Archive | April, 2021

Wobble World: Calming our Personal and Planetary Shaking, Dr. Robert Zuber

25 Apr
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Wake up. If your eyes are sleeping then wipe them gently. You need to be awake for this. It is a matter of life and death.  Kamand Kojouri

Longer than an earthquake, a pandemic shakes your life and living. P.S. Jagadeesh Kumar

There is nothing stable in the world; uproar’s your only music.  John Keats

On what slender threads do life and fortune hang!  Alexandre Dumas

As anywhere else, political instability provided an opportunity for local scores to be settled, for personal grievances to be aired, for heroes to be acclaimed and discarded.  Charles Emmerson

Instead of a stable truth, I choose unstable possibilities. Haruki Murakami

Humans can’t be strong because of the comfort & can’t be comfortable because of instability.  Sonal Takalkar

April is my favorite month of the year.  The gentle rains.  The longer sunlit days. The moderating temperatures.  The lightening of human moods, even in the midst of a pandemic that has lasted longer than most could have predicted or imagined, at least the moods of those of us privileged by health care access and vaccinations in a world still waiting – and waiting some more – for its fair turn.

And of course the trees and flower beds bursting with color.  In the north, April is the month that reminds us city dwellers of nature’s capacity – assisted in many instances by some truly remarkable urban gardeners – to regenerate itself and thereby tweaking the human race regarding the need for its own regeneration, its own need to recalibrate its relationship to the rest of the natural world, to (as UN SG Guterres says) “stop our war on nature.”

All this “Earth Week,” amidst a bevy of UN meetings alternately hopeful and maddening, I have been taking multiple, daily walks through nearby daffodil hillsides and under cherry blossoms and tulip trees.  I’ve also been spending evenings binge watching (for me) the stunningly filmed BBC nature programs hosted by the indefatigable David Attenborough.  I can’t get enough of either, not this week, not this month.

But all the color and the natural drama, the beautifully manicured parks and other scenes of a natural world bursting with new life also come attached to a blinking warning light, a warning that the flowers and species that make our hearts race are now under siege.  The biological rhythms that keep life in balance, indeed that help keep potential pandemics in check and our agriculture functional, are increasingly out of whack.  As our lands dry and our seas warm, species from bees to whales must find alternate survival settings on a planet increasingly hostile to their interests.

This “uproar” in the natural order, largely a consequence of human activity, is increasingly hostile to our own survival as well.  Those of us who are trying to stay vigilant, trying to stay awake and focused on our increasingly wobbly planet, seem so often to possess in our persuasive arsenal more warnings than we have solutions.  We know that deforestation ruptures food chains, destroys biodiversity and increases the likelihood of future pandemics at a moment when we have barely regained any firm footing from the current one. We know that our collective food security is regularly undermined through conditions from drought and flooding to soil erosion and the absence of pollinators. We know that levels of ocean plastics threaten to contaminate sea harvests on which many of the world’s peoples depend.

And we know that a warming planet continues to release both abundant methane into our atmosphere and vast quantities of precious fresh water into our oceans, altering both temperature and pH. In addition, a recent article by Brian Kahn chronicles the growing evidence that a combination of ice cap melting and groundwater depletion is causing a “wobble” in the very stability of our planet, a shifting (subtle for now) in the movements of the “rotational poles,” shifts in gravitational pull related largely to rapidly rising sea levels.

As the world wobbles on in response to our carbon addictive warming, so too do many of our fellow humans.  As noted at the UN this week, the current pandemic has been a boon to garden-variety narcissism but also to criminality in diverse forms – trafficking in persons and weapons, violence against cultural minorities, even the consolidation and expansion of extremist movements.   As the representative of the Maldives reminded this week during a UN General Assembly event on “urban crime,” cultivating a “sense of belonging” remains key to effective crime prevention. In its absence, criminal elements can establish (and have established) an increasingly malevolent, destabilizing presence, widening social divides and increasing levels of insecurity and anxiety within and across populations.

