Patricia Pearce

Helping You Be the Change

  • About
  • Books
    • Beyond Jesus
    • No One in I Land
  • Blog
    • Blog
    • Blog Archives
  • Interviews
  • Podcast
  • Subscribe
  • Donate
  • Contact

Ferguson and Other Nightmares

August 20, 2014 by Patricia Pearce

#453619428 / gettyimages.com

Like most people, I have found the recent events in Ferguson, Missouri, deeply disturbing. One of the most troubling things I learned this morning didn’t have to do with the ongoing violence, looting and arrests. It was the results of a Pew survey that showed a wide disparity of opinion between whites and blacks about whether Mike Brown’s murder points to deep racial issues in our country.

I think part of the disparity of opinion is because many white people don’t understand the difference between racism and prejudice. Prejudice is holding negative stereotypes about others. Anybody can be prejudiced, and most of us are in some way or another.

Racism, though, is far more insidious because it couples prejudice with institutional power. It places people in the dominant group in the position of being able to carry out their prejudice through institutional systems.

I don’t know about you, but I can’t recall a time when an unarmed white youth was gunned down in similar fashion by a black member of a police force. The judicial system in this country is certainly racist as well. The evidence? Blacks are incarcerated at overwhelming rates and for far longer compared to whites for similar crimes.

Someone has said that racism is a disease white people catch, but black people die from. And black people are dying.

As a white person, therefore, it is incumbent on me not only to speak out about injustice, but just as important to heal myself of the disease of racism. It is a highly contagious disease that everyone in our society is exposed to from an early age. It landed on our shores with the arrival of slave ships unloading their emaciated cargo onto the auction blocks, and unlike so many diseases that our medical establishment has managed to banish, racism is one that continues to inflict us all, sometimes with deadly results. [Along those lines, let me recommend an excellent book: Post-Traumatic Slave Syndrome: America’s Legacy of Enduring Injury and Healing, by Joy DeGruy]

Every now and then in this blog I talk about this world we live in being a dream. That isn’t an abstract concept for me. It was something that I saw to be the case at the height of an intense awakening I experienced over a decade ago. We are literally living out a story based on our unconsciousness. At the root of this dream’s plot is a very simple, erroneous premise: that something called “separateness” exists.

Anyone who knows me well knows that dream work has been a central feature of my spiritual life. Some of the most important decisions of my life have been informed by dreams, and much of my own healing has come about because of the insights dreams have brought me.

While I was in seminary, when “big dreams” first started coming to me, I studied dream interpretation with Jeremy Taylor, author of several books on dream work, and one of Taylor’s central premises is that all dreams come in the interest of health and wholeness. All dreams.

So let’s imagine for a moment that what’s happening in Ferguson is a dream, that it’s our dream. Better yet, look at it as your dream, because if separateness doesn’t exist, then it is your dream as much as it is mine, as much as it is the people’s on the embattled streets of Ferguson.

What does it mean in your dream that a white police officer has just gunned down an unarmed black teenager? What part of you is that officer? What is at the root of his hatred? What does he really fear?

And what part of you is that black teenager, despised, vilified as dangerous, the target for your psyche’s rage and fear?

How might the battle happening on the streets of Ferguson point to the same divisions that play out in your own psyche, and what must you do to reconcile those factions so that true peace can come? In other words, how can you bring the truth of Love (which is, simply put, the Reality of Oneness) to bear in this hostile, volatile situation?

These are not idle questions. The peace of the world rests on each of us doing this difficult work, of seeing the “other” as an aspect of ourselves no matter how hard it may be to accept. I, too, must embrace the unpleasant truth that inside of me is an armed racist policeman who needs healing, and a despised black teenager who needs respect.

What’s happening in Ferguson is a nightmare. What’s happening in Gaza is a nightmare. What’s happening in Syria and the Ukraine are nightmares. They are all extreme cases of the fallacy of otherness playing itself out in deadly fashion.

And nightmares, like all dreams, come in the interest of health and wholeness. They come in extreme form because the information they bring is important, and because the time has come for us to accept it. They are invitations to us to wake, finally, from our illusions.

 

The Mind Game We’re Playing

July 3, 2014 by Patricia Pearce

woman's face painted with American flag
What game are we really playing?

