As a part of a recent action on behalf of a living wage for fast food workers, those in the religious community showed up to stand in solidarity. Missouri Faith Voices was represented by various clergy in the area. Read the whole story from Columbia Faith and Values.
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Daily bread for those who serve the bread
Posted: September 3, 2013 in UncategorizedTags: Columbia Faith Voices, Living Wage for Fast Food Workers
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Intervention in Syria? Yes, immediately.
Posted: September 3, 2013 in UncategorizedTags: American intervention, chemical weapons, Syria
Add the latest egregious violation of humanity to the long list: The use of chemical weapons in a neighborhood just outside Damascus. Once upon a time we read that a man named Saul was heading there to do dastardly things and he was struck down and blinded by none other than the spirit of Christ. We need to be struck down again.
And so I add my voice to the chorus. Do something now, President Obama and Congress. Build a coalition or act unilaterally but don’t just sit there.
The action I propose, however, looks a little different. Immediately organize and lead a world day of mourning for the dead of Syria. Remember how they were preceded in tortuous death by millions elsewhere who also deserve our mourning. Wear black arm bands. Play dirges. Have a moment of silence and project it to the entire world.
And then, as quickly as possible, take a very public shock and awe action that cannot be ignored: Destroy all of our weapons of mass destruction, the ones we have developed, weaponized and are prepared to use. Wheel them out into the international square and in the presence of all witnesses destroy them and vow to never use them. Invite representatives of all countries who also have them in their stockpiles. Invite the Syrian government and its allies.
You could bomb Syria back to the stone age to make your point, adding agony to insult. But don’t. Do something much more subversive.
I’m not the river
that powerful presence.
And I’m not the black oak tree
which is patience personified.
And I’m not redbird
who is a brief life hearted enjoyed.
Nor am I mud nor rock nor sand
which is holding everything together.
No, I am none of these things. Not yet.
Mary Oliver
Seamus Heaney was a poet laureate of Ireland and though born in Northern Ireland lived most of his later adult life in Catholic Dublin. A regular fixture in the literature departments of the most prestigious universities he was known for his voluminous collections of poetry. His most common themes included evocative renderings of the common life, the strife in his homeland and meditations on mortality before eternity. In addition he was known for the translation of the epic Beowulf into modern language.
Some years ago I was visiting friends in Belfast and was invited to attend a gathering of some of the luminaries of Northern Ireland. When I arrived at Linen Hall I had no idea that Heaney would be in attendance, along with the likes of Michael Longley and one of my distant relatives, poet Ciaron Carson (the Carsons are all from Ulster, the grouping of counties surrounding Belfast).
Seamus Heaney and Michael Longley at Linen Hall, Tim Carson in background
In his well-known poem, Digging, Heaney remembers first the digging of his father and then his grandfather, men so connected to and owned by the soil that their son and grandson could never imagine doing, being the same. Instead he will give his life to a digging of a different sort. And so he did:
Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.
Under my window, a clean rasping sound
When the spade sinks into gravelly ground:
My father, digging. I look down
Till his straining rump among the flowerbeds
Bends low, comes up twenty years away
Stooping in rhythm through potato drills
Where he was digging.
The coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaft
Against the inside knee was levered firmly.
He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright edge deep
To scatter new potatoes that we picked,
Loving their cool hardness in our hands.
By God, the old man could handle a spade.
Just like his old man.
My grandfather cut more turf in a day
Than any other man on Toner’s bog.
Once I carried him milk in a bottle
Corked sloppily with paper. He straightened up
To drink it, then fell to right away
Nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods
Over his shoulder, going down and down
For the good turf. Digging.
The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap
Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge
Through living roots awaken in my head.
But I’ve no spade to follow men like them.
Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests.
I’ll dig with it.
A living wage for hard work
Posted: August 29, 2013 in UncategorizedTags: fast food worker strike, living wage
I’m not much of a march and protest kind of guy. I never have been. It’s not in my nature. I have done plenty in terms of advocacy for social justice and other issues of the day but mostly through speaking and writing. Not usually by assembling for public action.
Columbia Faith Voices (connected to Missouri Faith Voices), a coalition of congregations dedicated to addressing the root causes of poverty and suffering, chose to join in the action to advocate for a living wage for fast food workers. It’s a national movement and the action took place across thirty cities today. The long and short of it is that fast food workers (whose average age is 28, not teenie boppers) cannot earn a living wage. Try to live on $7.35 an hour. Go ahead. With no benefits.
Learnings from my experience of advocacy today included: Workers feel disempowered; it matters that people stand with them. They are not the only ones with substandard wages – many from many occupations share their predicament. Local owners struggle too, often while corporations are getting quite fat. The managers of these restaurants are also on poverty wages. The faith community has a moral/ethical role to play in terms of advocating for the least of these. It’s a religious matter, not just political or financial one. But I learned one more important thing.
