How grateful I am to the Occupy movement for demanding that all of us look at and discuss money: “Wall Street,” that all-purpose phrase incorporating a host of ills, bank bailouts, how politicians are bought and sold, the student loan crisis; how grateful I am that, thanks to those courageous souls of  Zuccotti Park et al, these conversations form the fabric of public conversation.

And how grateful I am to the Transition movement for teaching me to look at the world around me systemically (I still have much to learn!)

Thinking more deeply and more interconnectedly about money has had one immediate effect, I’m noticing: My reaction to Christmas, a holiday I usually LOVE, is pretty muted this year. In fact, verging on “Bah, humbug.” I see Christmas lights, for example, and think, “What a waste of money and energy!”

I have faith that the essential Christmas Spirit will prevail—maybe, as it often does for my husband, in January, February! Meanwhile, I’ll try to take comfort from these words from Faith and Practice of New England Yearly Meeting of Friends‘s twelfth query: “. . . When discouraged, do you remember that Jesus said, ‘Peace is my parting gift to you, my own peace, such the world cannot give. Set your troubled hearts at rest, and banish your fears.”?

. . . and, by the way, their fashion-sense may differ from your own.

Today at our Meeting’s Forum—a 45-minute opportunity to listen to and ask questions about whatever various individuals or groups wish to impart—we learned about AFSC’s Clothing Room. Housed in the basement beneath our meetinghouse, the Clothing Room used to send donated clothing all over the world. Nowadays it services those in need  who, after they’d been recommended by a social worker or anti-poverty agency and had scheduled an appointment, arrive at the designated time to browse through the ton of donated stuff and take take whatever they need.

“But you need to park your ego at the door,” the presenter, who often volunteers in the Clothing Room, explained. “Like one time I saw a whole bunch of turtlenecks being recycled.” (Sometimes donated items are given to other agencies or, if absolutely unusable, thrown away.) “Perfectly good turtlenecks! So I protested. But was told, ‘ No one wants turtlenecks. So we don’t bother keeping them on our shelf.’ ”

Is it just me or is that one of most, ahem, telling stories you’ve  ever heard?’

*Matthew 26: 11.

I have a Bank of America Mastercard. Any day now, I can proudly say, “had.”

The last straw, of course, was B of A’s decision to charge a fee for debit card transactions. C’mon! That’s just mean. So while the mega-financial institution recently rescinded this exploitive scheme, it’s still, “So long, baby!”

The switch-over was incredibly easy. I contacted Joe Grafton, head of LocalFirst, a Somerville-based agency urging all of us to, ahem, shop local, and asked him who issued credit cards around here.

Answer: the CPCU Credit Union. Started in 1928, the Cambridge Portuguese Credit Union’s Somerville office is  a couple of blocks from my house. (I’ve been using their ATM for years.)

For $25, I became a member so am now eligible for a no-annual-fee Visa.

A couple of days after I made the switch, a green and white Door 2 Door van—a free service for local seniors—drove past. Guess what was painted on the side of the van? Yup.  An announcement that CPCU sponsored this most-needed service.

“We live in succession, in division, in parts, in particles. 
Meantime within man is the soul of the whole; the wise silence; the universal beauty, to which every part and particle is equally related, the eternal ONE. 
And this deep power in which we exist and whose beatitude is all accessible to us, 
is not only self-sufficing and perfect in every hour, but the act of seeing and the thing seen, the seer and the spectacle,
the subject and the object, are one.
We see the world piece by piece, as the sun, the moon, the animal, the tree; 
but the whole, of which these are shining parts, is the soul.”

—Ralph Waldo Emerson—

We’re all deeply interconnected: ”Move the money.”

Last night I went to a very special evening at the UU church in Harvard Square to hear two heroes of mine, Bill McKibben and Wendell Berry, talk about civil disobedience, Thoreau, mountain-top removal, the projected pipeline, et al.

The minister of that church, Fred Small, noted that such a stellar evening felt like listening to William Lloyd Garrison and Frederick Douglass! Small’s referencing those two abolitionists was particularly apt given our New England protestant church setting, the enormity of the issue being discussed, and the towering presence of those two men.

The seventy-seven-year old Berry had reluctantly left his farm in Kentucky and flown to Boston in order to receive the Howard Zinn “People Speak” Award, given by PEN New England. How do I know he was reluctant? Because he’d commented on his growing reluctance to leave home these days and the irony that he had to expend fossil fuels in order to speak out against fossil fuels!

Since I have sufficiently gushed about Bill McKibben in previous posts, I shall celebrate this national treasure this way:

THE PEACE OF WILD THINGS

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

— Wendell Berry

The mini-version of “American Autumn” seems to be playing out at Friends Meeting at Cambridge in the form of collaborative efforts by my fellow Quakers with like-minded activists.

(At least that’s the view from here.)

Here’s an initiative that’s recently grabbed the attention of the Prison Fellowship group I’m part of:  Abolishment of Massachusetts’ Life Without Possibility of Parole. AKA “the other death penalty.”

Newbies to this initiative, we don’t have a clue who’s doing what. Especially among members of other MA faith communities. But as we begin to learn how best to contribute to this effort, I am mindful of how, during the Civil Right Movement, well-meaning but incredibly patronizing, self-righteous Quakers (and their best buds, the American Friends Service Committee) did an enormous disservice to the cause.

So pray for us!

Van Jones. (Okay, it’s 4 pages—but worth reading!)