A Mother's Day Reflection

Arise then...women of this day!

Arise, all women who have hearts!

Whether your baptism be of water or of tears!

Say firmly: "We will not have questions answered by

irrelevant agencies,

Our husbands will not come to us, reeking with

carnage,

For caresses and applause.

Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn

All that we have been able to teach them of charity,

mercy and patience.

We, the women of one country,

Will be too tender of those of another country

To allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs."

From the voice of a devastated Earth a voice goes up

with

Our own. It says: "Disarm! Disarm!

The sword of murder is not the balance of justice…"

Julia Ward Howe, Mother’s Day Proclamation, 1880

 

We in the United States observe Mother’s Day this Sunday, and I can’t help but recall how I’ve tried to honor my mom on past early May Sundays. I would get up early and make breakfast, just like she taught me years before. I did that several years. I remember that when I was senior in high school I bought her an artisan glass kerosene lamp from Gatlinburg, Tennessee. As it so often happens, those acts changed to cards and phone calls as I went away to college, and now being 700 miles away, that will have to suffice again (barring any sudden bursts of creativity).

But this year’s Mother’s Day is positioned in a rather unique period of time. Not only am I employed full time as a worker justice organizer, but it is less than a week after the death of the demagogue and global warlord Osama bin Laden at the hands of American military forces. My experiences as an organizer in Chicago have heightened my sensitivity to what true justice is, and while I am relieved that bin Laden will not be inciting more acts of murder, I cannot see this act truly bringing justice to a broken world. I recently tweeted (yup, you can follow me at Missionworker on Twitter) that “justice does not occur in the death of one man, but justice only occurs in the rebirth of many people”. This is my reaction to the vengeance killing of the former leader of al Qaeda.

Now how do I see Mother’s Day, situated in a time when young people have flash mobs to celebrate the demise of bin Laden? Well, I have to think about the lessons that I’ve learned from my mom. Mom is a bookkeeper for the Perry County Office of Aging, quietly making sure that funds get to the senior citizens of the much-mocked rural area northwest of Harrisburg. She is also a cancer survivor and long-time Sunday school teacher for 5-6 year-olds at our Methodist church. Maybe most importantly, at least to me, she is the mother of my older brother, younger sister, and me.

She taught me the importance of hard work, honesty, and persistence from her, and I also learned about sacrifice and boldness from Mom. Though Sarah Palin has claimed the “Mama Bear” title, I feel that my mom could run circles around her. She would be relentless in the pursuit of justice, and looking back, God help any folks were in the least bit unfair to us kids.

Though Mom and I no longer share a lot of the same views on politics, I can see how these lessons woven into my personality. I am not afraid to confront authorities or approach strangers, and maybe I can trace my endurance runner mentality (particularly useful for 8- and 10-k races) to these lessons. These traits are very useful in organizing and in ministry, and I’m sure that they will only manifest themselves further as I continue to pursue the intersection of ministry and organizing for social change.

I suppose that is one of the truly amazing about Mom. When it was becoming evident that I was diverging from the conservative politics of my upbringing, Mom still encouraged me to seize any opportunity that caught my eye. She helped me navigate the process of packing to live in South America for a semester. And I can honestly say that I wouldn’t have made it this far in my time as a missionary and organizer without her help. This is the greatest lesson that I learned: love transcends all causes, campaigns, and ideologies.

It is this love that guides me through the complex world of worker justice and community organizing. The world is not so simple to divide folks into good and evil camps, therefore I constantly fall back to the foundation of love from which grows my faith. I came to know this love through the life and behavior of my mom, and I still look to her to know this love in its most tangible form.

Thanks, Mom, and I love you.

