Re: [Conference

[Guest guest]

A positive step -

Dear Friends,

This is the conference where we just performed our play MOTHERBLOOD, an encounter between an Israeli woman and a Palestinian woman, both of whom lost a child in the violence. The play moves through the whole range of emotions and political issues toward the beginnings of learning to listen to each other. The experience of being there was awesome. I felt that we were in the midst of Hazrat Inayat Khan's MESSAGE of Spiritual Unity, being reflected in the most amazing array of speakers, clergy from many different traditions, enlightened politically oriented people, and other conscious activists. It was a privilege to perform there, as the opening performance of their last all group finale in The All Souls Unitarian Church. The performance went very well. Many people were crying and very moved. And it certainly was gratifying to receive a very enthusiastic standing ovation. May the Spiritual Covenent that Rabbi Lerner has articulated in THE LEFT HAND OF GOD: Taking Back The Country From The Religious Right, become a living reality. Below is his description of the conference that he just sent to his Tikkun community and to the new Network of Spiritual Progressives.

"May the Message of God spread far and wide, illuminating and making the whole of humanity as one single family in the parenthood of God."

Love, Saphira

In a front page story in the Washington Post, a major story reporting on our conference proclaimed in its first line "The religious left is back." "Long overshadowed by the Christian right, religious liberals across a wide swath of denominations are engaged today in their most intensive bout of political organizing and alliance-building since the civil rights and anti-Vietnam War movements of the 1960s, according to scholars, politicians and clergy members."I don’t want to say that the conference was without some problematic elements, and this report discusses them as well. I think a spiritual movement must always be honest, self-critical, as well as affirming what is good about what it is doing and accomplishing.It’s hard to convey the level of excitement and enthusiasm experienced by the 1,200+ people who attended the 4-day conference launching the Network of Spiritual Progressives on the East Coast. (Our first conference held in July 2005 in Berkeley had attracted 1,380 people. We had had to turn away hundreds more.) One reporter told me that she had interviewed over a hundred random participants. She had found the following: 1. Attendees were mostly Protestant and Unitarian, though there was a healthy selection of Catholics and Jews. She also reported encountering Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, WICA, and a large number of spiritual but not religious people who did not identify with any religion. 2. The attendees came from 34 states 3. Attendees came because they are sick and tired of having the Religious Right use religion or God language to justify militarism and war, cuts in spending for the poor while cutting taxes on the rich, assaults on basic civil liberties and human rights, assaults on homosexuals, and massive governmental corruption. They wanted to have a different kind of voice speaking for religion, God and spiritual people. 4. All of the people she spoke to expressed overwhelming satisfaction at what they had encountered. The reporter noted to me that she had not found a similar level of satisfaction at a conference like ours. The All Souls Unitarian Church was a beautiful facility, but the 1,200 people exceeded the capacity of the sanctuary, which typically holds about 1,000 people, so at least two hundred and sometimes more sat in an overflow room and watched theevents on a wide screen. The church had been deeply involved in preparations and planning for the conference, and their involvement created a sense of warmth and homecoming that helped make people feel that even though we had more people than we expected, everything felt haimish (like being in one’sown home, something one can’t get at the big hotels). In truth, we would have had far more people coming if they could have been accommodated, but it turned out that there were no hotel rooms available in Washington D.C. or even in the neighboring suburbs like andria or Arlington hotels. This was the week of several big conferences and many people from out of town whowanted to come found by three weeks before the conference that unless they had friends they could stay with, they were simply out of luck. The excitement was palpable from the start of the first session. After prayers from a variety of different religious traditions, the conference erupted in enthusiasm as Catholic nun (and Benedictine Sister) Joan Chittister, my national co-chair of the Network of Spiritual Progressives, presented a compelling analysis of culture and spirituality, followed by Gabel (associate editor of Tikkun, chair of the program on Spirituality an Politics at New College of California in San Francisco, and my collaborator in developing many of the ideas that are now central to the NSP) who provided an engaging account of the spiritual psychodynamics ofcontemporary society. Gabel was one of the many "spiritual but notreligious" people who spoke at the conference and presented a perspective that