Such a “sense of belonging” has certainly been hard for us to come by during this pandemic.  So many of us, even the vaccinated and otherwise privileged among us, even those of us who have not been victimized by crime or lost those we love to a creeping virus, even we are now less stable, more wobbly, than we might otherwise admit.  Many of us have retreated to places that offer more comfort than growth; many of us have recalibrated relationships and passions and made the decision to shrink our circles rather than pushing them outwards; many of us have abandoned the goals and gifts that once animated our lives and provided hope for others as we “ride out this storm” that never seems to run out of destructive consequences.  We have at times allowed the insecurities in our immediate spaces rob our attentiveness to the almost unimaginable insecurities of others bereft of health care, bereft of security from traffickers and other criminal elements; bereft of food security as once viable croplands turn into non-productive deserts. 

And yet, despite our efforts to protect ourselves and those closest to us, it is not at all clear that we have put the threat from wobbles to rest. As the pandemic evolves and as our long social isolation and chronic uncertainty slowly begin to lift, many of us find that some aspects of our competence, our confidence, even our essential sanity, have taken a hit. 

As the buds and flowers of April spring open, they communicate what should be a hopeful signal to the rest of us:  If they can open to the world, so can we.  If they can spread their color, sharing the best of what they have to offer to brighten our sometimes dismal, lonely spaces, we can do the same for others.  If they can honor their annual biological commitments despite the wobbles of pollution, temperature and pollination, we can overcome our own struggles; indeed we can address the anxiety and even depression that will otherwise continue to impede our engagement with a human-saturated world that needs our sustainable caregiving input as much as it ever has.

Perhaps the signature event of this past week available on UN Web TV was actually not a UN event at all, but a Climate Summit convened by the US White House, bringing a range of global leaders together (virtually) to strengthen commitments to stem the steady march of a warming, species-threatened, plastics-inundated planet.  Despite a stream of largely predictable statements long on concern and short on change; and despite the opening warnings of UN SG Guterres that we are now risking a “mountain of debt on a broken planet,” there were a few genuine bright spots.  US VP Harris opened the Summit with surprising references to the “indigenous insight” and “nature-based solutions” that offer a tangible path forward, much of which was reinforced this week at the UN’s Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues. Later on, the president of the Marshall Islands, stressed the need for his oft-vulnerable people to find “safe harbor” amidst the current tempest, noting that the safest of all would be policies and actions to keep global temperature rise at or below 1.5 degrees C.  He also noted the importance, as did other leaders, of using this “rare chance” provided by pandemic recovery to “to reset our economies and societies.” Perhaps reset ourselves as well.

All of this was helpful and hopeful, but as German Chancellor Merkel intoned, we face a “herculean” task requiring a thorough revision of the ways in which we now do our business.  Indeed, her statement raised questions, for me at least, about the sufficiency of our institutions, the wisdom of our policies, but even more about the resilience of our collective psychology, our ability to shed our pandemic cocoons, to find ways to stop our shaking and steady our wobbling, to do our best to overcome the anxieties and insecurities which have taken root during our long hibernation, to lay aside grievances born of social isolation and chronic instability and remain awake to a world which has been waiting anxiously for us to take up, once again, our engaged and caring roles, providing inspiration for healing that other people need and that might not exist if we don’t find the courage and capacity to share such ourselves.

As our world wobbles on, as we struggle to recover our economic and emotional health, the tasks lying before us seem to be growing in intensity not shrinking.  Of all these current “herculean” matters, perhaps the most daunting relates to recovering our own strength to overcome the after-effects of a most difficult time and play our role in this “life or death” moment for our world, embracing possibilities that might appear uncertain on the surface while making space for a wider and healthier range of global constituents to enter the conversation and share their own revision strategies.

The clear, consistent messaging coming from this UN week is that “we are running out of time” to change the way we do our business, to ensure that there will be more flowers and buds in springtime, more species able to dodge extinction, more people freed from pandemic anxieties and access inequities that continue to take such a heavy toll. We are running out of time to stabilize our now-wobbly planet and we urgently need to enable and support more of us still-shaken humans to remain awake to that task.

