a national call for moral revival: june 20th poor people's campaign

Adding more basil and dill to the herb garden on the deck is a little slice of heaven

for me on a sweet day in the Berkshires. I spent time weeding what was to be my pumpkin patch - damn deer - as well as cleaning up the raised bed bee wildflower spread. This morning it felt like it was time to reread Richard Rohr's four books on male spirituality, initiation and healing. As I told my primary care doc later in the day - a good friend and music-making buddy whom I haven't visited professionally for over a decade - over the past two weeks I have sensed a real albeit inchoate shift in the soul of our nation. We have been exhausted by cynicism, spiritually abused by the hatred spewing from the current regime, grieving beyond any frame of reference in a pandemic and starving for meaning as we careen from one disaster to the next. My heart feels as if all of that was necessary and is not being

tempered by a renewal of compassion. With hearts broken open in solidarity, it feels like the song the ancient Psalmist sang: 

Certainly you will again restore our life,
that your people may rejoice in you.
Show us, LORD, your mercy;
grant us your salvation.
I will listen for what God, the LORD, has to say;
surely he will speak of peace
To his people and to his faithful.
May they not turn to foolishness!
Near indeed is his salvation for those who fear him;
glory will dwell in our land.
Love and truth will meet;
justice and peace will kiss.
Truth will spring from the earth;
justice will look down from heaven.
Yes, the LORD will grant his bounty;
our land will yield its produce.

(Psalm 85)

The Rev. William Barber put it like this: The new nation being born in our streets must reckon with four centuries of systemic inequality. This is about more than policing. The question before us is whether America can be what it has promised to be. This coming Saturday, June 20, there will be a 21st century revival of MLK's life's work: The Poor People's Campaign. I sensed my call into ministry in the shadow of Dr. King's national rally in Washington, DC 52 years ago. And given the police free zone in Seattle - oh the spirit of Occupy lives on - the insightful and potent organizing work being done by Black Lives Matter and the NAACP youth section, and the Poor People's Campaign: it is clear that morning in struggling to be born in America. There will be clouds. And set backs. There will be fear and ugly resistance, too. But the arch of the moral universe tips ever so slightly towards justice. When I was young, this is what the invitations sounded like to me. It is rougher in 2020 - more edgy and direct - but no less essential.