Photo: Stacy Lanyon
A lot of things drew me to Occupy. The most direct thing was
something called the New Sanctuary Movement, which is a faith-based national
immigration movement, a pro-immigrant movement. I was a big organizer for the New Sanctuary Movement.
I really helped it get off the ground. I've dealt with a lot of faith communities on immigration,
not just churches, but synagogues, mosques, temples.
For years we were saying, “This is not working, and if we really want to get
underneath this, we have to go deeper down into the root system, and we have to
talk about economic justice in a larger framework and how that impacts
everything."
I also grew up poor on the west coast. I grew up in Washington. We were the grandchildren of farmers. What for one generation was a cherry orchard got bought out and became an industrial chicken farm that was no longer owned by local people, and that immediately led to Crystal Meth production, which is what all my cousins were doing. I think in places out west people had a sense of apocalypse. Everything was bought. There’s always been this brewing sense of, “It’s time to do something.” Now, I'm in New York City where I’m a minister and do faith-based organizing. When I knew this was coming, I was like, “Will this work as a tactic?" It was so obvious almost immediately that it was working. I had conversations with people before it happened, but I wasn't involved. Once it was so clear it was working on day three, I was like, “Wow, this did something. We’ve gotta get the same group of people who are saying these values all the time in these places of worship. We have to connect these things.” That was what motivated me to get involved. I thought that maybe I could be a connector piece between those two worlds, those universes.
I also grew up poor on the west coast. I grew up in Washington. We were the grandchildren of farmers. What for one generation was a cherry orchard got bought out and became an industrial chicken farm that was no longer owned by local people, and that immediately led to Crystal Meth production, which is what all my cousins were doing. I think in places out west people had a sense of apocalypse. Everything was bought. There’s always been this brewing sense of, “It’s time to do something.” Now, I'm in New York City where I’m a minister and do faith-based organizing. When I knew this was coming, I was like, “Will this work as a tactic?" It was so obvious almost immediately that it was working. I had conversations with people before it happened, but I wasn't involved. Once it was so clear it was working on day three, I was like, “Wow, this did something. We’ve gotta get the same group of people who are saying these values all the time in these places of worship. We have to connect these things.” That was what motivated me to get involved. I thought that maybe I could be a connector piece between those two worlds, those universes.
I first went to the park on day two or three. I had a lot of
friends who were involved, so I knew what was going to happen. I walked around
and hung out. I live at Judson Church on Washington Square Park, so I was down
there every day, whenever I could get away from the church. At some point, a
couple weeks in, I was organizing around this idea of bringing church
people down to the park. Occupy was getting hurt in
the media from the beginning. They were saying, “These are punk little shits,
and they don’t represent anybody. There’s no legitimacy." I wanted to do two things at once. I wanted to see if these dying church structures could offer a little legitimacy. I mean, that’s
the one thing they can offer us before they go. That was in one direction, and
the other direction was maybe to re-radicalize some of these places. I’m being
hard on the churches, but there are amazing people and amazing things happing
in the city, and it’s often faith led, as far as some of the real organizing things
in this country and in this city. A lot of the progressive advances have been
churches, but it’s been a while. I wanted to re-radicalize people and get them
excited.
We organized this march from Judson Church down to Zuccotti Park, and we got everyone we’ve ever worked with to come down with us. We had this golden calf in the shape of the Wall Street Bull made to juxtaposed a religious image of a false idol with this symbolism of capitalism, to hopefully from a picture, tell this story that from a faith perspective, capitalism is a false idol. It’s a false thing. It’s not real. That was the first official time we all came down. We had a big march with about one hundred and twenty people, and we had some friends dressed like Wall Street bankers holding the calf and dancers and faith people dressed in garb. That was great. That was an amazing moment. It was a lot of fun. From that point on, we created an ongoing interfaith service there, not because I felt like Occupy needed an interfaith service to come and preach at anybody, but we wanted to create a porthole presence that would allow all of these communities in, not only to help extend this story of co-relationship but also because of the racial diversity that had opened up.
