Author: KPB Stevens

At Wendy’s with the Immokalee Workers

~ KPB Stevens ~ Leave a comment

On Monday afternoon I was one of about one hundred and twenty people who gathered outside of the new Wendy’s flagship restaurant in Dublin, OH.  We were there to bring pressure on the nation’s second largest fast food chain, asking that they join the Fair Food Program, which eleven other major corporations, including four of the big five fast food chains, have signed onto.  The Fair Food Program provides a wage increase for farm workers and enforces a Code of Conduct among the companies that have signed onto it, which has been instrumental in reducing human rights abuses in the fields.  After talking to some very kind and decent Dublin police officers, a Wendy’s executive, Bob Bertini, came out to talk to us.  He tried to cover his anger and impatience under a patina of cheerfulness, but it was obviously there.  One of our spokespeople, Jessica Shimberg, asked him why Wendy’s was unwilling to sign-on to something that has helped so many people, and been embraced by the company’s competitors, especially when Wendy’s is usually a very good corporate neighbor, and the values of their founder, Dave Thomas, should lead them to embrace opportunities for justice and civil welfare like the Fair Food Program.

I participated in this action during a week in which I’ve been delving deep into Doris Kearns Goodwin’s new book The Bully Pulpit, which is about the progressive era.  Many of the political leaders in that era were rich men.  But they were men who were raised within a very specific ethic of wealth.  They thought that wealth was only justified if it could do good for one’s community.  They were also intellectually curious men.  Teddy Roosevelt, especially, read everything and delved into everything.  He began his time in the New York legislature as someone who was indifferent to the plight of the workers.  He was from the monied, property owning class, and believed that it was a property owner’s civil right to do whatever they wanted with their land and wealth.  But when he began to hear reports about the conditions of cigar makers in the New York tenement factories, he made a deal with a social crusader.  He would go on a tour of the factories, and if he found that the claims about abuse and maltreatment were true, he would support legislation to help the workers.  The reports were true, and he began to change his opinion about the civil rights of landlords.

What would the world be like if corporate CEOs, such as Wendy’s Emil Brolick, woke up in the morning asking themselves ethical questions about their company’ wealth and influence?  They would have to expand their understanding to realize that, in a global economy, everyone is in your community.  Corporations are very good at conjuring an image of community.  Their commercials show their customers, their ideal community, smiling and chatting with their employees, and enjoying their products with something close to rapture.  But of course a community is more than just employees and customers.  It’s more than those who live in the city or neighborhood in which a corporate office is located.  In a global economy, the community is the world.  And for Wendy’s, that means that their community includes the farm workers in Florida who provide tomatoes for their hamburgers, and who have seen a marked decrease in sexual harassment, unsafe working conditions, and even modern slavery because of the Fair Food Program.

What is wealth for, if not for the benefit of the communities we live in?  Moral psychologist Joshua Greene points out that, throughout time, generosity and cooperation within a community have benefitted the individuals who have those traits in abundance.  Those who are incapable of generosity and cooperation have failed within their communities, not just morally, but also in terms of evolution.  Using wealth for the benefit of one’s community also benefits the benefactor.  At this moment in time, we all live in a community that encompasses the world.  It might have surprised Wendy’s that a hundred and twenty Ohioans would show up in support of farm workers in Florida.  But they’re going to have to adjust to the fact that community has expanded if they want to prosper, and they’re going to have to sign on to the Fair Food Program.

Americans Don’t Trust Each Other

~ KPB Stevens ~ Leave a comment

Americans don’t trust each other.  That’s the main finding of the General Social Survey, which has been tracking all sorts of things for forty years.  You can read about it on the Huffington Post.  What struck me most was that almost two thirds of respondents said that you can’t be too careful in your interactions with other people, the highest level of distrust ever, but only for the white majority, which is skewing the results.  As the Huff Po article makes clear, African American people have been distrustful for a long time.  Does this mean that trust is a result of economic and racial privilege?  I never really thought of trust as a privilege before, and now that I am I find my mind divided.  On the one hand, I think it’s good for people to surrender some of their privilege on behalf of others, and to experience what life is like for the rest of America.  On the other hand, I don’t think that justice is really served by us all just becoming miserable.  Wouldn’t it be better if the trend was for trust to increase across the board, and for minorities to begin to feel the economic and social security that would allow them to trust like the majority?  Instead the opposite is happening, and I wonder if the church has any role to play in rebuilding neighborliness.