This past Tuesday, sitting with my spouse, Kip, in a packed sports bar watching the World Cup soccer match between the U.S.A. and Belgium, I was delighting in the comedy of the situation.

The gathering, mostly young people, many of them decked out in red, white and blue, beers in hand, crowded around the large flatscreen televisions, cheering and groaning together as though they were many bodies ruled by one mind.

The excitement was palpable. Maybe, just maybe the U.S. could pull off an upset and defeat the Belgian team to move on to the next round. Anything seemed possible in this World Cup that has already seen the dethroning of some of the world’s soccer powerhouses.

Thanks in large part to the extraordinary performance of their goal keeper, Tim Howard, the U.S. team managed to hold their own through the 90 minutes of play, and when the whistle sounded to end regular play the game was tied 0-0. During the break before overtime, we all took a breather. The T.V. volume was turned down, the bass-heavy music turned up, people mingled and, in the case of several of us women, stood in line for the restroom.

Not long after the 30 minutes of extra time began, Belgium scored its first goal, and the mood of the crowd instantly plummeted from excitement to disappointment, and then to resignation when Belgium scored yet again. A man behind me, angry, began using expletives more liberally and another young man within ear shot, clinging to the possibility of victory, said, “You gotta believe!”Continue Reading

The Cross Is Empty and Always Has Been

April 17, 2014 by Patricia Pearce

cross of matchesEvery summer growing up I attended Vacation Bible School at our Presbyterian church in downtown Denver. We would do crafts, sing songs, memorize scripture verses about God’s love, and try to cream each other in games of dodge ball in the church basement.

One summer one of our craft projects was to make a cross out of matches. We took partially burned matches and pasted them onto a cross-shaped piece of cardboard. Then our teacher had us glue the cardboard cross to a piece of contact-paper-covered plywood and told us to find an appropriate scripture passage to write on it.

I loved doing crafts, and this project was right up my alley. Painstakingly, I pasted my matches onto the cardboard, lining them up neatly, then glued the cross onto the backing. Then I thumbed through my Bible to find just the right scripture verse.

I was excited when I landed on the perfect verse. I carefully wrote it out, and proudly took my project to my teacher to show her.

As soon as she looked at it I could tell by her expression that I had done something wrong. She didn’t say what it was, but there seemed to be a problem with the verse I had chosen: “If you are the Son of God, come down from the cross.”Continue Reading

Gonna Lay Down My Sword and Shield

April 11, 2014 by Patricia Pearce

shield
What do you think you need to defend?

Several years ago I was attending a Quaker meeting when a young woman stood up and began singing, slowly, the old gospel song “Down By the Riverside.”

I’m gonna lay down my sword and shield down by the riverside…

After singing a few lines, she spoke the first few words of the lyric, adding an emphasis that opened up the song in a new way for me. “I’m gonna lay down my sword — and shield.” 

In all the years I’d sung that song I’d scarcely paid any attention to the shield part. After all, it was a song about studying war no more, and war, as we all know, is about swords.

But when she emphasized those words — “and shield” — I realized that laying down the shield is even more radical than laying down the sword, because to lay down one’s shield is to lay down one’s fear.

In truth, we rarely lay down our shield. We spend a lot of energy trying to defend ourselves  against the threat of attack, whether it be of terrorists, lawsuits, or even personal embarrassment. If you start paying attention, you’ll probably notice how often you use the shield in everyday interactions. Every time you feel the impulse to defend your opinion, or your experience, or your worth you are holding forth the shield.Continue Reading

Casting Love upon the Water

March 27, 2014 by Patricia Pearce

IMG_3373This week we had what will probably be the last trace of snow for the season here in Philadelphia, something a lot of people are happy about. Personally, I have mixed feelings. Sure, the spring is gorgeous, but I also love the winter and have especially enjoyed this one with all of the snow days it brought with it.

One sunny February morning, while I was out shoveling our front sidewalk after one of our big snow storms, I enjoyed watching a Dad and his two young children down the block gleefully piling snow into an enormous mound in front of their house.

Later that day I found out what they had been so excited about when I walked down the block and saw an enormous snow person in front of their house. With kale for hair, clementines for eyes, lemons for buttons, sporting a purple scarf around its neck and a street tree coming out of its head, it drew the admiration of parents and grandparents from all over the neighborhood who brought their little ones by to take a look.

