Spirit in Action
Nichola Torbett - Network of Spiritual Progressives
Nichola Torbett is National Organizer for the Network of Spiritual Progressives (NSP). She conveyed powerfully the vision of NSP as she spoke in Eau Claire on October 19, 2006, helping crystalize the formation of a local chapter, here in the Chippewa Valley.
- Broadcast on:
- 14 Dec 2008
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I have no hands but yours to tend my sheep. No handkerchief but yours to dry the eyes of those who weep. I have no arms but yours with which to hold. The ones grown weary from the struggle and weak from growing old. I have no voice but yours with which to see. To let my children know that I am out and out is everything. I have no way to feed the hungry souls. No clothes to give and make it the ragged and the morn. So be my heart, my hand, my tongue, through you I will be done. Fingers have I none to help and time. Welcome to Spirit in Action, my name is Mark Helpsmeat. Each week I'll be bringing you stories of people living lives of fruitful service, of peace, community, compassion, creative action and progressive efforts. I'll be tracing the spiritual roots that support and nourish them in their service. Above all, I'll seek out light, love and helping hands, being shared between our many neighbors on this planet, hoping to inspire and encourage you to sink deep roots and produce sacred fruit in your own life. I have no way to open people's eyes, except that you will show them how to trust the inner mind. On this edition of Spirit in Action, we are going to listen to a speech given by Nicola Torbett. She is the national organizer for a network of spiritual progressives and she was in Eau Clare on October 19th of 2006. She conveyed powerfully the vision of the NSP, helping to crystallize the formation of a new local chapter here in the Chippewa Valley. The network of spiritual progressives is the creative child of Rabbi Michael Lerner and a potential home and umbrella for a diverse assortment of religious and non-religious participants, concerned for a better world. Nicola does an excellent job of stirring the imagination, raising up hope and direction. I'm sure you'll enjoy what she has to say on Spirit in Action. I'm the national organizer for the network of spiritual progressives, also known as the NSP, which has nothing to do with Northern State's power. The NSP is made up of a group of people who have come together from a variety of different faith traditions. We're an interfaith organization also open to people who do not identify as religious but are drawn to the core ideas. We're concerned about the way religion, so many of our religions, are being used to justify violence and discrimination and repression. We feel called by our faith or by our belief in humanity to work for a different vision for America, and specifically an America that leaves the world in kindness and generosity and compassion. So that's sort of our mission is to transform the American culture into a culture of generosity and respect and kindness. We're hoping that that vision can begin to get us past the homophilic tendencies, the shrill polarities of left and right or red state or blue state, so that we can actually have a national conversation again. So I want to start tonight with a story, and it's a story about a family that was living in a Midwestern town in Ohio, where I grew up, and a mother and daughter were out in the yard and they heard a strange sort of yowling sound coming from their hedges. So the daughter went over to investigate what was happening, and she looked under the hedges and she saw that there was a cat under there. When she kind of crawled back and started to pull the cat out, she realized that the cat had been shot through the back of the neck with an arrow, like from a child's bow and arrow set, and had actually lost quite a bit of blood. So the mother and daughter got the cat into a box and they took it to the vet, and the vet said that the only way to save the cat was to transport it to a veterinary hospital in Cleveland and do this emergency surgery procedure, which was going to cost several thousand dollars between the transportation and the surgery, and this was a stray cat. There aren't many of our families that could afford to spend several thousand dollars on a cat that just shows up under the bushes, and this family especially could not afford to do that, because the daughter had just gone through a series of chemotherapy treatments, so they were struggling with huge medical debt, but they decided that they couldn't bring themselves to just let this animal die. They decided to put the cost of the treatment on a credit card, you know, huge risk to take. And somehow the canton repository, the paper I grew up with, got a hold of this story, and they ran the story about the sacrifice that this family had made. Not only were there about ten offers to adopt the cat, but money started pouring in. Not only was the cost of the care for the cat covered, but they were able to pay off all of their medical debts. And that's the kind of story about the way generosity inspires generosity that I think is so essential for us to talk about. When I talk about how do we create a culture of kindness and generosity, it's really that simple, and now I'm going to go on and make it much more complicated because that's what I do, but I do want to say it's that simple. So now, why is it not really that simple? If you're like me, when you hear a story like that, and I think most of us who pay attention have heard stories like that where generosity has inspired more generosity, where people act in surprisingly kind ways, those stories seem sort of quaint and somehow out of step with