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Revise and Consent: Enabling a World of Change, Dr. Robert Zuber

18 Apr
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We were revisionists; what we revised was ourselves.  Margaret Atwood

Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted. Albert Einstein

Improperly documented history, or more precisely, fraudulent versions of history not only deprive the victims of pasts injustices due recognition of their suffering, but also rob the living of a fair chance at a future free from the dangers of repeating past injustices.  A.E. Samaan

We have learned primarily by tinkering. Curt Gabrielson

In talking about the past we lie with every breath we draw. William Maxwell

If we don’t have real answers, it is because we still don’t know what questions to ask. Our instruments are useless, our methodology broken, our motivations selfish.  Jeff VanderMeer

It is in this childishly speculative state of mind, so different from common sense and its logic, that we know the world to be good. Vladimir Nabokov

Thanks to the confidence placed in me by a colleague, Barbara Adams, I recently published an article in a journal of development policy entitled “A Volatile Context: A Revisionist Lens on Good Governance.”

I’m not going to invite you to read the piece. It’s not dis-similar to the themes of this weekly post, but it is longer and surely more dense. It also reflects an assignment which I only accepted due to the editorial staff’s embrace of the “what if.” What would the world look like if our structures of governance were devoted to fostering care and equal access among constituents? What if governance were as competent and transparent as it often claims to be? What if governance were as concerned — in terms practical more than rhetorical — with the needs and aspirations of constituents as it is with its own protocols and power dynamics?

These and other, similar questions punctuated my piece, for better and worse. To be honest, I’m surprised it got published at all. In an age driven by data and branding, by professionals seeking control over smaller and smaller domains of human experience, speculative writing of the sort I indulge in has become a bit of a reach, and not an altogether welcome one. People in our governance and educational bureaucracies are rather preoccupied — and not without reason — with the accumulation and management of data, data that can establish trends and help ensure that, in the realm of policy and to the extent we are able, human and financial capital are directed towards the holes in security and justice that need to be filled and can be filled.

But it is clear in many places, including at the UN, that data of varying levels of sophistication and reliability does not always bring us closer to governance that is caring, responsive and trustworthy. Indeed, the pursuit of data can be its own endgame, accumulating “information” that in many instances is untethered to strategies to both unlock and incarnate its power to effect change; moreover, such data is often in flux as its gaps are only slowly recognized and fresh experiments are conducted that render the previous “truths” subject to a revised consent.

One of the smartest statements coming from youth climate activist Greta Thunberg was when she said, “don’t listen to me, listen to the science.” Yes, listen to the science, listen to those with data pertinent to the rendering of what are often dire predictions for our common future if we do not mange to revise our ways. But as Greta already knows, as any of us who ply our wares in the halls of global governance knows, such governance is as likely to render the power of science to something akin to a “petting zoo” as it is to unleash its full and furious influence over all our actions.

Simply put, we now know more than we do. Just this week, several good UN events underscored the degree to which having accurate data and incarnating relevant policy commitments are still at loose ends. We “know” that hording vaccines is ultimately detrimental to both the global economy and to the suppression of future variants — as noted this week in a special, high level event on “Vaccines for All” hosted by the president of the UN Economic and Social Council — and yet our commitment to equitable vaccine access remains well short of the need. We “know” as was stated often during an important UN event this week on “Financing for Development,” that a combination of debt burdens, limited investment access and illicit financial flows has made pandemic response and recovery a mere pipe dream, and yet our commitment to a revised, more inclusive financial system remains more the subject of speechmaking than practical application. We “know” as a civil society advocate from South Sudan testified in the Security Council this week that the wide availability of often-trafficked arms fuels so much of the violence and abuse in her country (and many others), and yet our addiction to the production and trade in deadly weapons shows little signs of abating. We “know” the many thousands in Yemen whose lives remain threatened after years of war by famine and economic collapse, and yet the Security Council remains largely impotent to end the violence let alone the impunity to which it has given rise. We “know” that we are unlikely given our current course to forestall the biology-altering consequences of a rapidly warming planet, but we continue to take more credit for our limited climate responses than to earnestly prepare to enact what the president of the UN General Assembly this week urged: “a greener and more equitable recovery that can keep our SDG commitments on track,” including and especially our lagging climate actions.