The snow person, of course, is long gone. During the following week, when the weather warmed up, it joined the rest of the melting snow trickling down into the storm sewer, and by now it is surely wending its way across the Atlantic ocean.Continue Reading

The Ultimate Keystone Demonstration: Love

February 26, 2014 by Patricia Pearce

The question I find myself asking is: What are we demonstrating?
The question I find myself asking is: What are we demonstrating?

A few weeks ago I ventured out into a snowstorm to attend a demonstration concerning the Keystone XL Pipeline. The State Department had just issued its environmental report which said the pipeline would have a negligible effect on climate change, and now the ball’s in President Obama’s court to decide whether to approve the pipeline’s construction.

Contrary to the State Department’s report downplaying the environmental consequences, the pipeline has been described by some environmentalists as the “line in the sand” in terms of our energy policy because the greenhouse gasses that would result from refining and burning the tar sands oil “would tip the scales toward dire climate change”. Climate scientist James Hanson has gone as far as saying if the pipeline moves forward and the tar sands extraction continues, the “game’s over” in our efforts to avoid runaway global warming.

Those of us who braved the cold and the snow that day to express our concern about the pipeline huddled next to the Federal Building in Center City Philadelphia listening to a handful of speakers talk about the implications of the pipeline and about the pledge that thousands of people across the country are signing, committing themselves to civil disobedience should the pipeline be approved. The organizers then said they would lead us in a training in which we would role play getting arrested. Some of them would play the role of police and the rest of us would come forward in groups, simulating a blockade of the Federal Building doors, and be “arrested.”Continue Reading

Christmas Cruelties and the Gift Economy

December 18, 2013 by Patricia Pearce

Amazon-warehouse-with candle 610x406
True wealth increases when it’s shared.

Given that Christmas is a week away, I’d really love to be writing about good cheer, about love and joy, but recently I read a disturbing article in Mother Jones magazine, “I Was a Warehouse Wage Slave“, that just won’t let me go.

The article described working conditions in a warehouse that stocks and ships merchandise for online commerce. I was horrified by what Mac McClelland, a journalist who took a job there as an undercover reporter, described. Not only were the demands placed on her as a worker physically exhausting and sometimes dangerous, but she and her co-workers were subjected to emotional abuse as well.

The article was published in the spring of 2012, so you could say it’s old news. Except it isn’t. Just last month an undercover reporter for the BBC took a job at an Amazon warehouse in England and secretly videotaped conditions there which have been described as brutal. And in Germany, Amazon workers have gone on strike because of the working conditions and wages.

I do most of my shopping online these days, so even though not every online merchandiser exploits their workers, I found the scenario MacClelland describes deeply disturbing. I don’t want to support cruel distribution systems any more than I want to support the sweatshop manufacturing economy. But as we all know, in this globally connected, interdependent economy it’s not easy to know which companies are acting responsibly and which aren’t, and it’s pretty much impossible to extract yourself entirely from the injustices of the system.Continue Reading

Scandalous Halos and the Incarnation

December 11, 2013 by Patricia Pearce

Nativity icon
What a difference it would make if we asserted the sacredness of the entire cosmos.

A couple of years ago, while sitting in the balcony of a church waiting for a concert to begin, I was pondering a mural of the Nativity that was painted on the back wall of the chancel.

In the painting Joseph and Mary were kneeling beside the infant Jesus who was lying in the manger. Nearby were a donkey and a cow, and off to the right the magi. But more than the figures themselves, it was the halos that caught my attention, halos that only appeared around the heads of Mary, Joseph and Jesus.

“That’s exactly the problem,” I thought to myself. The mural, placed in the position of the holy of holies, was inadvertently broadcasting the very belief that has led to so much devastation and suffering on our planet: the belief that humans alone carry the divine light, and not just that, but only certain humans.

Christmas is the season in which Christians celebrate the Incarnation, the Divine breaking into our earthly existence, taking on human form and the fullness of human experience. Yet over the course of my life, as a result of my own spiritual explorations and experiences, I have come to believe that traditional Christian understandings of the Incarnation obscure its radical implications.

Continue Reading

« Previous Page
Next Page »

© 2025 Patricia Pearce · Rainmaker Platform

Privacy Policy