Archive | November, 2022

Wait List: An Advent Reflection, Dr. Robert Zuber

27 Nov

Wallup.net

Every waiting day makes your life a little less. Every lonely day makes you a little smaller. Every day you put off your life makes you less capable of living it. Ann Brashares

What does the anticipation feel like? The sensation of staring into the void, the awareness of an end’s impending arrival? Burning and being extinguished simultaneously?  Teo Yi Han

One of the greatest strains in life is the strain of waiting for God. Oswald Chambers

Life can seem like a gloomy wait in the thick of black shadows. And still there are those who smile at the darkness, anticipating the beauty of an eventual sunrise.  Richelle E. Goodrich

“For a while” is a phrase whose length can’t be measured. At least by the person who’s waiting. Haruki Murakami

We never live; we are always in the expectation of living. Voltaire

So much of all this, so much of all living was patience and thinking.  Gary Paulsen

Whatever happens, do not let waiting become procrastination.  Neeraj Agnihotri

Tides do what tides do–they turn.  Derek Landy

Here we are at the beginning of another Advent season, another opportunity to remind ourselves, as several thoughtful figures have recently sought to do, that we should not let the struggles of the present annul feelings of anticipation that the promise of a brighter, more equitable and peaceful future can somehow be realized.

Somehow.

As with other years, this season leading up to Christmas seems to be more about preparation than anticipation, making our lists and checking them twice rather than discerning the times and its sometimes-frightening messaging. Such times require more from those of us who would once again dare to welcome into our lives in a few short weeks a baby lying in a barn whose presence in our world still yearns to teach and guide more than we are collectively willing to be taught and led.

But this season is less about the manger per se than about that which we long for, that for which we wait.  As we peer into the vastness of both a large and awesome universe and of our own inner realities, as we search for fresh signs that life on this planet, however damaged and threatened at present, is truly worth preserving by each of us, we must also acknowledge that the promise of such a world has not sufficiently informed our judgments or guided our actions.  We live for the most part as though the reality we recognize today is the one we will encounter tomorrow, and the day after, and the day after that.  A virtual carbon copy, if you will, of the tasks and their schedules which largely make up our weeks and months, tasks which reflect habits of the heart of which we are scarcely aware and mostly loath to shift in any event.  

But the tides are, indeed, continuing to turn.  Whether we choose to be moved to response by that reality or not, the planet we inhabit continues to become busier, warmer, less biologically diverse.   Rights are being rolled back.  Institutions of governance and finance are proving themselves to be less effective, indeed less trustworthy, than we had hoped they might be, often claiming more in the way of “leadership” than they are actually providing. Collectively, we still seem keen on soiling our own beds, on snuffing out much of the life on earth that has made our own life possible and thus jeopardizing prospects for those we have brought into this world (and those they will choose to bring as well).

And what of our religious life at a moment when so much of the humility and awe of our erstwhile divinely inspired universe has degenerated into mean-spirited and petty reflections of communications from a “God” many of us simply don’t recognize; a deity which seems to be stuck in age-old patterns of advocating violence and revenge rather than kindness and service; a God who has apparently authorized people of deep (if not altogether unjustified) grievance to take to the streets with their deadly weapons and smote those who offend their own sense of righteousness, who are at least as quick as the rest of us to pass judgment on others but not on themselves, and who somehow have allowed themselves to believe that the baby in the manger whom we anticipate yet again this Advent  represents a call to vengeance rather than compassion, of rampant materialism rather than reconciliation, of goodness somehow better reflected in our pigmentation than in the works of our hands, hearts and souls.

Thankfully, for many of us still, this is not what we long for in this season. This is not what we wait for nor what we hope for. Some still long instead for that time when the manger chill becomes a season of warmth, when the healing of body and mind can help us cast out our demons of hatred and violence, when the multitudes can be fed in a world of plenty as intent on sharing as on consuming, when the rumbling sounds we have come to hear so often are from many feet walking along paths of justice and mercy rather than from climate-induced devastation or from rockets slamming into apartment complexes.