These disconnects between knowing and doing should not be laid at the feet of scientists, many of whom have no doubt had more than a few sleepless nights over these past months as emissions continue to rise and policymakers continue to defy reasonable, pandemic-related limitations in the name of disinformation or “freedom.” The same scientists who developed safe and effective COVID-19 vaccines in record time and implemented health protocols to keep many more virus victims alive than was the case last spring — including no doubt many COVID-deniers — know that such measures alone won’t end the pandemic if large segments of the public remain uncooperative and revision-phobic, and they certainly won’t help us prepare for the pandemics sure to come as we continue to wantonly disrupt the planet’s biological safeguards.

It may be the case, as suggested above by Curt Gabrielson, that we learn primarily by “tinkering,” through small-scale revisions to what is known and seen, small-sale adjustments in what is given. But for the policy community such revisions at small scale are no longer suitable, if they ever were, as they don’t sufficiently address the diversity of threats facing our current world. They don’t sufficiently address the barriers that keep so many human skills — of youth, of cultural minorities, of women, of persons with disabilities — on the sidelines of policy deliberations and decisions. And they don’t address the deficits of trust which are themselves a legacy of promises deferred or ignored, assistance barely rendered, entitlements and privileges not shared or even acknowledged.

If we are not careful, if we are not sufficiently vigilant, the “bubble” that institutions like the UN are accused of operating within will morph into an “island” to which we in the policy community might well be exiled. Such exile would complicate positive change as it would cut off large swaths of the global community from a UN system which still connects, still convenes, still calls attention to looming threats and policy options — and often with considerable skill. But the threat of exile looms, primarily from constituencies who feel that they can no longer believe in us or in the words we speak, who display an eroded confidence in our ability to distinguish between what can be counted and what counts, to prioritize those responses that truly matter to human and planetary well-being.

In this regard, I worry most about any potential erosion among the youth, this large and diverse generation trying to organize their lives and dream their dreams under clouds of pandemic, climate change, weapons proliferation, and massive debt. Despite all the outreach the UN does to young people, do they –will they — find the UN sufficiently responsive, sufficiently committed to their future, sufficiently savvy on matters from technology access to policy inclusion? Will they find value in our answers to compelling crises let alone consent to at least some of the questions we are actually willing to ask? Will they find in their interactions with us evidence that the world is good and beautiful, and will they continue to feel that it is worth their time and energy to preserve that beauty and extend that goodness?

On this the jury is out. Among the formal events on the UN’s calendar this week was a side discussion, organized by the Youth4Disarmament initiative of the UN’s Office for Disarmament Affairs, which brought together diverse young people — including several of our colleagues — to examine that elusive “what if,” their dreams of a world that is fit for the aspirations and well-being of both this large generation and those who will come after. What if nuclear weapons were abolished? What if emissions could be brought firmly under control? What if the discrimination and incitement to violence highlighted by France and others this week could finally be stricken from the human register? What if our grand institutions — so often stuck in the mud of their own cultures and working methods — could be made to truly breathe again, breathe the air enveloping a human race which finally understands that care for the planet and solidarity with each other are practices, not premises?

At this “what if” event, the invitations to youth were sincere: to share stories from diverse contexts that need to be heard even if those stories (like many of my own) wouldn’t always pass the muster of fact-checkers; to envision (as High Representative Nakamitsu invited) what the world might actually look like if we spent less on weapons and more on people; to imagine as well (as Costa Rica’s Ambassador Chan advocated) a world “where “people no longer felt compelled to take up weapons in the first place,” where we were able to educate every child, where climate change impacts could be mitigated and even reversed? Can we envisage and then build a world where (as Pakistan noted) “power rivalries are disavowed,” where impacts from human selfishness are not a foregone conclusion, where injustices and atrocity crimes are no longer in mortal danger of endless repetition?

