On Palm Sunday many churchgoers hold palms during the service. I’m used to seeing people weave them into large crosses. Here are two smaller (East African?) designs that I saw for the first time.
“Song for Holy Saturday”
Following tradition, here’s a link to this poem by James K. Baxter.
“Enjoy the Silence: Triduum, sexual abuse, and the disappearance of the crucified” Michael Iafrate:
It is truly difficult to hear the continued reports of children raped by priests and not be struck by the presence of the Crucified One there. But this presence is denied—“I do not know the man!â€â€”each and every time church leaders and members alike remain silent or utter words of defensiveness that embarrassingly fill nearly every news story or ecclesial statement covering the abuse.
Clark students continue to support unionization of their dining hall workers; there have been twoincidents in the past year when Leominster cops caused trouble in Worcester; it’s Holy Week; Mike is a little confused about how Michael Hlady is supposed to have scammed Venerini Academy; there’s now a documentary about Lemmy.
I’m just now getting into the spiritual and intellectual work I associate with Lent. Barring some quick epiphanies, this work will stretch into the Easter season.
Here are some of the things I’m planning to read and watch. No real curriculum here, just what’s on one man’s shelf.
The Brothers Karamazov by Dostoevsky (also planning to read the recent thesis “The Sister Karamazov: Dorothy Day’s Encounter with Dostoevsky’s Novel” by Michael H. Hebbeler)
If anything else comes in handy I’ll add comments or maybe a second post. Probably 2001 (my favorite movie) and Breaking the Waves (my favorite religious film, though not for everybody–I freaked out a friend yesterday just explaining the plot) will find their way onto my screen.
Today’s the 1-year anniversary of the Stone Soup fire. We talk about the past and future of the artist/activist center. Also: the Joe Martin murder trial is over, and Councilor Rushton reopened the panhandling issue at this week’s City Council meeting.
CitySquare II, a subsidiary of Opus Investment Management, itself a subsidiary of Hanover Insurance, has signed a purchase-and-sale agreement with Berkeley Investments to take over demolishing the empty mall downtown and build something else. This announcement may or may not mean that, after 6 years, something will happen.
The Artichoke Food Coop is back in action with plenty of volunteers and plenty of food.
In the South Seas there is a cargo cult of people. During the war they saw airplanes land with lots of good materials, and they want the same thing to happen now. So they’ve arranged to imitate things like runways, to put fires along the sides of the runways, to make a wooden hut for a man to sit in, with two wooden pieces on his head like headphones and bars of bamboo sticking out like antennas–he’s the controller–and they wait for the airplanes to land. They’re doing everything right. The form is perfect. It looks exactly the way it looked before. But it doesn’t work. No airplanes land.
Activists can think this way, too. We’ve seen something work in the past, and so we try it again. Sometimes the underlying situation, power dynamics, and participants are very different, so the tactic or strategy doesn’t work. If we understand why it worked the first time, we can modify it to work in the present. But too often, if it doesn’t work, we just try it again with more passion. I mean, it worked for the Civil Rights struggle/labor movement/Gandhi/right here in this town in the 90s. Why wouldn’t it work for us today?
The South Seas cargo cultists didn’t realize that the important thing about a radio was what was inside, not what was outside. We should step back more often to analyze what we’re doing, to create tactics and strategies that work like the effective ones of the past, rather than just looking like them.
I’d bet we can avoid some of the worst of “cargo cult activism” by asking a few questions of the next thing we’re planning to try. Why do we think this will work? What’s a recent example of this working? How well do we understand that example? Did it work the last time our group tried it? If not, why not?
We discuss proposed Worcester 