I really focused on getting African American and Latino churches, and we did. We had a march on the history of a black power march from the seventies. There were about 1000 people that we brought over, many of them African American churches, and it barely made the news. It was frustrating because we were always trying stunts to counter what the narrative was. We got into a lot of religious press. It was interesting trying to figure out how to shape that narrative, how to reignite a faith-based anger around capitalism and economic justice. After that, we were trying to bring in people all the time under the name Occupy Faith. I was always looking to broker different groups that could come in under that faith piece. We had them doing stunts and actions throughout the city. That was a lot of fun. I’m still trying to bring these things together.
We organized this march from Judson Church down to Zuccotti Park, and we got everyone we’ve ever worked with to come down with us. We had this golden calf in the shape of the Wall Street Bull made to juxtaposed a religious image of a false idol with this symbolism of capitalism, to hopefully from a picture, tell this story that from a faith perspective, capitalism is a false idol. It’s a false thing. It’s not real. That was the first official time we all came down. We had a big march with about one hundred and twenty people, and we had some friends dressed like Wall Street bankers holding the calf and dancers and faith people dressed in garb. That was great. That was an amazing moment. It was a lot of fun. From that point on, we created an ongoing interfaith service there, not because I felt like Occupy needed an interfaith service to come and preach at anybody, but we wanted to create a porthole presence that would allow all of these communities in, not only to help extend this story of co-relationship but also because of the racial diversity that had opened up.
I really focused on getting African American and Latino churches, and we did. We had a march on the history of a black power march from the seventies. There were about 1000 people that we brought over, many of them African American churches, and it barely made the news. It was frustrating because we were always trying stunts to counter what the narrative was. We got into a lot of religious press. It was interesting trying to figure out how to shape that narrative, how to reignite a faith-based anger around capitalism and economic justice. After that, we were trying to bring in people all the time under the name Occupy Faith. I was always looking to broker different groups that could come in under that faith piece. We had them doing stunts and actions throughout the city. That was a lot of fun. I’m still trying to bring these things together.
In the faith-based organizing world, we’re always working on
a billion things. It’s Moral Mondays now, based off what’s
happening in North Carolina. We’re trying to have that be a movement builder.
North Carolina clergy started this big hugely successful rally in North
Carolina. They’re coming down every Monday and rallying for things. They were
trying, in part, to use time in the same way that Occupy would use space, which
is to say that our organizing principle will be this day, and we’ll bring all
of our grievances in on this day, and that will be this liturgical, ceremonial
thing. Monday is the day that you go to Town Hall, and you shake your fist. There
are about eleven cities who are seeing if they can duplicate that, and seeing
if it can become a national motion. It’s all movement building. I do a lot of
stuff with this and a lot of stuff with a group called Rainbow Door, which is
about LGBT rights, creating sanctuary spaces here in the city for a lot of the
homeless queer youth. I’m still very much involved with the New Sanctuary Movement
and immigrant organizing as well.
Occupy Faith became a big citywide network of people. We try to use that network for all of these things. One of the things that’s in development and has been for a while is a truth commission on money, debt and power, which we are calling the People’s Investigation of Wall Street. We’re still in the prep work. We’re trying to build a different system, which would be a larger structure that could take a lot of this street movement stuff and still build power with things like unions and non-profits and faith communities, things that don’t always play well together or have even exactly the same analysis. We're trying to create a larger umbrella by which they can operate and build a different narrative. This was an idea we had back when things were striving in the park, and now we have the right constellation of people. There’s a lot of prep work for something like this, so it’s behind the scenes right now. It’s been that way longer than I would have liked, but we have a lot of smart folks working on it. We’re hopeful that in 2014 it can rear its head and become something.
Occupy Faith became a big citywide network of people. We try to use that network for all of these things. One of the things that’s in development and has been for a while is a truth commission on money, debt and power, which we are calling the People’s Investigation of Wall Street. We’re still in the prep work. We’re trying to build a different system, which would be a larger structure that could take a lot of this street movement stuff and still build power with things like unions and non-profits and faith communities, things that don’t always play well together or have even exactly the same analysis. We're trying to create a larger umbrella by which they can operate and build a different narrative. This was an idea we had back when things were striving in the park, and now we have the right constellation of people. There’s a lot of prep work for something like this, so it’s behind the scenes right now. It’s been that way longer than I would have liked, but we have a lot of smart folks working on it. We’re hopeful that in 2014 it can rear its head and become something.