As the older speakers at this event noted, the policy and legal groundwork has been laid for such aspirations, including at the UN. But many traps have already been set in the form of crises we should have seen coming, crises that we failed to prevent in the first instance or forthrightly addressed in the second. There is still much for us to revise in our institutions and in ourselves, much in our own, sometimes “fraudulent” versions of personal and cultural history to clarify and confess, much in the stories of young people — especially those compelling “what ifs” — that can guide and inspire their practice but that must be better honored by the rest of us if they are ever to achieve their full flowering.

For better and worse, prospects for a more caring, trustworthy and visionary governance are still in old and worn hands like my own. We who are attached to such hands must undertake the revisions that history and circumstances now demand of us, revisions to our institutions and to ourselves, as we seek to deposit data and dreams into the anxious, younger hands of others.

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Voice Lessons: Ceding Space for Those Waiting Their Turn, Dr. Robert Zuber

11 Apr
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I know you can’t live on hope alone; but without hope, life is not worth living. Harvey Milk

No voice is too soft when that voice speaks for others.  Janna Cachola

Obviously these are some exceptional young people, but what they have in common is that they were ordinary people who cared. Morgan Carroll

You cannot protect the environment unless you empower people, you inform them, and you help them understand that these resources are their own, that they MUST protect them. Wangari Maathai

The people who are trying to be on our side have reduced us to a mere calculation. Sarah Kurchak

I was always taught that when you’re lucky enough to learn something or have some advantage you should share it.  Areva Martin

It is not loving to impose our own grid onto others.  Matt Perman

There have been a series of articles lately by journalists and academics expressing concern about the long-term affects of a pandemic that seems “determined” not to release us fully from its grip.  

We know about the COVID “long haulers,” those unlucky individuals who have been unable to shake the effects of the virus months after their initial infections.   But there are other “long haul” effects that we have only begun to assess, the economic, educational and psychological consequences that we have done our best to hold in abeyance, hoping for conditions that will allow our children back in school before they’ve forgotten what they’ve learned or lost touch with their dreams; conditions that will allow our small businesses to survive a year of numerous adaptations and little income; conditions that will allow some healing for those whose psyches have been battered over this past year by social isolation, fear of the loss of loved ones and incomes, and now concern about whether or not we have what it takes to successfully engage with people who seek to become for us, once again, more than a screen presence.  

Clearly, we are not “out of the woods” and are unlikely to be so even after available vaccines have finally been evenly distributed and this particular pandemic has been finally brought under control.  The sun will indeed rise post-COVID, but it will shine on a world that in many key aspects has lost its way, if not altogether lost its mind.   Despite our own privilege and general good fortune, we wonder if some of those aspects don’t equally apply to ourselves. 

It has been over 13 months now since we have set foot inside UN headquarters which, as most of you realize, is the setting for most of our work, the primary space where we have been “lucky enough” to learn some important things and then “using our advantage” to share what we think we’ve learned with others.  Over these long months, we have missed the personal diplomatic interactions, the rapid movements between conference rooms and issues more connected than acknowledged, the endless coffee breaks to discuss what we’ve heard, what we’ve failed to hear, who impressed and failed to impress, what comes next (or should come next) for our advocacy and outreach, and even the surprise visitors to UN spaces who allow us to better direct our energies and modest assets in the service of interests those visitors help to refresh.

Throughout this long physical hiatus, one which shows no signs of abating, we have managed to keep track of UN processes almost exclusively through digital means.  This past week, for instance, the United Nations and its excellent technical team managed a remarkable set of digital engagements, including a sober ceremony to mark the anniversary of the Rwanda genocide, important discussions in the Security Council on threats from landmines and the current crisis unfolding in Myanmar, and events celebrating the restoration of diplomatic engagements by the US, specifically on Climate and Security and on addressing the care of Palestinians through the United Nations Relief and Works Agency. 