Power, Amibition, and the Path of the Cross

"A lot of people thought Cesar was trying to play God, that this guy was trying to pull a saintly act. Poor Cesar! They just couldn't accept it for what it was..."
- Dolores Huerta in Cesar Chavez: Autobiography of La Causa

A few weeks ago I had the incredible honor of helping with the interviews and days of discernment for the next classes of US-2 and mission intern young adult missionaries of the United Methodist Church. First off, April is a beautiful time of year in Manhattan. I wish that the flowers were blooming in Chicago now like they were in the West Village then. Next, it is always a pleasure to interact with the wonderful, very capable folks at the General Board of Global Ministries who work tirelessly on the third floor of the Interchurch Center on Riverside Drive, just across the street from the famous Riverside Church. But really, the thing that will make those couple days stay with me is interacting with young adults who had converged from all over the United States to offer a few years of their lives in service to God and their fellow people. Those folks blew me away with their passion, their intelligence, their imagination.

And their ambition.

After returning from a night out, a few of us settled into the basement lounge of Alma Matthews House just because we knew that we wouldn't see each other again for a long time. Discussion wandered everywhere from liberation theology to infallibility of scripture to how we could lock out the guys who were smoking outside. For whatever reason, however, we kept returning to how we, the so-called Millennial generation, would soon step into the leadership structure of the United Methodist Church, especially with general conference approaching in spring of 2012. We were aware of the power of our voice, and I for one found both hope and at least a bit of panic at that thought.

See, I grew up with the saying, "Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely". Especially by my junior of college, I had all but rejected most bureaucratic structures that concentrated power, and I had flirted with Christian anarchism. I still have many friends who remain on that far left edge who reject nearly any form of organized power because of how it is often abused.

I no longer see that philosophy as feasible. The problems of the world are too great, too complex, and too often perpetuated by people with much more organized money than I have to follow such an ideologically pure path. In order to unleash the streams of justice, people must pool their power until dams of oppression finally break. I did not understand this even last summer when I first was introduced to my current placement site, Interfaith Worker Justice, and I felt incredibly uncomfortable claiming any power for myself when power from God alone. Then I started learning about organizing for social change, about different strategies and some tried and true tactics to put pressure on the power brokers who keep so many in chains. I came to understand that organizing is another form of the Holy Spirit, and, just as some folks speak strange languages and supernaturally heal the sick, this form of the Holy Spirit is righteous power.

I, like some of those of young adult missionary candidates, have ambition, or better stated, ambitions. I have ambitions to eventually obtain a master's of divinity and perhaps the white collar of ordination. Though the concept seems a bit far-fetched, I also can see how I could land in other positions of power and authority within or outside of the structures of the United Methodist Church. God help me if that happens.

Which makes me think of Cesar Chavez, whose biography I am currently reading. Despite the fact that he never even graduated high school, Chavez came to embody the farmworker movement and interacted with some of the most powerful men in the country. There are pictures of him with United States senators and even the pope. And naturally many people view him as something of an egomaniac. From what I have heard and read, there is some truth in that. It is also true that to wield power, one must also have a strong ego.

Thus, I don't think that we as Christians should flee from power. Hiding away in a cloister can be as insidious a temptation as controlling the masses from the bully pulpit. We, as Christians, must claim and then utilize our power in a fashion that honors God. The problem is that many Christians disagree about what honors God. Therefore, we must constantly stride the path of the cross and center ourselves in Christ's love. The path of the cross is sacrifice and nonviolence and hope. The path of the cross is ambitious because the cross has unimaginable power.

It is the power of love.

I Thirst: a Reflection for Good Friday

After this, when Jesus knew that all was now finished, he said (in order to fulfil the scripture), ‘I am thirsty.'
-John 18:28

It was one of those blisteringly hot days back in July. The previous day had been Independence Day, though we had started work earlier than usual, we still only worked a half day. I didn’t particularly like being denied a half day’s wage because of some silly nationalistic holiday, so I was determined to earn it back by working an hour longer each day for the rest of week.

            At the golf course nestled in the narrow valley, I worked as simple laborer on the grounds crew. Because I had started later in the summer than the rest of guys, I didn’t have the skills of my peers, and I was given the most manual labor. In this case it was removal of nine months’ worth of compacted leaves on acres of flowerbeds. That involved going between a leafblower and a rake and flat shovel. Usually working in pairs, we would load up the big Chevy pick-up with leaves, dump it behind number 13 tee, and repeat. It was good “honest” work.