In the meantime, it’s Moral Mondays and immigrant rights. We have 12 million people who are undocumented in this country, roughly. We don’t even know. That’s a huge social reality. They can’t go to the cops, can’t go to the hospital. Where do they go? They go to faith communities. I think churches have always been aware that there has been this really strange thing happening in the United States that we don’t report on, but if you scratch the surface of any economic transaction, a few steps back, there’s someone illegally documented helping that happen. We are propped up on those 12 million people who all came here following the same American dream that everybody else did. This country has now shifted the rhetoric of “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free” to a gated community. After 9/11, we went from Immigration and Naturalized Services (INS) to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Our immigration department was a bunch of social workers, and now they’re a bunch of cops. It’s now about who do you keep out, who do you get rid of? Our society changed overnight, and these people are being criminalized in mass. It’s a slave class that operates in the United States.
That’s something really important to me by sheer scale, and we’re still really working hard on it. Like with Occupy, it goes through moments of popularity where people want to talk about it. This is such a scapegoat in American public life. A lot of our Occupy Faith people who were really galvanized and excited by Occupy still work with us on the immigration piece because immigration as a story is about the movement of capital across borders. We have a world society where borders are invisible to money. The capital can move, but the humans dependent upon that capital cannot move, so like debt, it becomes a metaphor for the concentration of wealth in certain regions. People like to say, “Ah, they’re coming in and taking our jobs. Why can’t they go to their own homes?” It’s like, “Well, there’s a reason. It’s because we went to their homes, and we stole their money or their resources, or we created trade deals to allow us to export slavery and call it trade, so we can pay people nothing, and it’s not technically slavery because they can do whatever they want, but we’ve set-up a game where we have all of their resources. We make them sell and strip mine their natural resources to pay off the debt we have created for them.”
If you look at immigration and you really try to make the argument as to why we have to look at this in a different way, it inevitably brings you to an Occupy like discussion, where all of our grievances share this elaborate netting, this root system. I continue to work on this because it’s so immediately existential for the churches and mosques and Buddhist monasteries and everywhere we work with. That is so much the human reality, almost more than anything else, despite its being one issue among many on the news. We are kind of post Christian here at Judson on some level, but in that tradition, the number one moral commandment in the biblical text is to welcome the stranger in your midst. People always go to culture war and think it’s a religious value to bash gays after two obscure texts that might be anti-gay, but there are a mountain of things that are pro-immigrant, but nobody gives a shit about that, or there are a mountain of texts that say we should abolish debt and not have usury laws, but no one wants to talk about that. For us, we’re pretty simple here at Judson Church, just really going back to that tradition and really trying to take that seriously, and somehow that make you radical and out there.
To bring us back to the Occupy movement and why I was into it, it felt like a total extension of our values and of our ancient values, our radical prophetic calling that I think churches have against empire, which is the biblical story. That’s what it’s all about. It’s this confrontation of empire, empire being the mythical representation of the anti-faith, the lack of faith that we’re all together and taken care of, that we’re okay. What's been created out of that is empire, safety, ice, so for me the question is the reverse. Why isn’t anyone who is faithful to these texts, why aren’t they down in the streets with everybody? I was raised by southern Baptists, and I don’t agree with them in a lot of ways, but a lot of what they tell us about all of those biblical lessons, it’s like, how can they say those things and not be out on the street calling out the core problems in American society now? Occupy was a no-brainer for me. The only questions were tactics, like, “What’s the best way to do this, and how do we negotiate it?” It’s the greatest thing that’s happened in the city for me.
