simulacrum experience. Digestion in the form of consumption.

There is an edge to this movement. Occupy Wall Street because wall street and moneyed interests have literally “occupied” or colonized the public sphere in our country and that has factored out in so many ways from predatory lending, opportunistic borrowing, a tax code that favors the wealthy and ultimately nobody as all taxes reduce to starve the beast. Campaign financing which turns our politicians into nothing more than fundraisers beholden to those that contribute the most (citizens untied fiasco) and lobbyists that have undue influence, an immigration system that is utterly broken, indentured scholarship for students and on and on. One does not even need to enter into the wholesale demoralization of the public in the Bush years where over 250,000 people on the streets of new york and more across the nation against the war in Iraq were called by the President, “a focus group” that he would not listen too.  Abu Graib etc.

And so here we are in this extraordinary moment where there are issues, there is an urgency, there is a disgust and then there is also the circus aspect playing out in classic American form, somehow everyone trying to buy, sell or purchase some piece of this to wear, trumpet, or have as memory.

My mother went to Occupy Wall Street and All She Bought me Was This Lousy  T Shirt.

Faith Communities. We need the people to come out and attach to the core messages of this movement. This is what we have been talking about in our pulpits, mosques, synagogues, sanghas, zendos for years. The golden mean, justice as fairness, a scratch line of acceptable quality of living that all can aspire to even at the lowest ebb of society.

Don’t buy the T Shirt. Don’t believe the hype. Don’t watch the News on this. The core message is strong and people of good faith hopefully will see in it the deep concerns of their own traditions for fair play, justice and accountability.  If you want to see some insightful thinking check this out…one of my parishioners sent this to me ..here ya go.

Rev. John

I can’t catch up so here is October 20

Eventually I will share the events between the afternnon and October 14th and October 2oth but for now I am just going to add here a record of a meeting that was had and appeared as part of my weekly newsletter to my church Church of the Ascension Greenpoint.

In touch (newsletter name) for October 21-26

The Diocese has been posting my reflections of experiences in the context of the Occupy Wall Street movement (click here). I have been keeping a kind of blog although of late it got cut off as a lot was happening.  There is a group I have been involved with called Occupy Faith NYC which has the endorsement of over 280 local faith leaders from every major tradition. It has the endorsement of the Presidents of Drew and also Union Theological seminaries. It is a stand in witness against economic and social policies of the last 30 years that have widened the income gap and frayed the social safety net. It does not take a political scientist to track the erosion of the public trust in both the institutions of government and large corporations.

This phenomenon is happening, some paradigm shift is afoot and, as I mentioned last week in my sermon, whatever one thinks, wherever one’s surmise falls the church is called to be up in this conversation. Occupy Faith NYC and Jesse Jackson’s PUSH coalition had a meeting downtown last Thursday morning. It was a conversation how faith communities understand this phenomenon, how to respond, witness. There were 40 local faith leaders present and, after making a call to the Diocese the day before the Bishop agreed to clear his schedule and come down for the meeting.

I met Bishop Provenzano at Atlantic Avenue at 7.50 am and we drove over. He in the Bishop’s purple and I in a clerical suit, walked around Zuccotti park. Different folks came up to us, some I had met before. One guy brought his bible over and asked the Bishop what his favorite passage was in the Bible. The Bishop replied John 15. We stood there for a few minutes in what amounted to an impromptu Bible study. After that we talked and met with other people making a
few circuits of the park, viewing the “kitchen”, the sanitation area, the medical area, the lending library. The Bishop took a few pictures (click here), and he chatted with different folks as they approached him to ask a question or say how good it was to see the church present.  His sensitivity in the highly organized though disheveled early morning state of things prompted the reflection that it had affinities to a monastic environment. It was a wonderful insight.

