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Kicking the Can: A Plea for More Tangible Urgency, Dr. Robert Zuber

27 Jul

From this instant on, vow to stop disappointing yourself. ― Epictetus

Only put off until tomorrow what you are willing to die having left undone. Pablo Picasso

A year from now you may wish you had started today. Karen Lamb

Some of us keep missing the breakthrough because we don’t want to cross the bridges of growth that look like weakness, solitude, loneliness, and delay. Andrena Sawyer

If you choose not to deal with an issue, then you give up your right of control over the issue
and it will select the path of least resistance.  Susan Del Gatto

That glorious vision of doing good is so often the sanguine mirage of so many good minds. Charles Dickens

We tremble with the violence of the conflict within us — of the definite with the indefinite — of the substance with the shadow. Edgar Allan Poe

You may think twice about beginning to build your ark once it has already started raining. Max Brooks

The comfort zone is a region where great dreams go to get murdered, buried and forgotten.  Michael Bassey Johnson

The truth which has been spoken too late is more damaging than a lie. Amit Kalantri

The High-Level Political Forum has concluded for yet another year.  Under the leadership of Ambassador Bob Rae of Canada, Ministers, other diplomats and NGOs convened at UN Headquarters to assess both global and national efforts to fulfill a multitude of promises made in 2015 on sustainable development and good governance, including getting the 2030 Development Agenda back on some reasonable facsimile of a right track.

The HLPF consists of plenary sessions, side events (often the most interesting aspects) and what are known as Voluntary National Reviews where governments present efforts and outcomes on sustainable development priorities and receive input on how they can expand/improve such efforts.  One major culmination of all these efforts is the adoption of a Ministerial Declaration which will be presented in the General Assembly in September at the opening of its 80th session in the hope of achieving some sort of consensus adoption by those a bit higher up the political food chain than most of those who attended the HLPF.

The Declaration (https://docs.un.org/en/E/HLPF/2025/L.1) is a difficult read in at least two senses.  The 21-page, single-spaced document is a litany of issues which the global community acknowledges require urgent attention, especially in the five key focus areas of this HLPF – ensuring health lives, promoting gender equality, decent work for all, sustainable use of oceans and marine resources, and revitalizing global partnerships with a special focus on finance for development.  Moreover, side events attempted to incarnate some of the urgency suggested by these priorities, through topics such as access to housing and workforce empowerment, localizing social development and how AI is reshaping government operations.

he HLPF represented some of what is best about the UN, even amidst its current financial limitations, as issue after issue which weighs heavily on both our global agenda and on future prospects for younger staff and interns are given significant attention. There is perhaps no place on earth where so many global problems –problems which cannot be managed by any one country alone – are put on the table for consideration by diplomats and other stakeholders.  In this “see no evil” moment in our collective history, the willingness to acknowledge and specify the gravity of these times is most welcome.

But acknowledgment has its own caveats which our younger colleagues are often quick to point out. Negotiators at the UN are rarely key decisionmakers in their own governments, nor are they responsible for implementing the resolutions they pass – the “promises” which they make but have by professional design little or no role in honoring. 

Moreover, there is a growing disconnect between the loftiness of our aspirations and the current malaise (at best) of our human condition, our propensity to tell only the truth which suits our purposes, to accept cruelty and abusive governance as signposts of a corrupted reality we have not done enough to challenge, to cheer on technological advances without asking ourselves if human beings now seemingly resigned to a “race to the bottom” can do any better than exploiting such technology for private gain. If we collectively fail the test of a fairer and more compassionate humanity, and even the recent “Mandela Day” events suggested that we might well be on our way to doing so, is there any chance that we can rescue technological advance from being a shiny new toy to increase our already draconian levels of inequality?  Some young people are dubious.  I am compelled to join that sentiment.

But there is a second, related theme in the Declaration which comes up over the over at the UN and certainly at this HLPF – the virtual obsession by the UN and its member states with large conference events on topics from climate change and finance for development to ocean health and the status of the Least Developed States.  You often hear at the UN statements such as “the upcoming conference on (name a topic) provides an important opportunity” to push forward on commitments which, in the main, were made at previous major conferences and which largely remain as un-ripened fruit on the vine.

Why do we need conference after conference, pact after pact, outcome document after outcome document as though the major, often carbon-sucking events from which all this emanates will ever justify the expense of energy and money they require?  And why do we need so many of these events when the UN exists on a daily basis to promote those sorts of collaborations?  And dare we ask: Has the Paris agreement actually resulted in lowered global emissions?  Do we really need more climate-focused COPs (now on number 30) hosted by governments often hostile to significant aspects of climate activism, whose policies in more than a few instances promote deforestation and fossil fuel use which has gotten us into this mess from which we are now struggling to extricate ourselves?

Why is it considered to be some incarnation of multilateral heresy – mild or severe — to raise these conerns?

And while we’re at it, what of the failures of the Security Council on peace and security and its blatantly obvious impacts on our ability to meet our sustainable development obligations?  Peace and security were not a major focus on this HLPF but in the Council chamber where we spend much time implications for sustainable development were disturbingly and stubbornly clear. How do conflicts in Gaza and Ukraine impact our sustainability scorecard?  What about Sudan and Myanmar which have largely fallen off the diplomatic radar?  What of the tensions in South Sudan, Libya and elsewhere which threaten to unravel some very hard-won political and protection gains?  And why did the HLPF and the Council, as in years past, choose to keep each other at arm’s length?

The point here is really not to bash the UN so much as to call attention to some of its structural and procedural flaws as it enters a period of profound budgetary uncertainties in a world which stands in desperate need of sanity and healing.  Why do we continue to hold large international meetings with little regard for whether the outcomes actually justify the event? Why does the president of ECOSOC leave office upon the conclusion of the HLPF rather than continuing to use the office to push harder for outcomes and consequences that truly matter?  Why, given all that we know about the state of the world and its current trajectories, do we continue to kick the proverbial can down the road, pointing longingly towards the next major event which is as unlikely to break policy impasses as were previous ones?  Why do we act as though what we have been doing is good enough when the indicators of sustainability continue to point, often decisively, in the wrong direction?

For the sake of us all, especially for the young and those yet to come, this serial policy procrastination must end.  We need more truth-telling, more honest discernment, a greater capacity for compassion for those who have been waiting far too long for relief, a resolve to stop confounding constituents and, if we are able, to stop disappointing ourselves as well.

We are called now, more perhaps than in the past, to cross bridges of growth which have long beckoned, bridges for ourselves which can enable more tangible outcomes for our institutions and constituencies. The HLPF and its Declaration are heavy on sound analysis of our dire straits but short on breakthroughs.  We need breakthroughs and we need them soon.


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Staying Engaged, Dr. Robert Zuber

29 Jun

Dear All, I wrote this short piece for another list, but thought it might be useful to some to post it here as well.

This will be a short message to all of you.  I’ve been asked on several recent occasions why I am not posting as many weekend messages as in the past.  It is a good question which requires me to “fess up” to what has been going on with me and with Global Action amidst the searing heat and personal health issues which have defined the summer so far. 