our culture, almost as if they're from an airbrushed by gone era. Why is that, why does it seem that those acts are out of context in our culture? We live in a culture in which the dominant worldview of the 21st century is that the world is a scary and hostile place. There is danger afoot. You don't have to do anything more than turn on the television at nine o'clock at night to see someone murdered. In fact, you almost can't turn on the television at nine o'clock without seeing someone, usually a woman, who has been murdered. And our television news contributes to this climate of fear as well, with stories like tune in to find out about the kitchen appliance that seems harmless but is actually killing you, right? Story at 11. So there is this climate of fear. And on top of that, most of us who are on email get several emails a day from the widows of foreign dignitaries of small countries that want us to help them transfer funds if we will only give them our bank account information. So we've learned to react to what seems like an act of reaching out or an act of generosity with a dose of cynicism. And this also has an effect on how we raise our children because I think most of us want our children to grow up to be open-hearted and compassionate and generous. But we also want to prepare them for the real world, right? So we often give them mixed messages about how to navigate between trust and suspicion, between openness and cynicism. The dominant worldview that comes to us from our workplaces, our media, and even the schools is that the world is dangerous, that people are fundamentally self-interested, and that you'd better look out for your own interests or else you're going to get taken. It's that phrase looking out for number one, right, which we hear quite often. This first strand that contributes to the story of the cat seeming kind of quaint and outdated is this notion that we need to be a little bit afraid and a little bit suspicious in order to take care of ourselves. At the collective level, this worldview manifests as a politics of paranoia, this belief that there are people who hate us because we are free and in preemptive war, right? We have to attack them before they attack us, which is just one step from we need to watch out for ourselves or we're going to get taken. It's just an elaboration of that worldview. So that's one strand. And then a second strand is actually a legacy of the enlightenment and the triumph of scientific materialism, which tells us that that which is real is that which can be measured or perceived by the senses. So not only is that used to reject or ridicule any kind of religious or spiritual belief, but it also ends up manifesting itself in a belief that what really matters is material goods, the collection and accumulation of material wealth and material possessions. So that when we speak of the bottom line in accounting or just in colloquial speech, what we really mean is how is this going to affect money and the power I need to protect my money and my investments? To be rational in our culture is to be always vigilant about looking out for your own material interests. That's what it means to be a reasonable person in our culture. So these two streams of belief coming together have created what we in the NSP call a spiritual crisis. What do we mean by a spiritual crisis and why is this contributing to it? Because this kind of worldview severely limits our ability to fulfill our spiritual or meaning needs, the need to feel like my life has some meaning beyond accumulating stuff, the need to feel like I'm contributing to the common good, to something larger than myself and the need to feel seen and heard and held in loving community with those around me. We are living with a great big difference, we are washed by the very same rain, we are swimming in a stream together, some in power and some in pain, we can worship this ground, we walk on, cherishing the beams that live beside, love these spirits will live forever, we're all swimming to the other side. I am alone, I am searching, hungering for answers in my time, I am balanced at the break and wisdom, I'm impatient to receive a sign, I'm on board with my sentences open, perfection in my crime, in humility, I will listen, we are all swimming to the other side, we are living with a great big difference, we are washed by the very same rain, we are swimming in a stream together, some in power and some in pain, we can worship this ground, we walk on, cherishing the beams that live beside, love these spirits will live forever, we're all swimming to the other side. On this journey, thoughts and feelings, finding intuition in my head, my heart, I am gathering the twos together, I'm preparing to do my part, all of those who have come before me, land together and be my guide, loving lessons that I will follow, we're all swimming to the other side, we are living with a great big difference, we are washed by the very same rain, we are swimming in a stream together, some in power and some in pain, we can worship this ground, we walk on, cherishing the beams that live beside, love these spirits will live forever, we're all swimming to the other side. When we get there, we'll discover all of the gifts we've been given to, share, have been with us since lives begin, and we never notice they were there, we can dance at the brink of wisdom, never recognizing that we've arrived, loving spirits will live together, we're all swimming to the other side, we are living with a great big difference, we are washed by the very same rain, we are swimming in a stream together, some in power and some in pain, we can worship this ground, we walk on, cherishing the beams that live beside, loving spirits will live