I was a Buddhist monk before I was a minister, but I was always very involved with social justice. What I'm always hoping to accomplish is to shape the conversation in this larger way. This was the embodiment of everything we were trying to do. That became a social reality for generations of Americans, and I think it still is. I’m actually very hopeful and optimistic about what it can be regardless of the rhetoric. It’s not as popular in the news right now. We’re way ahead of the Civil Rights movement by time. We’re having this conversation, you and I. We didn’t have that. To me it’s been a tremendously positive thing in a world that’s set-up to keep us from having that conversation at all cost, to keep us from connecting as humans at all cost and having a decent conversation. We’re supposed to meet in a coffee shop and pay money for things we don’t need and talk about bullshit jobs we don’t like. That’s how we’re supposed to interact. Instead, we’re here. I thank Occupy for that.
We’ve seen a slow
drift in this country of wealth being concentrated into the hands of fewer and fewer people, and as that happens, the social realities on the ground are favoring less and less people. I’m from the west coast. I was
just home for the summer with my parents. Every conversation I have is about the collapse, whether is be with economists, environmentalists or with religious people.
I went to seminary. We’d talk about the apocalypse coming. I don’t have a
conversation that’s not about this collapse. It’s different for every person in
every field. The environmentalists say we’re headed for a disaster. Economists are
talking about the depreciation of the dollar as if there are going to be biblical ramifications when that drops. In the
span of a week, every one under a certain age that I knew was talking about the
collapse. “What are you doing for the next few years?” “Well, I have a law
degree, but I think I’m just going to learn how to farm, so that I’m better
prepared after the collapse." I was laughing, but we all know that we’re headed
toward a cliff.
We have an economy that can’t sustain itself, a culture that can’t sustain itself. We’re spiritual materialists in a world where that doesn’t work.This collapse is inevitable. When I hear people asking what Occupy is trying to change, I'm like, “What naive planet are you from?” This is an existential reality. It’s deeper than any of that. You must have some kind of wealth to be asking such stupid questions. I feel the same with people who are like, “Oh, you should form a political party.” Why would we do that? I already know how to be irrelevant. Like that obviously gets anything done. There are people who are ready to see that collapse coming and people who aren't, but for more and more of the world, the collapse already came. That’s the real joke of this. The collapse did come, and it happened a long time ago for most people on this planet. It’s only a very few of us on the tip of the iceberg. I’m white. I’m straight. I work in New York City. I have the privilege of not having to think about that all of the time, but those days are coming to a close for more and more of us.
I’m particularly frustrated with church. The truth of church is that it has always been an empire and an enforcer. The Christian church became a political party for the Romans, and ever since then, we've been the domesticating agent of the government, so I’m not a total idiot about that, but I’m an idealist too and sort of a romantic. I do believe. I have hope that our calling is to be in solidarity with those who are suffering, those who are poor. Even if we are people who have relative degrees of privilege, our calling primarily is to be with them. Christ is those people. That’s literal. That’s not figurative. My part of the whole Occupy world is that simple piece, to get faith people realizing that this is not something tangential to their faith traditions. It’s central to it.
I’d like to see a world that’s closer to the ground, a world that’s post-history, a world where we live our interconnectedness truth from the inside out, not as an idea, but as a felt emotional reality. I’m an environmentalist. For me, the political aspect of Occupy was just part of it. I’m looking for a world where we’re living closer to the ground in local communities, where decisions about our lives are made by looking people in the eye, where we have true exchanges, where our lives mean something, where the talk we have equals the world we build. Right now, it’s not true. It doesn’t matter what we say to each other. Someone else is making the social reality, the economic reality. I’m part of the rebel alliance. I want to destroy the empire and create a world where we trust humans enough to do it. That’s the nut of it—the destruction of the empire and the rise of humans.
I’m one of the rare Christians who think that the bible and the biblical history that is illustrated is not the record of a good thing, but instead it’s a record of a bad thing. We existed as homosapians for 200,000 years on this planet, long before recorded history started, and we were fine. We were okay. Something happened that was a sickness. I’m a big believer that we suffer from city sickness. I think that we’re seeing modernity wear off and seeing the limits of what it can offer us. For me, Occupy is not only the beginning of a political movement. It’s the beginning of a spiritual awakening on some level. It gets accused of airy-fairy talk, but that’s why I’m with Occupy, because they’re cool with that talk and the recognition that we’ve got to shake off not just how fucked up the American political system is, what a plutocracy that is, but that there’s a whole system of ideas that’s embedded inside of us that have to get shaken up.