At the meeting many people spoke. At one point a logjam occurred in the conversation and the Bishop offered  some of the more insightful words of what would be a three hour meeting, warning about some of the blind spots of the church and all our institutions of power when trying to read the signs of change, and how we might witness while not squelching or distorting what is being revealed in this whole affair on all sides.  Again demonstrating a real open hearted sensitivity, not to his own and our own privileged needs but rather trying to discern what voices might be crying out in the wilderness of that park and the canyons of wall street. Nobody expected that from someone dressed in purple.

It is important to note that this is your Bishop in action. He does not wait, he  jumps right in and wades around with people. No church nonsense language like “radical hospitality” etc which tends to be code for trying to connect when you don’t really actually care to.  His consecration (somehow) did not obliterate what is ordinary in him; and what is ordinary is holy if we can see it. Our Bishop’s show of presence makes me proud for this diocese. Someone once said to me, about some of the low qualities which seemed to manifest themselves in church hierarchies that “the dead wood rises to the top”. Not here.  This Bishop is alive,  this diocese is doing well, as we explore the links between the mystery of the mass and the misery of the masses in church, and even more, out on our city streets.  Where does such trust come from…such a willingness to embrace the basic ambiguous and hard demands of real life….perhaps we should do a close reading of John 15 (click here).

Yours,

Fr. John Merz

A long hiatus..I will fill in the blanks :)

I have been off line for a while because between the  13th and today so much stuff has been going down that I have barely had time to write while I deal with my regular church job and keep in touch with all the stuff with OWS. Please forgive my musical interludes but songs and images come to mind at times and our technology allows us to share them. Think of this a kind of record, maybe a talmud page, though less sophisticated and less edifying, with less voices. Well really there is one voice so it is not talmudic but I am not of one mind so maybe it is. Whatever.

A rough schedule of late.  Last week there were many efforts to get clergy faith leaders signed on to a statement that was being hammered out by the Interfaith Coalition Occupy Faith NYC. Then there were preparations for a press conference to be held at Judson Memorial Church Friday October 14th at 11am. Rev. Micheal Ellick and Rev. Donna Schaper and the whole Judson/Union Theological crew and others had been burning the midnight oil getting things together. If you want to see the statement or sign on do it here. If you are clergy please put your title.

The whole thing got somewhat wacked out by the fact that the afternoon of the 13th the Bloomberg Admin said that Zpark would be cleaned at 6am Friday October 14th. Naturally people were both alarmed and skeptical. There was lots of talk among the clergy about what stance we ought take and it was recognized that people would/should be out there at 6am in order to be present to witness and to and be with others see to it that the promises the Bloomberg admin made would be honored.

Thursday night after hitting a local Metta Meditation with my wife (great sitting, first time I hit this one in our hood) I realized that I would not be able to sleep so I decided around midnight to head down there. When I arrived the park was middling in capacity.

People were cleaning like mad but there were many who were not. Not surprisingly there was a lot of anxiety present. It had rained like cats and dogs, I mean the kind of rain we got a few weeks back, I thought it might wash the people straight out of the park. On the other hand a little rain is cleansing.

People were worried about could be an impending confrontation with the police. I went there to meditate but realized after getting there and milling around and talking with people, that just talking was the best way of being present. When you are wearing the clergy outfit you end up basically having a portable Lucy Stand from the peanuts…people want to talk. I am not about giving advice but I like to converse and listen.

I chatted with a crew from the Bronx who were super bright in terms of political analysis. We also talked a while about painting as one of them was an artist. Another was deeply involved in liberation theology. After that I talked to a bunch of young guys who drove in from Wesleyan that night to be there. They were quizzing me on Kant’s Critique of Pure Judgment and the philosophical distinction between the private and public person. Having been in seminary I am well attuned to commenting on things I know nothing about so I managed well (I did actually read that book but all I remember is the Categorical Imperative and Kants chilling rebuke that we should NEVER use another person as a means to an end…that is what the Gospels might call the blasphemy against the Holy Spirit).  The Wesleyan crew seemed worried that they had walked into the middle of what might be a tense situation but they felt they couldn’t sit up there at Wesleyan while this was going down. Very cool of them. Every conversation moved in the direction of non violent witness and the discipline of it.