forever, we're all swimming to the other side, we are living with a great big difference, we are washed by the very same rain, we are swimming in a stream together, some in power and some in pain, we can worship this ground, we walk on, cherishing the beams that live beside, love these spirits will live forever, we're all swimming to the other side, loving spirits will live forever, we are all swimming to the other side. That was Swim into the other side, it's by a group called Magpie and they have many other wonderful songs as well. We're listening to a speech that was given by Nicola Torbett, she is the national organizer for the network of spiritual progressives and this is spirit in action, let's go back and listen to Nicola as she continues this address that she gave to a number of folks interested in NSP here in Eau Claire in October of 2006. Our workplaces teach us that the way to view other human beings is in terms of what they can do for me, there's this idea of networking which is meeting someone who I know may be able to help me down the line whether to get a job or to maybe meet a potential romantic partner or to help me find clients for my business, so it's this very instrumental way of viewing human beings, rather than seeing them as embodiments of the sacred or if you're uncomfortable with the religious language as having inherent worth and dignity as the Unitarian Universalists say. So it's an instrumental way of viewing other human beings and most of us hate having to live in this kind of culture. We hunger for more meaning in our lives, we hunger for more authentic connection, there's a reason that a book called The Purpose Driven Life has been a bestseller for months and months and months, people are hungry for a sense of purpose. At the same time, most of us know that the way we're going to be judged successful in our work and to a large degree in our lives is how much money and power we manage to accumulate either for ourselves or for our company or how we make our boss or supervisor look to their boss or supervisor, right? That's what's going to determine whether you get ahead in the workplace. So there's sort of this cross purposes and these ideas are coming not out of just my speculation but a series of interviews that were done over a 30 year period with thousands of low to middle income workers about sources of workplace stress. And the number one source of stress that those people cited is that they felt their work had no meaning. Yes, they wanted more money, they were concerned about economics but they were concerned about economics as compensation for what felt like a wasted life. And I think that our national tendency to over shop and over eat and over indulge in all kinds of ways is a manifestation of our hunger for something more in our lives. So there's this conflict between believing on the one hand that in knowing in our hearts that we want something more and then feeling like well this is the real world so we better just get used to it because it's really just about this kind of money game that is happening on a large scale. This consciousness which the NSP calls market consciousness has also tainted our personal relationship so it's not just confined to the world of work. We learn this instrumental way of viewing other human beings and then we forget how to actually connect with someone so that our friendships become a sort of exchange of goods and services. I will give to you with the reasonable expectation that you will give to me about the same amount. Well what's the problem with that? Well as people get older or as people get sick and they aren't able to give as much then those friendships become thinner just at the time when people need them the most. The same way of viewing people has also tainted our romantic and family relationships. I don't know how many of you are in the dating world right now but I certainly am and especially since the advent of internet dating it feels like there's sort of this supermarket of potential partners and you go out there and you taste a little bit of this and you try a little bit of that kind of see what tastes the best to you. And then eventually when it comes time to settle down to choose a partner the reasoning goes something like this. Among all of the people who are likely to fall for me in the immediate future this person seems able to meet the most of my needs. So it becomes about who can meet more of my needs. What's the problem with that? Well the problem with that is that it creates tremendous insecurity in our relationships because the chances are if I'm with someone that eventually sometime in his or her life that person is going to meet someone who at least seems to meet more of their needs. And then if they are a rational person according to the old bottom line it would be completely reasonable for them to go be with that other person and leave me according to this view that you have to look out for yourself. So it creates tremendous instability in our marriages, in our relationships, in our families. And the problem is not that gay and lesbian people want to get married. The problem is that we've come to look at each other as a kind of commodity as a way of filling something in me. When the religious right says we have a crisis in our families they're absolutely right. We do have a crisis in families in this country. But it's not about gay and lesbian people wanting to get married and it's not about women having an equal role in a partnership. It's about this way of viewing each other which we learn in the world of work and which is reinforced in all parts of our culture. So there is a real tragedy in all of this. And that is that there are many, many people, maybe some people in this