Collective Action

It has been a very busy past few months. See below for photo documentation! 

But before you scroll down, we just want to give you two important updates: 

 

1. Tommy is moving most of his writing to his new Substack newsletter. He is posting pieces every Sunday morning. You can subscribe for free here. 

2. At the end of this month, we are joining an interfaith coalition in D.C. to take on Christians United for Israel (CUFI), the largest Zionist organization in the country. Christian Zionism is a far-right fascist ideology that bears major responsibility for the ongoing U.S.-sponsored Israeli genocide being waged on Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. CUFI is antisemitic and aggressively white-and-Christian supremacist in a way that is actively working within the highest places of power in our nation to strip us of our rights, safety and freedoms here domestically as well. 

We are going to DC to participate in the largest interreligious protest for Palestine. Please consider joining us July 28-30 if you can! 

For more details, click on this link to register for a mass informational call hosted by Christians for a Free Palestine tomorrow, July 11th @ 9amPT/12pmET.  

Also, you can register to join us for this action in D.C. (either in-person or online) here.

On a more personal note, Lindsay participated with the Christians for a Free Palestine direct action in D.C. in April (more photos below), and the whole gathering was one of the closest things to liberatory church she's experienced in a long while. Not only was it empowering to take collective action together for Palestinian freedom and an end to this atrocious genocide being waged in our name, it also felt deeply aligned to be part of a burgeoning movement of Christians pushing back against the rising tide of Christian nationalism and fascism in our country - weaving an alternative liberatory network and narrative around what it means to embody Christian faith and witness in these harrowing times.

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We got to be the Uber drivers for a youth group with We the People of Detroit. They are conducting a series of water tests in the 48217 neighborhood of Detroit. It is one of the dirtiest zip codes in the US because it is home to many factories. One resident told us that on his street there are several developmentally disabled neighbors and he made no bones about the fact that the air their neighborhood is forced to breathe was doing the dirty work. 

We also joined We the People of Detroit for a volunteer work day a couple Saturdays ago. Over the past couple years, they've transformed the backyard of an old eastside home and its beatdown garage into a rain garden and gathering space. The justice-weaving work We The People continues to do, at both the policy and grassroots community levels, is enduring and vibrant. A mustard seed model of what walking out hope looks like in our times...

...and always overflowing with a whole lot of joy and laugher! 

Medicine for our souls.

The Craws came to town and we took them on a tour! Sara Jo is a beloved member of our board. She is pictured here with her husband Steve and her son Jeff and his girlfriend Sara. 

Tommy met his mom down in Cincinnati for a long weekend. They visited his godmother Cheryl and her daughter Carrie.

Lindsay's mom came to town in early May and we made time for happy hour in Ypsilanti, visiting with Rev. Roz at Brightmoor Connection Food Pantry, a trip to the Ann Arbor student encampment at UofM, and lots of long walks, talks and meals with friends.

Tommy facilitated a couple personal retreats. He was in Oregon with former Capo Valley colleague and Kardia Kaiomene board member (and dear friend!) Chris Dollar.

Different state. Different river. Different dear friend. On the Allegheny in PA with Sheldon Good. 

Lindsay held down the home front with accompaniment calls, marches, rallies and local solidarity meetings, attended the deeply impactful Annual People's Conference for Palestine (where 1000's gather from across the country and globe), and participated in various local actions pushing for an end to the genocide in Gaza. She also made sure to ease the looooong transition from Winter to Spring with consistent walks with beloveds in beautiful places (pictured below: Detroit's Belle Isle with dear friends Simon Wolff and Kateri Boucher).

Below, Lindsay is caught walking with Bill Wylie-Kellermann on the way to their direct action in the basement cafeteria at the US Senate office building on April 8th. Bill is a retired pastor who only worked part-time for churches so he would have the space in his schedule to organize for peace and justice. 

Lindsay, Bill and 50+ other Christians were arrested for shutting down lunch service in the Senate Cafeteria, proclaiming no one in the White House should be allowed to eat while those in its halls of power are funding and supporting the ongoing war crime of starving the entire population of Gaza. 

They were released later that day. 

Having deepened bonds of solidarity and commitment to see justice for Palestinians.

Their action went viral.

We attended a vigil in downtown Detroit held by American doctors who just got back from a few weeks working in Gaza. The stories were heart-breaking and outrageous. 

We visited the Gaza encampments at the University of Michigan and Wayne State University. These college students summon spiritual depth, moral clarity and political courage. You can read Tommy's write-up here. 

We joined an interfaith coalition at multiple city council meetings in suburban Farmington Hills. We gave public comment and listened to stories from many Arab-Americans and Palestinians who live there. 

After this month's full docket of action, we will be getting away for five days to a friend's cabin in Northern Michigan. Our hearts are full with much vital and fulfilling work, AND our bodies will be more than ready to let down into some of that good shoreside sunshine come month's end.

