Reckonings: a journal of justice, hope and history

Your work

Your work is to discover your world and then with all your heart give yourself to it.

— The Buddha

In a Lenten season - Verlyn Klinkenborg

We may not not need Verlyn Klinkenborg to remind us that Americans are not a naturally ascetic people.Then again, absent asceticism, perhaps we do.

In any event, it is more his reminder of the Lenten opportunity as one of fasting in wilderness that is arresting.

"In the ancestral stories of nearly every culture, wisdom comes from the bare places, from deserts and dry mountains. The season of Lent itself is based on a 'wilderness' — the one in which Jesus fasted for 40 days after his baptism."

"It’s common to read this story and others like it as though the wilderness were little more than a blank backdrop. I read it a different way. Wisdom comes from the bare places because they force humility upon us. In these Lenten places, where life thrives on almost nothing, we can see clearly how large a shadow modern life and consumption cast upon the earth.... Perhaps it might be a season in which to learn the value of abstention and to consider how to let the bare places flourish, or even simply to exist." 

It is in wilderness without and within that we are most likely to find the commonality of living and dying, hope and hopelessness.

 

Bill Moyers is back

It is heartening to see and listen to Bill Moyers' return to public radio and television this January. His new program, Moyers & Company, includes this week "Decoding political misinformation," a discussion with Kathleen Hall Jamieson, and a conversation and readings with the poet Rita Dove. It's Moyers at his best, joining politics and poetry in thoughtful conjunction. As one determined to remain without a TV set, I'm grateful that Moyers sees fit to make the program available online as soon as it is broadcast. For any who missed the first weeks, they are available at www.billmoyers.com.

Rita Dove has recently completed editing The Penguin Anthology of Twentieth-Century American Poetry. Her reading from that collection - and video portraits of readings by Stanley Kunitz and Lucille Clifton - offer dramatic - I wish I could say redemptive - counterpoint to Moyers' attention to the deterioration of American democracy. The experience of watching and listening to Stanley Kunitz saying his late poem "Touch Me" still echoes -

Summer is late, my heart 

In addition to the audio podcast and television program, Moyers offers an ongoing series of weekly essays. “On Democracy” is co-written by Moyers and Michael Winship. They focus "much of their attention on money and its corrosive influence on government and politics: who’s spending the big bucks on contributions and lobbying — and to whom it’s going, as well as the monster impact of the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision that unleashed vast — and often anonymous — corporate and special interest dollars."

The current essay is datelined February 13 and entitled "Money Throws Democracy Overboard," a fit companion piece to Moyers' discussion of this ghastly primary season with Kathleen Hall Jamieson. If any of us are left imagining that the electoral process remains as a residual bastion of democratic life relatively free from the oligarchic dominance of big money, that essay and discussion places such delusion in sober perspective. We are enduring "government of, by and for the one percent." 

"We are drowning here, with gaping holes torn into the hull of the ship of state from charges detonated by the owners and manipulators of capital. Their wealth has become a demonic force in politics. Nothing can stop them. Not the law, which has been written to accommodate them. Not scrutiny — they have no shame. Not a decent respect for the welfare of others — the people without means, their safety net shredded, left helpless before events beyond their control."

See www.factcheck.org and www.flackcheck.org.