Earth Day Prayers

These prayers are from the book "Earth Prayers From Around the World"

Suggested for Earth Day

And now we will count to twelve
and we will all keep still.....

For once on the face of the earth
let's not speak in any language,
let's stop for one second,
and not move our arms so much.

It would be an exotic moment
without rush without engines,
we would all be together
in a sudden strangeness.

Fishermen in the cold sea
would not harm whales
and the man fathering salt
would look at his hurt hands.

Those who prepare green wars,
wars with gas, wars with fire,
victory with no survivors,
would put on clean clothes
and walk about with their brothers
in the shade, doing nothing

What I want should not be confused
with total inactivity
(Life is what it is about,
I want no truck with death.)

If we were not so single minded
about keeping out lives moving,
and for once could do nothing,
perhaps a huge silence
might interrupt this sadness
of never understanding out selves
and of threatening ourselves with death.

Perhaps the earth can teach us
as when everything seems dead
and later proves to be alive

Now I'll count up to twelve
and you keep quiet and I will go

Pablo Neruda

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For the Lord your God
is bringing you
into a good land.

a land
of flowing streams,
with springs and underground waters
welling up in valley and hills.
a land of wheat ad barley,
of vines and fig trees and pomegranates,
a land of olive trees and honey,
a land where you may eat bread without scarcity,
where you will lack nothing.
a land whose stones are iron.
and from whose hills you may mine copper

You shall eat your fill
and bless the Lord your God
for the good land
he has given you.

DEUTERONOMY 8:7-11 NRSV
___________________________________________________________________

Don't destroy the world
I've only nibbled
the grasses of my lover's meadow.
We are early May
and clematis has not yet blossomed.
Alyssum, lady's slipper, buttercups
I want to hold the to her chin as we did childhood summers
shining their yellow reflection.

And the large magnificent trees
rhododendrons, splashed pink as dawn
magnolia, white waxy bowls of purple swooning.
I've waited my lifetime for this.
Plums are yet to come, fat, taut
the fragile bloom misting their skin like breath.

Let there be days of grainy juices
sticky on my face I
want time. There's
plush mango I smear over her.
Let me lick the pit clean, memorize
each crevice with my tongue

Don't
destroy
the world
because my child;s five, because
she crises when she scrapes her knee on gravel' skin shredded, blood beading through the dust
cries pitifully and long
while I envision scenes of devastation
holding her against the clawing pain
her screams, my helplessness.

"I hope nothing really bad ever happens to you," I blurt
the accusation, shield for my own hysteria...
Don't Don't destroy the world.

Ellen Bass


Happy Earth Day

Jeannette

Martin Luther King Holiday Musings

Today in Christ Church we celebrated Martin Luther King's birthday. It is one of those flexible holidays which are celebrated on Monday even though Dr. King was born on January 15th.

We heard readings from Dr. King's Letter from a Birmingham Jail. As I listened to the selections I was struck by how appropriate they were for today.

Why we can't wait. People keep telling us to wait and things will be better. We African Americans wonder how long shall we wait. I wonder what Dr. King would have said about the photos of people on the Gulf coast and New Orleans after hurricane Katrina. It looked like a third world country and this was America. Our leaders were saying help would arrive. It has been two years and help has still not arrived for some people. How long should they wait?

Brown vs Board of Education was supposed to integrate schools and make education equal for all students. Well the schools have been integrated but white people (in New Jersey) have moved to the suburbs leaving the urban schools to have a majority of African American and Hispanic students. Is the education equal, no not really. How long can we wait?

The new school funding plan will put more money in school districts with large underrepresented populations statewide. This changes the old Abbott schools who were the urban schools and received more funding. Will this work? I really don't know because not all the extra money in the urban school districts was used for education purposes.

But back to MLK. Dr. King spoke about the fact that African Americans would like to be able to order a cup of coffee from a lunch counter. My cousins who live in Springfield Mass drove my grandmother south to Greensboro North Carolina. They had grown up in the north were there was no overt discrimination. The first thing my cousin Robert noted that he could not stop everywhere for gasoline. He was told to go to the "Nigger" gas station. The other thing he found out that some of our cousins who lived in Greensboro and were attending North Carolina A & T were involved in the sit in at the lunch counter in Greensboro. My southern cousins told Robert to stay away from them because they were afraid since he did not know the problems in the south he might get in trouble.