room, who feel that they are never seen and valued for who they in their essence are. But instead are valued for what they do for everyone else. And that is a very, very painful situation and it contributes to loneliness and alienation and I think rage. I don't know if you have a lot of road rage in Eau Claire but I know that in California where I live it's a huge problem. And what I experience when I'm driving down the highway and the SUV cuts me off is am I invisible? And then immediately I'm going to make him see me. And I think that that is at the root of a lot of our road rage. This feeling that we are not seen, that we are not valued for who we are. So most of us end up feeling as if we are living sort of at one remove from our own lives. And able to make contact with what? Some essence that we can't quite name but we think well if I just had more time I would know what that essential meaning of my life is. But I don't have time. So I'm going to save up my time and I'm going to save up my money and I'm going to go on vacation. And so we go on vacation and we may have a wonderful time. But then we come back and discover that nothing has really changed. That whatever meaning we were after for our lives is still not there. The fact that we are living at one remove from our own lives becomes visible in some kind of funny ways sometimes. It happened to me the other day I was ordering my latte which I do way too often in the mornings. And the barista said to me enjoy your latte and I chirped out you too. And then I thought oh wait that's the wrong script right? I didn't realize that I was following a script until I flubbed it. But I think very often we are following scripts in our interactions and not being fully morally present to the human beings that are behind the counter or in line with us or in the cubicle next to us at work. I think there's not a huge difference between that sort of remove, that sense of being one step removed. And what a lot of us found disappointing in say John Kerry's presidential campaign when he talked about or he would say things like from coast to coast, from east to west the people have spoken and the people want change. And we just felt like is there anyone in there, you know, it just seemed kind of hollow. And I think that just as I was playing the role of person ordering morning coffee, John Kerry was playing the role of someone being presidential and it rang hollow. I think a lot of us felt the same thing when Gore ran in 2000. And those of us who've seen an inconvenient truth think there was our presidential candidate. You know, I wasn't he like that when he was on the campaign trail because he's so real. He's like in full color. So there's this issue of moral presence of being fully present to the people around you. And we've sort of lost our ability to do that, the inability to be genuinely present with each other in more than an instrumental way coupled with this belief that we have to serve money and power above everything else has resulted in what we call a spiritual crisis. The only people talking much about this spiritual crisis are people in the religious right. And they are decrying the selfishness, the materialism, the commercialism of our culture. And I think they're absolutely right. Where I part company is when they blame it on what they call special interest groups. And I think the phrase special interest group is a very powerful phrase. It's a phrase that is often used to refer to whatever the out group is in any given culture. So historically in Europe it was the Jews who were causing the selfishness of materialism. In this country, historically it's been the African Americans and the Native Americans. Right now it's very much gays and lesbians who want special favors somehow. What's powerful about this phrase and in some ways accurate is that those special interest groups are often trying to get their piece of the pie of the economic materialism that is at the heart of our culture. So in a way they are reflecting the selfishness of materialism and commercialization. But there's a huge difference between reflecting something in a culture and causing it. And that's where the confusion comes in. So we also feel that there is a kind of irony or a kind of maybe hypocrisy in the way that through an alliance with corporate America the right has served corporate interests and in a way perpetuated the very cycle of selfishness and materialism and money and power above all else that they are at the same time critiquing. I don't know that that's intentional but that has been an effect of that alliance. In the network of spiritual progressives we are bringing people together to address the spiritual crisis in what we hope is a more genuine way. We haven't really found that the left is doing that at all. Historically and especially I think now there is a kind of knee jerk hostility to the word spiritual in some sectors of the left as if anyone who has a spiritual practice or believes in God is in some way less intelligent than others or somehow less mature or less evolved or has a father complex or something you know there's all this intellectualization of it. So there's a real resistance to looking at spiritual needs and instead the left tends to focus on economic interests and civil rights and both of those are extremely important and I don't mean to be saying those aren't important issues. At the same time they end up sort of playing into the hands of people who are really feeling the spiritual crisis. In the beginning there's life that came forth, the oceans heaved, the mountains were cleaved, the permanent stone at the center of being immensely small, as the master of now don't ask me how, the world and the seasons were