I ran into a number of people I have met down there like Anthony the laicized (no longer practicing) Roman Catholic priest. He is young-ish We literally circled the park talking about religion, theology and social action stuff and this movement, maybe 8 whole times. It was classic paideia. I felt like I was in the Greek Agora. Walking talking, conversing, sharing. There was no point to this, it was just being part of the soul of the place.

Then I bumped in Lauren the Catholic worker who I had met before. He came up a week or so prior from Carolina and we did a lap or two. He had come to the first meeting at Judson and he is a real interesting guy: thoughtful, non judgmental, and serious about his faith and he wears it easy. At one point he gave me a tour of his neighborhood which is sort of how the parts of Zpark are delineated. He steered me to one of the leaders such that there are any (there really aren’t any) because I wanted to convey that  if the rules of the occupation are changed, meaning the powers that be say that people won’t be able to be in the park and lay down once they return after cleaning, the Interfaith Coalition will be able to get people off site to sleep shower etc and that they can maintain their presence though perhaps in a different form. Though the rules of the game may change there is will that the essential game and the core calls for equality won’t change.

At one point there was a group refusing to clean their sleeping area and said they would get tough with the cops if they tried to move them. The group prevailed upon them after much back and forth but this horizontal style leadership is pretty trying at moments like that. I wanted to say, “look idiots, you have to move your fu%ng crap, this is not about a fight with the cops, it ain’t about a small plot of space, it is about something bigger”.  I just stood around and watched it play out. It worked out. However as the night dragged on there were other problems, people being obstinate. Anxiety was still high and at one point off alone I had to consult my iphone as I couldn’t recall the words but rather the feel of the  Yeats poem Jerusalem. It felt like the place was going to crack as internal rifts were present….”what rough beast slouches toward Jerusalem waiting to be born”.  There is no leadership and yet everyone is leading…..its moments like these that give the lie to my stance that I have a problem with authority. I kept thinking, man what rough beast is being birthed here. Maybe something not so great, and yet the overall vibe is very peaceful at most moments. As I said in a previous talk with someone, there is a violence going on here, no more violent–no less violent–than the policies which have ushered this in, but there is a certain violent upheaval and not to be aware of that, to naively imagine all will be well is to be out of touch with it. That is what I think scares a lot of church people and leaders away. It is one thing to preach and talk about transformation in on the Gospel page, static and still as it is; it is one thing to send yet another “join the facebook group against this or that in Darfur” which actually drove me off that medium (the tedium of those requests), but here is this odd energy pushing itself all up over our streets, welling up like conscience and it is not neat. Something very destructive could be happening, something wonderful, who the hell knows. That said, there is no better place for a person of public conscience (is that what a clergy person is, I am not sure?) to be.

As 6 am approached the park was buzzing more but not full. I would say at about 5.55 or thereabouts, if you went to get a coffee and came back the place would have been unrecognizable. People poured to the site. Not slackers as the media likes to portray, I am talking teachers, workers, construction workers, every sort and condition of everyday people you can imagine. It looked like being on the subway at rushhour…one would be at a loss to try and describe this as some particular group. It was EveryDay People.

Rev. Micheal Ellick who is leading the Interfaith Coalition Occupy Faith rolled up. He had put the word out to many other clergy and I started seeing people left and right that I knew in collars etc. There were plenty of faith leaders there in “uniform” either part of our group or not. The whole park was literally jammed out. They called of the cleaning. There straight up was no choice. They would have had to arrest 5.000 people, and when those arrests were done more would flood in for sure.

One thing that sucked was that not a few clowns had posters that said the “NYPD support and protect the rich”. Once the cleaning was called off, a few groups decided to go on random marches. I think these marches are somewhat foolhardy but I may not yet understand the wisdom of such passiagati. In any case the group with the signs went off with others on such a trek and lo and behold they would be the ones who ended up in an altercation with the police. A sucker is born every minute as Boss Tweed exclaimed not so many blocks away.