            On this hot day, I was working alone. I was in the shade, and I thought that I was keeping well hydrated. I don’t know if I just didn’t drink enough water or if the extra hour in the dust put me over the edge. I was feeling extra tired and a little dizzy when I got home that day, and I just went to bed and tried to drink as much water as possible.  The next morning I got up at 4 AM as usual, tried to eat some breakfast, and nearly vomited. Something was wrong with my body.

            Up on the cross Jesus was thirsty too. He’d already lost a lot blood from the flogging, and the physical exertion is more than I can imagine. I feel that we talk a lot about Jesus’ perseverance in the church, as we should, but then we use it affirm to our “Protestant work ethic” as well. However, in Jesus’ admission of thirst, I see the embrace of human frailty, our bond to the physical and physiological. Jesus didn’t keep a stiff upper lip. Jesus didn’t try to show up the other guys hanging with him. Jesus took the path of humility, recognizing his humanity when he was so close to the revelation of his greatest divine glory.

            This is the Jesus I know. Born to poor, refugee parents, raised in a marginalized and oppressed culture, working as a tradesman and a teacher, then persecuted for political agitation. Jesus loved. Jesus wept. Jesus ate and drank, so that means that he also peed and pooped. Jesus was human just like you and me.

            I missed two days of work that July due to heat exhaustion, and it wasn’t for some grand cause. I was constantly thirsty for those two days because I tried to deny my humanity. I thought that I could justify myself through my work. That’s not the path of the cross, not the path of Christ. Today as we remember Christ’s divine nature, may we also remember his human nature. Today as we remember our liberation from thirst, may we also remember our liberation to thirst.

Amen

Intentionally Communing

Keep in mind that our community is not composed of those who are already saints, but of those who are trying to become saints. Therefore let us be extremely patient with each others' faults and failures.

-          -Mother Teresa

The story of how I came to live in community is a little convoluted. I did not intend on living on the Near South Side of Chicago, an hour’s commute via public transportation to the office of Interfaith Worker Justice. In early August of 2010 I had thought that I would live in an intentional community made up of mostly seminarians in the Far North neighborhood of Rogers Park, but I learned, quite accidentally, that the community was exclusively for seminarians. And someone forgot to tell me. Oops. That set me off on a panicked effort to live at another intentional community also on the North Side. Through the generous help of the General Board of Global Ministries of the United Methodist Church, I spent the last weekend of August in Chicago hoping that I would be accepted by the residents of that community. I learned in the parking lot of Baltimore-Washington International Airport that they hadn’t accepted me. 

That was 6 days before I was to move to Chicago from central Pennsylvania. Oh dear.

Luckily, the office assistant of the IWJ office had also done a Google search for “Christian intentional communities” in Chicago. That was how I got into contact with First Trinity in the near-south neighborhood of Bridgeport. I had visited First Trinity during my short weekend stay in late August, but I had figured that it was too far away from the office. Suddenly, I had little choice but to live there...or live with the family of a second cousin of my father whom I had never met.

First Trinity it was.

I moved into the second-floor apartment of the community center across from the old Lutheran church over Labor Day weekend after a 12-hour car drive via the Pennsylvania Turnpike and flatland-crossing interstates of the Midwest. My room was threadbare. The walls were decorated with blue-and-gray streaks and aquatic plant scenes. The paint was chipping. I slept on a roll-away bed mattress for about two weeks until I brought home the mattress left by my US-2 missionary predecessor.

But the folks there! They were such an odd assortment of folks. Bohemian artists and musicians, immigrant students and workers, and a few guys who had lived there since the late 1970’s. On Labor Day we had a big barbecue where we ate hamburgers around a big table and then played Uno. I felt pretty accepted pretty fast.

But I also learned that community is a difficult thing to perpetuate without any structures or organized effort. One roommate left three months after my arrival; he and his girlfriend needed more space than the little apartment could provide. True story. Shortly after Christmas another roommate left for a construction project at O’Hare, and though all his things remained at Trinity, I have seen him maybe twice since the beginning of the year. Three more “roommates” who lived in the old parsonage across the driveway also left by the end of February. The musician who shared a wall with me was the next to leave in mid-March, and it is likely that one more roommate will leave by the end of May. 

