“When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag
and carrying the cross.”
—Sinclair Lewis
“Disobedience
is the true foundation of liberty. The obedient must be
slaves.”
—Henry David Thoreau
"Let us fight
to free the world! To do away with national barriers! To do away with
greed, with hate and intolerance! Let us fight for a world of reason,
a world where science and progress will lead to all men's happiness.
Soldiers, in the name of democracy, let us all unite!”
—Charles
Chaplin
I am a
long-time socialist and ordained woman priest according to the rites
of the Roman Catholic Church, deemed excommunicated automatically
because of my "disobedience" to the principles that
ordination is forbidden to individuals unless they are male. I
contribute these thoughts because of the inability of many fellow
socialists and revolutionaries to accept and most particularly to
respect my belief systems. It seems to be one of the forbidden
topics. Allow me, then, to claim a moment of your attention.
I was married to a wonderful man who was not a believer but who
worked with the religious left. As a human rights lawyer and social
activist I have always defended the rights of others to have any or
no beliefs, and he was my soulmate. And yes, I believe in eternal
souls because of E=mc2.
I am also a Reiki healer, a practitioner of Emotional Freedom
Techniques (EFT), and a student of hypnosis. I have been a teacher of
meditation and in my work as a healer and a social justice activist I
hold space for those who are grieving, who are battling diseases, who
are dealing with the issues I deal with on a daily basis: the stress
of living in an uncaring gangster-capitalist society and, with regard
to the United States, in a traditionally racist one.
Every day
I run into someone who proclaims proudly that they are an atheist and
who wants me to explain why I am not. In the same way that no one
needs to explain themselves to me, I do not need to explain myself to
anyone, but I expect respect for the work I do even if it doesn't fit
into "approved doctrinaire" beliefs. I will "explain"
what I mean because I think this is important for the future of our
work of subversion. Although of Sephardi descent, I was raised
Catholic and had my start in liberation theology in the mountains of
the Dominican Republic. I do follow a subversive Palestinian Jew, and
to me subversion of Empire is thus a command to do the same. Read
Reza Aslan's Zealot: the life and times of Jesus of Nazareth.
Aslan, a Muslim, has written a wonderful treatise on the man I call
Isa or Yeshua.
Yesterday
I attended a people's trial of the Sheriffs of Alameda and Contra
Costa County, with respect to their brutality against immigrants. I
had been one of three priests who had served the office of Alameda
County Sheriff Gregory Ahearn; other clergy had served Costra Costa
County Sheriff David Livingston. We heard from witnesses, from
journalist and social activist David Bacon, from members—as I have
been for years—of School of the Americas Watch. We heard from
psychologists who are working with the post-traumatic stress created
by the terrible situation in immigrant prisons. We held a trial. They
were found guilty of human rights crimes.
The groups that are
doing the best work on immigration are interfaith groups. We have
rapid response networks. We write letters and we show up at court
hearings. And sometimes we chain ourselves to ICE buses. We do civil
disobedience. School
of the Americas Watch, which may be one of the most important groups
doing the work of solidarity throughout the world, is
originally a Catholic group, founded by a veteran Catholic priest,
Roy Bourgeois, and a band of other Catholics who had been doing work
throughout the Americas—priests and nuns who "hung their
habits" and married one another, but who never gave up their
beliefs.
Roy was excommunicated for supporting women's
ordination. He attended the ordination of my program companion,
Janice Sevre-Duszynska, a veteran activist who has been arrested many
times and who has served hard time as a prisoner of conscience in
federal prison. One of my other sheroes is Rita Lucey, who also
served time in federal prison as a prisoner of conscience and had to
undergo psychotherapy because of her ongoing rage as part of PTSD.
Now in her eighties, she inspires me daily. Then there’s Kathy
Kelly, a Catholic woman who defied the government by taking food and
medicines into Iraq, who has been arrested over a hundred times, who
ends her retreats by singing Dona
Nobis Pacem, whose
Voices in the Wilderness had to be closed down because she refused to
pay a penny of the government penalties, and is now doing the same
work as Voices for Creative Non-Violence. As the Rev. Lucius Walker
of Pastors for Peace used to say when taking medical supplies to
Cuba, we are not the ones who are breaking the law. Those who
are my friends and fellow conspirators include the Swords and
Plowshares movement people who also serve hard federal time, who go
to jail for justice, who have spent their lives ministering to others
and conspiring.
Most
of the work I do these days is interfaith. It includes Jews and
Muslims, Lakota and Lenca . . . so many I would need a separate essay
to write them all in.
