Do Consider Signing the Jubilee Covenant for the 2020s
How do we live in the 2020s? Some important actions are embodied in the OneEarth Jubilee Covenant. You can read it and sign it online https://oneearthjubilee.com/2020/06/30/invitation-to-sign-the-oneearth-jubilee-covenant-for-the-2020s/.
Changes we need to make in this decade feel beyond our reach in many ways. All the more reason to live in the Spirit and in solidarity with others in a covenant together like this one.
Upon reading the covenant, Scott Klinger, sent us his affirming reply.
How thrilled I was to receive JEM’s new covenant. It is the perfect balance of unlearning, relearning and action. There is such a void for pieces that ask us to look at our relationship with money. JEM’s covenant does this in such important ways—focusing on consumption, giving AND investment. Thank you for inviting people to divest from fossil fuels. It is a great entryway and one that fits with the other commitments. My hope is that as people unlearn and relearn, there will be room later on to extend the covenantal invitation to divest from the whole of Wall Street, and to reinvest in community investments. I am working on an annotated list of funds in different parts of the country and will pass it along when it is done. My goal is to help others unlearn the purpose of investment as maximizing return (wealth) and relearn that the world would be different if the goal was instead maximizing justice (well-being). I want people to unlearn the idea that retirement assets were for their family’s security, and relearn an investment practice that sees real security as social/collective in nature. I want people to invest in the world they want to live in, and which they want their grandchildren to live in.
Scott has been a JEM partner for a long time. He occasionally contributes to the “Views” that are part of the Commondreams online news and views source.
We hope you’ll sign the covenant, suggest ways for its most meaningful use, offer additions, and such.
Covid-19 Brings New Forms of Ministry to JEM
Nothing in the following sentences minimizes the grief and death of Covid-19, nor the ongoing compromises in the heath or financial suffering now cutting into lives and spirits of people everywhere.
At the same time, the powerful little microbe has motivated us in JEM to develop some skills and approaches we’d been thinking about but hadn’t acted on. To see what we mean, read John Michno’s article below on how we are producing videos that will add a dimension to educate toward an ecological economy and way of living. Some of the work of Jubilee in Mexico and the U.S. will soon be available on YouTube. Here’s what else Covid-19 is prompting:
- Every podcast episode, starting with April, has interpreted ways to think about Covid-19, not only as the fatal disease it can be, but as an imperative to change our lives and systems for the wellbeing of people, species, and planet.
- Because we hold Jubilee Circle meetings and other meetups on Zoom, we are able to include people who live at some distance. More of us can come together. When we meet in person, many people are excluded.
- The Jubilee Circles in San Cristobal and San Mateo are doing their best to address emergency needs as families lose employment and even members due to Covid-19. JEM has a “Special Fund” which you can donate to. Indicate that you want your contribution to help the two Circles in Mexico to stand with their friends with love and support in this relentless emergency.
Video Story from San Cristobal, Chiapas
by John Michno
I’ve been working on videos in past weeks, and noticed they carried me along my spiritual journey. Here’s an example of what I mean:
Lindsey created a video about folks working together on democracy and spirituality at the Jubilee circle in San Cristobal. Her participants brought the stories of their lives — one, a rap artist, working, in the face of the pandemic, toward his vision of the greater good; others standing for justice as members of the Movimiento Pluricultural por la Democracia.
San Diego is a long distance from San Cristobal. Yet, as a woman from San Cristobal read the story of Jesus revealing to his disciples that he was the hungry person they unknowingly fed and clothed (Matthew 25), I felt, “These people in San Cristobal are like me”. When Jesus made this remark, he was talking to all of us — people in San Diego and in San Cristobal. Like me, those in the video resonate with his message of caring for the disadvantaged in our community.
As the Chiapans stand and gaze, they express their strength and energy to re-shape the world. I loved how friends from the Iglesia Centro Christiano had expressions that registered to me as … just being who they are. I was seeing real people, not actors. What would I learn, I wondered, if I were to listen deeply to them — what tales would they tell me, through their body-language, their tone of voice? The video was an opening to consider: how is their experience different from my experience, and how similar to mine?
Here’s a link to the video. We urge you to watch it. Just 4 minutes long. We’ll share more videos with you in future months.
August’s Podcast Episode Based on Presentation to Los Angeles
Interfaith Group about Changing to an Earth-size Economy
This podcast episode, “Leaving Superpower Ways for Earth-size Living,” incorporates much of the presentation Lee Van Ham gave in July to a Zoom gathering of the Interfaith Communities United for Justice and Peace in the Pasadena-Los Angeles area.
They are an impressive interfaith group for learning and action that formed quickly following 9/11 in 2001 to counter vigorous anti-Muslim discrimination and violence. Since then, they’ve held a forum on a wide range of justice issues nearly every Friday.
Lee was asked to speak to the group about a new economy because they recognize that Covid-19 has ushered us into enormous changes. The case for big change is made every day as the coronavirus exposes more ugly realities of the current systems, including the political economy. The extent of those changes depends on showing new ways that handle the pandemic better and reverse climate change.
To name a few of the breakdowns which the current economy is not handling, note the grotesque rich-poor gap in delivering healthcare, the racial injustices systemically privileging white people at the expense of people of color, the failure of leadership at the national level to eschew privilege in order to serve all the people, to name a few. The current economy systematically and corruptly exacerbates these injustices rather than correcting them. And all the while, climate heating continues with the U.S. government and corporations on the accelerator instead of leading us into economic change that can apply the brakes.
This podcast episode gives Earth-centered ways of thinking and defines actions we can take. We hope you’ll listen to this and other episodes from past months. Find them on our website or on other podcast platforms including iTunes. Tell us your thoughts.