We call that “transistioning”.

With the absence of folks with whom I had only begun to develop relationships and the appearance of new folks with whom I had no relationship, I finally got proactive in my community-building. One of the newbies had lived in an honest-to-God coop for a few years, and so we worked together to make a proto-coop out of our mismatching neighbors. We sent out e-mails and knocked on doors, and then repeated it. Last Sunday we finally had our first Trinity Community meeting where 10 of the 13 current residents showed up. 

Hallelujah.

We have a long way to go before we function as an actual community and instead of just people who live in the same space. Because the community consists of two buildings, we have to organize separate meetings to go over things like cleaning common spaces (bathrooms, kitchens, living rooms), provision of communal resources (toilet paper, sponges, pots & pans, etc.), and respecting each other’s different schedules (no violin after 11 pm, please). In lieu of active and organized residents, the church board of trustees and deacons had been interviewing and admitting new residents. It is my neighbors’ and my hope that soon we will at the very least have a stronger voice in that process. And lastly, maybe we’ll actually, you know, like, hang out together every once and while?

Community is a hard thing to practice in general, and it is even harder when the community is as diverse as the one at First Trinity. We are co-ed, represent four different nations of birth (and thus four different native languages), are between 20 and 65 years old (though mostly under 30), and have jobs ranging from full-time student to missionary to software engineer.  Deciding issues through consensus will be fun.

But I don’t think that the beauty of community can be captured by demographics. It comes to light in short narratives. Stories like helping a love-struck roommate make an unplanned trip to Phoenix. Stories like sharing impromptu birthday cake on a Wednesday night. Or everyone singing along with music from a laptop as the night drags on. While community takes some very intentional organizing and planning, community also just…plain…happens.

While I was in college, my closest friends and I had been struck by the account of the community of believers from the book of Acts. Our community at Bucknell didn’t look like that, and Trinity Community won’t look like that either. Maybe that’s because every community looks different, and that’s cool. But what remains constant is the sharing of resources, of space, and of life.

I wouldn’t want to live anywhere else right now.

Epistemology of the Prophets

Pilate asked him, ‘So you are a king?’ Jesus answered, ‘You say that I am a king. For this I was born, and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth. Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice.’ Pilate asked him, ‘What is truth?’

-          John 18:37-38

I recently had a fascinating conversation with a very good friend of mine from college. It was prompted by a text message from my friend: “I want to talk with you about epistemology.” For those of you whose philosophical terminology is rusty, epistemology is the branch of philosophy dealing with truth and the nature of knowledge, i.e. how we know what we know. Plato talked about it in the famous “Allegory of the Cave” from his The Republic, Descartes meditated on the subject until he concluded cogito ergo sum, and Wittgenstein capitulated that reality is confined within human language. But my friend and I did not discuss any of these distinguished fellows. We discussed Focus on the Family.

We did not discuss specific issues like abortion or gay marriage. We had already talked about those two hot potatoes. What had piqued my friend’s interest was Dr. Dobson’s ultra-conservative group attack on constructivism, which, among other things, explains how subjects previously thought to be objective and unbiased, like experimental science, are largely socially constructed and thus do not necessarily representative objective truth but only the experience of an individual or a group of individuals. Conservative Christians often see this way of thinking as threatening to orthodox Christianity and especially a biblically-based Christianity. After all, if we view the biblical canon as human construction and not divine ontology, then Christianity can no longer hold singular possession of objective truth.

I personally disagree with Focus on the Family on many issues, and this time is certainly no different. Just yesterday I sat in on an Old Testament class at Garret Evangelical Theological Seminary in which the class discussed how history is how we imagine things must have been. No matter how hard we try we cannot separate ourselves from our own reality nor can we separate a text from the reality in which the authors wrote it. Thus I view the book of Genesis not as a literal account of what happened at the dawn of the world but as a glimpse into the understanding the Hebrew people of its own existence.