I have talked to a lot of police down there. I make it my business every time I am there to talk to a few blue shirts. I strike up a conversation, and eventually say I am part of supporting this thing but I regret the occasional person who has a sign or message like that. Almost to a person they say they are sympathetic  (that in fact in a way they are part too. As this movement grows things like the principles of peaceful witness need to be spread. The economic issues, the social justice issues are too great to be jeopardized by such nonsense. I am also aware that there will always be provacateurs in this stuff. As De La said back in the day, Stakes is High, therefore discipline is critical as Stakes is High.  But of course even as it seems at moments non disciplined, as you pass by a guy with a gladiator outfit holding some sign (for real) next to a 70 year old white woman with a button you realize there is some odd plaintive discipline being expressed….it has been remarkably, remarkably peaceful.

I met up with a friend and colleague the Rev. Earl Kooperkamp of St. Mary’s Harlem. We walked around the park a few times. Walking with earl is like being with a rolodex of activism as he seemed every 6 steps to know someone. At another point we turned around and the park seemed somewhat empty. We shared the concern about people stepping off too quick. Earl is a trip. He has a mind for names like a steel trap and one amazing and wonderful thing about him is the first, middle and last thing he does when he encounters people is ask them questions about their life, about their interest and about their passions. I once invited him my college chaplaincy to talk about faith and politics. I has to call it something and I knew he would like the AND. He went off for 25 minutes without taking a breath dismantling the conjunction. Faith was all about involvement in Politics for Earl. It was like a bomb went off.  There were a bunch of young folks who came to the service that night who had wandered in and who were on a roadtrip from college in the south. There were 6-7 of them, and they were sleeping in the back of a van and it was cold. Guess where they spent the next 2 nights. On Earl’s families floor. That is how he is. I am surprised he is still married but he is like that and I have met his wife and she is good with it, that is how she is too.

A large police presence ringed the park and clearly they were trying to decide what to do. At the Trinity Place end of the park there was a particularly strong presence. My parishioner Chelsea Elliot who had been one of the women pepper sprayed was standing at that end holding a sign which read simply freedom of assembly. It was unclear whether the police were going to make a move from that end. My inclination was to stand with her and then I had my Peter moment “did I want to be arrested” since we had this press conference at 11am. I could tell that as brave as she is she was worried as the police were really massing there, and having been the victim of the pepper spray incident she is aware that things can get ugly.

The police put up the barricades at that end. After making a few calls to Rev. Micheal Ellick, who had gone back to pull the whole press thing together (he wanted to be kept in the loop on what was going down at Zpark in case he would need to shift something in mid stream) I decided to go over by Chelsea. It was safer now.

I learned a lesson there. You have certain moments where you can do the right thing or not. I saw she was really worried and it would have been the decent thing to do to go over and be next to her. Her safety did not hinge on me. She has more than proven she is strong as anything, however I waited till I felt comfortable. As a Priest I did not do the right thing in that instance. I remember once Rev. Dr. Gardner C. Taylor saying how so many pastors who backed away from King when he was on the Birmingham jail later on were torn up by grief because they couldn’t re do that moment. This was no Birmingham jail but when I saw Chelsea and her lip quivering a bit at the sight of the cops arrayed all around her and I turned I did not stand next to her to just be with her, even as I had emailed her the week before offering words of encouragement,  it cut like a knife. You live and you learn. And everything we do etc makes us who we are.

At that moment I ran into Rev. Mark Bozzuti Jones, a Priest at Trinity Wall Street. I called him over, he said hello to Chelsea and supported her. He is a solid dude, he is eccentric, and savvy….basically nuts in a positive way.

That is it for half the report on last Friday October 14th.