Most people honked in solidarity with the sentiment, namely, that people who work hard should have the ability to make a living wage. But there are exceptions. I’d like to mention one.
I would like to say thank you to the guy driving the new shiny Grand Cherokee Jeep. I really dig your wheels. In fact, I’m a little envious. I’d like to thank you for driving by, shouting obscenities and flipping us off. You’re a class act, you and your new car.
The four or five ordained ministers who were standing there with these people thank you for your humanity, tact, and reasoned response. You’re an asset to your community and one of the bright lights of hope among us. We were inspired.
Seriously, you brought some important matters into sharp relief. Here were the workers who earn $7.35 an hour and will most likely not be cruising in a Grand Cherokee in the near future. And they are flipped off by the guy in the new jeep who is incensed that they would dare suggest that their salaries are sub-standard. How dare them want to support their families. They are such dead wood, ungrateful leaches who don’t know their place.
If I nursed any doubts about our action today you and your jeep placed a salve on my anxiety. Now I know just how important it is for people to organize and find their voices.
More than anyone else today you solidified my conviction that we have done exactly the right thing. The truth is often validated by the equal and opposite attempt to discredit and dismiss it. And you, my friend, have succeeded beyond your wildest dreams. Congratulations.
How many pastors can say, honesty, that they enjoy their congregation’s board meetings? I mean, really. Sure, plenty may know them to be important, necessary or even strategic, a means to an end. But what about enjoy them?
I have not always enjoyed board meetings or other meetings of congregations. At their worst they have been tedious, plodding, stuck, conflicted or superfluous. But not now, not here.
I am the most fortunate pastor in the world. My board is full of people devoted to their church, acting in its best interest, who like one another and make important decisions they feel joyful about. It’s not always smooth sailing. It couldn’t be and still be church. But it is possible.
I know because I am a witness of these things.
Interpretations: Artist interprets Writer
Posted: August 25, 2013 in UncategorizedTags: Columbia Art League, Interpretations, Tracy Eichhorn
A second aspect of the Interpretations process included the artist interpreting an original written work, so Tracy Eichhorn created a visual response to my original writing.
The medium is a window frame with wall paper and epoxy on glass.
When I awoke it was to a song out of place.
The solitary voice of a bird sounded
before its season.
The usual suspects waited behind the closet door:
parka, overcoat, checkered scarf from Scotland.
But I elbowed past them and chose
the flimsy jacket hiding in the back.
When the wind struck my face,
winter asked what I thought I was doing,
that it was hardly finished with me yet.
And I said I didn’t really care,
that I was a song out of place,
singing as though the end
was almost here.
Interpretations opens to standing room only crowd
Posted: August 25, 2013 in UncategorizedTags: Columbia Art League, Interpretations
The Interpretations exhibit at the Columbia Art League opened Saturday, August 24, and the confluence of written and visual word filled the hall. One of my pleasures was meeting my secret assigned partner, Tracy Eichhorn, the artist whose art I interpreted and who in turn interpreted mine. The exhibit runs through November 1.
My assignment was to interpret her original piece with a written composition. Her oil painting of a comet slicing the night sky was the subject of my following poem:
Deep calls to deep
as green blends to blue
and the edge that joins
is the edge that cuts
creating and holding
until the uninvited
makes its flashy entrance
disrupts the plan
tears away the veil
and then, without notice
takes leave, walks off stage
leaving nothing behind
except that lonely mark
where reverie danced
no more than a day
(Tim Carson, April 2013)
The Butler reviewed on Columbia Faith and Values
Posted: August 22, 2013 in UncategorizedTags: Columbia Faith and Values, The Butler
My column runs in Columbia Faith and Values today:
The least important thing about the smashing film “The Butler“ is the likelihood that Forest Whitaker will be walking away with an Oscar because of it, and that Oprah will get back to doing one of the things she does best, acting.
More importantly, a critical moral story has been retold. Like other truth-telling films, “The Butler” weaves together the personal and public in such a way that it is not only believable but convincing … read more
Visual Art Meets Written Word
Posted: August 19, 2013 in UncategorizedTags: Columbia Art League, Interpretations Exhibit
Some creator or creators came up with the brain child: Draw together artists and writers and structure them in such a way that they interpret each others work. And that is exactly what has happened. 40 artists and 40 writers have been selected to create and cross-create with their assigned partner. The result is a show called Interpretations and it runs from August 24 – November 1 at the Columbia Art League. In addition they are creating a coffee-table book of the entire collection.
I have been selected as one of the writers and look forward to the expo!
For the full story go here.
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