Redefined

"Definitions belong to the definers, 

not the defined." - Toni Morrison, Beloved

For the past fifteen months, we’ve been participating with a grassroots organizing campaign called Core City Strong. The Core City neighborhood is directly to the west of Woodbridge, the neighborhood in Detroit where we live. Core City is literally right across Rosa Parks Blvd from us. It is 96% Black and has a median household income of under $20,000. Core City summons old memories. There are many burned out buildings and open lots where homes once stood. But a lot of people still live in the neighborhood. On many Spring and Summer afternoons, Tommy runs through Core City, tracking wildflowers, feral cats and friendly faces. 

A dozen years ago, a wealthy white dude named Murray Wikol bought a parcel of land for $1300 in Core City. He tried to sell it for a huge profit a few years later. Then, he pivoted with plans to build a concrete crusher facility. Just a few blocks from homes, schools, churches and organic farms. He applied for a permit and was denied. But he put up electronic fences with barbed wire and started storing and sorting huge mounds of dirt and concrete anyways. Trucks and tractors have been operating on the site. When wind whips from west to east, as it so often does in Detroit, it sends toxic fugitive dust through the neighborhood. The city has given him 127 blight tickets and he still owes more than $130K of it. The city is now suing him. 

Wikol, who lives in a mansion in suburban Bloomfield Hills, claims that all the construction and demolition debris that is stored on his property has been illegally dumped there by other people. Wikol claims that he has cleaned up that land more than anyone else ever. He claims that he is just trying to create jobs and development in the community. Wikol is trying to control the narrative. Code for lying out of his ass. For the past fifteen months, we have listened to Murray Wikol spread his propaganda to news sites, over and over and over again. Everything's been documented by a professional community organizer named Vanessa - as God is our witness, a sure-as-hell, real-life superhero who just so-happens-to-live a block from Wikol’s toxic shit show. 

Radical Be(com)ing

Millions of people in the United States are part of this organically evolving cultural revolution. Because we believe in combining spiritual growth and awakening with practical actions in our daily lives, we are having a profound effect on American culture. - Grace Lee Boggs, The Next American Revolution (2011)

Note: a tad longer than our usual quarterly updates, this is an abridged and edited version of a way-too-long end-of-the-year review Tommy wrote for the Radical Discipleship blog. 

Fifty-five years ago, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King warned that American society was in a spiritual death spiral and that we would not be able to come out of it without undergoing a radical revolution of values. That same American society assassinated him when his radical values led him to speak out clearly against the Vietnam war, and when he threw his support and efforts behind the mass-organization of sanitation workers in our country. 

Is it any wonder that same American society has been working hard ever since to demonize the notion of anything "radical," which simply means to get at the root? Root causes expose America's sins, so we are trained to fear, dismiss, and mistrust anything radical. Grace Lee Boggs was a Chinese-American with a PhD who moved to the eastside of Detroit with her spouse Jimmy Boggs to live in solidarity with low-income residents and labor organizers. She was fully committed to the spiritual and political revolution that Dr. King participated in. Grace used to say this:

We can transform the world if we transform ourselves – and we can transform ourselves if we transform the world.

Grace Lee Boggs believed that this two-sided transformation is rooted in an interconnected network of diverse and scattered partnerships and groups, most of them small and barely visible. These radical incubators can cultivate in us the kind of moral courage we need in order to openly break rank with the supremacy stories (like racism, materialism and militarism) that control every major American institution - and create new ways of being and living. When two or three are gathered in the name of a love supreme, the long arc of justice, a compassionate groan, the inconvenient truth and a whole-hearted humility, Something Else is present and working towards transformation (pictured above: the Nahar Family, beloveds we visited in Elkhart, IN just after the new year - they inspire and lead, in manifold ways, with their enduring and dynamic embodiment of Boggs' and King's vital visions for our times).

Bound

A few months ago, on a gray, thirty-five degree afternoon in Detroit, Tom was sipping on a Reds Rye IPA by the fire at Founders Brewery with his friend Bill Boyle, a former teacher and administrator who is now the executive director of a company that helps organizations (like schools) become more equitable, restorative spaces. When the topic shifted to spirituality, Bill flipped the script and said that he was “religious not spiritual.” Bill broke it all down to the basics. The Latin root of religion means “to be bound.” Bill said that he’s bound to his Zen Buddhist practice, a discipline that leads to love and liberation – for himself and others.

Bill was dropping some really compelling wisdom. In these chaotic, confusing times, we need to be bound and anchored to Something Else. Unfortunately, “organized religion” in America is often weighed down with so much traumatic, dramatic and dogmatic baggage. The guilt and obligation can be so oppressive. On the other hand, “spirituality” can feel like a slippery, vague, kind of non-committal concept. Our Buddhist brother Bill speaks a slightly different dialect, but we are bound together by core convictions. Above all else, we both pivot on a love paradox boldly proclaiming that the only thing we get to keep is what we give away. 

No Matter What

While we do our good works let us not forget that the real solution lies in a world in which charity will have become unnecessary. - Chinua Achebe 

 

Spring is a beautiful time of year to be in Detroit. The leaves and the flowers burst on the scene in fast forward. The red robin returned to our back deck to build another nest for her babies. We open the windows to feel the breeze and hear birdsong every morning and evening - and gunshots every once in a while. We see raccoons, groundhogs, pheasants and falcons. A few weeks ago, we encountered a coyote at dusk, just a block from our condo. On days off, we drive to the beach on Belle Isle (the 982-acre island in the middle of the Detroit River) or to Bishop Lake, a state park about fifty miles west of the city. 