JM

Sent out to the Episcopal Wing Tuesday Oct 11th

Sent to the Episcopal Wing Tuesday morning October 10th…let me say at the outset that I have always been annoyed by my fellow clergy who beat others over their heads with this cause and that. This hardly seems like a cause though. This is something going down all around. This is not an issue, it is a phenomenon.

 

Some Updates from Occupy Wall Street, Interfaith Coalition

 

Episcopal Crew: Many of you have may have popped down there solo but what is building is an organized mass voice of interfaith religious who are part of and support this movement. And some of you were there on Sunday and at last weeks meeting.

Please do visit the Judson page because it gives some information about policies coming up that can be endorsed as well as other strategies in the works.

You are on this email because I figured you would want to be in the loop about this common work:

Here is a page from Judson Church who is organizing the interfaith coalition to be and support this movement not only with direct action but statements and policies
If you click this page you will be led to videos of the event and other important info

Here you will see some images from this last Sundays march which included a strong interfaith coalition who marched a golden calf from Washington Square Park to the Zucotti Park site.

Here you will hear a Brian Leher WNYC radio show broadcast aired on Monday where both Rev. John Merz, Episcopal Priest from Greenpoint Brooklyn and The Rev Donna  Schaper, Senior minister of Judson Memorial speak (this coalition is egalitarian though she and Michael Ellick are primary facilitators of what is emanating from Judson).
John is 3rd in the segment and Donna 4th.

And finally to get involved as this moves forward see the following which is basic info from my view…not a statement from the group whcih is currently being worked out among leaders.

Please let your Muslim, Hindu, Jewish, Buddhist brothers and sisters about these meetings–particularly action directed leadership who, once plans are hammered out at these meetings can pass this along to those in their congregations that are inspired to join in

“Multi-Faith Support of ‘Occupy Wall-Street’”

Fridays 11:00 am

Inter Faith Leaders Meeting

239 Thompson Street

http://www.judson.org/Occupy-Wall-St

Every Friday at 11am there is a standing Interfaith Meeting of people from every tradition and practice who wish to stand and represent in Occupy Wall Street our commitment to non-violence and our various traditions long struggles for economic and social justice. Judson Memorial is located at the south end of Washington Square and you enter through 239 Thompson Street. There was a march from Judson this Sunday that was covered widely in the media. We will continue to support this through direct action, prayer, mass meditations. Please join in Friday. Our strength is in our diversity.

Finally, the following is a journal of some of my experiences. There is some levity, some personal observations etc, it may not be for all but thought I would include it so you can get a flavor. There are lots of contradictory emotions that emerge and I feel it is important to share them. I have received a lot of response appreciating that far and away the most salient experience is amazement and gratitude for the cross/class/cross cultural peaceful joining to speak out against inequality. I am only 46 but the last time I saw anything like this was at 6 or 7 with anti Vietnam demonstrations…as the Rev. Donna Schaper prayed at the other clergy meeting so well, some words from that old song that says “something is happening here…’

All best and hope you are all well

John

Oct. 10th On the Brian Leher show, and saying thank you to your heroes…gratitude is a good habit, no?

Subject: Brian Leher call in on Monday October 10th WNYC radio/Prophetic religion/ and saying thank you to your heroes

While gathering myself together to make yet another run to the restaurant supply for our hunger program I heard that Brian Leher was taking call in’s for a segment on Faith Leaders addressing OWS in church and what would Jesus do type stuff.

Here is the link..think I was 2nd or so on the line

I  find the WWJD universe ridiculous. The question is basically a rorshach test where you ennoble your own secret longings and inclinations and then put a beard and robe on them: externalize them into something sacred and holy. Nonetheless I called in.

The clincher was the conclusion where I  had my wfan “first time long time” (Hey Mike been listening for yeaz and just wanna say I luv duh show”) call in moment where I told Brian Leher that 10-2 weekdays were wnyc holy time and his show was like church for me. Always nice to thanks to one of your heroes. I have yet to call Mike F but was close to it during the whole Lebron Fiasco. Now that I have called Brian L i can scratch that off the bucket list.