The Gold Standard of Humanity: Global Activism and Spiritual Practice

1 Upaya Chaplaincy Training Sixth Chaplaincy Cohort Final Paper – Diana Fried February 2015 The Gold Standard of Humanity: Global Activism and Spiritual Practice Table of Contents 1. Introduction 2. The Tension Between Activism and Spirituality – A look back at my personal story 3. Start-Up Phase: AWB and New Orleans 4. The Three Tenets 5. How This Work Has Impacted Volunteers 6. Working with Conflict and Challenges – Staff, Volunteers, Board 7. Haiti: How to Hold It All 8. Military Stress Recovery Project (MSRP) 9. Nepal: Nomads With Needles (and photo essay) 10. Israel-Palestine: The War Lives Inside of You Just as You Live Inside of It 11. Chaplaincy: Empowerment of Others – Empowerment of Self 12. Conclusion 2 Introduction My great-grandfather on my mother’s side of the family was a socialist, living in the old country. However, his family had him pegged to become a rabbi. This conflict between social justice/activism and religious practice drove him to go to the United States, even though his wife, my great-grandmother, would not go with him. He was so adamant about being able to practice his politics freely in the U.S. and to have his family with him, that he went back to his village, took one of the children, and went back to the U.S. He then sent a ticket to his wife urging her to join him with the rest of the family, and she had no choice but to go if she was to be with all her children. I am using this theme of the interweaving of social activism and spiritual practice, that has roots going back in my ancestral history, as the underlying theme and inquiry of this paper. Many of us have had a deep and abiding interest in both spiritual practices and social/political engagement with the world. Often it seems we must pick one or the other. At times, we may have found the world of spiritual practice cut off from the deepest global issues of concern to us. Or, perhaps, we have been involved in social justice work and have experienced burnout or something missing for the soul. This tension and the search for resolution between social justice/activism and deep inner spiritual and emotional practice has been a central story of my life. The Chaplaincy program at Upaya Zen Center has now become an important part of that integration. The driving force for me to join the program was the fact that I still had not found a way to truly balance these worlds in my work with Acupuncturists Without Borders (AWB) and was seeking more help and a foundation of support. I found this foundation at the Upaya Zen Center, which turned out to be a perfect fit. I have found a huge change in my understanding of what it takes to balance my spiritual practice with my global activism. At the same time, I made a huge change during my chaplaincy, which was to leave my position as Executive Director. In this paper I would like to explore the areas of harmony and balance and those of challenge with my work with AWB over the past ten years, using the lens of the Three Tenets of the Zen Peacemaker Order and the Five Buddha families as the foundational paradigm. The Three Tenets, as formulated by Roshi Bernie Glassman of the Zen Peacemaker Order, include: 1) Not Knowing – Being in a situation without opinion or judgment and with no fixed ideas. This allows for things to arise that you would not expect because the ideas and judgments are no longer obstacles to awareness. 2) Bearing Witness – Entering into a situation with an open mind and heart, and in a state of non-separation between the subject and object, which means not making a “we or I” and a “they” and just being present to what is happening, moment to moment. This opens the field to tremendous learning and clarity; 3) Loving Action – Allowing for the natural actions to arise out of not knowing and bearing witness, actions that were not planned or in an agenda that one has beforehand. This allows for tremendous creativity and actions that are far more durable and strong and with greater impact. I will use writings I have done over these past ten years from various disaster relief and international programs as the basis of the investigation. The purpose of this exploration is to use this as a way for me to deepen my integration of social justice/activism with spiritual practice; to explore how I’ve managed this in the past; to find the places of inspiration and transformation; and to find ways to move forward with this work in the future that are most advantageous for myself and for all beings. My hope is that this may be beneficial for others who have undertaken similar missions in their life. The Tension Between Activism and Spirituality – 3 A look back at my personal story I grew up in a family that was deeply imbued with progressive politics, with a strong focus on education and learning, a lot of left brain thinking, and a lot of emphasis on talking and debating ideas and being involved in world issues. From a young age, I was an activist, in a sense. I remember leading a protest with my best friend, Doreen Nicastro, in fifth grade. I had a guitar in hand and we sang songs of the 60’s as we led our homeroom out of the classroom in protest: I think it was about the Vietnam War. We were sent to the principal’s office. The principal, Mr. Purpel, was a sweet man and mostly acknowledged Doreen and my independence and leadership! Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was my hero and A Raisin in the Sun was my favorite book in fifth grade. I remember feeling proud of the political actions at this age; I thought I knew what was right and what was justice! By the time I was in college, I was studying Political Theory. I was also studying religion with a great teacher named Mr. Geohegan, who was very interested in Eastern religions. (In high school, I had already become interested in Eastern religions and philosophy and had done an independent study in this area. I also started learning how to meditate at Ananda Marga in Cambridge, Mass.) When I told my father that I wanted to major in religion, he just about went through the roof. He had been raised in an orthodox Jewish family, and was himself a self-described radical and an atheist. He had experienced the pain of orthodoxy as a child growing up. He felt religion was truly the “opiate of the people” and wanted none of it for me. I, however, continued to study religion though I decided to major in Political Science. There was something that spoke to me in the Eastern spiritual practices, and I wasn’t going to let it go. I also created an organization called “Struggle and Change,” which showed political films, worked on issues of apartheid and the like. But teachings with a spiritual basis that I discovered in the community, on Anthroposophy and other such things, continually captured my attention. After college, I went on to travel in Latin America and to learn a great deal about the world, about inequity in global distribution of income and resources, and the true impact of multi-national capitalism on countries of the global South. I also saw true deep poverty in a way that I had never seen it before. I was both captivated by the issues of inequity and had a strong passion to work on these issues, but also there was a way that some fear was touched upon in me. I think it was the deep culture shock of experiencing life in the slums and ghettos of the global South that would impact me forever. I then became community organizer for clerical workers in Maine, and eventually went on to study film and Latin American Studies with an emphasis on the political economy of the global South. My righteous bones were moved more deeply as I learned about multi-national capitalism and its impacts on the world. I also felt strongly about telling the stories of people who were oppressed by these systems. I managed to do a video thesis for my graduate work. I contacted the organization Cultural Survival in Boston to find out about connecting with indigenous groups in Mexico. I was put in touch with someone working with the Huichol Indians. After many months of being “tested” during visits to Mexico, I was allowed by the Huichol community to do a video about how the Huichol Indians were taking back their deforested land through small-scale economic development projects. This project opened my eyes not only to the ways in which the indigenous people were being exploited, but also to their deep connection to the land. I loved wandering the remote canyons where the Huichol lived and being part of their practices. After that I worked at Oxfam America doing global grassroots community development and creating a video program to tell the stories from our partners around the world, from the communities that had experienced the massacres of the death squads in Guatemala to the Eritreans who had won independence after a 4 protracted civil war, and much more. Although I loved the work at Oxfam, and my professional life grew and changed in extraordinary ways, it was during my time at Oxfam that a huge void started to open or appear in my soul/spirit and that changed everything.

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