spoke in a language that bridged the gap and showed how humanists could equally find a home in the Network of Spiritual Progressives along with progressive spiritual people.I won’t say much about my own talk on Wednesday afternoon except to say that it will be available (along with many of the other talks) on audio recordings that should be on sale on our website www.spiritualprogressives.org in about a week, and that some of my friends said it was best talk ever (I’m not so sure about that). In any event, I also had to announce that our NSP co-chair Cornel West was not coming because his mother was facing an operation and he would be with her in California. Later in the conference we prayed for her speedy recovery and a moment of silence for Charlene Spretnak’s dying mother. A central part of the conference was the presentation of the Spiritual Covenant with America. While the entire Covenant and its interpretation can be found in the last four chapters of my book The Left Hand of God: Taking Back our Country from the Religious Right, we used a very scaled-down version to present to Congress (you can find that version at our website www.spiritualprogressives.org. Since we needed preparation for presenting the eight planks of the covenant to Congress, we broke up into eight groups, each one focused on a particular plank of the platform in order to work through some of the issues that might come up around that plank. And then after that we broke into workshops on a variety of issues in spiritual politics.To tell you about each of the plenary sessions and workshops would be too much for one communication, so we’ll try to print parts of some of these in our September or November issues of the magazine. Suffice it to say that there were mostly wonderful speakers and presenters, a few who were only moderately wonderful,a very few who didn’t quite rise to the level of beingwonderful, and a few who didn’t show up at the last moment because of personal illness or illness in their families. But overall the level was very high, serious and sophisticated ideas presented by engaging speakers in a language that was easily accessible, not academic, and always highly connected to the spiritual and religious and political issues facing our country in 2006. And what was particularly amazing was their willingness to contract their egos and speak in 15-20 minute spots when they were often nationally known figures who are used to having 60-90 minutes and being thecenter of attention. These were mostly celebrated figures in their own arenas (take, for example, Branch whose monumental three volume study of Luther King had been universally acclaimed, or Rev. Bill Sinkford, the national president of the Unitarian Universalist Association, or America’s most famous Islamic theologian Sayyed Hossein Nasr, or Rev. Bob Edgar the chair of the National Council of Churches of Christ, or Episcopal Archdeacon Kendall or Rabbi Arthur Waskow or_well the list goes onand includes over 120 speakers and presenters, all of whom came to this conference by paying for their own transportation and accommodations and then agreed to speak for only a short period of time, a true modeling of ego-contraction that made the spiritual progressive conference possible).Thursday morning we had hundreds of individual or small group meetings on Capitol Hill with Senators and Members of Congress or sometimes their aides. If you can imagine the reality of having hundreds (approximately 400) such meetings, it was quite amazing. Suddenly Capitol Hill was aflame with discussion of a Spiritual Covenant with America. In sessions on Friday people gave feedback and shared amazing stories of how they were able toarticulate ideas they originally doubted their capacity to present, and how amazing it was for them to find receptivity (except among thse who were greeted by pure cynicism). Overall most people had very good experiences as they tried to explain at least one particular program plank. That morning I had a private "off-the-record" meeting with U.S. Senator Barack Obama. The one thing I can say about the meeting is that Senator Obama was very much in sync with the approach of the Network of Spiritual Progressives and I was very encouraged by my conversation with him. We then proceeded to Lafayette Park across from the White House for our Pray-In for Peace. Prayers led by Methodist Bishops, Episcopal and Catholic priests, Muslims, focused both on urging a new receptivity to the Spiritual Covenant with America. I also led prayers for the healing of the brokenness and fear-driven consciousness of the people in the White House includingPresident Bush. I emphasized that while we were not interested in decreasing the intensity of our critique of the hateful and murderous policies of these people, we nevertheless continue to see them as God’s children, created in the image of God and embodiments of the sacred, deserving to be seen in their complex humanity just as we ourselves need to be seen that way and notas demons. So we prayed that there would come to them a speedy healing, recognizing that as long as they held power that we very much need for them to recover from the demons that currently twist their consciousness into supporting hate-driven homophobia and murderous policies toward the people of Iraq.