Dr. King also talked about traveling by car and having sleep in his car. This was shown in the Percy Julian DVD on NOVA were Dr. Julian a respected chemist and business man was also forced to sleep in his car on occasion. When my parents and I traveled we consulted the "Red Book" a book that told Negros the names of hotels that would accommodate them. This book was used not only for the south but the north. My parents consulted that book when they went with me to graduate school in Minneapolis Minnesota. They were given the room that overlooked an air shaft near the elevator. I have been back to Minneapolis since and that hotel has been torn down! My father was so excited when the civil rights act was passed because we could now stay in any hotel in Washington DC!. Even when I was traveling for my company in the south I always had my reservation in my hand when I went up to the desk for fear that they would turn me away. That did happen one time when I had a confirmed reservation at a hotel in New Orleans. But they booked us in another hotel and paid that night's rent and the taxi to and from their hotel. We arrived late at night and they had overbooked the hotel. We also got a free night at the hotel that we had originally booked!

MLK sitings.
My mother and father and I were at Riverside Church when Dr. King preached. My father decided we should go and I went along for the ride.
I also went to the second "March on Washington". I stood in front so that I could see the speakers. I happened to be in DC for an American Chemical Society meeting and decided to go. I got on the Metro and arrived at the mall right in front of the speakers platform!

So these are my thoughts about Martin Luther King's birthday 2008.
Jeannette Brown

New Jersey apologizes for slavery

On Sunday I announced in church that New Jersey was considering resolution that would apologize for slavery. The vote was taken today and New Jersey became the first northern state to apologize for slavery. This resolution was sponsored by outgoing Assemblyman William Payne.

As today's article says: "Payne said an apology will comfort black residents, who make up 14.5 percent of New Jersey's 8.7 million residents.

"This apology is not for deceased slaves," Payne said. "It's an apology for their descendants. It's an apology for the ages and all mankind."

"The Assembly voted 59-8 and the Senate 29-2 to approve a resolution expressing "profound regret" for New Jersey's role in slavery. A resolution expresses the Legislature's opinion without requiring action by the governor.

"This resolution does nothing more than say New Jersey is sorry about its shameful past," said Assemblyman William Payne, D-Essex, who sponsored the measure.

The resolution offers an apology "for the wrongs inflicted by slavery and its aftereffects in the United States of America."

It states that in New Jersey, "the vestiges of slavery are ever before African-American citizens, from the overt racism of hate groups to the subtle racism encountered when requesting health care, transacting business, buying a home, seeking quality public education and college admission, and enduring pretextual traffic stops and other indignities." Note: These traffic stops are not limited to African American males although they are the principal target, I have been stopped by a police man who probably thought I was a man, not a little old African American lady. I have never received a ticket on these stops only warnings.)
Note: Taken from the Associated Press article by TOM HESTER Jr. |Associated Press Writer| http://www.newsday.com/news/local/wire/newjersey/ny-bc-nj--
slaveryapology0107jan07,0,2453783.story

Here is some information about the slave trade in New Jersey. In 1800 the number of slave in New Jersey was 12,422 second among the northern states with New York at an estimated 20,613 slaves.
For more information about the slave trade in New Jersey here is a link: _slavery_in_New_Jersey#The_Great_Migration

For information about what New Jersey blooggers think about this, here is a link: http://blog.nj.com/jerseyblogs/2008/01/bloggers_react_to_new
_jerseys.html

What do I think? I think it's great. Anything that might help people to think about history and how what happened in the past reflect the present and maybe the future is a good thing. As a newly minted historian I have seen this time and time again.
Jeannette Brown
A little fuzzy from chemo meds today so I hope this makes sense.

Happy New Year & New York Times Op Ed Article worth reading

I managed to make it to the Christmas eve evening service. It was great although I would rather sing in the choir than in the congregation. I am slowly coming back from the reactions to chemo even though I have four more treatments to go, I seem to be tolerating them better.

I would like to point out an Op Ed in today's (December 30, 2007) New York Times about the end of the slave trade in the United states. It is worth reading:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/30/opinion/30foner.html?_r=1&th&emc=th&oref=slogin
Here is a summary of it.:

Forgotten Step Toward Freedom

By ERIC FONER

Published: December 30, 2007

WE Americans live in a society awash in historical celebrations. The last few years have witnessed commemorations of the bicentennial of the Louisiana Purchase (2003) and the 50th anniversary of the end of World War II (2005). Looming on the horizon are the bicentennial of Abraham Lincoln’s birth (2009) and the sesquicentennial of the outbreak of the Civil War (2011). But one significant milestone has gone strangely unnoticed: the 200th anniversary of Jan. 1, 1808, when the importation of slaves into the United States was prohibited.