I went to
Standing Rock twice in answer to a call for prayer. Standing Rock is
an important milestone in the environmental work that I have been
doing for decades now. Standing Rock solidified my belief in working
through spirituality, conspiring (which means literally to breathe
together, to hold the breath of life or the breath of the divine,
originally, together in harmony) for a better and more just world. I
was asked by the young group of spiritual leaders, from many states
and Indian nations and beliefs, all the ones who use different names
for the unnamable, to lead them in prayer in one of my last days
there. I had become sick because I had been taking care of so many
sick. I had walking pneumonia and hypothermia. From bed, as they
surrounded me, I thanked them for being there, for fighting, for
spending endless days and nights fighting corporate evil. In 2003 I
followed Cindy Sheehan, also a Catholic rebel, to Crawford, site of
the summer "White House." The work of peace (and prayer,
and meditation, and testimony) was amazing. I cooked for three weeks
for attendees and in between performed songs on stage. We did the
work that is always done in these types of events: Memoria y
resistencia. We protested, held hands, sang, prayed.
I am
inspired (again, filled with the breath of life or the divine) by
these comrades in faith. When I attended the kickoff event for the
Poor People's Poverty Campaign, which is based on the work of a brave
preacher, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who called out the triplets of
militarism, racism, and materialism, I was inspired, filled with that
breath of the divine.
My
Sephardi grandfather, Gerald Brandon, a polyglot who was a journalist
and a war correspondent born in Rutherford, New Jersey, but reporting
from the trenches, frequently read to me in several languages, and
insisted that there was a mot juste that would express
perfectly anything I wanted to say. Years later I realized that one
of the things he was always saying was attributed to Hillel the
Elder: “If I am not for myself, who will be for me? If I am only
for myself, what am I? And if not now, when?”
I include
a picture of abuelo Gerardo with Pancho Villa along with this
article. His pictures were used in portraying the life of José
Doroteo Arango Arámbula, who later took on the name of Francisco
Villa and is now remembered as Pancho Villa, the only man to
successfully invade the United States during the First World War—on
March 9, 1916. I learned Scrabble in several languages, and even
chess, as a child, from my most unforgettable character, condemned to
death in Mexico after publishing articles against General Venustiano
Carranza; the family had to find someone to bribe and were
successful, otherwise I wouldn't be writing these lines.
When I
practiced law in New Jersey for 28 years, one of the things I did
even though I hated it was immigration defense work. I was one of
many lawyers across the nation who defended, pro bono, the Haitians
who were fleeing Duvalier's paramilitary Tonton Macoutes. The
Duvaliers, père et fils, were monstrosities aided and abetted
by the U.S. Government. The State Department made the amazing
pronouncement that the Tonton Macoutes were a private "gang"
that was unrelated to the government. This made the granting of
political asylum an impossibility. We defended them anyway, and I had
any number of cases I took over from lawyers who had only been able
to devote time to one or two appearances. I met Haitian priests in
the Vodun religion. My twin sister from another incarnation, civil
rights attorney Moonyene Jackson-Amis, who used to sing spirituals
with me when we were depressed in law school, did the same thing. She
came last year from Maryland, where she lives now, to attend my
ordination. She was the first Black councilwoman in Easton, Maryland,
a seat of entrenched slavery and racism.
I am
starting a home temple, filing papers in Sacramento, and I am already
running a Catholic Worker House, following the work of Dorothy Day. I
am doing prison and hospice work, and immigrant defense and advocacy
work. I marry people, and sit with the dying and honor their grief
and pray with them if that is what they want.
We must
conspire together. Some of us will do so in the original context of
the word, and will inspire one another with the breath of the divine.
Marx, in the end, whose 200th birthday we celebrated on cinco de
mayo—a day that is not Mexican independence day—had it
right. But solidarity means love, and love is quite possibly the best
and strongest virtue there is.
Here is a
link to an article. It talks about the photographer Giulia Bianchi whom I met in
Pennsylvania when we ordained three bishops in our organization,
including the one who ordained me, Olga Lucía Benjumea Alvarez, who
works in Colombia with women coming out of prison and who are thus
denied work and rights by the government.
I have
never believed in the infallibility of any being while he or she is
alive, and recently the head of the Vatican, Francisco, admitted to
not being infallible. Marx, Lenin—whose works I have in Spanish,
side by side with Jim's copies in English—were not infallible.
Modern quantum physics is akin to the writings of the old
metaphysicians (Read the Tao of Physics, written by Nobel Prize
physicist Fritjot Capra).
We can and we must change. And that
means that no topic is off limits. No voices are left out of the
conversation. The work we are doing, each in her or his own way, is
sacred. If
I am only for myself, what am I? And if not now, when?
------------------------------------------------------
P.S.
The community which followed the crucified man and lived in the
catacombs was completely communistic. There was no private property;
everything was shared.
P.P.S. I
just received a note from Janice’s partner that she was arrested in
Washington DC at the confirmation hearing for Gina Haskell, noted war
criminal and torture “specialist” being promoted by Herr Trump.