That’s another thing that Occupy told us, that even if you get in a circle, it’s not enough to say fuck Pfizer or whatever else. We have internalized these things, and there’s internal work that we have to do together. That’s part of why it didn’t hold. We’ve gotta take responsibility for how we conduct ourselves with each other and all of the internalized policemen in our heads that tell us to act certain ways and have domineering power, all that stuff. Sometimes it was really pretty, and sometimes it was really ugly, but to me this is like birth. It’s like a contraction. I think we’re suffering from contractions, this whole planet and this whole race of humans, and who knows where it goes.
We’re a species that destroyed our environment and ate up all of the natural resources and grew fat and are killing ourselves. There’s another species that does this. Caterpillars do this. They eat up everything, and they destroy their own environment until there’s no food left. I’m kind of hopeful that Occupy is the first fluttering in that cocoon, that we’re all fat inside, that we’ve eaten up everything and now we’re this bloated, miserable, isolated thing. That that wall of isolation and misery, that whole “You’re over there, I’m over here” is just us going through the change, and maybe now we’re fluttering. I’m hopeful. I don’t think nature makes mistakes. I don’t think there is evil in the world. I think that’s a myth. The bible says that too by the way, and everybody likes to brush past that. I think that there is no accident that things are happening the way that they are. Nature tends to find a way, and I think that we’re part of that, and this is part of that. I know that’s true.
We have an economy that can’t sustain itself, a culture that can’t sustain itself. We’re spiritual materialists in a world where that doesn’t work.This collapse is inevitable. When I hear people asking what Occupy is trying to change, I'm like, “What naive planet are you from?” This is an existential reality. It’s deeper than any of that. You must have some kind of wealth to be asking such stupid questions. I feel the same with people who are like, “Oh, you should form a political party.” Why would we do that? I already know how to be irrelevant. Like that obviously gets anything done. There are people who are ready to see that collapse coming and people who aren't, but for more and more of the world, the collapse already came. That’s the real joke of this. The collapse did come, and it happened a long time ago for most people on this planet. It’s only a very few of us on the tip of the iceberg. I’m white. I’m straight. I work in New York City. I have the privilege of not having to think about that all of the time, but those days are coming to a close for more and more of us.
I’m particularly frustrated with church. The truth of church is that it has always been an empire and an enforcer. The Christian church became a political party for the Romans, and ever since then, we've been the domesticating agent of the government, so I’m not a total idiot about that, but I’m an idealist too and sort of a romantic. I do believe. I have hope that our calling is to be in solidarity with those who are suffering, those who are poor. Even if we are people who have relative degrees of privilege, our calling primarily is to be with them. Christ is those people. That’s literal. That’s not figurative. My part of the whole Occupy world is that simple piece, to get faith people realizing that this is not something tangential to their faith traditions. It’s central to it.
I’d like to see a world that’s closer to the ground, a world that’s post-history, a world where we live our interconnectedness truth from the inside out, not as an idea, but as a felt emotional reality. I’m an environmentalist. For me, the political aspect of Occupy was just part of it. I’m looking for a world where we’re living closer to the ground in local communities, where decisions about our lives are made by looking people in the eye, where we have true exchanges, where our lives mean something, where the talk we have equals the world we build. Right now, it’s not true. It doesn’t matter what we say to each other. Someone else is making the social reality, the economic reality. I’m part of the rebel alliance. I want to destroy the empire and create a world where we trust humans enough to do it. That’s the nut of it—the destruction of the empire and the rise of humans.