All of these activities – and many others where these came from — are important markers of a global system alternately hopeful and discouraging, a system which, in the case of the UN, is often more political than thoughtful, whose “genius” lies in crafting consensus among states more than in creating urgent remedies for those decimated by armed violence or facing long-term food insecurity from what might be irreversible climate change impacts.  We who operate in UN contexts are sometimes surprised by something we should already know well:  that while the UN has a firm stake in many issues it has limited power to resolve them; indeed that the resolution engine of the UN is largely about persuasion rather than coercion; and that the many skilled and caring diplomats assigned to UN headquarters are as beholden to the aspirations of their foreign ministries, for good or ill, as they are to UN Charter obligations.

Through the use of twitter and other dubious means, we have been able to follow the ups and downs of multilateralism, at least in part, and we have continue to share views within and well beyond the UN community on what should happen, what is not happening, and how we might better integrate our ethical and caring impulses into our policymaking going forward.  I am quite sure that the UN doesn’t miss our physical presence, doesn’t miss our constant scrutiny of its promises and working methods, doesn’t miss our relentless concern that, especially in this time of COVID, branding has too often been allowed to crowd out substance and urgency in our policy deliberations.

The “zoomification” of policy has clearly been a boon to this sort of branding.  While we continue to encourage digital events by our younger colleagues to help them define generational issues and concerns within pandemic-imposed limitations, we are also mindful of how much easier it is to organize events in digital spaces than to ensure their follow-through.  While there is no shortage now of online images of diplomats and (mostly) large NGO leadership saying things which are perhaps meant to be profound but are often self-evident and self-referential, there is too little reason to believe that any of it matters as it should, to believe that the endless statements uttered by these leaders are actually tethered to real concerns in a broken world and reflect policy priorities they are fully determined to address.

This is the dilemma faced by our sector in this pandemic age.  How do we navigate the spaces between image and substance, between the rhetorical branding of global problems that concretely and painfully impact the lives of constituents and the brand-building that allows us to fund salaries and our endless publications, creating strands of expertise that rarely reach and connect beyond the borders of our mission statements?  And how do we ensure, in the name of constituency building, that we are not also constituency-gate keeping, that we are not also oblivious to the reality that people are much more than a “calculation” to substantiate our annual reports, that we recognize people who can only speak their truths to the extent that those of us with privilege and access speak in “soft voices,” and commit to sharing the microphone rather than endlessly grasping for it?

Our sector is fond of calling for change in the UN’s priorities and working methods, as well it should, but it often fails to address the need for reform within our own ranks.  Moreover, for reasons that are only tangentially related to our organizational missions, our collective tendency has become to suggest only the changes that won’t ruffle feathers or threaten funding sources, only the changes that can be incorporated into bureaucracies that it is surely not our principle job to placate.

The damage exacerbated by this pandemic and related crises is experienced broadly by the global community, including within our own offices.  More than a few of our colleagues are also depressed and hurting, are also burned out, are also angry and frustrated that the agencies and processes into which they have poured their live energy have been able to deliver only half a loaf when a full loaf was called for. And what of our colleagues with more direct engagement with the wounds and deprivations which characterize so many communities in this world? What do we in our relatively safe policy bubbles owe those journalists, mediators and humanitarian workers who have taken on the arduous and often dangerous task of reporting on our messes, cleaning up after our messes, or negotiating an end to messes that need not have occurred in the first place? What more do we need to do in our own spaces to bring hope to communities and those who serve them without “imposing our grid” on to lives where such impositions have historically been too frequent and where they simply don’t belong?

There is now a movement among some NGOs around UN headquarters, one which to our mind is not mindful enough of our complex debt to front-line advocates and constituents, a movement which has deployed the twitter hashtag #unmute through which it seeks to organize legitimate concerns regarding access and impact. To be sure, there are people around the world doing the work for real that we purport to be doing in principle, people under siege and threat, people doing their jobs while trying to protect their children and keep from languishing in prisons where guilt is largely fabricated and release is often serendipitous. To be sure as well, there are people around the world, some of whom we have been honored to meet over many years, who are literally models of resiliency and resourcefulness, extending hands of care and promises of empowerment well beyond the attention of UN conference rooms, beyond the reach of funding agencies and international NGOs, small and large.