I want to remind all of you that I have never written for mass consumption, in large measure because in my case there is no “mass” to consume.  What there are is friends and colleagues, diplomats and even occasional adversaries, people who once thought we were crazy and have come around to see the benefit of what we do, people who once sided with us and now think we’re crazy.  Or worse. 

 I am grateful for all of you, more than you know. The fact is I have always written to people I know, at least in some measure, sharing challenge and hope and, if desired, a pathway to policy communities at times impactful and at times delusional.   We have written and contributed to a number of books over the years but the impact has mostly been modest as they weren’t really directed anywhere — perhaps towards some “community” of practice in disarmament or peacekeeping or human rights, but those communities are fractured at best and are sometimes resistant to the sympathetic critique which lies at the heart of our work.  

We all need critique, and I have surely benefited from yours.  We continue to bite off a lot especially inside the UN, reminiscent of the pelican whose “mouth can hold more than its Belly-can.”  And with all that is going on in the world now, there is a need to bite off even larger portions and chew them harder. This summer has been a test of endurance, dodging dramatic storms record heat and the impatience it breeds to get in front of policy actors and remind them of the consequences of the paths they have chosen and seemingly refuse to adjust.  There is a stubbornness about our sector,   a refusal to rethink the value of unimplemented resolutions, performative rhetoric and values which adorn the ice cream cone but don’t materially affect the ice cream. There is, as I reminded a group of NGOs a few days ago, a danger in sacrificing our dignity for the sake of access and acceptance in increasingly restricted UN spaces, a danger in forgetting that when our dignity suffers so does that of the constituents we are connected to, constituents who are often and already poorly placed on the lower end of the dignity scale.  

My wonderful summer intern, Tazia Mohammad, has quickly grasped the “tangibility gap” which characterizes much of what we witness and try in our own small way to amend.  As a gift to me and to others, her reaction to this “gap” has been less cynicism and more about trying to discern how Security Council members and other people with considerable authority in the world could invest that authority so timidly, as though there were no institutional values to uphold and as though previous practical investments — on climate, on weapons, on women, on conflict prevention, on the health of ocean and forests — had gotten us over even one future-challenging hump.   The numerous younger people who have passed through our program have felt the weight of a future which seems murky at best and frightening at worst.  Many have retreated into a world that politics can’t easily reach, including various cyber spaces where the world might actually seem more manageable.  Others want to know clearly and concretely what they and their future are up against.  Tazia is one of those. 

There were others like her this past week in a large auditorium at the New School where I joined Professor Peter Hoffman and two senior officials with the UN Department of Political and Peacebuilding Affairs to talk about the future of peacekeeping and related matters.  I always enjoy helping to explain to younger audiences the extraordinary complexity which accompanies the mandates, planning, discharge and eventual drawdown of such missions.  As with many things in life, relevant complexities are often hidden from view rendering the criticisms which inevitably follow lacking in both sympathy and context.  Indeed, one of my concerns about modern society is that we don’t know much about how things work — including how the things we rely on for our comfort, safety and general well-being actually come to pass..  We don’t know what it takes to get vegetables into our kitchens or water into our sinks.  We certainly don’t know what it takes to protect civilians in a conflict zone let alone protect an entire country from hostile attack.  I could fill pages with those things which are essential to our well-being which we merely take for granted, to which we are entitled but not cognizant.  In a complex and at times frightening world, the logistics of things need to remain fully in our sphere of appreciation and support. 

Beyond complexities, we New School speakers all took turns describing threats to peacekeeping from terrorism and budgetary limitations to the deliberate spreading of hate speech and disinformation and the concerns of more and more UN member states that peacekeeping must do more itself to blend its mandates with national priorities.  My own contribution to this part of the program (surprise, surprise) was a bit different, seeing the main threat in the form of a UN (and especially a Security Council) which refuses to uphold its own values, its own Charter, its own reason for being.  More and more, the Charter and international law violations of states are serving as cover for violations and abuses by other states.  If there is only impunity for breaking the most fundamental of organizational principles, then more states will cross those lines.  If there is only impunity for breaking those principles, then the UN’s reputation is sure to continue taking the “hits” with implications for how peacekeepers and their mandated tasks are perceived and trusted in the field. 

While we are well down the list of concerned parties, these reputational issues affect our sector as well.  Many of us have gotten the message in recent years (from inside and outside UNHQ) that our input is neither necessary nor particularly valuable, that our presence is more annoyance than appreciated, that our role is merely tolerated rather than cultivated.  But we also don’t have “thin skin” and we have no right to thin skin as we are duty bound to make the most of our place at the table even if at times we seem to have been relegated to the kiddie table.  People worldwide need to know what is going on in that large complex at Turtle Bay.  They also need to know how they can meaningfully connect to that daunting space.  These things we know how to do, and it is important in these times that we keep doing them without whining and with whatever tools and resources are at our disposal.  

While we continue, we offer to all of you our heartfelt thanks as well as access to our platform to get your best ideas and deepest concerns in front of global policymakers.  Certainly, we don’t have the best platform around, not by a long shot.  But we have penetrated the system deeply through many thousands of hours of listening and reflection.  We know what works and what doesn’t, and we know where to go with ideas and concerns even if we can’t always go there ourselves. 

We’ll report back again at the conclusion of the High-Level Political Forum in July.  Fingers crossed for bold policies and even bolder practices to help reverse some of our current slide.

Blessings, 

Bob

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Masculine Mark-Up: A Father’s Day Reflection, Dr. Robert Zuber

15 Jun

I could settle for being a man, or I could struggle to become a human being. Robert Jensen

If they could just get over themselves, then everything might be a whole lot simpler. Izumi Suzuki

It is arrogance in us to call frankness, fairness, and chivalry ‘masculine’ when we see them in a woman; it is arrogance in them to describe a man’s sensitiveness or tact or tenderness as ‘feminine.’  C.S. Lewis

We do not need to redefine masculinity. We need to reclaim it. We need to affirm the masculinity, the rough and tumble, the competition, and the discipline needed to teach boys right from wrong. We need to be able to give them safe avenues to express themselves, and to model for them what it means to accept and love people. We need to teach them things like honor, perseverance, integrity, adventure, justice, tenderness, determination, hope, love, peace, and freedom are all masculine virtues, and they are a part of what it means to be a man.  Josh Hatcher

The stronger a man is, the more gentle he can afford to be. Elbert Hubbard

This Father’s Day is replete with images which call into question whether we are up to the “struggle to become a human being.” 

While trying to be decent parents, decent mentors, decent neighbors, decent citizens we are now bombarded with images that seem to render anything we do, anything we try to teach, to the proverbial dustbin of history. Tough guys with masks and badges threatening civilians with death or tossing older veterans to the ground as though our essential freedoms did not in some measure depend on their prior sacrifices?  Politicians male and otherwise bending the knee to lawless colleagues or to foreign governments for funding their own grip on power?  Active- duty military being deployed on often angry and frustrated civilian turf asked to practice restraint that they were not trained to perform.  Weak men masquerading as strong men by getting loyalists to do the bidding they could never “bid” on their own.