I’m one of the rare Christians who think that the bible and the biblical history that is illustrated is not the record of a good thing, but instead it’s a record of a bad thing. We existed as homosapians for 200,000 years on this planet, long before recorded history started, and we were fine. We were okay. Something happened that was a sickness. I’m a big believer that we suffer from city sickness. I think that we’re seeing modernity wear off and seeing the limits of what it can offer us. For me, Occupy is not only the beginning of a political movement. It’s the beginning of a spiritual awakening on some level. It gets accused of airy-fairy talk, but that’s why I’m with Occupy, because they’re cool with that talk and the recognition that we’ve got to shake off not just how fucked up the American political system is, what a plutocracy that is, but that there’s a whole system of ideas that’s embedded inside of us that have to get shaken up.
That’s another thing that Occupy told us, that even if you get in a circle, it’s not enough to say fuck Pfizer or whatever else. We have internalized these things, and there’s internal work that we have to do together. That’s part of why it didn’t hold. We’ve gotta take responsibility for how we conduct ourselves with each other and all of the internalized policemen in our heads that tell us to act certain ways and have domineering power, all that stuff. Sometimes it was really pretty, and sometimes it was really ugly, but to me this is like birth. It’s like a contraction. I think we’re suffering from contractions, this whole planet and this whole race of humans, and who knows where it goes.
We’re a species that destroyed our environment and ate up all of the natural resources and grew fat and are killing ourselves. There’s another species that does this. Caterpillars do this. They eat up everything, and they destroy their own environment until there’s no food left. I’m kind of hopeful that Occupy is the first fluttering in that cocoon, that we’re all fat inside, that we’ve eaten up everything and now we’re this bloated, miserable, isolated thing. That that wall of isolation and misery, that whole “You’re over there, I’m over here” is just us going through the change, and maybe now we’re fluttering. I’m hopeful. I don’t think nature makes mistakes. I don’t think there is evil in the world. I think that’s a myth. The bible says that too by the way, and everybody likes to brush past that. I think that there is no accident that things are happening the way that they are. Nature tends to find a way, and I think that we’re part of that, and this is part of that. I know that’s true.
I have no idea what our potential is because I’m from
the suburbs. I’m from fast food. I have no cultural heritage. I was from strip
malls. We’re all from some off-ramp of the highway
in the west. It’s hard for me to imagine what that would look
like, other than in value statements. I feel like if I’m lucky,
my grandkids will start to get to visualize it. They
say you experience God through love, that that’s not just a commandment, that
that’s an existential reality, that the underlying interdependence that we all
know is true scientifically. We wake up to that reality when we have compassion
for each other. That’s a metaphor for what God is. The act of
being in love and taking care of people and having love for people is
itself the process of waking up, realizing that we're not separate things. We’re on a planet falling through space, and if we don’t hold onto each other, we’re going to fall off.
That’s the business I see myself in, and I’ll use anything at my disposal to do it. The church is just the carrier wave, and the Christian history is just the carrier wave for a process of wakefulness that comes from compassion. To me, anything beyond the felt experience of that can only be poetry and metaphor because it’s beyond human construct and ideas. I have a lot of ways of talking about it, but they’re all kind of canned. That’s where Buddhism was helpful because you could create ways of talking that point to realities that can’t be finely articulated. Christianity used to do this. That’s what parables were. They were ways of pointing beyond themselves. I can’t see it, but I believe we all feel it. I think that reality that I can’t see yet, all of us have immediate access to that when we love ourselves and when we love other people. Those two things cannot be done separately. They can only be done at the same time, so that’s the reality now, and I don’t think we necessarily have to wait.
Okay, this street thing didn’t work. We all still live in an empire. It’s Star Wars times. We all knew in the seventies what we were going to grow up and live in, and it’s our job to create that society one person at a time, and I'm doing the work of Occupy for me when I love myself. You ask, "Do I love myself?" "Well, I’m overweight. I don’t dress right. I’ve got scars. I’m stupid. I’m not as funny.” Can I love myself still? That’s it, and if we then share that with each other, now the occupation is two, and that’s how it will happen. It will happen like that, one person at a time. So yeah, I don’t know what that looks like, but I feel it every day, and that’s my calling is to always hold it and feel it and try to help others feel it and learn from others that feel it better than I do. Then off of that interpersonal foundation, build better neighborhood blocks, better church communities, better neighborhoods that are cities and countries and planets, and that’s Occupy I think at its core. It’s an expression of that, that fundamental faith that’s not religious. It’s trans-religious. Religions are just local history streams of people trying to get it right. We’re ultimately all post religion, I think. We just use the buildings.