We have written of this before and wish it did not bear repeating, but we must remind our readers and ourselves that our assessments in life our largely a function of our expectations.  And we do acknowledge that our expectations of humans remain considerable, even as we probe the depth of our own unhelpful habits, even as we continue to search the night skies and our own souls hoping to find more inspiration for ourselves and others, the “more” which can better enable, yet alone ensure, a planet fit for our children, all our children. 

We do indeed expect more of ourselves and of others, and this in spite the debris which I and so many have scattered over a too-broad section of our lives  We also expect more of institutional and political officials who continue to insist on the spoils of “leadership” while habitually overpromising and under-delivering.  We also expect more of self-justifying religious leadership which seems to be making this spiritual thing up as they go along, dragging us into places more arrogant than humble, more judgmental than kind, faith which presumes much but which dodges much of the emotional content of this Advent season and those moments which convey dimensions of a deeper and more common human aspiration. 

And we understand that anticipation worthy of the name is not to be equated with passive waiting, certainly not the waiting to be confused with lethargy or procrastination, clearly not the waiting which brings us pain or simply condenses our lives into smaller and smaller spaces. Rather it is about living such that what we anticipate is already alive within us, already burning and consuming what stands in the way of the changes we have mostly waited too long to make, already encouraging us to align ourselves, our actions and faith, with those times which could well be just around the bend, those times which can finally bring to pass the full promise of the manger. 

There is much to learn in this Advent season, much to fix as well, in the world and in ourselves.  What I wish most for each of you, for myself also, is the waiting which transitions into anticipation and which further transitions into a deeper commitment to discernment and service.   The sun will surely shine over us after this long season of darkness.  We can live in these moments as though its rays have already begun to melt away the Advent chill.

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On Caring and Enabling: Navigating Crisis Response on a Post-Twitter Planet, Dr. Robert Zuber

19 Nov

The goal is not to get something said but to get something heard.  Fred Craddock

We cannot feel good about an imaginary future when we are busy feeling bad about an actual present.  Daniel Gilbert

It is our daily lament that we cannot love enough.  Charles H. Spurgeon

We want our leaders to inspire us because we’ve been inspiring them for so long.

This last quotation from Vanessa Nakate, one of the leading youth representatives at COP 27 in Egypt, hit me in ways that most of the oft-compromised, policy speechmaking emanating from this climate COP (and previous COPs for that matter) has not. 

While preparing yet another Advent Letter and while assessing the value of our work and how it needs to change going forward given the possible end of twitter and some predictable disappointments from the latest (and now extended) UN climate change event in Egypt, the words of a compelling young advocate seeking from “leaders” what they should be providing to our youth as a matter of course is, to my mind at least, both jarring and dispiriting.   

For over 20 years, we at Global Action have chosen to tether ourselves to institutions which tend towards being long on activity and short on progress and the inspiration which progress engenders, institutions (and their talented people) which largely mean well but which fail to communicate the limits of their own efficacy; institutions which urge people to have confidence in state capacities which have proven largely insufficient given the magnitude of threats and challenges which now dominate our social and political landscape. In process and rhetoric, the emphasis seems to be on maintaining control of issues and their response narratives much more than most officials of these institutions would ever acknowledge.

Many of us know what it feels like to “mean well,” to grant ourselves some form of emotional participation trophy for efforts – good faith and not – to honor our promises and commitments to others.  In our own modest line of activity at the UN and beyond, such honoring has taken the form of both careful scrutiny and feedback which has attempted to be harsh when needed, complimentary when deserved, and mindful that the insight and skills of our policy competitors and even our adversaries are likely to be as indispensable to a healthy, secure, peaceful future as our own.

After years of engagement, we continue to believe that our own small-scale energies are mostly on the hopeful side of issues from climate change and capital punishment to weapons spending and the well-being of persons with disabilities.  And while we may have over-rated a bit the capacities of we humans to rise to difficult occasions, especially in cases where our status and income might be called into question, we have seen enough change over the years – much of it welcome — to know that the fact of change – if not its general direction – is inevitable.  Painful to navigate at times, raw material for a barrage of grievances often, but also potential never to be dismissed. 