 Where is the honor, you might ask?  The perseverance?  The tenderness?  The hope?  On and on, virtues which good parents, good fathers, attempt to instill in children find less and less expression in our governance structures and public institutions.  We have been lied to so often now, and lied to ourselves a fair amount as well, that the ties that bind a country, ties of trust and tolerance, barely extend beyond our own dining rooms, if at all.

What are parents, what are fathers to do?  How do we cultivate a virtuous life in our children, in our boys, when there is so little external to those relationships which reinforce those virtues?  When our erstwhile leadership is willing to say anything, do anything, to enhance their own riches and power, how do we convince children that a life of virtue remains worthy of their best efforts or even a reasonable facsimile of such?

I don’t have any answer to this question that doesn’t lapse into cliches and/or political fantasies.

Some fathers I know have merely moved the goal posts, hoping to raise decent children but not necessarily honorable ones.  Others have tried to maintain family values and spaces as a bulwark against what are increasingly predatory and violent influences, real and imagined.  Still others have chosen to focus less on the world and more on themselves and the path we all need to walk if “becoming a human being” in the best sense, a parent in the best sense, a father in the best sense, is to be realized.

Many other, of course,  have chosen to filter out as many of the implications as possible from these ideological and testosterone driven times, trying to convince themselves that it will be possible for their children to graduate from a good school and land a well-paying job amidst a world compromised by the unfathomable stupidity of officials who refuse to “get over themselves” and the wars, climate impacts and other unleashed demons such officials fail to address, in some instances, even to acknowledge.  For those willing enough to make it, this choice, sad to say, is more of a risk than it seems, a choice driven by a stubborn love than by a rational assessment of circumstance, a cross-your-fingers moment that answers only some of the responsibilities of parents to lives poised at the starting gate, lives ready to run what might well turn out to be a rigged race full of metaphorical landmines and other impediments out of immediate view.

And, especially for fathers seeking to mentor the boys in their lives, there is another potential confusion.  In searching out quotations for this piece (which is my habit), what I found is that a majority of the quotations I found under the “masculine” rubric were actually much about women, much about the “feminine” characteristics that men should cultivate and should want to cultivate.  Needless to say, I support claims of “arrogance” by C.S. Lewis in casting judgment on erstwhile masculine and feminine characteristics embraced by the “other sex,” or even other manifestations of gender.  But this is another complicating factor for parents, for fathers, trying to exercise soft influence over lives trying to adjust over and over to turmoil both internal and external.

Given all this, allow me to honor fathers who directly engage the current caldrons of affect and policy, who try their best to enable conditions for hope which is more than performative, who understand that their ability to ease the path for their children in this dangerous, difficult world means their own involvement  in that dangerous, difficult world without making more of the same. It means thinking through all that it means to be strong in ways that allow us also to be gentle, to be kind, to be hopeful, to be engaged, to listen and show compassion, to apologize and make amends.

To all the fathers out there who embrace all or some of these tasks, you have my great admiration.  Regardless of the hostile noises you might hear from others, it is not so easy now to be what you strive to be.  In my own small and inadequate way, I and others pledge to “have your back.”

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A Fraying Republic and its Broken Bonds, Dr. Robert Zuber

11 May

Quotations Courtesy of Robert Bellah

This society is a cruel and bitter one, very far, in fact, from its own higher aspirations.

The only remaining category for the analysis and evaluation of human motives is interest, which has replaced both virtue and conscience in our moral vocabulary.

Chosen-ness that slips away from the controlling obligations of the covenant is a signpost to hell. 

The energy of creation and the energy of aggression are often only a hair’s breadth apart.

If we allow the external covenant to be subverted utterly, then our task is infinitely greater: not to renew a republic but to throw off a despotism.

There are enormous concentrations of economic, political and technological power that will react harshly to any challenge.

We have plunged into the thickets of this world so vigorously that we have lost the vision of the good.

No one has changed a great nation without appealing to its soul, without stimulating a national idealism.

We are not innocent, we are not the saviors of mankind, and it is well for us to grow up enough to know that.

It has been one of the hallmarks of the current US administration that it is constantly referencing a history about which it (and especially its leader) seems to know shockingly little.  Over and over, we hear that so and so is the worst president “in history;”  that no one has been persecuted like the current office holder “in the country’s history;” that no one has done more for “the blacks than I have in history.”  There are so many more examples of the current president, his loyalists and even at times his dissenters making slanted or even outrageous claims about a “history” which they have done virtually nothing to investigate and which they are using primarily as a tool to whip up political support, much like a preacher who enthusiastically misquotes the bible in order to send his/her parishioners into a frenzy right before the collection plates come out.

I am no historian but have studied enough of our history to know how complex that history has been, a strange brew of idealism and brutality, devotion and indifference, caring for neighbor and foreclosing on neighbors, piety and hypocrisy, opening our doors to others and then punishing them when they arrive, affirming the dignity of all humans while consigning some to be treated like cattle or violently displacing others from their ancestral homes.  

These contradictions are part and parcel of all nations to some degree, but not all nations have had to traverse the wide gap we have had to navigate between our myths and our practices. As I have been reminded while revisiting texts from my graduate school past, including Richard Hofstadter’s “Social Darwinism in American Thought” and the text from which today’s quotations have been mined, Robert Bellah’s “The Broken Covenant,” from the beginning of our national experiment, we have over-assessed our national uniqueness, our erstwhile special relationship to divinity, the abundance of our piety and virtue.  Indeed, and certainly in recent times, we have turned “virtue-signaling” into an art form, and not at all to our credit. At the same time, we have sought to cover or ignore our bursts of utter brutality, our preoccupations with money and the power it can coerce, our sometimes harshly restrictive notions of “neighbor” than our alleged covenantal relationship with any deity would ever endorse, our willing acceptance of a faith which stresses personal conversion to the virtual exclusion of social obligation. 

Indeed, as Bellah points out, those who formed our nation began to erode the covenant almost as soon as it took effect, setting ourselves on a path at times divine and at other times ruthless in  pursuit of national conquest and fortune.  As a country we have consistently talked a good game – indeed at times inspiring other nations to rethink their own oppressive preoccupations – but have surely not always played one.  In practical terms we have sewn together self-interest and idealism in a way which consigns the latter too often to rhetoric while providing a kind of plenary indulgence to the former, a license to accumulate and then lord worldly “success” over others within and outside our own nation with little restraining force or friction.

Bellah noted with sadness our long, national pathway to what was for him a present moment where  “once born” people have taken advantage of a covenant that they themselves no longer abide by or otherwise take seriously, people who have decided that owning neighbors’ properties is preferable to having neighborly obligations and that religion to the extent it is practiced at all is confined to personal rather than social consequence, all about the maximizing of self-interest rather than the practical, virtuous intensification of a wider ministry to others.  

Bellah wrote this book in the 70st and we must confess that much of what he identified, both past and in his present, now stalks our own present a half century later.  We have steamrolled much of our national complexity and allowed partisan rooting interests to replace thoughtfulness about ourselves and our place in the world.  We are all-too-willing to parrot unverified assumptions and positions if they suit our increasingly narrow frameworks.  Even 50 years ago, it was clear that “we are not innocent, we are not the saviors of mankind,”  and even more clear that we stubbornly refuse to own up to that reality. Other peoples and other countries, even those who rightly admire us in a variety of ways, figured that out some time ago.

