Bravo, Montana!

What if I told you Haiti can become livable in four months? I am tempted to say four weeks.

How, do you ask? The way every other country has: through responsible leadership. That simple. That fast. 

We need ethical folks overseeing the police force and the Central Bank. We need responsible authorities to name impartial judges. We need conscientious civil servants to maintain accurate archives. We need honest officers in customs and the tax offices. We need just prosecutors. We need agricultural experts to help our farmers and our environment. We need decent agents in our prisons and compassionate professionals in our hospitals. We need visionary business owners who comply with labor laws. We need moral clergy men and women. And loving moms and dads who actually raise their children.

All of it begins with good political leaders.

Except we're too defeated to believe that's possible. Too afraid to demand it. We are convinced we would need guns. Or money to buy guns. Or to buy the people who have the guns.

Which brings us to the Montana Group.

They tried. They really tried.

For more than 18 months, starting to meet well before the assassination of President Jovenel Moise, those Haitian citizens from various backgrounds saw a steaming volcano and thought they should defuse the explosion.

Haiti had not seen such a thing before. Teachers, union members, pastors and priests, Voodoo activists, former ministers, business professionals, politicians from opposite spectrums, rural farmers, urban youths—gathered all by themselves. No “technical support” or “capacity building” or laptops from any "partner." Just a bunch of Haitians who said to one another, “you know, we’re here; let’s propose something.” And they kept it going!

At the hand of the UN, such an initiative would have swallowed USD 2,500.000 whole. Imagine the material and equipment budget lines! And the costs associated with experts, all from lands not Haiti. Workshops and the “baseline survey” alone would have sipped the first million.

Reactions to the Montana Group echoed in rounds.

First, there was the Prime Minister’s tweet: “the Haitian constitution does not grant a small of group friends the right to gather in a hotel and elect a president.” Brilliant!

There should have been a straightforward rejoinder: “Indeed. On the other hand, the Haitian Constitution does grant to small groups of foreign officials gathered in embassies the right to choose a prime minister.”

I ached to launch the hashtag #omwenseAyisyenyoye. #atleasttheyareHaitians. But I didn’t. (See above.)

The actors supporting Ariel Henry chimed in: “the MG is a failure, an utter failure”; “Fritz Jean had been a serious person, but his involvement with the GM was political suicide. He’ll never, never, never amount to anything ever again”; “Magalie Comeau is just as responsible as Ariel Henry for where the country is today”; “the whole Montana thing is finished, done.”

As for the international community, they proved Ronald Reagan’s prescience when he warned, “trust but verify.” Between an illegitimate and duplicitous (criminal?) prime minister and a group of more credible Haitians, they chose the former. 

Then there was the Haitian population. Punch-drunk from blow after blow by politicians of all stripes, they yawned at the initiative.

That was the Montana Group’s first mistake. They did not have a strategy to rally public support. The courtship would have been arduous, but they stopped at hello. They thought their awe-some-ness sufficiently obvious and alluring.

Their second mistake was less forgivable: they accepted bread crumbs for cake from the kingmakers (read: the international community) and realized too late they were never really invited to the feast.

Still, oversized egos and credulity are not crimes. Not in a country that faces drug trafficking, kidnappings, and hordes of uncontrolled guns.

So, yes, chapeau, Montana!

Congratulations to you all, especially the leaders. How brave you were to start this journey, with no money and no security guards. Not having been "convened" by foreigners.

You must have anticipated the invectives and the contempt that would come your way. Did you at least manage to ride around Port-au-Prince in armored Patrols? 

This Haitian heart gives grace for all of you. For a while, and perhaps yet still, you showed the beauty that is possible when woven by Haitian hands. 

That model fed my soul.

Thank you and blessings. 

An Identity-based Fight

We in Haiti face a monster goliath, the red flesh of those with guns and cash, with official license plates. Lots of overlap. A tiny group with raw power. They kill and let kill. They don't cry. They dare us rise. 

We the people are David's brothers. We are afraid and resigned. We don't believe we can fight and win. So we keep crying and dying.

Oh for a David! How praiseworthy he was! 

He did not fast. He didn't create an action committee. He didn't read white papers or crisis analyses. He didn't launch a political dialogue. He didn't seek a broad agreement or national consensus. He didn't organize a donors' conference. The whole Goliath mess wasn't even his job!

But he knew identity, God's and the Israelites'. He asked, "How dare you? Do you not know who we are?" Then he stepped up.

We need a David to recall who we are, take offence at our intended shame, and say "no way."

He will have to ignore the it-will-take-50-years-to-change-Haiti crowd; reject those who recite all day long "things are really complicated in Haiti"; avoid the analysts who label optimism or faith naïve; laugh at the experts who insist on the failed traditional projects. And stay alive somehow. And make an honest living.

That's a lot to ask of a human being. 

Unless chosen of God.

Picking and Choosing

Thinking is disheartening. Anger, injustice, traumas, poverty, biases, racism, pride, sexism, blind beliefs, lies, violence, broken friendships, abuse, failures, all subvert joy and optimism. And we haven’t mentioned cancer.