Still, we who spend time in the endless gabfests of international policy have forgotten things which are perhaps not in our remit but are indispensable to the success of our efforts to address problems beyond operative paragraphs in resolutions that all governments (and even some civil society organizations) can accept in theory if subsequently ignore in practice. We especially forget that beyond the range of our policy bubbles, resolutions represent promises.  People anticipate, and have the right to anticipate, that our erstwhile “leaders” are fully committed to global well-being, and that the skilled diplomats who carry their messages and incarnate them in agreements are as committed to honoring public expectations in a timely manner as they are to honoring “political realities” or diplomatic consensus.  

We also seem to forget that the messes we have made in the world are unlikely to resolve themselves, that the sickening mold on our walls will only expand unless we take firm measures to remove it and then impede it from returning.  Such firmness in the policy realm requires commitments to both boldness and fairness, ensuring that crises are met with actions that can bring us back from the brink and can do so to the best of their ability without inflaming further the tensions currently tearing our grossly unequal world apart. 

Such a scenario is not outside the realm of possibility, even in this time of shrinking response options. But we need more – much more – from the people who hog the podium, negotiate tepid agreements beyond public view, accept outcomes which they know will not solve the problems to which they point, and dare to get inspiration from talented, energized youth advocates rather than providing more of it themselves. 

No, the ones who gobble up the speaking slots and then stand and accept the applause for their “leadership” should also be providing a larger share of the inspiration, encouraging the rest of us to do more, care more, and take more risks while promising to watch our collective back.  It should not be left to a group of diverse and determined teens to inspire leaders to do more to mitigate climate and other global threats, to take more tangible responsibility for the health and well-being of this next generation as they would take for those of that generation in their own households.

Nor is it unreasonable for me to wonder if after all these years of monitoring and organizing, of creating spaces of hospitality and access for people who could otherwise not afford to have their voices heard in UN policy spaces, if we haven’t also, at times inadvertently, enabled the perpetuation of some of what we say needs to be fixed. Enabled by showing up every day and tacitly (and at times explicitly) equating what the UN does with what the world now needs; emabled by sharing critiques that are little more than feathery blows against a system which has amply fortified itself against much stronger winds; enabled by failing at times to communicate the best of what we see at the UN in anticipation of its potential recurrence, or to hold up the worst of what we see in the hope that repairs can commence at the earliest possible moment.

I don’t want to be that sort of enabler any longer.  To the extent that I and my colleagues have been so, we should have had the sense to divert from that path long ago.  Of course, enabling itself can be (and often is) an act of love, one which commits to attentiveness beyond our comforts, which seeks to magnify the voices, capacities and skills of others, to help more and more people find places in the world where they can not only speak but be heard, and where possible, even be heeded.  This is the sort of enabling we wish to do, what we have long sought (and sometimes failed) to do, the sort of enabling which helps create and inspire more in the world of what we seek beyond the limits of our own mandates, energies and capacities for care.

The possible demise of twitter has sent many users, including within our own community of some 6800 followers, into a state of alarm. Some have already found an alternative platform in an effort to preserve a modicum of community engagement which an otherwise-flawed resource has for some time allowed them.  If twitter dissolves, a large portion of our own monitoring work will likely dissolve with it.  But we will continue to write, continue to engage our lists, continue to create spaces for hospitality and presence in and around multilateral settings, continue to enable others to take up their hopeful tasks in the world as our frustratingly constrained capacity for loving this planet and its diverse inhabitants permits. 

Reports this morning suggest that COP 27 might actually have endorsed creation of a fund for “loss and damage” directed towards the states and peoples suffering disproportionate impacts from climate threats. We greatly honor those who have advocated for this breakthrough while we wait to see if this fund can be sufficiently capitalized to address the fossil fuel-influenced loss and damage which continues to slowly, inexorably engulf our world and which too many of our policy compromises — including at COP 27 –seem as likely to inflame as to abate. Given this and going forward, twitter or no twitter, we all must do more and better to enable life-preserving outcomes.

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