Jun 23, 20206 min read

Primary Day - Exercise the Preferential Option for the Poor

NYS Primary Day – Today June 23

“If we fail to give everyone a seat at the table, this may well turn out to be humanity’s LAST SUPPER.”

YOU CAN STILL VOTE IN PERSON AT YOUR USUAL POLLING PLACE

--site of the League of Women Voters where you’ll find all you need…

--Remember, based on their gender, over 50% of our population once could not vote…The times they are a changin’

--Voter suppression, which disproportionately affects the poor and minorities, is still a tool of the system to keep the system in power! Let’s vote to change it up!

Forcefully and Peacefully!

Primary Day - June 23, 2020

If you’re a registered Democrat and your views resonate more with a candidate other than Joe Biden, your vote in today’s primary can still send a message to the party, helping influence their overall platform and resulting policy decisions.

Here are two links you can use as starting points to see the positions of Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders and the others who participated in our wonderful, yet flawed democratic (lower case) process. If you don’t like my sources, please find your own. But get involved!

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/2020-democrat-candidates-771735/

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-lists/2020-democratic-candidates-issues-policy-positions-820811/bernie-sanders-socialist-826209/

OK, enough reading...let's have a music break to get us into a receptive state of mind and heart...

Bill Withers, Stevie Wonder, John Legend perform "Lean On Me" at the 2015 Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Induction Ceremony for Bill Withers

Lean On Me | Playing For Change | Song Around The World

Preferential Option for the Poor

I’ve expressed this before – I don’t lean left or right but try to fix my eyes straight ahead and model my life on one whose life I want to emulate – Jesus. This is not a religious statement – it’s a practical one, a humanitarian one. This guy’s lifestyle and message expresses a preferential option for the poor. He chose to hang out with and support those at the margins of society. Then he said to them and to us – we are to follow him, to do what he did AND MORE!

Where do I stand???

When folks ask me if I’m a Democrat or a Republican, I look at them and love them and say, “I’m a Franciscan!” I resonate with this guy Francis, who left his privileged, middle-class lifestyle, to wander the streets of Assisi, wondering, “Who are You?” and “Who am I?” But he wasn’t just a dreamer. He and his band of brothers (and sisters under Clare) cared for the unfortunate victims of the systems of their day – ministering the gospel with bread, cleansing lepers with water, mourning with those who lost loved ones, and rejoicing in his friendship with Brother Son and Sister Moon. He saw himself as intimately connected to EVERYTHING and EVERYONE.

Poor People’s Campaign: A Moral March on Washington

As you saw from earlier Facebook posts, this past weekend I participated in the Poor People’s Campaign: A Moral March on Washington – a current version of what the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King started many years ago. This campaign comes at a time when, due to the pandemic health issues and racism, those at the margins of society – those living paycheck-to-paycheck - are getting disproportionately pushed outside all of the limited safety nets the system has to offer.

We need more transformation, not more information – we need a contemplative mind

Leaders with vision are urging us to pray and then act. BOTH are needed, so we can creatively act, not merely RE-ACT.

Prophets and mystics like my spiritual father, Franciscan Richard Rohr, inform us as Paul did, we have to be transformed by a renewing of our minds. Our small, fear-driven, self-protective egoic minds need to be upgraded to minds that can see with a wider, non-dual perspective – can see beyond the small fields of left/right, good/bad, my way/your way/highway, either/or – to a new landscape where we will be shown new ways of relating to the multiple critical OPPORTUNITIES FOR CHANGE we are facing in areas like: health, race, gender identity, political representation, environment and economy.

Contemplation is a name given by some to this new mind with its deeper perceptive capabilities.

Humanity’s Last Stand???

My son John told me that Richard Rohr did a recent podcast in which he expressed with lament that we may be witnessing "ENVIRONMENTAL HOSPICE".

If we fail to give everyone a seat at the table, this may well turn out to be humanity’s LAST SUPPER.

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RESOURCES – The Teachers of all wisdom traditions offer us UNLIMITED resources

If you’d like to “Give Peace a Chance” here are some resources (FYI – Our Source’s resources are unlimited and are given freely to all who ask.)

“What does G-d ask of us? To act justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with G-d.” Micah 6:8

These simple and profound words form the theme of Richard Rohr’s 2020 Daily Meditations.

At this link, Richard reflects (4 minutes) on the importance of contemplation during a politically divisive time. This page also lists and links to the Weekly Summaries of all the topics that have been covered so far this year. Each Weekly Summary contains links to the full Meditation (Medication : ))) for each day of that week. The Summary also contains a contemplative practice designed to help us move beyond our overly defended and opinionated heads and get us into our more open and receptive heart spaces.

The Inevitable Spiral of Violence

Radical Solidarity

Environmental Awareness Rooted in Franciscan Spirituality (podcast)

Frame | Alternative Orthodoxy (Theme 3) (podcast)

Includes Richard's words cited above "Environmental hospice"

Artistic Expressions for Change

Dom Helder Camara in his own words

I'm thankful to Richard Rohr for introducing me and my family to Brazilian Archbishop Camara's prophetic call for justice

“Keep your language. Love its sounds, its modulation, its rhythm. But try to march together with men of different languages, remote from your own, who wish like you for a more just and human world.”

“When we are dreaming alone it is only a dream. When we are dreaming with others, it is the beginning of reality.”

“Without justice and love, peace will always be a great illusion.”

“The capitalist empires, with their affirmations of sacrifice for the free world, of defence of private enterprise, of safeguarding order from subversion and chaos, are in fact defending their political prestige and the economic interests arising from it; they are indeed at the service of economic power and the international trusts. The socialist empires for their part are hard and intransigent, they do not allow pluralism, they impose dialectical materialism, demand blind obedience to the party, set up a regime of total and permanent insecurity and fear, just like the fascist dictatorships of the extreme right.”

“In the developed countries of the capitalist world, the mass media are beginning to become businesses, and huge businesses at that. The freedom of journalists is now becoming, in most cases, a very relative thing: it ends where the interests of the business begin... In socialist areas, it is enough to recall that the means of social communication are the monopoly of the party.”

Source of the above quotes