This week, let’s think about people power. A lot of people are focussed on their salvation, or how good or bad they are. Jesus never seemed very interested in that. He trusted that God held us all in love, regardless of our behaviour. What he was interested in was how we worked together as a community, how we recognized the problems around us, and how we acted to improve the world for others, how we acted as the healing Messengers in our world. That improvement would have surprising benefits for all. By working together, we would learn tolerance, feel satisfaction from working together, and gain an end-product to make us proud. Moreover, it would be an opportunity for creativity and empowerment for all.
I read an interesting article in The New Yorker magazine about the city of Cascais in Portugal, that both empowered and employed its citizens in participatory budgeting. Here is an excerpt. You can read the whole article by clicking here.
…participatory budgeting is a sort of distributed intelligence, activating the collective mind of the body politic. Each year, the city analyzes a complete list of all the ideas presented at participatory-budgeting sessions, finding there a map of the city’s desires and anxieties. Even if a particular idea does not advance, it can still signal an important issue — a neighborhood with no parks, a busy road without a safe pedestrian crossing — that the city can address by other means. A few years ago, a public school was among the winners of the general vote; it proposed to remove asbestos from old buildings on its campus, and the city now plans to do the same work at every school in the district. A majority of the participatory projects in Cascais tackle unglamorous infrastructure needs; improvements to schools, roads, old buildings, green spaces, and athletic facilities are among the most frequent winners. This has implications far beyond Portugal; it suggests that, even when federal spending is limited and national politics is dysfunctional, an effective participatory-budgeting system can directly engage citizens in politics while satisfying fundamental needs.
from The New Yorker: How to Spend Your City’s Money by Nick Romeo
Jesus teaches “soft” problem solving. In our culture, we usually begin with “hard” problem solving. Instead of asking people what they need, we tell them. Instead of planning for safe and healthy lives, we begin with profit and pride of place. Jesus invites us into participatory problem solving, not for ourselves but for the least of us so that we may see them simply as “us.” So, not a building erected so much as a people gathered.
“Our strategy should be not only to confront empire, but to lay siege to it. To deprive it of oxygen. To shame it. To mock it. With our art, our music, our literature, our stubbornness, our joy, our brilliance, our sheer relentlessness – and our ability to tell our own stories. Stories that are different from the ones we’re being brainwashed to believe.
The corporate revolution will collapse if we refuse to buy what they are selling – their ideas, their version of history, their wars, their weapons, their notion of inevitability.
Remember this: We be many and they be few. They need us more than we need them. Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.”— Arundhati Roy
Other notes…
For friends of the parish of Blandford, our services are open to everyone. If you are a parishioner, please pass this web page on to your friends. They might like to be with us. Palm Sunday and Easter are two services in which kids are particularly welcome. We do not have a children’s program for Good Friday this year, but don’t forget us next year. It is our great honour and delight to serve the community of Aspotogan.
Rev’d Canon Trudy Lebans, Wardens: Brian Mosher, Malcolm Boutilier
Announcements
We are still looking for help with the Palm Sunday meal, and finding some reeds or bulrushes. Many thanks to Ann Stott for taking care of the children’s activity packages. Going forward, I wondered if we could organize a small team to help with children’s little projects, like building little bird houses, or learning about bees, etc.
For the imagination… Let’s think about a new motto to describe us. I used “friends on the beach and in the storm,” but more people need to brainstorm a few ideas. What kind of graphic should we use for the web page and the Sunday bulletin? Look at this Sunday’s bulletin and then imagine some other ideas.