Reverend Billy

[suchandra]

Looks like the erstwhile staunch preaching movement, ISKCON, needs some good lessons from reverend Billy (Church of Stop Shopping, see below), who preaches quite similiar like Prahlada Maharaja: My concern is only for the fools and rascals who are making elaborate plans for material happiness and maintaining their families, societies and countries. I am simply concerned with love for them.

Church Of Stop Shopping

http://www.revbilly.com/events/

Finally someone who isnt in a blue funk to preach against the globalization elite billionaires - gig activist Reverend Billy: http://www.revbilly.com/

Why are the Ethopian workers at the bottom of a 80 billion dollar industry starving? – this is globalized greed and THAT'S A SIN, children. This is precedent-setting.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/6619307.stm

WHAT WOULD JESUS BUY?

The Meek Shall Inherit

by reverend Billy

 

“The meek shall inherit the Earth.” Who said that? Emma Goldman? Or was it Subcommandante Marcos?

 

Here’s another question. Who is the meek party in question? Who has been genocided and holocausted more than another victim in history? It’s a trick question. The Earth. The answer is the Earth.

 

The Earth shall inherit the Earth. We are all the Earth ourselves, of course, but we’re a rogue species that may now be rejected by our fellows in creation, like the many once-dominating life-forms who have been returned to the dust. If we eventually get through this climate crisis and extinction epidemic and our rash of wars – it will be because we knew that we got really really MEEK.

 

Reverend, are you asking for me to be powerless? – I’m supposed to be powerless on purpose? Yes children -- try meekness like this. Walk from where you are toward the greatest amount of nature – even if it’s just a tree on an exhausted traffic island. Go to the natural world and make no demand, have no statement. Let’s call it Radical Humility. Face the rest of life, leave your human power behind, and have no pre-emptive belief. Not even – “I want to save you!”

 

Listen, see, and wait – without conditions. Take the non-human into us, in a way that we haven’t before. Let strange life systems come to us with our new instructions. The intelligence which flows in the rocks and grass and wind and birds is not hearable by 200 foot cell phone towers and does not register on picture-window size home entertainment screens. But you and I can hear it.

 

What the Earth says to us is not vague at all. It is specific. It comes in subjects object and verbs set to a heartbeat. Officially, our governments regard nature as without language. Our scientists and – our culture generally – doesn’t think speech can come from rocks, or even chimps. But global warming, for instance, is coming to us as dramatic screaming monologues. Much of our population is spending some time every day translating the waves, fires, floods and droughts into the King’s English. It is so astonishing to us that nature talks. Nature is shouting with a whisper that can flood a continent.

 

The End of the World is very exciting. It is like a gathering of Guernicas. So much drama. And so many swashbuckling celebrities and suddenly GREEN! corporations are finding the spotlight at the End. The increased compassion for nature by the famous is astounding, but Hollywood’s heavy-breathing love of the drama of the climate crisis leaves the impression that they love the apocalypse as much as their right-wing Christians, their opponents in the well-known cultural war. But very few commercial personalities seem to have the meekness to be in the other media – communications of wilderness, from the wild.

 

Let me humbly propose some Inheritors, before we chase the Devils. Rachel Carson, author of The Sea Around Us, is a little woman who was hounded by the chemical companies but inherited the Earth. Wangari Maathai , the Kenyan planter of a million trees, who won the Nobel Peace Prize, has taught heads of state the humble on-your-knees-with-muddy-hands act of lowering a seedling into the ground. And the most effective image for Al Gore may be his long shots of simply standing at the edge of his river talking quietly. “We may lose all this” – he is opening the door for his public to the Aldo Leopolds and Walt Whitmans, who loaf and invite their souls but are American radicals of a type that wait within the environmental movement and have been there more deeply and longer than the new Green brat packs.

 

With Reverend Billy, I mimic the least meek of our American iconic characters, the televangelist. I’m an Elvis impersonator with a secret. Somehow the transcendent moments of our “Fabulous Worships” come when I am “beside myself” -- stuttering haltingly toward a truth that comes from an unknown source, falling back into the wave of gospel. In our last show the whole lot of us whispered “Change-a-lujah!” again and again.

If I judge anyone, I want to do it more carefully then I have in the past. We are all sinners doing the best we can and we are all forgiven. But – a commercial celebrity who is Green as hell will insist that it is best that the system of the present economy remain as it is. You can’t get these people to talk about globalization, sweatshops, or the Orwellian bleaching of our minds by the product monoculture. No – they have 2 movies a year to sell, with the flotilla of pixilated spin-offs. So, if the Celebs can’t look inward, they swashbuckle outward, flying into the old colonies and picking up orphans for the cover of People.

 

The Devil here is not the celebrities, who are just people doing their best – it is a system where share-holders of their corporations demand ever-expanding returns for the money they move around. That cancerous per-share expansion is the thing that is not meek. And you don’t hear the public voices in the United States ever talk about this fetishistic love of growth. Hasn’t it been proven long ago that the GNP does not indicate real prosperity? Stop buying that! The gambling casino of the Dow Jones is still recited as received wisdom by our pretty TV anchors, yet another layer of celebritude.

 

Each of us is a celebrity, down in our own world. Each of us should resist going to the horizon, away from where we are, to flashily show off our love. Each of us has to strip down to simple nature, get THAT radical. The Earth that inherits itself will do so by turning culture upside down and inside out. Commercial celebrities don’t have that option. They are the modern old priests that frowned on Rachel Carson and Wangari Maathi and Jesus and Malcolm… They must resist real change. Our new earth-inheriting leaders will instruct us radically - with a whisper, and then a long pause for the crickets and singing leaves to come through.

 

Invite the Reverend to your town