many, creation was new, there on a tree deceptively free, the forbidden fruit upon leaving the burden after the full, one thing was clear, we chose not to hear the love of all, but for the love of it all. I would go anywhere, to the ends of the earth, what is it worth if love could be there? Walk in the sea, between fear and the call, one learns to bend and finally depend on the love of it all. There is a stubble of talkings, I heard someone say. It was speaking of angels who are so courageous, the day after day, got down on a highway, as we often recall, I hear a scream, I have a dream, love of all, still the world is in the way, she grows in a cave, she cries with evil and all but she sighs in the song of the world, while the heart of her people, bays at the wall, the spirit inside, preparing a pride for the love of it all. For the love of it all, like the stars in the sun, we are hearts on the rise, separate eyes with the vision of one, no valley too deep, no mountain too tall, we can turn like the moon, the love of it all, and so we are marching to give peace and chance. Brother and sister is one in this mystery dance, long before you go, we're now the curious crowd, a man on a cross be the ultimate cause for the love of it all, for the love of it all, we are gathered by grace, we have followed our hearts to take up our hearts in this time and thanks, and for the heart, we hear the centuries call, it is still not too late, to come celebrate the love of it all, we need the love of it all. That was Peter, Paul and Mary with the love of it all, I'm Mark Helps meat and you're listening to spirit in action and today we're listening to a speech given by Nicola Torbitt when she was in Eau Claire back in the month of October, she is the national organizer for the network of spiritual progressives and let's listen to more of the very important things she had to say in the course of that visit. When we talk about economic policies first of all, what we're usually talking about are the kind of social safety net programs like food stamps and Medicare and Medicaid, all of which I think are really important programs, but the way that we talk about them reinforces this notion that what really matters is economics, what really matters is are you able to accumulate material wealth and that everyone should have an equal opportunity to accumulate as much wealth as possible. When you talk about that sort of policy to someone who is suffering from the selfishness and materialism of the culture, you reinforce that suffering because you act as if that person's secret and shameful desire for more connection rather than more stuff is either pathological or just doomed. I think that somehow a rights discourse can do the same thing because a discourse of rights assumes that we are these self-contained monads sort of walking around and we're completely autonomous and self-contained and occasionally we bump into each other and that's rights is about figuring out who has a right to bump into who, how hard, and it doesn't acknowledge the ways in which we're all interconnected and interdependent. So I'm not saying that civil rights are not important, but I'm saying that emphasizing those above all else is sometimes counterproductive because it reinforces this idea that we're just out for ourselves. It's about my rights and what I have a right to do and you can't stop me because I've got a right or at least that's the way it's heard by a lot of people in the country. The network of spiritual progressives is developing a vision that transcends this view of human beings as self-contained monads and tries to emphasize the ways in which we are all connected and to address in that way the spiritual needs for purpose and meaning and service and connection, authentic connection that is about our essence and not about what we can do for someone else. Here's what we're about. We want a new bottom line in America. I talked about the old bottom line which says that decisions whether they are corporate or legislative or family decisions or individual decisions are judged rational based on the effect they're going to have on money and power. The new bottom line that we're after would judge those same decisions whether they're legislative or corporate or individual or family based on the degree to which they optimize love and caring, kindness and generosity, non-violence, ethical and ecological sensitivity and the ability to view other human beings as embodiments of the sacred or as having inherent worth and dignity and the degree to which they enable us to respond to the universe with awe and wonder and radical amazement at the grandeur of creation. That's all we want. Is that so much to ask? So what would this actually look like in practice? Well we started to develop a kind of platform that articulates some ideas and it's still very much in the early stages. We call that the spiritual covenant with America and we've got some copies of that in the back and I would encourage you to take a look at it. I can give you just a few ideas of the kinds of things that are in that spiritual covenant. First let's look at homeland security. We believe that the way to ensure the security of the United States is to look after the security and the well-being of all of the peoples on the planet and to recognize the fundamental humanity of every human being no matter what part of the country or what part of the world they live in. We've proposed something called the global martial plan and the global martial plan says that we would lead the G8 countries in dedicating 5% which is a big chunk of our GDP every year for 20 years to eliminating global poverty and repairing the damage to the earth from the last 200 years of industrialization. That's