With this said, I am still very, very in love with Jesus. If I were presented with a check-list based from the Nicene Creed, I might want to qualify some answers, but I would mark my belief in every part of it. I can point to any one of a half-dozen instances where I felt close enough to God to get a big, bear hug from my papi. I would love it if everyone knew God the way that I knew God, or even better, knew God better than I knew God. And though I find a lot inspiration from non-Christians like Mohandas Gandhi and Thich Nhat Hanh, I still know God best through the Church.

But I know that the traditions of my local congregations are as culturally constructed as they are divinely inspired, and I am not convinced that outwardly rejecting Christianity is a direct one-way ticket to the condemned city of Dis. As I have worked with people of various faiths, or of no particular faith, or even of an antagonistic bent toward organized religion, I have found the Light of the Holy Spirit. I tend not to tell some folks this because I would seriously weird them out. Jesus-language can be a real sticking point for some folks.

What keeps me coming back to the Gospel, the Word of God, is not that it happened, but that it happens. Every day. Every hour. Right now—the Gospel is happening. And a lot of the time, it doesn’t involve a special prayer or mass. As missionaries, my US-2 peers discussed prevenient grace—that the saving and redeeming Spirit of God is already present in a place, and we agreed that it was a damned good thing, too. Oh, sure, folks can reject that Spirit, and all of us do, but that doesn’t keep the Spirit from working with us. And when we finally embrace that Spirit, we see something as awe-inspiring as the rainbow crowned cliffs of Iguazú Falls.

So—epistemology. What is truth? Is it, as logicians say, a property of a certain proposition? I tend not to think so. That doesn’t seem to be what Jesus was talking about with Pontius Pilate. Jesus seemed to be talking about something that even the most powerful government in the world at the time could not understand. It went deeper than that. I think Jesus was not so much referring to epistemology as to ontology, the study of existence. I do believe that there is objective truth, and it is both simpler and more complex than we would often like it to be. This Truth says, “Come to me all who are weary.” It bids us to set aside our ideologies and our ambitions and then look at the world through the eyes of a child.

Can imagine that truth, dear friends? We would no longer take away health care for the needy and pad bonuses already in the tens of millions. We would no longer create “smart” bombs and look for ways to use them. We would no longer tear apart families and build walls to keep them separated. Swords would become plowshares, the ancient streets would become a place safe for kids to play in, and justice would flow like a no longer chemically tainted stream.

I believe in that Truth.

Workers' centers and labor unions

I was sitting in the top floor “Governor’s Lounge” of a hotel just a block away from the Capitol, sipping coffee in between furiously writing notes from the meeting with other SEIU organizers. The view was spectacular, and breakfast and hors d’oeuvres were complementary. That is, if you can find time to get up there in the heat of battle.

I was sitting in a classroom at the School of Public Health in the Near West Side with 30 Spanish-speaking construction workers, mostly day laborers (or jornaleros) who had gathered to learn about how to avoid injury at work and what rights they have with OSHA. We worked in small groups answering questions about specific cases and then gave demonstrations of proper safety equipment. Lunch was typical Mexican fare: rice, beans, salsa.

These are two recent experiences, taken vastly out of context, to explain two branches of the 21^st century labor movement. The first took place almost daily in Madison, Wisconsin as my coworkers from IWJ and I worked to organize faith communities around the worker rights struggle there. Because of some connections my one coworker has, we worked primarily with SEIU, or the Service Employee International Union, which is one of the most powerful and strategic labor unions in North America. The international organizers that I worked with were incredibly smart, diligent, and constantly plugged in. For the first time I came to see why a smart phone is useful in the real world. I cannot imagine the amount of money SEIU has spent to support workers in Wisconsin.

The second was a 10-hour OSHA training held at UIC that was sponsored by two Chicago workers’ centers, the Latino Union and Arise Chicago. Latinos disproportionately get injured and die on the job in the United States, usually because they are not properly trained for the job they do, are not given adequate tools and safety equipment, and won’t complain if injured or robbed of wages. The facilitators, who were members of Arise Chicago and were jornaleros themselves, stressed that they were not going to teach the men and women but that they would all teach each other. We wrote answers on pieces of butcher paper and then taped them up on the walls. It was modeled off of the popular education model of the Brazilian educator Paulo Freire, and the funding came from a NIOSH grant.