Most of our churches abandoned trust long ago.  Buildings are locked most of the time, and the idea that a church could provide a place for quiet contemplation or sanctuary for those walking in off the street is complicated by our fear of theft or other dark deeds.  But what if our solution wasn’t to lock the doors, but to try to increase the use of our buildings, to make sure that people were always around who could keep an eye on things?  Imagine a church that had three different groups meeting at once, most or all of them outsiders to the actual congregation.  They would have the opportunity to exchange ideas with each other, and to teach church people about their dreams and ideas.  And they would keep the buildings safe.

One of the culprits that’s constantly sited for our decline in trust is our lack of a public forum.  There is no central meeting place where Americans gather.  Could this be the new mission of the church, especially churches like ours, that have big, crumbling buildings?  Could we become the tide that rises all boats, all people towards a greater sense of trust in one another?

jesus

Why I Draw

~ KPB Stevens ~ Leave a comment

typhoonAs of this morning, the official count of those who have died in the Philippines stands at 1,800.  It’s a faceless number, a mere estimate, and it will rise.  Yesterday I went to the New York Times website and looked at the photos.  I tried drawing some of them.  Then, in the evening, I celebrated the Eucharist at Bexley Hall.  I couldn’t say the words of the Eucharistic prayer without thinking about the faces that I saw.  The man, his body bent to the curve of the child he held against his chest, as the wind whipped across his hair and his wife placed a hand on her child’s back, her clothes billowing towards him, possibly a final gesture.  Today I woke and read on CNN’s website about a woman who took refuge with her husband and six children in a bus.  They were swept away by the storm, while she survived.  She’s wandering through the ruins of Tacloban, looking for their bodies.

In 2011, when 30,000 children starved to death because of a draught in East Africa, I was barely aware of it.  When 6.9 million people were displaced because of the monsoon floods in India in 2012, I didn’t pay much attention.  I, like so many other people, can’t wrap my head around the numbers, or put faces to them.  And each escalating disaster serves to inoculate me against compassion.  People are always dying, suffering, grieving, and it doesn’t feel like there’s much I can do about it.

But losing my grasp on my compassion is a step towards total acquiescence to a sinful world, a studied willingness to enjoy my health and prosperity now, without worrying about those who suffer because of it, or what might happen tomorrow.  I believe that we need societies that pay attention and care, if we are to be capable of making the changes that could help us all survive.  A dispassionate society is one that’s blind to the future and indifferent to the present, and I belong to that substance-less kingdom more than I belong to the Kingdom of God.  But I want to belong to the Kingdom of God, and I want the world to survive.  Training my compassion is the first spiritual step to taking action and aligning myself with Jesus’s vision of the kingdom.

And so I draw.  Yesterday I sat and stared at the face of a displaced woman, clutching her sleeping child to her chest.  I took my pen and tried to capture the dark worry in her eyes, the shock, the slight hardening that happens to those who wait.  I drew the man who curved his body to the shape of his child as his wife reached towards him.  I noticed, as I drew, that the man was holding a water bottle, and I realized that the picture was taken four days ago, and that there’s a terrible shortage of drinking water now.  That bottle means life to the child the man is cradling, and the water is almost certainly gone.  I drew, even though it hurt to consider these things, and it still hurts.  But if I am going to be a man who prays, who dares to stand before God and touch bread and wine in the way that Christ did, I have to allow the world to hurt me, and to feel my own sense of sin.  I have to try to move beyond the comfort of my prayers into that same wilderness of loss and searching that the woman in Tacloban walks through as she searches for the bodies of her husband and her six children.  So I draw as a training in compassion, knowing how little it means, but hoping it will change me.