Fifty years on from Bellah’s contributions, we face another “time of trial,” another period of straying further and further still from a covenant the non-fulfillment of which has become less our collective measure of success and more akin to a “signpost to hell.”  We have allowed the external covenant, the means for keeping our nation on some semblance of course, to crumble thus risking what Bellah posited as “an infinitely greater task,” not to renew a republic so much as to “throw off a despotism.” 

That degree of difficulty is defining our current moment.  However, this moment is not entirely an aberration but a continuation of a pervasive national trend.  We are living now through the implications of a long brokenness, a long period of lying to ourselves about our values and our virtue, a long habit of affirming an exceptionalism that, despite our considerable national achievements, many around the world no longer see as fundamentally exceptional. At official level and beyond, we have embraced what has become a recognizably cruel form of social Darwinism – the notion that “godliness is in league with riches” and that those who can play in that league deserve a free pass to improve their positions at the expense of those less exceptionally endowed.  To those who have much, even more will be given.  To those who have not?  That’s their problem. 

What is true of this current iteration of our broken covenant is not only its utter contempt for those who suffer but its phobia towards any effort to diversify and/or balance society and unlock the potential of all who reside within its confines.  On this Mothers’ Day, while this posting is not exactly a Kay Jewelers moment, it seems relevant to point out the desire of current officialdom to roll back much of what women have gained in large measure through their own talents and efforts.  From restricting voting rights, childcare options and reproductive and other health access to the thuggery of deportations violently separating mothers and children, and the obsessive scrubbing of women’s contributions and leadership from government websites, the options and images of an entitled, smug patriarchy have sought to relegate many women, many mothers, to places they never thought they would visit again in their lifetimes. Happy Mother’s Day indeed.

For Bellah, for many others, this is just one consequence of a covenant which is now little more than a “broken shell,” taking down with it the care and solidarity for one another which was once recognized as our covenantal obligation, but which has long  been buried under an avalanche of greed, projection, indifference and exclusion.  As brokenness gives way to more despotic influences we will need to summon larger quantities of energy, courage and mindfulness to restore bonds of liberty and solidarity that we surely should have done more to protect in the first place.

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The Legacy of Pope Francis for Africa and Interfaith Dialogue, by Professor Hussein Solomon (University of the Free State)

23 Apr

Editor’s Note: Like many of you I have my own reflections on the death of Pope Francis, much of which is in the form of a concern that the next Pontiff will favor doctrinal conformity over compassion and justice for the growing number of victims of war, poverty and oppression. But more on that later. Here, our colleague Hussein Solomon reflects on his own interfaith path and specifically honors this important piece of Pope Francis’ legacy.

The passing of Pope Francis on 21 April 2025 placed me in a deeply reflective mood. I recalled my early interactions with the Catholic Church. As a non-white, growing in South Africa in the 1970s, my parents did not wish me to have an apartheid education but at the same time could not afford to send me to a private school. The next best option was St. Anthony’s Catholic School in Durban. Here I found myself, a Muslim boy, amongst Catholics, non-Catholic Christians and Hindus. The nuns and priests were always respectful of other faiths and those of us who were not Catholic were allowed to skip mass if we chose – I never did – as well as go to Friday prayers. I loved the religious classes taught by nuns where the first principle stressed to us was respect for all faiths. At the age of 8, I was exposed to interfaith dialogue and it became an intrinsic part of my life.

During the anti-apartheid struggle, different faith groups, bandied together in the United Democratic Front to demonstrate against the divide and rule policies of the National Party. Following school, when I opted to go to university, it was Catholic Archbishop Denis Hurley who paid for my tuition fees. Later, in life, when involved in conflict resolution in various African countries, it was Catholic friends who provided me deep insights into the various ethnic and religious dimensions of a conflict. Later still, when working with Global Action to Prevent War in mobilizing support for a United Nations Emergency Peace Service (UNEPS) it was my Catholic and Jewish friends who joined me in this collective effort to help save humanity from the scourge of war.

Pope Francis’ papacy reflected the values of interfaith dialogue, respect and striving to create a more peaceful world which was so ingrained into my being by the likes of Sister Meryl as a young boy. When Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio was elected pope on the 13th March 2013, he opted to be named after St Francis of Assisi. At the time, many did not realize how significant this was. It was St Francis of Assisi who in 1219 travelled to Egypt with Crusaders besieging Damietta and walked unarmed into the Muslim camp Here he met with Sultan Al Kamil, the Governor of Egypt and nephew of Saladin. The sultan was so impressed with the sincerity of this friar that he gave him permission to visit all the sacred places in the Holy Land. This was the first attempt to bridge the deepening Muslim-Christian divide.

In both his personal and professional life, Pope Francis was a bridge-builder between faiths. He was known for the strong friendships he forged with the likes of Rabbi Abraham Skorka in Argentina as well as the Grand Imam of Al Azhar, Al-Tayeb. He was the first pope to visit the Arabian Peninsula. He also met with Iraqi top Shia cleric – Grand Ayatollah Sistani in Najaf in 2021. Much of the Pope’s thinking on interfaith dialogue was set out in the Declaration on Human Fraternity for World Peace and Living Together which was endorsed by the Grand Imam of Al Azhar. Here these two leaders rejected extremist violence and called on all to cherish the values of tolerance and fraternity. Following this, the Pope wrote an encyclical, Fratelli tutti which focused on the theme of fraternity. Fittingly, it was dedicated to Sheikh Al-Tayeb. The Pope also travelled to the most populous Muslim nation in the world – Indonesia – where he met Grand Imam Nasrauddin Umar at the Istiqlal Mosque. This is the world’s largest mosque. Here, these two religious leaders signed the Joint Declaration of Istiqlal on Fostering Religious Harmony for the Sake of Humanity.

The Pope’s approach is sorely needed in the African context with Muslim-Christian sectarian strife reinforcing ethnic violence and other fissures in society. The African context occupied the pope’s mind early in his papacy. In 2015, he travelled to Bangui, the capital of the Central African Republic undergoing the throes of war. The conflict saw Muslim Seleka and Christian anti-balaka militias engaged in an orgy of violence. He decided to visit a mosque and a church in Bangui and drove with the highest-ranking Muslim and Christian clerics in the country in his Popemobile through the streets of Bangui stressing interfaith dialogue and why peace was a human imperative. I know of no other world leader who could or would have done this.

The Pope was well aware that his high-level engagement with other religious leaders would not on it own ensure communal harmony and for this reason, he insisted that these initiatives should also take place at the grassroots level inside communities to complement and reinforce what was happening at the higher level. Pope Francis also realised that sectarian strife was also fuelled by poverty and relative deprivation. In circumstances of scarcity, grievances take root and conflict becomes inevitable. For this reason, the papacy also focused on poverty alleviation, economic development and the creation of inclusive societies.

It is hoped that whoever succeeds Pope Francis continues with his sterling legacy of interfaith dialogue globally but especially in Africa where Catholicism and Islam are the two fastest growing faiths.