a big commitment and we believe that by leading with generosity and not in an instrumental way in a way that we're being forced to do this but because we care about the people of the world and we say not God bless America but God bless the world that we would actually dry up some of the cesspools of anti-American sentiment that are breeding terrorists. That's the way to combat terrorism not by going and killing people. We also believe that that same policy by the way would do a lot to address our immigration problem because it's not that people are coming to the United States because they're dying to live next to Nikola Torbit as much as I might like to think that. They're coming here because conditions in their own countries are unlivable and until we start to address that we're going to have this constant stream of immigrants trying to get into the country. So it's a foreign policy of generosity that we're proposing. A second example looking at our domestic situation, if we talk about education, the typical liberal demands for education tend to have to do with teacher student ratios, repairing school buildings that are falling down, getting more computers in the classroom, all of which are really, really crucial goals. We believe that we'd have a lot more success though in improving our schools if we talked about what we want education to do, what kinds of human beings we want those schools to be producing and whether or not standardized testing is the best way to get there. And when you hear the debate on education, the debate seems to be kind of about how much standardized testing, not whether that's actually what we want students to be learning to do is to take multiple choice exams. So our proposal is to actually rework curriculum so that in addition to teaching basic skills, we also teach things like compassion and empathy and respect and problem solving and teamwork. It's just an example of one of the programs that we're suggesting. We're proposing a mentorship program that would start in fourth grade so that every student starting at fourth grade would be assigned a younger student to mentor throughout the entire school process so that by the time they graduate, they would have eight years of learning to care for another human being. And we think that would go a long way toward developing really compassionate people. When policymakers talk about the purpose of education now, they tend to talk about America's ability to compete in the global marketplace, which again is reinforcing that notion of what really matters is whether we can compete and whether we can make lots of money and be prosperous. And it's not that those things aren't important and that we should entirely abandon them. But I think that we want to talk about is that all we want our schools to do is create prosperity or do we want to shape human beings that actually can solve problems and can care about each other and create a loving community. Can you see how this is sort of departure from what any political party at this point is proposing? So we're trying to work within all of the political parties. We are a nonpartisan organization to bring these ideas into the parties, to bring them into our houses of worship, and to start a national conversation around some of these ideas. Now, is this realistic? I know that some of you are sitting there thinking these are some really nice ideas and she seems kind of sweet. But I can't go to work tomorrow and say that I'm going to work for a world based on love and caring because they're going to think I'm a cooke. So I want to address that kind of cynical realism as we call it. And I want to do that by telling a story that Rabbi Lerner tells when he talks about the new bottom line and with my apologies to those who have heard him tell it, the first time he talked about the new bottom line, he was addressing a group of 400 Methodists in Kansas and they gave him a standing ovation. They loved it. And then a group of people came up to him afterwards and said, "Oh, we love your ideas, but they're never going to work." And he said, "Well, why won't they work?" And they said, "Well, the only people who would want that are Methodists in Kansas." They said, "You know, we read the papers, we watch television, we know what those people on the coasts are like and they're all a bunch of selfish materialists." And then when he gives that talk in Los Angeles or New York or Washington, D.C. or Seattle, they say, "Great ideas, but middle America, they're never going to buy it." So there are hundreds of thousands of people out there for whom these ideas resonate. This is what they want, but they don't know you're here and you don't know they're there. So then nobody is willing to go out on a limb and work for this. That's why the network of spiritual progressives is important. And it's why I'm going to ask you to consider joining, and I will ask my friend Betsy to pass the membership forms around, because joining the organization is a way of saying, "Yes, this makes sense to me. This is what I want." The question is really not, "Is this realistic?" The question is, "Is this what you are called to do? Do these ideas resonate for you?" Because in the end, the question is, "This realistic is the wrong question." The real question is, "Does this move you?" If we felt that John Kerry came across as hollow or failed to embody moral presence, this because he was asking the question, "Is this realistic?" Which when translated into political language is, "Will this make me electable?" I hate the word "electable" because what it means is, "Am I pandering to the right interests here?" It's not realistic for that family that found that cat to spend several thousand dollars on what