Spiritual Mastery

~ KPB Stevens ~ Leave a comment

saint luke for postSaint Luke’s feast day was a few Fridays ago.  In additional to writing his Gospel and the Book of Acts, Luke is the patron saint of artists, for the simple reason that he’s believed to have been the very first Christian artist.  The earliest icons, showing Christ and Mary, were thought to have been painted by Luke, and that’s why iconographers are so careful to take themselves and their own artistic vision out of the equation when they write icons.  In their minds, they’re simply copying the original portraits of Our Savior and his mother.

In the middle ages, artists organized into Guilds of Saint Luke.  When an artist wanted to be considered a master, he had to submit a masterwork to the guild.  Often, these masterworks show a scene in which Saint Luke, sitting at an easel, paints the Virgin with the infant Christ sitting in her lap.  The painter himself is sometimes pictured as well, but always in a subordinate role – cleaning Saint Luke’s brushes or performing some other menial task.

Learning about this got me thinking about the idea of mastery.  Obviously, if Christian artists and other craftsmen were trying to attain the status of “master,” the idea of mastery can’t be entirely foreign to the Christian church.  But how often do we think of our spiritual lives as leading to some goal, some master work?  Would it change the way we thought about our faith if we had some distinct purpose in mind when we went to church or prayed privately during the course of our day?

A Christian masterwork could be anything, really.  When I was working in a hospital for a summer I had a friend and mentor who was an elderly Roman Catholic priest.  He and another priest had a spiritual practice of meditative walking, which they did in downtown Chicago.  As they walked, they tried to open themselves to the world around them, the sound of street traffic, sunlight cutting its way across the buildings.  One day, as they were walking through a park, they encountered a man who was assaulting a woman.  Without hesitation or fear for their own safety, they interfered and protected the woman.  I consider this their master work.

The one prerequisite to producing a master work seems to be humility.  Medieval and renaissance artists were often arrogant fellows, but they subordinated themselves in the paintings they made of Saint Luke.  My friend the Roman Catholic priest could only help the woman who was being attacked because he’d been humble enough to try to make himself truly aware of the world around him.

I found myself thinking about humility this past week, when I served as chaplain during the Stand Down for Homeless Veterans in Columbus.  This is a yearly event where agencies and companies and politicians gather in the Veteran’s Memorial to provide gifts and services to vets who are living on the street.  Humility was the prevailing ethic of the day.  Danny, one of the chief organizers, told me what he tells all volunteers, that the men and women who came through the door were veterans first and foremost, and that we wouldn’t dwell on the fact of their homelessness.  Ask them about their service, not about their poverty.  This seemed very humble to me, this willingness to concentrate wholly on the dignity of the people we would meet.

But an even greater humility belonged to the ROTC cadets who lined up by the door.  These were high schoolers in baby blue shirts and neckties.  As the veterans came in, they stepped forward to push shopping carts, carry bags, and guide the men and women through the Memorial Hall.  I watched them and thought about the fact that in five or ten years these kids will be leading troops in combat.  That day in the Veterans Memorial they were engaging in a kind of training in humility.  A good officer has the humility to set their own needs aside in order to look after their troops.  Because of this early training in humility, these young people may, someday, be capable of a masterwork in leadership.  They may, through their attentiveness and caring, be able to save the lives of those who serve under them.

If I were to describe a spiritual path to Christian mastery, the first station would be humility.  No skill can be learned, no human relationship truly established, until we learn humility.  Without humility, we are deaf to the voice of God in our lives, and blind to the needs of those around us.  This, I think, is why Jesus so clearly values the tax collector in Saint Luke’s parable, the one who prays “God, be merciful to me, a sinner.”  It’s not because Jesus wants us to demean ourselves.  Jesus wants us to be like him, a spiritual master.  But the first step on the road to mastery is humility, the ability to set ourselves to the task of cleaning Saint Luke’s brushes and not assuming that we already have the skills to create a masterwork.