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The Fallacies of Friction: A Holy Week Reflection, Dr. Robert Zuber

13 Apr

Where there is power, there is resistance. Michel Foucault

The friction between ‘what is’ and ‘what could be’ burns you, stirs you up, propels you. Marcus Buckingham

Occasionally when people in the grip of obsessive resentment were pouring out their ire and grievances, something in them, some small trace of self-awareness, heard themselves as others might, and was surprised to find they didn’t sound quite as blameless, or even as rational, as they’d imagined themselves to be. Robert Galbraith

Every grievance you hold hides a little more of the light of the world from your eyes until the darkness becomes overwhelming. Donna Goddard

Poetry is about the grief. Politics is about the grievance. Robert Frost

When we make grievance our traveling companion, it blocks out light, it distorts our perspective, it consumes our hearts until there is nothing left. Merida Johns

Our culture is not this thing to be seen from a distance. We need to be embracing the friction of it all – that is where the energy is. — Doug Aitken

Change means movement. Movement means friction. Saul Alinsky

I have been quiet in this space but not quiet. In other formats I have been doing my small part at national level to counter the grievance which has become a form of embedded cruelty and at international level commenting on the peculiar brand of diplomatic indifference which refuses even to uphold the core principles which gave rise to the institutions which we have entrusted with peace and security in the first instance.

In these strange times, in some ways a throwback to manifestations of the human condition we foolishly thought we had consigned to history, I and many others have taken up the task of creating friction for those who believe they are above the impacts of their own bad work, those who believe that their lofty positions and distorted policies exempt them (or should) from resistance to the point where such is deemed an evil impediment to the fulfillment of their desires – a grievance and even vengeance-driven remaking of political culture in their own image.

As some of you know, I have long worried that my own country has become essentially ungovernable, full of people fleeing to the safety of bubbles where we can nurture our self-serving ideas and petty grievances without friction, without interference. We have become a nation of trolls with little taste for subtlety or even self-reflection. We “root” for people and ideas rather than examine their legitimacy and intent. Our collective arrogance blots out almost all of the inclinations we might otherwise have to humility, reflection or self-awareness, let alone to service.

What I just alluded to has been true of my country for some time. The current crisis is a symptom of a larger and more systemic problem which cuts across political and even religious affiliations. Our hearts are largely consumed by violence and greed, much more than is helpful for a society which seems to have misplaced its creeds, a society which is increasingly turning its backs on veterans, on the elderly and disabled, or on those seeking refuge from governments deemed even more cruel than our own. We have “drunk the kool aid” even when we aren’t thirsty and by so doing contributed to a society which seems comfortable with mass firings of government employees, mass dismantling of our health systems and mass deportations of non-criminal legal residents. A society where its leaders huddle to embrace a God of violence, riches and vengeance as though there had not been a subsequent message focused on forgiveness, humility and reconciliation attributed to Jesus of Nazareth. A society where what is true is reduced to what someone can convince us is true.

This society has needed and now needs even more the friction which communicates categorically “this is not OK.” This is not good enough. We will not return to a time long past when enfranchisement was for the few not the many, when a cruel but not so unusual hierarchy kept too many people in the places that they were “assigned” ostensibly by a God who ordained our lofty patterns of discrimination.

You’ve heard all this from me before, this indication that what we are now living through is a culmination of sorts, a culmination of increasingly inadequate leadership and a distracted, self-interested populace which has lost sight of all that must happen in this world – the good, the bad and the sometimes ugly – in order for us to enjoy the blessings that we too often forget we have.

In this current climate, I and others continue to resist, continue to provide a bit of friction to a government and a system that has convinced itself that its cruel judgments have some sort of divine sanction. But in this season of Ramadan (now concluded) of Passover and of the Christian Holy Week, we cannot allow ourselves the luxury of resisting a false religious narrative with one of our own making.

Indeed, we must remind ourselves that resistance is not righteousness, that to overquote Reinhold Niebuhr, “the evils against which we contend are the fruits of illusions similar to our own.” Resistance is an obligation for many as it is for me, but it is not a “counter-crusade.” It is not about swapping out one perverse view of God’s favor for another.

In this Holy season, we must also remind ourselves of the costs associated with being that source of friction which not all of us provide but which all of us need. This is the friction which helps us to be better versions of ourselves, refusing to divert our gaze from cruelty and poverty to which none should be subjected, refusing to allow the chores of the present to divert our attention from the needs and aspirations of those who follow.

But the friction which people like me attempt to apply in our now-adrift society cuts in many directions. We who attempt this work, including the work of inspiring resistance in others, are not immune from the responsibilities and impacts of that resistance – to challenge what we see while trying to be better than what we see. But also to acknowledge that friction wears us down too. Friction takes a toll on us too.

And this toll is in part a function of the culture of resistance itself – seeing the glass as forever half-empty, slipping into patterns of language that ascribe things to people – including evil –that apply in full measure to only a handful of humans, failing to appreciate the spring flowers, or poetry and music, or a thrilling sports match, so that we can get in one more “cut” of friction, one more pithy response to a systemic “monster” which remains much more formidable than people like me will ever be.

Indeed the consequences of resistance, of creating friction day after day, can produce their own grievances which serve neither our own work in the world nor the interests of those to whom we seek to connect.  More than anything else, we must never lose touch with the people whose lives have been upended through policies which are anything but “people-centered.” Indeed, such loss of touch helps explain the predicament we now find ourselves in.

I’m a bit beaten up now but will spend this Holy Week recalibrating my own resistance and the effects it is having (or not having) on matters internal and external to myself, including on those whose response to the gravity of these times remains to be inspired.  For those of you already in the friction business, even part time, we need to ensure that our voices and actions have all the impact that is possible.  It’s going to be a slog for now as what “is” continues to lag well behind what could be.  Let’s commit to locating the formula that can bring more hope to the world and ensure timely and healthy responses from ourselves.

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The Madness of Merit, Dr. Robert Zuber   

23 Feb

Heaven goes by favor. If it went by merit, you would stay out and your dog would go in. Mark Twain

The merit of originality is not novelty; it is sincerity. Thomas Carlyle

Reputation is an idle and most false imposition; oft got without merit and lost without deserving. William Shakespeare

It seems to never occur to fools that merit and good fortune are closely united. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

To delight in war is a merit in the soldier, a dangerous quality in the captain, and a positive crime in the statesman. George Santayana

The sufficiency of merit is to know that my merit is not sufficient. Francis Quarles

Not too long ago, I get an interesting email from a longstanding African colleague complaining about the decline in performance in both public and private sectors in his country.  His concern was with a growing number of people who want a job, but don’t particularly want to do a job.  The frustration at this state of affairs  is understandable but, like most of our frustrations, this one also has a context.

In my country at the moment, one of our challenges is actually related to people wanting to do a job, trained to do a job, but who are prohibited by their own government from doing a job. One of the many unilateral Trump policies and related orders that I have deep problems with is the notion of “merit” thrown around mostly in the context of dismantling Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) programs. Such programs have been under attack in favor of a definition of “merit” which is ascribed mostly to white people – indeed white men – based on the “insufficient” and largely misguided assumption that the problems we face as a country are due to a bending the rules for “not-white men” who then transfer their erstwhile “incompetence” into the public domain.