is in our culture basically a throwaway animal, right? Most of our spiritual and political leaders that we revere have not been realistic. How realistic was Jesus living in a time of tribal warfare, basically, and coming with a message of love and compassion and non-violence? How realistic was that? How realistic was Moses to try to lead his people out of slavery? We see in his struggle that he knows he's not being realistic, and he's always questioning, "This is stupid, I can't do this." And yet something is calling him on and saying, "No, this is what you must do. God is calling him on to do that." Martin Luther King was not realistic in his time. Rosa Parks sure wasn't realistic to believe that she could sit at the front of that bus. So at certain points in our history, we are called to transcend what is realistic in our time in order to move forward. And I really think we're at one of those times right now. We have a limited amount of time, I think, to make a world that we can live with and that we'll continue to live. And I think we have to reach beyond what our politicians and our media tells us is realistic at this point. So my question for you is how long are you going to continue to scale back what you want? For the remaining 20 or 30 or 80 years that you have left on this planet, how long are you going to wait to demand what you really want from our culture, love and caring and compassion? I think that that's what we want regardless of our political affiliation, regardless of who we vote for in the election booth, that's what so many of us want. So I'm here as a member of the network of spiritual progressives to say to you that if you stand with me, if you say I'm going to stand up for a world of love and caring and kindness and compassion, that I will stand with you and I will not take advantage of you and I will help to build with you a parallel universe in which we treat each other as we know people should be treated. And eventually, the joy and the celebration that is generated in that parallel universe will draw people to it. That's what we're about. So if you join me, we can make this happen. I really hope that you will join me. Thank you. This is me, this is mine in my life, in my time, every heart, every soul. We're each part of the whole, every birth, every breath, every life, every death. I am here, I am home, I am not alone. Every step of this journey will be mine, take a stand, take my hand, take your time from the moment of my birth, every day here on this earth. I will live this life for all that I am worth, but this is me, this is mine in my life, in my time, every heart, every soul, we're each part of the whole, every birth, every breath, every life, every death, I am here, I am home, I am not alone. For in the end, there's precious little that we own, great or small, kind is all, just unknown. So let us live life to the brim, and if we sink, if we swim, let us leave a bit of grace where we have been, what this is me, this is mine in my life, in my time, every heart, every soul, we're each part of the whole, every birth, every breath, every life, every death. You are here, you are home, you are not alone. Every door we close leads to an open door, love is worth this living all is far. This is me, this is mine in my life, in my time, every heart, every soul, we're each part of the whole, every birth, every breath, every life, every death, we are here, we are here, we're each part of the whole, every birth, every life, every life, every life, every life, every life, every life, every life, every life, every life, every life, every life. And you are not alone, you're here with me, Mark helps me on Spirit in Action, that song We Are Not Alone is by a fellow Quaker of Mine, John McCutchen. We've been listening to a speech by Nicola Torbitt who's the national organizer for the network of spiritual progressives. You've just listened to the end of Nicola's speech but she also offered to take a few questions and some of the audience spoke up. And the first question was if there was specific direction and organization and structure that the national organization of network of spiritual progressives provided for the local chapters like the one just starting up in Eau Claire. We are starting to give a little more guidance in terms of structure. We originally thought we'll just let chapters do whatever they want, we'll give them maximum autonomy. And what we found is that some people were fine with that but most people didn't have any idea what to do. So we are starting to make suggestions that there be a steering group of people who are interested in making decisions, in sort of managing media, handling finances when you get to that point, and then that there be working groups that work on particular projects. The spiritual covenant with America is divided into eight platform planks and so some chapters are creating working groups in each of those eight areas to start doing outreach to other progressive organizations, to do outreach to churches and synagogues and mosques. We recommend that you have a media committee, the purpose of which is to do a couple things. One is to get press releases that we send you as a chapter out into your local media. So just develop the contact with the political reporters and the religious reporters at your paper and get these press releases into their hands. And then the other thing is to gently call into question when the media is reinforcing this belief that what matters is economic prosperity above all else. Just gently call that into question with letters to the editor and op-ed pieces. So there's a media committee. A lot of chapters have found it helpful to have a speaker's bureau that will go out to speak to other