-----"In the United States, however, slavery not only survived the end of the African trade but embarked on an era of unprecedented expansion. Americans have had to look elsewhere for memories that ameliorate our racial discontents, which helps explain our recent focus on the 19th-century Underground Railroad as an example (widely commemorated and often exaggerated) of blacks and whites working together in a common cause.

Nonetheless, the abolition of the slave trade to the United States is well worth remembering. Only a small fraction (perhaps 5 percent) of the estimated 11 million Africans brought to the New World in the four centuries of the slave trade were destined for the area that became the United States. But in the Colonial era, Southern planters regularly purchased imported slaves, and merchants in New York and New England profited handsomely from the trade."

Note: New York City was a center for the slave trade and our Congregational forefathers were actively engaged in the slave trade.

"From 1803 to 1808, between 75,000 and 100,000 Africans entered the United States.
By this time, the international slave trade was widely recognized as a crime against humanity. In 1807, Congress prohibited the importation of slaves from abroad, to take effect the next New Year’s Day, the first date allowed by the Constitution.

For years thereafter, free African-Americans celebrated Jan. 1 as an alternative to July 4, when, in their view, patriotic orators hypocritically proclaimed the slave-owning United States a land of liberty."

OK. Enough I hope you will read the full article in the newspaper today or in the library some time this week.
Jeannette

A Poem for Christmas

This is taken for "Earth Prayers From Around the Wold 365 Prayers, Poems and Invocations for Honoring the Earth" edited by Elizabeth Robers and Elias Amidon.

This poem is and adapted from the Gaelic. In the choir we have sung a piece with similar words.

Deep peace of the running wave to you,
of water flowing. rising and falling;
Sometime advancing, sometime receding;
Deep peace of the running wave to you!

Deep peace of the flowing air to you,
which fans your face on a sultry day;
the air which you breathe deeply, rhythmically,
which imparts to you energy, consciousness, life;
Deep peace of the flowing air to you!

Deep peace of the quiet earth to you;
who, herself unmoving, harbours the movements
and facilitates the life of the ten thousand creatures
while resting contented, stable, tranquil;
Deep peace of the quiet earth to you!

Deep peace of the shining stars to you;
which stay invisible till darkness falls
and discloses their pure and shining presence
beaming down in compassion on our turning world
Deep peace of the shining stars to you!

Deep peace of the watching shepherds to you;
of unpretentious folk who, watching and waiting,
spend long hours out on the hillside;
expecting in simplicity some Coming of the Lord
Deep peace of the watching shepherds to you!

Deep peace of the Son of Peace to you,
who, swift as the wave and pervasive as the air,
quiet as the earth and shining like a star;
breathes into us His Peace and His Spirit:
Deep peace of the Son of Peace to you!

by Mary Rogers Adapted from the Gaelic

Jeannette Brown

No Child Left Behind Reauthorization Bill

I received two communications about the "No Child Left Behind Reauthorization" which was supposed to happen in 2007 and now has been put off until 2008. This is something which should be of interest to everyone parent, grandparent, and single. How are children are educated reflects on the future of our economy and our political future. How many times have you called someone about a problem and when you finally got a human on the phone, that person was unable to give you any other answer than that which was printed on the sheet in front of him/her. They might have been in a call center in India but even if they were here in the USA students are not being taught to think outside the box. This is the result of standardized testing where teachers spend all their time teaching to the test and not exploring the thoughts of students. Some teachers jobs depend on the students performance on these tests. Schools in New York City are being closed and reorganized because of the "poor" performance of the students.
Science is not one of the subjects being tested and the American Chemical Society's position is that if you can't fight them, join them and want science to be one of the "optional" subjects to be tested. As a chemist I do not agree with this as I would like to do away with the tests and find other ways to "test" student knowledge of a subject. These other methods do exist as I learned them when I took some courses with WestEd in Teacher Leadership, but it involves training the teachers to be able to do this. It is simpler for a teacher to teach by rote to the standardize test.
But enough of my soap box I will copy below the e-mail I received from the Rev Jan Resseger the UCC minister whose sole job is to study Public Education in this country. She is the only minister of any denomination to have this job and as such sits on some important education commissions.
-----------------

On December 5, author Jonathan Kozol finally was able to meet with Senator Ted Kennedy about the reauthorization of the No Child Left Behind Act.

