Sunday, November 26, 6:00 – 8:00 p.m. Saengerrunde Hall, 1607 San Jacinto
An Invitation to Last Sunday
by Eliza Gilkyson and Jim Rigby
We live in the most affluent and powerful nation in the history of the world, yet more and more people are beginning to fear that all our money and guns are little protection against the crises that loom ahead.
We think that those crises — political and cultural, economic and ecological — are real and that the fear is justified. But rather than allowing this fear to divide us, which makes us easy prey for the politicians who are so crafty at manipulating our insecurities, we must come together to find honest answers rooted in justice rather than illusory “solutions” rooted in more frantic attempts at domination.
Toward that end, we have come together from very different positions as a musician (Gilkyson) and a minister (Rigby), but with common progressive political principles, to try to help create space for like-minded people to gather not as consumers in the mall but as community members in a hall.
On Nov. 26, we will sponsor the first in an ongoing series of “Last Sunday” community gatherings that will include artistic, political, and spiritual components. We extend a fiercely non-partisan and non-sectarian invitation to all those in Central Texas who are searching for a place for conversation that goes beyond cable TV news soundbites and polarized shouting matches.
Because this is Austin, there will be lots of good music, of course. And Naomi Shihab Nye, the San Antonio-based poet, will be our special literary guest for the first gathering.
Though we open the doors for “Last Sunday” to all, we don’t want to pretend the event has no political bent; we are progressives who believe that the existing distribution of wealth and power in the world is fundamentally unjust. Given the dominant role of the United States in that world, we also believe U.S. citizens have a moral obligation to be part of the global justice movement to counter the effects of predatory capitalism and empire-building.
Those of us on stage at the venerable Saengerrunde Hall for this evening will reflect those principles, but we won’t be politicking for candidates or issues in traditional form. Electoral politics and issue-oriented campaigns are crucial, but it’s just as important to create a space for people to confront those fears, explore our options, and make connections that can be useful in a wide variety of campaigns in the years to come.
We speak of these pending crises not because we have a crystal ball to predict the future, but because in our guts we feel this country is headed in a dangerous direction. More than 60 years of U.S. military domination of the world have hardly made us safe, and an unbridled capitalism has left half the world’s population living on less than $2 a day. We see around us an increasingly violent society, a culture in which women and people of color still face very real dangers in a society based on domination. And perhaps most troubling of all, we see the signs of ecological collapse that quite literally threaten the capacity of the Earth to sustain human life as we know it.
It seems to us that, given those realities, being afraid of what is coming is a perfectly sensible reaction. But we can’t give in to the fear and retreat. Instead, we have to think of how to act — not simply to affect public policy in the short term but also to rethink fundamental values for the long term. That will require a level of connection and commitment to community that very few of us feel we have and which we desperately need to foster.
We hope “Last Sunday” will be a small part of that community-building process as we dig in for what one writer has called “the long emergency” that our society faces. There’s no better time to start that than now, and no better place than Austin.
****************************
“Last Sunday” is not a political rally or a church service, not a literary salon or just a concert. Instead, it’s designed to be a gathering that brings all those elements together toward the goal of creating space for people to make and deepen connections.
Last Sunday is the project of an ad-hoc group responding to a deepening sense that the crises — economic, political, cultural and ecological — we face in the contemporary United States and the wider world are growing more serious by the moment. As we grapple with these issues, many of us fear that institutionalized religion and traditional political parties are inadequate to meet these challenges. How will we build the relationships and organizations that will allow us meet our obligations to each other and the world? There are no easy answers, but the solutions will have to come out of community, out of our commitment and connection to each other. Last Sunday hopes to be part of that process.
The first evening will feature Grammy-nominee Eliza Gilkyson, whose latest CD on Red House is “Paradise Hotel”; the Rev. Jim Rigby, author of the forthcoming The New Reformation; and University of Texas professor Robert Jensen, author of Citizens of the Empire: The Struggle to Claim Our Humanity.
Special guest that evening will be Naomi Shihab Nye, the San Antonio-based poet whose award-winning verse has been recognized with Guggenheim and Lannan fellowships. Her most recent collection, 19 Varieties of Gazelle: Poems of the Middle East, was a finalist for the National Book Award.
The event is free and open to the public. Child care will be available.