Since our last quarterly blog update, Lindsay has taken blood tests, gotten her hormone levels checked and got a brain scan (on Easter Sunday!). Everything came out "normal." She's been taking heavy doses of Vitamin D and B-12, in addition to the Chinese herbal tea formula prescribed by her acupuncturist Annie. The next step in the referral process is to see an endocrinologist, as Lindsay and her team both suspected her particular Long Covid symptoms to be connected with her nervous system, potentially an onslaught that led to a severe adrenal insufficiency, among other things. Before seeing that specialist (her appointment isn't until 6/15!), Lindsay started following a regimen for adrenal repair on her own - continuing to avoid spiking her heart rate (no high impact cardio, very little social time, medical leave from work), and making some key adjustments around diet (cutting out coffee, alcohol and processed foods, but also upping her intake of electrolytes via a daily I.V. hydration powder, and eating more meals, more regularly - she even braved a stint of eating red meat every day for 3 weeks! Oh, and salt. Lots of salt.). Radical REST was also a key requirement and healer, and regular walking and meditation practices became not only integral medicine, but unexpected delight. 

In mid May, Lindsay asked her homeopath Carrie if this incapacitation of fog and fatigue would now become her new normal. A disability she would live with from here on out, having to remain vigilant and never push beyond her limits for risk of relapse, as has become the reality for far too many afflicted by Long Covid. Carrie was quick to shoot that down. She was extremely optimistic. Because Lindsay dove deep and took the healing process so seriously (and was able to take medical leave): the regimens, rest and remedies, and the ongoing emotional/spiritual work, Carrie affirmed it's all part of the same holistic path to healing. She was confident Lindsay would not only make a full recovery, but be restored to a state of health even deeper than before she became ill.

Spirit Strength

To hope is to gamble. It's to bet on the future, on your desires, on the possibility that an open heart and uncertainty is better than gloom and safety. To hope is dangerous, and yet it is the opposite of fear, for to live is to risk." - Rebecca Solnit

It has been a bit of a scary, exhausting and confusing season for us in Detroit. 

On the one hand, as we enter our second year putting down roots in this beloved city, we have been finding deep joy and grounding in more meaningful place-based work and opportunities to throw in with folks struggling for justice in our own neighborhood and beyond, as well as delighting in the slow weaving of new and old networks of support and kinship. This first quarter of 2023 has been a time of catching our breaths after the holidays and end-of-the-year grind, and returning to regular rhythms of Sabbath rest, rigorous AlAnon program and meetings, and restorative practices which have been composting deep wells of grief, lament, and pain into unexpected gifts of delight, promise, and new life.  

On the other hand, Lindsay has concurrently been suffering from an extreme blend of insomnia, brain fog and fatigue over the past couple of months, and has become increasingly debilitated over the past month. She is finally getting some clarity and comfort from diagnostic tests, including comprehensive blood panels, in addition to a brain scan coming soon. It could be Long Covid, Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and/or other possibilities. Her B12 and iron are also low from 14 years of a pretty strict vegetarian diet. Lindsay is extremely grateful for the avenues of healing, treatment, and diagnosis she now has in place - both western medicine diagnostics (which she wouldn't have access to without our expanded statewide health care) + alternative healing practitioners, who are serving up more tools and medicine for addressing and treating root causes, rather than leaving her only to manage symptoms and live with such a dramatic decrease in functioning. 

Grassroots Gratitude

We touch this strength, our power, who we are in the world, when we are most fully in touch with one another and with the world. - Carter Heyward

On Christmas Eve, it was four degrees in Detroit. Our next door neighbor, Henry, was out grilling steaks in his backyard. He was wearing jeans, a leather jacket, work gloves and a Dodgers baseball hat. We opted to stay inside and enjoy the oven-roasted vegan sausages we bought earlier in the week at the Meijer on 8-Mile. You should have seen the line for the automated checkout. It was at least fifty deep at 11am. 98% of the customers were Black. This year, we’ve been to grocery stores in Mission Viejo (CA), San Clemente (CA), Laguna Beach (CA), Bend (OR), Lawrence (KS), Sacramento (CA), Lodi (CA), Vail (CO), Ypsilanti (MI), Gross Pointe (MI), Troy (MI) and Battle Creek (MI). We haven’t seen anything that remotely resembles the line at the Meijer on 8-Mile. 

A couple weeks ago, the Detroit board of water commissioners held their monthly zoom call. The women of We the People of Detroit rang the bell, recruiting people of conscience to make a public comment. The city-wide moratorium on water shut-offs was (and still is) set to expire at the end of 2022. This year, the water department instituted a “lifeline plan” to help long-time, low-income residents pay their water bills. That’s good news, but too many folks are still falling through the cracks and we are still stuck in a pandemic. The prospect of turning off anyone’s tap is a crisis of ethical proportions - and a public health fiasco too.