There is so much wrong with this notion, one for which there is no viable metric and which seeks to pin the blame for our numerous social ills on some alleged retreat from those who can meet the standard (select white men) and those who must be accommodated to standard (pretty much everyone else). 

When I spell this out in black and white (which I have had trouble doing of late) the absurdity of it becomes unmistakable. For one thing, it presumes that “merit” can be divorced from privilege and the role of “good fortune” in preserving and even expanding access to opportunity only for some and not for others.  Moreover, it assumes that (in the case of the US) agencies responsible for training air traffic controllers or marines or surgeons or agricultural inspectors would make the conscious choice to deviate from their training standards to fulfill some unspecified DEI agenda, thus contributing to those quite happy to conflate admissions access and standards compliance. 

Finally, it presumes that many of us are not looking askance at the inadequate “merit” of our erstwhile political leadership, people often without backbone, without principle, and without a lively sense of how their lofty positions are themselves the result of the privilege they are hell-bent on denying to others. From my vantage point, attacks on the competency of mostly women and minority interests have actually served to expose the fallacy of white male “merit” based on  some alleged “right” to be the decisionmakers regardless of how cruel and incompetent such decisions turn out to be. We are seeing yet again the challenges associated with merit based solely on genetics and their social determinants rather than on hard evidence related to performance in the public interest.

Those of you who read these posts know where I am likely to stand on this.  I have seen over the years people of diverse backgrounds who possess far more potential than opportunity, who must too-often wait in a long line behind those who continue to claim without shame “merit” based in large measure on some combination of family riches and connections, or even on race-based entitlements.  I have long believed that we create the “merit” we need and desire for our societies to be prosperous and resilient, and that such creation fundamentally requires inclusion of access.  Entrance doors to opportunity must remain open, and that can be (and largely has been) ensured without compromising the training, standards and capacities needed for exit.

The “equal opportunity” and “upward mobility” which constitute an integral part of our national mythology is being compromised at so many levels as ethnic and ideological conformity – and the grievances which now proliferate – “trumps” time after time, the need to ensure the full development and utilization of all our skills and capacities in whatever human package life has situated them. And that of course includes the “white male package.”

But how to move in that direction in these ethno- and gender-repressive times? There is a commercial I have seen once or twice and  which I particularly appreciate, the tag line for which is “the key to riches is knowing what counts.”  Knowing what counts.  In my experience I don’t think that most people pay enough attention to this, pay enough attention to the specifics of how they define success, how they define riches, indeed how they define a life worth living for themselves and others. If they did so, maybe they would be more respectful of the “knowing” of other people, recognizing that there are many paths to living a successful life.

But even beyond this, we are not paying enough attention to the ways in which privilege bends the arc of access in the favor of ourselves and our circles, allowing us to indulge the fantasy of pursuing what counts based solely on merit utterly divorced from social and political context.  Playing the game, if you will, without understanding the degree to which whatever success we have attained has been to one degree or another “gamed” in the direction of the interests of people like me and so many others.

With regard to the prescient Mark Twain, I’m not sure any longer that I can count on some notion of “heaven” to rescue me from the pretenses of my own life, including inadequate assessments and applications related to “what counts.”  But I know that if there is such a reality, the thought that pets might deserve to enter before me and other humans is certainly a wakeup call. For me, this represents a call for greater inclusion, a call for eliminating ideology-based entitlements to practice division and cruelty, a call to make this plane of existence more like the vision of heaven which so many are seeking in another life.  

Moreover, I remain convinced that our now highly-skewed notions of merit have no value in eyes of the creator who, if our religious traditions are to be believed, sees clearly the motives and intentions we largely hide from the world, putting forth instead the face that seeks to convince others that we have sufficient merit relative to our chosen tasks in the world and that, moreover, we sincerely intend  the best for other people.  Despite the ideology-based madness which characterize this moment, we can do better at ensuring that both our public and private “faces” convey merit which faithfully attends to task and which serves a larger public interest. The rest, at least in my view, is mere distraction.

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Service Station: A Pledge Worthy of a New Year, Dr. Robert Zuber

1 Jan

I cannot do all the good that the world needs. But the world needs all the good that I can do.  Jana Stanfield

It is never too late to be what you might have been. George Eliot

In three words I can sum up everything I’ve learned about life: it goes on. Robert Frost

It is better to be hated for what you are than to be loved for what you are not. Andre Gide

I slept and dreamt that life was joy. I awoke and saw that life was service. I acted and behold, service was joy.  Tagore

I don’t know what your destiny will be, but one thing I know: the only ones among you who will be really happy are those who have sought and found how to serve. Albert Schweitzer

Service is the rent we pay for being. It is the very purpose of life, and not something you do in your spare time. Marian Wright Edelman

Understanding the true meaning of accountability makes us strong and enables us to learn. Sameh Elsayed

For more years than I am comfortable counting, we have posted our own version of the “year in review” on the front page of our website. That site has been essentially non-functioning for a year now and so we will offer this brief reflection here on what has been a difficult year for our values and infrastructure, but evermore so for the millions of people who have found no relief from armed violence and climate impacts, from displacement and discrimination affecting both the enjoyment of “guaranteed” rights and access to essential services.  On a daily basis we see images and hear testimony of torture and other horrific abuses often perpetrated by people more inclined to celebrate their violent “achievements” than to question the fundamentals of their own humanity.

As most of you know, since our founding in1999 we have been little more than a small operation.  Covid made us smaller still, though we still manage to make our modest contributions on a regular basis – to interns, to UN security policy, to scholars and advocates in many global regions looking for a UN foothold or a larger circle of concern, to people who maintain the hope that their faith can serve to bind people rather than divide them, to people with good ideas and good energy who need a push to ensure an audience for their contributions. Despite our small size and the oversized crises we attempt to influence, we are honored every day by the quality and richness of our collaborators.  In every corner of the world, advocates put their livelihoods and even their very lives on the line to help ensure a more just and sustainable future for their families, their neighbors, their societies.  We find much of what comes to our attention from these advocates inspiring beyond measure, a reminder that our “easy duty” at UN Headquarters also demands risk taking from us, risks commensurate with the front row seat we have enjoyed for a generation in UN spaces, a seat we didn’t necessarily earn but one which we can necessarily share with others.

In assessing the year now past and plotting out a strategy for the year to come, it is evident in ways which have not been this clear in some time that all of us who share this space are swimming against some powerful currents including authoritarian shifts in traditional democracies, donor fatigue among those who could normally be counted on to help address humanitarian needs, armed and at times genocidal violence bringing entire populations to the brink of complete collapse, shifts in weather patterns, ocean temperatures and related factors leading to alternate flooding and drought as our climate sends warning after warning we mostly refuse to heed. These are powerful, even life-threatening currents indeed, demanding more attention and remedial energy from us than we can easily muster. 