organizations, to churches and synagogues and mosques, to the political parties to start getting the word out about what we're doing. I can work with people about a formula for practicing how to talk about the NSP because it's sort of a complex set of ideas to get your head around, so I can help with that. So those are some committees that are helpful, but again this idea of working groups so that people can plug themselves in in whatever area they feel passionate about. We really encourage people, if you've got an idea for something you want to do under the rubric of the NSP and it fits our core vision, do it. Just put an email out or let your chapter meeting know that I want to do this. And does anyone want to do this with me? We really are encouraging people to be the leaders that we're waiting for. The next question directed to Nicola was in which way communication should start. Because the NSP advocates that there be a redefining of the fundamental values that underlie our decisions, the question was, should we work on redefining that basis for the conversation or should we jump right into the political issues where there's different values already motivating different party's interests? It's a difficult question actually because I think we need to be doing both. We certainly can't neglect what is happening now on the political scene in order to get to some point that we probably are never really going to feel ready for anyway. So I think now is the time to have those conversations. One of the things that some of our chapters have done really early on is to study nonviolent communication which is a way of engaging in dialogue in a way that you're looking at the other person's needs rather than feeling threatened by what they're saying because they're disagreeing with you. That enables these conversations to happen in a more respectful way. So that might be a way to get started with that. When I was in South Dakota about two months ago working with a group called Pastors for Moral Choices and that state is so polarized right now over the abortion referendum over the gay marriage amendment that is on the ballot that they felt they couldn't even talk about these issues in their churches because it would tear the congregations apart. So we got together and strategized like how can you have a dialogue where all points of you are welcome and you start talking about well what's the fundamental need underlying your position on this? What's at the root of it and start to find common ground in that way? And so they're really experimenting with that but there's a lot of fear around it because we've internalized this idea that we can't talk about those issues that they're too divisive. Then Nicola Torbett was asked how many NSP chapters are there in Wisconsin and nationwide? There are in the country about 87 right now. In Wisconsin there is one here, one in Madison and one in Milwaukee and those are the three that I know of at this point. I know that there are some other people reading the fundamental book kind of at the center of this movement which is Rabbi Michael Lerner's book The Left Hand of God Taking Our Country Back from the Religious Right. So there are some small book groups but they haven't yet decided that they're going to move on to become a chapter. The next person to direct a question to Nicola Torbett started out by saying everything you say is wonderful but and she went on to say she imagines that she's going to be ridiculed that people aren't even going to be able to begin to listen to have this discussion and this was Nicola's response. I think one of the most powerful questions you can ask after talking about this vision is okay let's put aside now whether this would work. Do you want it? Is this something that you feel drawn to that you feel excited about? And then what makes you think that everyone else out there is so different from you and that happens we polarize in all of these ways so that we think that the other side is evil or stupid or ignorant in some way and so they'll never go for this and there's a sort of arrogance in that. I'm not recommending that you say that to the person that you're talking to but you know what do you want and get at it that way instead of trying to talk about masses of people that we don't really know but we assume couldn't possibly want what we want because they aren't smart enough or educated enough or cultured enough or whatever, you know what do you want? What kind of communities do you want to live in? What do you imagine that would look like and get people sort of dreaming because I think we've forgotten how to do that. We've forgotten how to imagine the possibilities because we're so stuck in what's realistic. Rabbi Lerner talks about realism as a kind of idolatry. It's worshiping what is in front of you instead of imagining a transcendent reality and I think that's a powerful argument. You've been listening to a speech by Nicola Torbett, National Organizer for the Network of Spiritual Progressives. She had more things to say on that visit. You can learn more about NSP via their website which is spiritualprogressive.org. You can hear this program again and find useful information and links via my website northern spirit radio.org. The theme music for spirit in action is "I Have No Hands But Yours" by Carol Johnson. Thank you for listening. I welcome your comments and stories of those leading lives of spiritual fruit. You can email me at helpsmeat@usa.net. May you find deep roots to support you and grow steadily toward the light. This is spirit in action. I have no higher call for you than this, to love and serve your neighbor, enjoy in selflessness, to love and serve your neighbor, enjoy in selflessness. [Music] [Music]