Let’s be clear: We who function in and around UN spaces remain more privileged than muted. Our voices connect with policymakers beyond our size and volume, likely also beyond demonstrated impact. The doors to UN headquarters remain locked to us. The interactive life inside UN buildings is becoming something of a dim memory. But we are not muted. We have a say, we always have a say, even the smallest among us, even when we have nothing fresh to contribute, even through a flat screen in the middle of a stubborn pandemic which has otherwise exposed and compromised so much in us.

The key for us going forward in these treacherous times is not so much about branding but about sharing. How can we better help people affirm a hope that is based neither on wishful fantasy nor on some externally “imposed grid”, a hope which is grounded instead in a more generous reception for the truths they can convey, truths that can make our own work richer and more relevant to shifting circumstances? And how can we do our part to help “unmute” those whose voices truly demand more attention, those who have been hoping and waiting more patiently then perhaps they should for us to voluntarily mute ourselves, to make way for contributions we need and cannot replicate?

We have had the privilege to learn many things in this UN policy space. And we have enjoyed advantages of institutional access and respect, much of it unearned. As the pandemic continues its relentless eroding of our psychological health while enabling inequalities in so many forms, we will do what we can with what remains of our organizational capacity to help spread what others have come to know, the hopes they sustain and the skills they have accumulated, over our own policy deliberations. And to do so in their own voice.

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Spring Forward: Realizing Renewal Amidst the Gloom, Dr. Robert Zuber

4 Apr
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Things are always better in the morning.  Harper Lee

It is in this difference between returned and replaced that the price of renewal is paid.  And as it is for spring flowers, so it is for us.  Daniel Abraham

There is something infinitely healing in the repeated refrains of nature – the assurance that dawn comes after night, and spring after the winter.  Rachel Carson

When this ultimate crisis comes… when there is no way out – that is the very moment when we explode from within and the totally other emerges: the sudden surfacing of a strength, a security of unknown origin, welling up from beyond reason, rational expectation, and hope.  Émile Durkheim

It is by means of our own victories, if we are not regenerated, that the work of Nemesis is wrought: doom breaks from the shell of our very virtue.  Joseph Campbell

We become influencers, leaders and teachers in this world, by performing within ourselves the purging that we wish to see take place in others.  C. JoyBell C.

Let the whole world see and know that things which were cast down are being raised up, and things which had grown old are being made new. Anglican Book of Common Prayer

In the northern hemisphere, there are indications that, as obstinate and habituated as we have often demonstrated ourselves to be in both personal and institutional contexts, renewal is in the air.  Flowers adorn parks and gardens.  The songs of migrating birds enrich the spring cacophony.  And our religious communities once again determine to maintain their relevance as the world groans under burdens of hunger, violence and virus while public institutions in too many instances encourage the mistrust and misinformation we need them so desperately to counter.

On this Easter Sunday, we in the Christian community have a special obligation to look ourselves in the mirror, to ask (as we would of all our institutions) if we are actually being faithful to both our founding spirit and the specific, concrete needs of our constituents; indeed if our institutions are able to “get over themselves,” rendering the services and promoting the hope and conduct which are in large part the point of having such institutions in the first place. 

And when reforms are warranted (which they almost always are) such that our personal and institutional life can prevent more effectively and respond more efficiently, we must ask if we up to that task?  Or do we take the path that we see so very often during personal counseling, individual leaders and their institutions willing to consider only the changes they are prepared to make, not the changes they need to make?  

In addition, again with analogies to counseling settings, how many of us are actually willing to engage in the “purges” which we are quite certain are required for others?  How many are committed, paraphrasing Christian scripture, to removing the log in our own eyes such that we can better see the specks in the eyes of others?  How many of us are sufficiently committed to vigilance and renewal as doom threatens to break, yet again, “from the shell of our virtue?”

These are two of the impediments to a renewal that is more than rhetorical, that is more than a tepid commitment to close the gaps between expectation and performance, between the people we are capable of being and the people we have become too comfortable being. We are collectively too comfortable with acts of discrimination against the categorical other, too comfortable with lifestyles that imperil survival both current and prospective, too comfortable with institutions, even churches, that are wrapped so tightly within their bubbles, that continue to justify protocols and practices that have long lost their relevance, that have become as some of us used to sing during childhood, the “chewing gum which has lost its flavor on the bed post overnight.”