Full disclosure--I am a liberal Christian. Broadly speaking, I believe in traditional Biblical teachings on God, the fall, the Israelites, praise and prayer, Jesus, his death and resurrection, sin and salvation, a second coming, heaven and hell. But I don’t believe a human being exists five seconds after conception. And recently, I was floored when the US Supreme Court ruled that proof of innocence was not sufficient to halt an execution.

For a while, I believed if Christians of good faith from different traditions came together, with honest hearts and rigorous intellect, the rest of us could count on them to reach a minimum consensus on essential issues: “how then shall we live?” Or at the very least, “what must we do to be saved?”

But a young Evangelical pastor and a Catholic professor, among others, have disabused me of that notion. They seemed so very reasonable at first, almost loving. Ted Cruz they were not!

So I watched, daring to hope for strong arguments. None came.

The pastor went after “progressive Christians,” comparing them to “parasites.” He tried, he really tried to say he was debunking “progressive Christianity” and not “progressive politics.” Then he used Barak Obama as the face of unacceptable religion. You know, Pastor Barak Obama. He derided him for preferring the Sermon on the Mount to the book of Romans, for “using one part of the Bible to refute another.” Such Christians can be called that only with “quotation marks.” And as if on cue, the pastor added Evangelicals like him suffer much hostility for their faith; they are victims of today’s American culture. I am tempted to conclude he took the same rhetoric course as Prince Harry.

The professor, for her part, decried the “woke” movement, warning it grew from socialist roots. As if that was enough. As if there was an 11^th amendment: “thou shall reject all socialist tenets.” She also accused the “wokists” (that is a word, right?) of minimizing fathers. The “they-don’t-believe-in-fathers” line was new to me. But that of course is a strategy—attacking an issue through its worst expressions, however rare.

So, most unfortunately, there is no broad Biblical consensus that I trust for essential life or spiritual issues (marriage and divorce, money, politics, abortion, nationalism, miracles, women as pastors, etc.). 

Who exactly will make it to heaven?

Only those who are predestined, who accept Jesus as their personal savior and have a personal relationship with him, who are transformed through water baptism and the Holy Spirit? Those who love the Lord with all their heart, mind, and soul, who love their neighbors as themselves, whose lives reflect Paulinian morality? Those who have faith, who love justice and mercy, who pursue righteousness, who are holy and have a pure heart?

Is it a combination of those conditions, and if so, which ones? Is there a hierarchy?

A few years ago, I was struck by the importance of forgiveness: “forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us.” That passage and some others indicate God will not forgive those who don’t forgive their fellow human beings. Can we get to heaven if we don't forgive?

More answers would come, I suspect, with more knowledge of Greek and Hebrew, history and anthropology, Church fathers and traditions ... 

But for now, I remain at square zero. The Bible is bigger than I can grasp, and I trust no scholars, seminary professors, or independent researchers to teach me its essential truths. They, like me, come to Scriptures with their own biases. And sadly, our religion serves our prejudices.

So yes, I pick and choose the Biblical principles to follow. I grant the highest priority to Jesus’ teachings, then everyone else: the OT prophets, poets, leaders, storytellers; NT writers Paul, James, Timothy, etc.

As a result, I am guided by three principles. First, the unassailable characteristics of God. He is holy; He is eternal; He is love; He is glorious; He keeps his word; He does not change; He is omnipotent and omniscient; He is jealous; He is obsessed with "the least of these"; He is good; He loves justice AND mercy. He must also love beauty: He made the earth and a whole lot of people quite beautiful. Second, his son Jesus brought not just the initial but the complete salvation message to us when he lived on earth. So if he didn’t talk about an issue, it’s non-essential. Third, I am a 90-percenter. That I believe something does not make it good or even accurate. I could be wrong.

This is sure to make the “all of Scripture crowd” see red. They will declare such an approach anathema, since the whole Bible is “God-breathed and inerrant.”

To that, my answer is stupidly simple: you do it too--a most unsatisfactory response. We should not decide what is acceptable by what others do. So let me try anew: I do this for I must. We all have to, lest we twist ourselves into varied “interpretations.”

One need not be a Biblical scholar to see the myriad of Protestant denominations are but a result of “picking and choosing.” For that matter, the pastor and the professor discussed above would vehemently disagree with each other regarding what the Bible says about Mary.

I grew up in a church that insisted women cover their heads during services. My late mother went further and refused to wear pants until her death. Pants were for men and therefore forbidden. Neither she nor my dad wore wedding rings though they were married for more than 50 years. God bless them! How many proponents of the “whole Bible” approach have divorced and remarried? How many require women to cover their heads in church?

This is not a matter of ‘anything goes.’ It would be good to recall the Bible is an anthology, not a single book. A Shakespeare scholar may not agree that Hamlet is his greatest work, but he would not be taken seriously if he chose The Merry Wives of Windsor. And neither would anyone who pretends all the plays are of equal weight.

God, the Supreme Being, could have produced a Bible without any contradictions, real or apparent or cultural or political or linguistic. He did not. Maybe he wanted to tell us, “stay humble; you know less than you think.” 

We should meditate on that.