But muster we must. It is important that we recognize our debt to those who have been accountable to their times, their deficits, their crises, as we must be accountable to ours.  We have no illusions about our ability as an organization to move even the smallest of malevolent hills, but we can give all that we can give, share in a wealth of helpful ideas and strategies, open doors to the participation of others with more energy, wisdom and insight than we possess ourselves, and link issues and concerns in ways that challenge those in authority who seek to keep issues in some kind of abstracted isolation, those who want you to believe that all the problems of the world are someone else’s fault, those on a seemingly endless quest to find the specks in the eyes of others without dislodging the logs impeding their own. 

As the world gets harsher for so many, we and others like us have clearly not made the case that we need to make, in part because we have espoused values more vigorously than we have put them into practice, values of democracy and equity, values of respect and dignity, values of service and compassion.  We have too often forgotten that we are what we do, not what we claim to do, not what our “brand” attributes to us.  We have also forgotten that there is sanity in agency, that failures acknowledged ultimately take less of a toll on our spirits than isolation or indifference.

We have another year of service before us, another year of pushing the UN community (including ourselves) to uphold standards and fulfill promises to weary constituents, weary from a world which has too often forsaken them, has too often over-promised and under-delivered, has too often offered excuses for malfunctions  that we are insufficiently committed to fixing.  In the end, 2025 will be much as its chronological predecessors were – about us, and the quantities of compassion, service, courage and receptivity to growth and learning needed to help this too-often mean and myopic world turn a corner before the path we have been blithely traveling comes to an abrupt end.

As this new year unfolds, we give thanks for all that you contribute to keeping us on that safer, saner, healthier path.  We appreciate it more than you know.

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Crèche-ing Poverty: A Christmas Reflection, Dr. Robert Zuber

23 Dec

For outlandish creatures like us, on our way to a heart, a brain, and courage, Bethlehem is not the end of our journey but only the beginning―not home but the place through which we must pass if ever we are to reach home at last. Frederick Buechner

The hinge of history is on the door of a Bethlehem stable. Ralph W. Sockman

The Almighty appeared on earth as a helpless human baby, needing to be fed and changed and taught to talk like any other child. The more you think about it, the more staggering it gets. J.I. Packer

I will honor Christmas in my heart and try to keep it all the year. Charles Dickens

How many observe Christ’s birthday! How few, His precepts! O! ’tis easier to keep holidays than commandments. Benjamin Franklin

Christmas is built upon a beautiful and intentional paradox; that the birth of the homeless should be celebrated in every home. G.K. Chesterton

Into this world, this demented inn in which there is absolutely no room for Him at all, Christ comes uninvited. Thomas Merton

The photo above comes via an exhibit in Barcelona wherein artists attempted to adjust the iconic crèche of Christmas to modern circumstances.  It was well worth the effort. 

For indeed in our time that scene of hay and barn animals and a baby born into conditions which belie a painful truth about poverty and divinity – that scene has been sanitized and sentimentalized to such a degree that we can barely feel the winter draft, let alone the uncertainty and even peril which must surely have punctuated the scene as much as the smell of livestock and the laughter of those more fortunate beings able to party indoors near enough to a roaring fire.

The artist gets it right, in my view.  Three members of a modern-looking family huddled amidst the rubble of perhaps what was left of their home, perhaps in the ruins of one of the few structures in the area which still had something approximating a functioning roof. 

And from which places might this scene have been inspired?  In Gaza surely.  Or maybe in rural Myanmar.  Or perhaps Port-au-Prince.  Possibly areas of Yemen or Central African Republic which have yet to accept the messaging regarding pathways to peace.  Or perhaps in Darfur where people cannot currently count on any manner of shelter whatsoever from the endless betrayals, violent attacks and other miseries which daily batter their weary (and often displaced) lives?

So much ruin.  So many seeking refuge in whatever makeshift shelter they can manage to find.  So many holding out hope represented by the manger child but more immediately seeking secure-sufficient places for their own and perhaps others of the many threatened children of holy promise now among us.

Such security isn’t too much to ask, is it? Not too much to ask that we in our Christmas-obsessed traditions who purport to be redeemed by the birth of a child should commit more to the well-being of other children, the children who will never be idolized in crèche scenes but who nevertheless suffer the crushing poverty, the hunger and cold, the veritable stench of a world which has in all but rhetorically abandoned them and allowed their own God-given potential to be stifled if not altogether snuffed out.

At the UN and despite wholehearted efforts by Secretariat officials, numerous governments like Malta and Sierra Leone and diverse civil society leadership from advocates like Jo Becker and Lois Whitman, the plight of children remains precarious at best and criminally negligent at worst.  I’ll spare you the stories and the moral outrage which tends to follow in their wake, but most who bother to read this will recognize that in so many global settings at this very moment, children are being used as target practice, as economic lifelines for otherwise impoverished families, as fighters in armed struggles about which they understand little, as the unwelcome means to satisfy adult urges, and so much more that bear little or no relationship to any conceivable, positive trajectory of intellectual, physical or spiritual growth. 

That children are as resilient as they often appear to be is surely no excuse for our collective failure to honor them in every home and community, honor with even a fraction of the protection, wonder and appreciation which is due the baby in the manger, to recognize as we often do not that the “hinge of history” attributable to that child in Bethlehem is, in some more modest but discernable fashion, attributable to all. At core level, by failing to honor the “hinge” that represents the promise of all children, we have allowed the “hinge” of the manger child and his impact to corrode as well. In the theology with which I am most familiar, the incarnation event focused on a Christmas manger cannot, should not be conceived as a one off but as a flow-through, the power of the manger extended to all who enter this world in hope and promise.

I won’t go on about this much longer.  At this time, you have people to hug, presents to open and food to prepare. But just a word about the degree of difficulty of keeping Christmas in our hearts year-round, keeping it as something more potent than a sentimental attachment to a holiday, but more as a call to use our hearts, brains and courage to create safe passage for all God’s people, for all God’s children. It is that passage which is sorely lacking for millions of children, thereby exposing our season of incarnation as more sentiment than fidelity — fidelity to precepts and commandments that we mostly engage only episodically, often when crises in our lives occur that remind us of our relative frailty and dependency, characteristics that we share in common with the children we are responsible for whether we fully assume that responsibility or not.

What seems like a very long time ago, I sat regularly in a conference room at UNICEF in New York, part of a committee to assess and recommend principles for what became the Convention on the Rights of the Child, now the most frequently ratified of all UN treaty obligations. But for all that energy and all that diplomatic consensus, it is clear that, where children are concerned, we are still far from home, far from ensuring a world fit for for nurturing and enabling young lives, far from extending the reverence for the manger child to those other vessels of divinity on a planet which some of us at least continue to believe has been redeemed, even if it so often feels like something considerably less than that.

Beyond the lights and gift-giving, beyond the holiday parties and TV specials, we can live out the promise of a helpless, shivering baby and his impoverished earthly family for more than a season. The children in our midst, the inheritors of a holy baby in an unholy manger, need more consistent care and vigilance from us, a gift worthy of the crèche we now reverence.

