[Oe List ...] Thoughts on Occupy and Creation Spirituality from Matthew Fo

[LAURELCG at aol.com]

I love it when Matt thinks!
 
Jann
 
 


Some thoughts on Occupy and Creation Spirituality from  Matthew Fox

_www.matthewfox.org/index.php/recent-articles_ 
(http://www.matthewfox.org/index.php/recent-articles) 

I  have visited Occupy Boston, Oakland, New York, Ashville, San Francisco. 
There  is much to like about the people I have met there ranging from 
20-somethings  to sixty-somethings. A 58 year old in Boston told me he was camping 
out  because he had been unemployed for over two years; a 30 something in 
New York  told me he was there “because of Jesus who teaches him that the 
poor get to  heaven, not the rich.” On Wall Street this past weekend I watched 
two lines of  exuberant young adults playing “Rover, red rover” literally 
in the middle of  Wall Street while police cordoned off the entrance to the 
street. Nice to see  some fun enacted in the name of social change. I very 
much appreciated two  very large canvases on a side of a building at Occupy 
Boston: One was  entitled, “What is Good about America” and the second was 
entitled: “What is  bad about America.” Everyone was invited to write on the 
pages. I read all the  entries and they were moving and thoughtful. I liked 
the balance that was  invited forth to everyone to express their opinions. 
In Oakland one day of  protests brought out about 7000 people of all ages and 
ethnicities, mothers  with babies in strollers, a flash mob dance of about 
80 people well  appreciated by hundreds of observers, a band playing as we 
marched through the  city center streets. My favorite sign? “I will believe 
corporations are people  when the state of Texas executes one.” Results have 
already been significant.  The language of the economic debate in America 
has shifted from “the deficit  is everything” to the matter of justice and 
injustice—rare words to enter  American political discourse the past two 
decades (though Obama shies away  from the words and prefers “fairness”). A New 
York Occupy person told me  “already Governor Cuomo has learned something 
and is seeking $2 billion in new  taxes from the richest among us.”

More important than immediate  “results” and even a change of language and 
perception is the bearing of  witness that is going on. The bearing of 
witness against Wall Street’s greed  and arrogance, its willingness to borrow 
trillions of dollars from Main Street  but offer nothing in return but more 
foreclosures, more bankruptcies, more  excess, more CEO privileges and more 
greed. I have written about greed quite  extensively in my book on evil, Sins 
of the Spirit, Blessings of the Flesh:  Lessons for Transforming Soul and 
Society. Returning to that book recently, I  have to say I was pleased with 
the teachings that are there. Greed corresponds  to the fifth or throat chakra 
(“gluttony” comes from the Latin word for  “throat”). Greed interferes 
with self-expression, stuffing excess things down  the throat instead of 
eliciting wisdom from the inside with the throat as the  birth canal. The fact 
that 70% of the American economy runs on consumerism is  proof positive that 
consuming is the newest form of gluttony and such gluttony  feeds greed and 
vice versa. As Aquinas warned, “avarice tends to  infinity”—there is no end 
to a consciousness of greed or its ally,  consumerism. Henry Ford was once 
asked: “When do you have enough money?” His  response: “When you always have 
a little bit more.” So with consumerism. It  never ends. It is infinite. 
Ask Donald Trump.

If Occupy accomplished  this alone it would be revolutionary: To educate 
Americans and others that an  economy that runs 70% on consumption and on 
greed has to reinvent itself. It  is not spiritually or materially sustainable. 
We can do better than consumer  capitalism.

In the matter of reinventing economics, I never tire of  recommending David 
Korten who I feel is the most profound and most relevant  teacher of an “
economics that works for everyone”—not just for 1% of the  people but for all 
the earth’s people including the more than two legged ones.  Korten has 
done his homework about ecology and cosmology as well as about  economics and 
ethics. He knows of what he speaks when he shows the way to our  reinventing 
economics so that it serves the earth and all her creatures and  therefore 
future generations as well. Go to Yes magazine web site to see his  many 
articles on the current economic crisis as well as to his  books.