Occupy did that really, really well. I don’t think you could put the genie back in the bottle. I think this is it. I think this is a momentous event horizon thing, whatever metaphor—birth, butterfly, event horizon, whatever. As the economy situation continues to decline, as the collapse continues to manifest in different ways, people will now remember, “Oh yeah, Occupy.” That will be in the bones of too many humans, and maybe we won’t call it Occupy. Maybe we’ll find a better name. I never liked the name Occupy originally, but ya know, who cares? I think there is no going back. There are too many haters with money, but in the end, we always win. On a local community level, there are too many good parties and gatherings of love and laugh. That’s what really is happening in the world, and I think that has more sway than we realize. I think that has more truth than we know. It just doesn’t feel like it in that weird politically funded MSNBC stream of the world. I’m totally a rose colored optimist.
Interview by Stacy Lanyon
http://buildingcompassionthroughaction.blogspot.com/
https://www.facebook.com/stacylanyon
https://instagram.com/stacylanyon/
https://twitter.com/StacyLanyon
http://stacylanyon.com/
That’s the business I see myself in, and I’ll use anything at my disposal to do it. The church is just the carrier wave, and the Christian history is just the carrier wave for a process of wakefulness that comes from compassion. To me, anything beyond the felt experience of that can only be poetry and metaphor because it’s beyond human construct and ideas. I have a lot of ways of talking about it, but they’re all kind of canned. That’s where Buddhism was helpful because you could create ways of talking that point to realities that can’t be finely articulated. Christianity used to do this. That’s what parables were. They were ways of pointing beyond themselves. I can’t see it, but I believe we all feel it. I think that reality that I can’t see yet, all of us have immediate access to that when we love ourselves and when we love other people. Those two things cannot be done separately. They can only be done at the same time, so that’s the reality now, and I don’t think we necessarily have to wait.
Okay, this street thing didn’t work. We all still live in an empire. It’s Star Wars times. We all knew in the seventies what we were going to grow up and live in, and it’s our job to create that society one person at a time, and I'm doing the work of Occupy for me when I love myself. You ask, "Do I love myself?" "Well, I’m overweight. I don’t dress right. I’ve got scars. I’m stupid. I’m not as funny.” Can I love myself still? That’s it, and if we then share that with each other, now the occupation is two, and that’s how it will happen. It will happen like that, one person at a time. So yeah, I don’t know what that looks like, but I feel it every day, and that’s my calling is to always hold it and feel it and try to help others feel it and learn from others that feel it better than I do. Then off of that interpersonal foundation, build better neighborhood blocks, better church communities, better neighborhoods that are cities and countries and planets, and that’s Occupy I think at its core. It’s an expression of that, that fundamental faith that’s not religious. It’s trans-religious. Religions are just local history streams of people trying to get it right. We’re ultimately all post religion, I think. We just use the buildings.
Occupy did that really, really well. I don’t think you could put the genie back in the bottle. I think this is it. I think this is a momentous event horizon thing, whatever metaphor—birth, butterfly, event horizon, whatever. As the economy situation continues to decline, as the collapse continues to manifest in different ways, people will now remember, “Oh yeah, Occupy.” That will be in the bones of too many humans, and maybe we won’t call it Occupy. Maybe we’ll find a better name. I never liked the name Occupy originally, but ya know, who cares? I think there is no going back. There are too many haters with money, but in the end, we always win. On a local community level, there are too many good parties and gatherings of love and laugh. That’s what really is happening in the world, and I think that has more sway than we realize. I think that has more truth than we know. It just doesn’t feel like it in that weird politically funded MSNBC stream of the world. I’m totally a rose colored optimist.
Interview by Stacy Lanyon
http://buildingcompassionthroughaction.blogspot.com/
https://www.facebook.com/stacylanyon
https://instagram.com/stacylanyon/
https://twitter.com/StacyLanyon
http://stacylanyon.com/