Now this is not to say that SEIU does not ever use pop ed to educate workers; I know from experience that in trainings for trainers the pop ed model provides the methodology. However, there are marked differences between a workers’ center and a traditional union. First, workers’ centers exist because certain sectors of low-wage earning workers, like day laborers, restaurant workers, domestic workers, and many others, do not have unions. Workers’ centers help to fill that void. Second, workers’ centers usually are not financially self-sufficient like unions, which are allowed to deduct dues directly from workers’ wages (well, at least in some states). Third, workers’ centers neither have the protection nor the regulation of the NLRA, or the National Labor Relations Act.

However the most interesting difference in my experience is that of culture. Workers’ centers often try to espouse leadership by the rank-and-file. I know of a few workers’ centers that have “flat structures” in which members make the important strategic decisions by consensus. While some processes require technical expertise, such as navigating the legal system to claim back wages, workers’ centers often emphasize direct action because it so often is more effective and creates leadership along the way. It is rare that a traditional rank-and-file worker would think of herself as a “foot soldier”—she is a leader working with other leaders to confront unjust systems of power.

As the Workers’ Center Network Assistant at IWJ I primarily interact with workers’ centers and much less labor unions, but it is vitally important that we maintain both models. When members of a workers’ center understand what a union does, they desperately want to be part of one. They would sacrifice like our ancestors did in the last century to gain that sort of power. But we also desperately need workers’ centers to reach into immigrant communities that are so often ruled by fear of the patron and la migra.

I was filled with pride was I looked out over the crowds in Madison, knowing that I had a role in that show of power. And I was filled with pride again when I saw how I had a role in creating that space where oft-despised day laborers could learn and teach each other. Both ways I felt like I was part of a much larger whole, working for justice in a highly oppressive culture.

Maybe it’s what the cornerstone of the Sears’ Tower feels like.

On Wisconsin: What I Saw in Madison

It will surely be a, if not the, defining moment of my time as a US-2 missionary with the United Methodist Church.

“Hey Joe—would you like to go to Madison?”

Within 3 hours of that initial invitation from the deputy director of Interfaith Worker Justice, my 2-year placement site organization, I was on the Kennedy Expressway leading out of Chicago, past O’Hare, through frozen countryside of Illinois and Wisconsin, toward the capital of Badger State and the revitalized labor movement. I didn’t have a map of Wisconsin with me, and I was driving with the promise that I would have a homestay ready for me when I arrived. I called my parents and a few different close friends that I didn’t know what I would be doing, but I was really, really excited to do it.

The next week was a true whirlwind of religion-labor organizing to support public sector unions in their fight to preserve their right to collectively bargain on behalf of their members. In case you’re not familiar with collective bargaining, it “consists of negotiations between an employer and a group of employees so as to determine the conditions of employment” (Legal Information Institute, Cornell Law school), which means that workers negotiate with their boss on things like pay, working conditions, health benefits, worker-management relations, etc. For those United Methodists reading this, the United Methodist Book of Discipline explicitly supports the right of workers to collectively bargain (¶. 163.B of the Book of Discipline of the United Methodist Church-2008). Most Christian denominations have similar statements of support—mainline Protestant, evangelical, and Roman Catholic.

I saw a lot of things that I will never forget, things that will shape my ideology, philosophy, and theology well past time at IWJ. Here are three things that stand out the most:

1.       Young people were the heart-beat

When I first walked up the hill that is crowned by the St. Peter’s Basilica-mimicking-Capitol, I only knew that I needed to see the place to understand the movement. I was told as much by CJ Hawking, director of Arise Chicago and de facto coordinator of IWJ efforts in Madison. I immediately saw a crowd of hundreds of people, some standing and other marching, in the sleeting darkness just after dusk.  They were mostly people more or less my age—20-somethings, the Millennials, the Echo-Boomers, that generation characterized by our unprecedented acceptance of the Other and our dumbfounding apathy. When I entered the building, the center of the poster-plastered rotunda, what some faith leaders would later call the “people’s cathedral”, there were young people in the center leading the chants, cheers, and songs.

