“It was as if the last day, as people say in the Bible, that there will be a last day that Jesus Christ will come, and whatever on Earth will be judged. That was my imagination. I thought that God felt tired of people on Earth here, felt tired of the bad deeds, the bad thing that we are doing, yet God is watching on us. I thought that God got tired of us and he want to finish us.”
- John Bul Dau
For our November meeting, our movie group watched the documentary God Grew Tired Of Us. Narrated by Nicole Kidman, this film tells the compelling story of three “Lost Boys” John Bul Dau, Panther Bior, and Daniel Abol Pach. After fleeing the civil war in Sudan as boys and spending more than a decade as refugees, these young men were given the opportunity to resettle in the United States. The film documents their amazing journey from a refugee camp in Kenya to their new lives in New York and Philadelphia.
In our discussion after the film, the theme that came up again and again was the concept of community. Aubrie commented on the striking contrast between the men’s lives in the African refugee camp where they did everything together and in the United States where they struggled with a sense of isolation and loneliness. Amy noted that in the refugee camp they had “hope and humor and love and community” and she observed that while they were happy to leave the camp for a better life in the US, they also experienced a deep sense of loss in leaving their friends.
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11-16-2007 |
3 Comments »Mark is the leader of the Safe Space community. This is a small missional and new-monastic community in the Anglican tradition in Telford, a post-industrial town in central England.
Safe Space love to tell stories and one of their great stories is about how they became involved in their town soccer club. Working from Luke 10, Safe Space seek to find ways to bring peace to the community around them. Mark describes it as being yeast - but unlike most churches which appear to expect the flour to come to the bowl and create a homogenous inedible pile of yeast, they seek to permeate the flour to produce bread.
They went to the soccer club and asked the CEO what it would mean for the Safe Space community to be peace there, underlining their understanding of Luke 10 and pointing out that they were not interested in preaching at people or arranging carol services. The community is now involved in cleaning the stadium after games and serving on the governing body of the club.
Mark blogs here . I think this approach is very challenging - seeking to find out what would be ‘peace’ to people around us rather than what we would seek to give them.
07-13-2007 |
7 Comments »For our monthly movie group, four of my girlfriends and I watched the South African film Tsotsi. It tells the story of a troubled young man with a painful past struggling to survive in a shanty town outside Johannesburg. His nickname Tsotsi means “thug” or “gangster” and he and his friends lead a life of robbery and violence. Everything changes one night when Tsotsi steals a woman’s car and then discovers an infant boy in the backseat. This chance encounter leads Tsotsi down the path to redemption.
We all agreed that this was an excellent film with a strong emotional impact. Staci described the underlying theme of the movie as “the universal need for family and connection.” And Aubrie noted how many times Tsotsi and his friends used the words “brother” and “together” in reference to their group. Clearly they were trying to create a sense of community in the midst of what Sheena aptly described as “a bleak environment.” Read the rest of this entry »
04-13-2007 |
5 Comments »Dick Staub and a panel of bloggers recently discussed the following fascinating question on their live radio show: Can The Inklings face-to-face pub experience be replaced with online interaction?
Various intriguing aspects related to this question arose. One that caught my attention was this: Does online interaction increase our (western, 1st world) isolation from community, from *real* others? Or does it decrease that aloneness?
Apparently there is an already large and growing body of research (for instance, check out this search on google scholar) on what is termed “computer mediated community” or CMC. Wikipedia has an interesting overview as well
“Michael Keren, who has written Blogosphere: The New Political Arena, suggests individuals who bare their souls in blogs are isolated and lonely, living in a virtual reality instead of forming real relationships or helping to change the world.” (from this provocative article).
I remember Mother Teresa talking about how while the third world has a poverty of basic stuff like food/water, the 1st world has a poverty of community. In blogging about how to MTWABP, are we somehow exacerbating our separation from each other, and our separation from those in least developed countries (for whom internet access is fairly far down the list of “things we don’t have which we’d like to get”)?
04-11-2007 |
10 Comments »I recently had the opportunity to visit a Church of God in Christ Mennonite congregation in California. It was a fascinating and enjoyable experience. The men all sat on the right hand side of the church, they all wore clean, long sleeved, button down shirts and dress pants, and they all had short hair neatly parted on the left and neat, well trimmed beards. The ladies all sat on the left side of the church, and they all wore pretty, modest dresses with long sleeves, high necklines, and similar puffy shoulders. They all had shiny black head coverings which covered the back half of their hair and their neck.
They could sing! No accompaniment–just voices in harmony.
Even after the service, the segregation continued, and I enjoyed a half hour of interesting and open conversation with 3 of the guys. It seemed to me that they enjoyed an experience of very tight community which I have often longed for and never really found. On the other hand, they very much lacked the enormous … freedom/mobility at the individual level which I have very much experienced and sometimes enjoyed. It seemed to me that if one of them awoke one day and realized they *didn’t* any longer believe all the things they have agreed to believe, they would either have to deny their new reality, or else experience a really catastrophic loss of community in their life.
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03-21-2007 |
19 Comments »Welcome to Justice and Compassion, a conversation about how to create a more just, compassionate and peaceful world. This blog is sponsored by Off The Map and hosted by Benjamin and Rachel and we invite you to add your voice to this conversation.
We live in a world where 2 billion people live on less than $2 day and 1 billion people do not have access to clean water, a world where 30,000 children die every day of starvation and preventable disease and 15 million children have been orphaned by AIDS. As Westerners, we so often live our comfortable lives completely insulated from the great problems of our time.
Activist Jim Wallis says, “Conversion in our time is to liberate the poor and to make the blind see. The poor need justice and the rich need restored sight.” We are ready to have our eyes opened, to truly see and then be converted and transformed by what we see. We hope you will join us on this risky and exciting journey.
Here is what we envision for this blog…
We want to get a better grasp on what the world situation is in terms of poverty, hunger, disease, war and suffering and to understand what that looks like on both the global and individual scale.
We want to dialogue about what it means to do something about these problems – actively, wisely and practically.
We want to talk about the interaction of compassion and justice and the relationships between the “first world” and “third world” nations.
We want to ask ourselves as participants in this conversation to step outside of our own comfort zones, to be open minded and to be willing to change our ideas and our actions.
Most importantly, we want this blog to be a conversation. We want to provide a forum for respectful interactions between people with very different viewpoints. We want to learn from and be inspired by one another.
We also want you to help us map out this journey…
What do you envision for this blog? What would you like it to look like and be about?
What are some subjects and ideas you’d like to explore and learn about together?
Do you have areas of knowledge or passion that you would like to share with us?
Do you know of anyone doing justice and compassion work who we should interview for our blog?
02-26-2007 |
12 Comments »