Kozol has made the overwhelming injustices in the federal education law a primary subject in presentations during a recent national promotion tour for his new book, Letters to a Young Teacher.

He has also spent the summer and fall engaged in a partial fast to protest Senator Kennedy's unwillingness to meet about the No Child Left Behind Act.

Here is a link to Kozol's report about his December 5 meeting with Senator Kennedy: http://ed-action.org/news.php?section=letters .

As you know, the law will not be reauthorized in 2007, as scheduled. Jonathan Kozol's fast was a powerful witness to bring attention to the injustices not just in the law's mechanisms but also in its educational philosophy of test-and-punish, a strategy that has increased pressure to intolerable levels for many teachers and children, and that has increased so many unfunded demands for the most vulnerable schools that there is less funding remaining for instruction.

As we enter 2008, it will be up to all of us who care about public education to reflect on ways we too can witness to keep the focus on the need for reform in the No Child Left Behind Act, even during this presidential election year when politics might push the reauthorization even farther into the future.

Wishing you peace in this Advent season.

--Jan

Jan Resseger, Minister for Public Education and Witness
United Church of Christ Justice and Witness Ministries
700 Prospect Avenue, Cleveland, OH 44115-1100
216-736-3711

----------------------
Not to get political but I also received a letter from Senator Lautenberg in reply to my "form" letter that I sent to him advocating the American Chemical Society's position along with my own. --------------

Dear Ms. Brown :

Thank you for contacting me about the reauthorization of the "No Child Left Behind Act" (NCLB). I appreciate hearing from you on this important issue.

The "No Child Left Behind Act" was enacted in 2002 to increase accountability and raise educational standards in our public schools. While I support the principles upon which NCLB is based, I have concerns about the way this law has been put into practice.

First, I am concerned about the emphasis on standardized testing. The law requires annual math and reading tests in grades three through eight, and once in high school. Schools that miss the set benchmarks face increasingly tough consequences, such as loss of funding or having to replace teachers or principles. While useful in some cases, standardized testing can measure only a small sample of what is learned in school. We should not rely solely on a single test to reflect the achievement of a student or the realities of their school district. I support changes to No Child Left Behind that would grant states flexibility in measuring schools' progress.

I also support implementing a "growth" model when assessing schools. Under this method, changes in test scores are measured over time to determine if students are making strides in their learning. Thus, schools will get credit for student progress. This model is particularly useful when measuring the achievements of schools in poorer districts, which face a more difficult set of circumstances than schools in more affluent areas.

Finally, I believe the reauthorization should place a high priority on a wider number of academic subjects. As it stands, many schools have begun to neglect subjects like science, social studies, and the arts in favor of increased instruction on reading and math - both of which are assessed by standardized tests. While reading and math are important subjects to learn, they should not be taught to the exclusion of other important fields of study. It is imperative that students receive a well-rounded education that will prepare them for a wide variety of professions.

Congress is set to reauthorize the No Child Left Behind law within the next year. Please be assured that I am closely monitoring the progress of this legislation, and will keep your views in mind as this issue comes before the Senate.

Thank you again for writing.
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This letter appears to be a personal note maybe I am wrong, but we have met because he is also involved with the Amtrak appropriation but that is another soap box.

Merry Christmas
Jeannette

Shawl Ministry

OK. I should be writing my book but when I am sitting having an infusion or bored in a hospital room knitting is fun. So I finished one shawl that I had started. When I took a look at it, I had knitted so much it turned into a blanket and not a shawl. So I remembered that a year ago there was a request from Homeside Hospice in Clark for knitters. I have put a notice about that in the Clarion but I will reproduce that here.

Homeside Hospice

67 Walnut Ave., Suite 205,
Clark, NJ 07066
Phone (732) 381 3444
Fax (732) 381 3445
Email homesidehospice@aol.com

There is a request for volunteer knitters, weavers and sewers to make Lap Blankets, Prayer Shawls and other items. This request came to me a year ago and I finally have something to donate. Please keep this in mind as you are knitting this winter. You can call and contact the volunteer coordinator or just mail the shawls to them. They will give you volunteer hours for your work which might be of interest to teenagers.

I have another shawl to finish and I will start some new ones . I have a lot of yarn left over from other projects.
Anyone is welcome to join the Shawl Ministry. Directions for shawls are on the table in the Atrium or on the web at http://www.shawlministry.com/instructions.html We have virtual meetings although we might meet with the group from Stanely Congregational church in Chatham in the spring. I will try to arrange it.
Jeannette