Another aspect of the Occupy movement that moves me is its  bearing witness 
to moral bankruptcy. The banks are very willing to condemn  plenty of us to 
financial bankruptcy at this time of high unemployment and  intransigence 
in refinancing home loans and business loans, for example. But  they are the 
carriers of a Moral Bankruptcy that needs calling out. Speaking  truth to 
power (the economic power elites who brought the economy crashing  down on us 
all) is what prophets do. Occupy is prophetic. They are daring to  interfere 
with the economic status quo.

There is courage involved in  Occupy as there is in all those movements in 
the Middle East that we attribute  to the Arab Spring. It takes courage and 
endurance to sleep in the parks and  even on the concrete as so many 
Occupiers have done (including the 68 year old  woman I met in Boston!) and to face 
police harassment. Courage is, in my  opinion, the number one sign of 
Spirit. Without courage there is no Spirit.  There is Spirit afoot in Occupy.

There is hope also because of Occupy.  David Orr says, “hope is a verb with 
the sleeves rolled up” and those in  Occupy are doing something. How 
important is that? Doing something, bearing  witness, instead of just getting 
depressed or angry and sitting on it while  addicting oneself to more TV or 
eating or whatever. Putting one’s moral  outrage to action, tapping into anger 
as an energy source. All good. Tea  partiers great success has derived from 
the anger they tapped into. While I  find their solutions short sighted, 
their energy has made a difference and  Occupy’s can do the same—with much 
sounder solutions. Part of Occupy’s success  has been its appeal to television. 
In this post-modern time television is the  primary medium for reaching 
peoples’ heart and minds and the very act of  sleeping outdoors has attracted 
the cameras that have in turned allowed fresh  stories to be passed around. 
Stories about values. Social media is part of  this post-modern political 
movement obviously also. And the effort to reinvent  community through 
democratic means of listening to all and not just the  powerful and ego-driven ones.

Now of course Occupiers are not allowed  to encamp or sleep out in most 
cities but that only means that the means of  expression are morphing. More and 
more Occupy is focusing on foreclosed houses  and trying to raise 
consciousness about that. In New York I was told that  $400,000 still remains in the 
kitty they have raised and that all of that is  going toward housing for the 
poor and bringing attention to the plight of the  unemployed. The movement 
is evolving and morphing as anything living does. In  Oakland evicted 
persons are occupying boarded up and foreclosed homes putting  them to use.
Occupy is raising consciousness about the big banks, the “too  big to fail”
 profiteers. Many are the people moving their money to credit  unions (I am 
one of them and I am happy I did that).

When I preached  recently in a Unity church in New York City a woman came 
up afterwards and  started to cry. She said: “I have been supporting Occupy 
in every way I can  bringing food and warm clothes and more but so few of my 
friends get the  point. They are just living their lives as if this doesn’t 
matter. And where  are the clergy? I hardly see them at all. But to me this 
movement is about  everything Jesus taught us about loving our neighbor. 
There are so many people  suffering today. Your talk inspired me to keep going.”

Recently I wrote  a book on The Pope’s War which lays bare much of the 
sickness within the Roman  Catholic Church at this time in history, a sickness 
that panders to sexual  abusers as well as to dictators like Pinochet who 
tortured and murdered  thousands and to fascist movements like Opus Dei, Legion 
of Christ and  Communion and Liberation, a sickness that has silenced or 
expelled over 100  theologians while supporting the movements just mentioned 
that between them  produce armies of canon lawyers and not a single 
theologian. The emasculation  of Liberation Theology and base communities was a 
program enacted by the  present and previous popes.

Of course not all priests who work in the  Roman Catholic church are child 
molesters nor are all hierarchy busy hiding  and protecting them. So too not 
all bankers and all financiers who work with  Wall Street are crooks. But 
both systems are practicing moral nothingness and  condoning it so staying in 
the system and not critiquing carries with it the  risk of being an 
accomplice, however distant, to the system. Leaving it makes  more obvious moral 
sense but if one chooses to stay you must stay as a critic  and with one’s 
conscience in tact and operating to change the system. One  stays not as a 
cheerleader to the system and not to profit from it while  taking no moral 
position. There is no room in a moral crisis whether of  economics or of sexual 
predation for putting one’s conscience on a shelf and  hiding either in the 
pew or in the boardroom. It is time to stand up and be  counted and support 
those who are so doing. It is a time for moral courage.  Thank God for Occupy!



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