Part of renewal for our time must be about recovering those bursts of “flavor” when we metaphorically bite into a sacred or cherished pursuit; appreciating and sharing those bursts of color and fragrance as the blossoms of spring almost magically return to life and our sunrises signal yet another chance for us to grow and change; magnifying those acts of human courage and capacity which now sadly tend to manifest themselves mostly during times of crisis, when our backs are truly against the wall, when there is no more wiggle room for us, no more opportunity for a sane and rational dismissal of what our collective narcissism and indifference have literally brought to a boil.

We are in such a moment of boil now.  Our human community has backed ourselves into places where we no longer have the room to maneuver we once imagined ourselves to have; where our self-deceptions about who are the good ones and who are the evil doers serves only to magnify evil and suffering; where our institutions mostly play at renewal, moving some of the pieces around but not changing the game in any significant way, not sufficiently reassuring those crying out for assistance that help is on the way, a “help” that is more predictable and which leads to peace, health and self-sufficiency, well beyond the stasis of mere survival.

We know we can do better.  Even in protocol-saturated institutions such as the UN, we know that we can renew what is now holding us back.  We can demonstrate with our time and treasure that we are determined to honor the trust that other still place in us, fulfill the expectations that we have led constituents to anticipate from us.  We can pull some of the “weeds” that choke off some of what promised to be a verdant garden; eliminating more of the numerous unfulfilled financial pledges, both institutional and humanitarian; the misguided applications of consensus that constitute de-facto vetoes, the habit by some states of sponsoring resolutions that they have no intention of honoring; the actual vetoes and threats of veto by permanent Security Council members which have become tools of politics not of statecraft, tools which do not prevent mistakes in conflict response so much as inhibit conflict response itself. 

There are times when it seems as though numerous states don’t actually want the UN to honor its many promises, don’t actually want it to take the leadership we rhetorically bestow upon it to anticipate and then prevent the tragedies that take such a huge toll in blood and treasure in our world. SG Guterres noted this week in an interview that “multilateralism has no teeth.”  I won’t belabor the extent to which the SG has insufficiently pushed back against this longstanding reality, but I do know that metaphorical dental implants are at the ready if and when states and stakeholders decide to commence the procedure.

For those of us who delight in this Easter Sunday we should also acknowledge a responsibility beyond predictable family dinners, religious rituals, egg hunts and bonnets; a responsibility to incarnate the renewal which anchors the promise of this season, to manifest the hope in all our worldly undertakings, including in our institutions, that “things which were cast down are being raised up, and things which had grown old are being made new.” 

If Jesus were once again to emerge from the tomb to which his body was once confined, scanning the current terrain of our flailing human commitments, he might face temptation yet again, this time to head back inside the cave, fire up the Neflix, and just forget about this whole renewal thing.  Except that he knows us, knows the complexity of our hearts, knows what he had willingly gotten himself into from the dawn of time, knows as well what needs to happen in this current moment  — what can with grace happen — such that the promise of renewal, indeed the fate of our species to which renewal is now tethered, can stand a reasonable chance.

We are quickly running out of time and space to turn the promise of renewal into a discernable reality, to raise up those many people and species which have been cast down, to infuse those institutions which have lost their way with fresh energy and care, to revitalize a global public which has grown so weary of coups, displacements, discrimination and deprivation, a public increasingly gloomy regarding the prospect of institutions that can truly help restore communities beyond the edges of their own bubbles. We can’t wait for recognition of some “ultimate crisis” in order to release our better selves into a world starved for relief and reassurance. Indeed, that “crisis” is likely already at hand.

The bursting buds in our northern parks and gardens remind us that renewal is possible, that color and life can return to even the most barren of personal and institutional landscapes.  May this Easter serve up portions of energy and grace sufficient to keep on track the renewal our times so desperately require.

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