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Pedagogy for Preparation: An Advent Reflection, Dr. Robert Zuber

1 Dec

What you are is God’s gift to you, what you become is your gift to God. Hans Urs von Balthasar

Love is not a gift. It is a diploma. Toni Morrison

The whole purpose of education is to turn mirrors into windows. Sydney J. Harris

Everyone is a moon and has a dark side which is never shown to anybody. Mark Twain

The more involved you are, the more significant your learning will be.  Stephen Covey

Only someone who is well prepared has the opportunity to improvise.  Ingmar Bergman

Whatever sorrow shakes from your heart, far better things will take their place.  Rumi

We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Re-examine all you have been told. Dismiss what insults your soul. Walt Whitman

I distrust those people who know so well what God wants them to do because I notice it always coincides with their own desires. Susan B. Anthony

Leave the door open for the unknown, the door into the dark. Rebecca Solnit

Nothing in all creation is so like God as stillness. Meister Eckhart

Education is not preparation for life; education is life itself. John Dewey

In a time of drastic change, it is the learners who inherit the future. Eric Hoffer

I am not afraid of storms for I am learning how to sail my ship. Louisa May Alcott

The least of the work of learning is done in classrooms. Thomas Merton

As some of you recognize, Advent is a special season for me, a time of preparation for what remains as one of the great mysteries, even ironies, of my faith tradition – the baby in a manger representing an incarnate hope for the world that has, needless to say, yet to be fully realized.

To put so much stock in such a vulnerable setting has always seemed a marvelous leap of faith to me. In our own time, some factions of Christianity  seem to prefer the God of wrath and vengeance to the figure who left the cold manger to forgive – and transform — the coldness of our hearts, calling us to feed multitudes, put away swords, cease petty competitions, give cloaks to the poor, and help others to feel the grace that had long been denied. 

For some self-proclaimed Christians, apparently, this post-manger Jesus is simply too naïve, too divorced from the dog-eat-dog societies which we have crafted for ourselves, too willing to extend an invitation to soften hearts and minds that we have willingly cased in metaphorical cement.  Jesus may “get us” as the US television commercial proclaims, but for some in our Christian orbit, he apparently doesn’t “get” our times, doesn’t “get” the rampant “evil” knocking at our doors which apparently obscures” the “evil” for which we are also responsible while giving us license to hate and purge the “evil” which some of us are quite convinced lies wholly beyond our remit.

This time of what I at least would consider a form of pseudo faith would not seem to easily accommodate the self-preparation and commitment to growth and learning to which the season of Advent invites us all.

Perhaps it is because I am now too old to embrace so much of our modern mind-set, but I remain almost serially disinterested in the incessant branding and self-promotion which characterizes the current moment.  I am less interested in hearing what people “know” than what they have learned about their craft, about themselves and the “dark sides” of their metaphorical moons, about their responsibility to others close and far, about the world and its multiple challenges and blessings. I am less interested in where people think they “are” and more interested in where they’ve been and where they’re heading. It is the path that appeals to me, especially the path that beckons our better selves and which provides a context for the forgiveness of our less-better ones.

After all, if Advent is to mean anything beyond consulting our budgets and making sure our cars are sufficiently gassed to endure the malls, it means preparation of a special sort, a preparation that is one part attention and two parts assessment, one part seeking comfort in tradition and two parts allowing tradition to breath and grow, to stare down the inherited recipes for life and refuse to follow them entirely straight, to keep the windows of learning, growth and change open even as we stare into a mirror reflecting all we have been and failed to be, all we have neglected and all we have cherished.

And so as this new Advent adventure unfolds, I know that I too have learned, albeit often too late, often too casually, often with transaction in mind rather than grace.  What I have learned, especially during Advent season, is reflected in some of the quotations above.  Those same quotations no doubt also mark the limits of my current learning, mark the way still to sojourn on a long and wonder-filled path towards a life that is finally and ultimately in sync with itself, becoming more of a “gift to God” that might actually be in sync with God.  

And what are some of those Advent learnings you might ask? Well as with my other posts, it might be more fruitful to visit the introductory quotations rather than dwell on my own reflection.  But a few things come to the fore. For starters, I’ve often felt that many of us need a crash course in wonder, leaving those windows open for the unknown which is not entirely unknowable, making space for the new ingredients which could spice up a recipe, or even energize a life.  So many of us struggle with letting God be God, giving ample credence to the belief that God honors our path, honors our growth, even when we backslide, even when we misrepresent grace in all its forms, even when we fail to acknowledge that our failures are not God’s failure, our spiritual ignorance is not God’s ignorance, our enemies are not God’s enemies. 

There is something seriously wrong at this time given those within my own faith tradition who proclaim to know precisely what God wants from us, what God has in mind for us, but who are so often steeped in grievance, preferring to vanquish rather than to forgive, proclaiming enemies as though such was a badge of divine favor rather than a symbol of divine distance.  I’m not sure I always know what Advent requires of me, but I’m pretty sure that making and destroying enemies is not it.

And this leads me to the next point, perhaps the final one lest I test your patience further.  For faith to be real, and for the quality of learning which faith in Advent seems to require, it must be fully and practically engaged. I know that there have been times – too many in number – when I have talked a better game than I have played, when I have doubled down on the learning I’ve acquired and shut the windows on the wonderous revelations which continue to flood our world, albeit those which we largely ignore. I don’t always recall that we have actually been given metaphorical guidance for this revelation in the form of parents and guardians who routinely, at times even seemlessly, adjust their caregiving to the stages of the children under their charge.  We know that children are continually evolving, and we know that our own adjustments to their growth are the healthy and loving responses. Truly, the life of Advent is also about change and the God who honors it, who adjusts the forms and contours of divine love as we struggle to move in directions which allow us to celebrate a created order which needs more care from us and about which we still have so much to learn.

This learning may have something to do with classrooms but has more to do with life itself.  We point here to an immersion experience, immersing in the not-yet-known to both confirm and revise what it is that we thought we knew about faith, about the world, or about ourselves. It is learning as a preparation of sorts, but a preparation which is more layered and nuanced than merely breaking out last year’s metaphorical tree ornaments, social schedules and cookie recipes. It is about preparing ourselves to be those “spiritual beings having human experiences,” to learn how best to both be active and to sit still, to be both curious and grateful, to be both attentive and reflective, to sail our own ship and help others sail as well by risking a more robust and dynamic worldly presence, by learning all that we can in those places where learning is best served, the world which we believe has experienced the gift of divine presence and which calls us to share in that presence yet again.

Of all the quotations at the front of this post, the one from Toni Morrison probably expresses best my understanding of the Advent Season. For love, indeed, is a diploma, an elusive achievement that is greater perhaps than all other achievements to be had in this world, one which tests us, humbles us, confounds us, sometimes bringing us to our knees, sometimes bringing us to our senses. Love is a hard practice. Faith is a hard practice as well.  During this season, in a time of armed violence, acrimony and division, a time when trust is scarce and forgiveness scarcer still, it seems as though Morisson’s “diploma” is further from reach than ever. But there is a path of learning and preparation for us to follow. There is a way forward to graduation for us.  

So far as I can tell, the Advent path to this graduation is to recommit to turning at least some of our mirrors into windows, to learn and prepare as though the full flowering of our spiritual and physical lives depended on it.  Advent represents our annual calling to do precisely that.

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