                It would be easy to brush the college students off as simply letting off steam for the cause of the hour, but that’s not what I saw throughout the week. In closed meetings and in the rotunda I continually saw an amazingly strategic organization. Students and TA’s were keeping the grounds incredibly clean, constantly reminding each other that this was a PEACEFUL protest, and the cause was a lot bigger than them. The young people’s energy, dedication, and imagination provided the heartbeat that pumped life-blood into the rest of the movement.

2.       Union organizers were the brain

My head didn’t stop spinning from the time that I met up with CJ to the time that I left Madison the next Monday. My colleague shared the strategy that organizers from the biggest labor unions in the country—AFSCME, SEIU, UFCW, AFT, Teamsters, various trade unions, and others—had formulized in less than a week, and then it was time for work. They had transformed the second floor of a hotel a block away from the Capitol into a sort of mission control of meeting locations, war-rooms, and work spaces. From there the unions organized the mass rallies that numbered in the tens of thousands (up to 100,000 at the climax), the outreach efforts throughout the rest of the state, and media campaigns for public consumptions. I got tired just by taking a tour.

                Say what you may about unions, but I saw that unions work—HARD. Their energy had a singular purpose: to defeat this disastrous bill that would all but eliminate collective bargaining rights for public workers and destroy their unions. It was something to see.

                On a personal note, I also saw what I will not be. My call to ministry will surely include organizing, but I will not exclusively put my focus there. I was so exhausted by my time in Madison that it’s taken a good week to recover, which tells me that a career in organizing would not be sustainable for me. May God bless those folks who are lifers; we are in your debt.

3.       Solidarity stitched us all together

On Tuesday, the Interfaith Coalition for Worker Justice of South Central Wisconsin, the local IWJ affiliate in Madison, held a rally that drew at least 50 clergy and faith leaders from the area. We held prayers and declared that our faith traditions compelled us to act in support of these workers. Honestly, we probably talked too much, but hey—what do you expect from a bunch of preachers? What happened next I won’t forget.

                We organized ourselves behind the ICWJ banner and then marched with the chant “Show me what religion should look like! THIS is what religion should look like!” We went straight into the rotunda with various unionists cheering us on, many expressing their thanks for our presence. We slowly filed in and around the “drum circle” that the college students were keeping manned continuously. Then some young woman took up the chant with us, and the rotunda was filled voices united. The crowd quieted as a few religious leaders spoke for a few minutes. And then the firefighters arrived.

                I don’t know if there’s a group that galvanizes folks like firefighters. I remember how in the parades of my childhood we always looked forward to the big fire engines at the end, how we would cheer them on as sirens blared. There were no fire engines in capitol, but there were bagpipes and flags and men and women wearing helmets, suits, and boots. We had similar experiences when the police marched through the building. Yes, the police were part of the protests as well.

                On Sunday night, as a few hundred people waited for the authorities to forcibly clear the Capitol, I saw the clearest picture of solidarity yet. Hundreds of students, union members, professors, and faith leaders were crammed together on the 2^nd floor of the rotunda, waiting to be arrested for deliberate civil disobedience. I was among them, and as the hours ticked by, we began to sing. We sang old standards like “We Shall Not Be Moved” and “We Shall Overcome”, but that wasn’t the best. One student struck up the chorus “Power to the people”, and then changed whose power we celebrated each time we sang the chorus. We celebrated students, teachers, steelworkers, priests, rabbis, firefighters, and police.

                Together.

The fight is far from over in Wisconsin. There are also anti-worker bills in Ohio, Michigan, Indiana and a number of other states. I already know that unions have flaws. I’ve worked with them, and I am a member of one currently. However, not since the Great Depression have we as a society needed labor unions more than now. In so many heartbreaking ways, we are a fractured society, grappling at each others’ throats in the midst of our shared pain and fear. This is not the Kingdom that Jesus declared.

                But this is my hope, dream, and promise given to me by my God: that if God can work through as fractured and as scarred an institution as the Church, then surely God can work through unions, community organizations, and even government. After all, they are all just made of people.

                And it is through people that the Holy Spirit works.