The stories that sadden me the most in our country are the stories of prisoners. I have worked as a prison chaplain in California so I have experience of this side of life. When people enter our prisons, it is as if their rights are taken away. They are habitually targets for rape and exploitation—both by other inmates and by corrupted guards. They live in isolation and depravation and in fear. I know some maximum security prisons that remind me of our visions of hell. To think that we allow our fellow countryman to live like this is a horror beyond words. We need to focus on rehabilitation and redemption instead of bringing even more evil into the lives of those convicted of crime.

I am also very saddened by the increasing divide between the very rich and the rest of us. While some live on beautiful tree-lined streets with all the amenities one could hope for, a great many more of our citizens today live within noisy, hectic, polluted environments devoid of beauty. In concrete jungles, how can a person stay connected spiritually with God? It is very difficult. Great numbers of our citizens now turn to alcohol and drugs and to technological and sexual addictions to escape from the ugliness of their environment and the loneliness of their lives. We need to start again to be a United States in which each person has an opportunity to live in a healthy environment, and one rooted in our natural world.

We need desperately to protect and build up our natural environment. Our harmony with the rest of the life that God created gives our lives health, rootedness, and joy. Disharmony or the destruction of nature robs us of all of these and creates a living hell for us.

We need to change our medical system so that every American has access to equal and high quality health care. We need to change our system so that it is not drug-driven and profit-driven, but health-centered for each and every person. Too many people in every family are dying because their doctors no longer have time to see them—they are just busy writing in charts and not even examining their patients in many places. People are dying because they have to wait for weeks and months for appointments when they have cancers and other devastating illnesses that could be treated, but because the delays are so long, instead these people die. People are dying because the doctors are so hurried by the profit-based-system we are in that they make mistakes constantly, and the number of innacurate diagnoses has soared. People are dying because even the nursing care has been drastically reduced in most hospitals in service to the false god of profit. People are dying because so much of our money goes to make weapons which will only further hurt and maim people, and trillions are going into outerspace research and travel for God knows what reason, while our brothers and sisters are left abandoned in their illnesses.

We need to change our thinking so that technology and money are no longer or false Gods, our idols. We need to put God, who is Love, back in the center. Instead of replacing so many workers with technology (I think of people who work in supermarkets as clerks, in factories as workers, even on bridges as toll collectors)—we need to continue to employ our people and to value them. Robots should not replace people. People need work for their dignity and we need salaries for our families. And all of us in the community need to live among and with people—-not robots. We need to think of the joy of living within a happy human community and to bring this back as a value, as our way of being.

Of course, I experience the same divides that everybody in this society does, and I am very much aware, as the sister was saying at the end of her talk, of the fact that my white skin gives me privileges that other people don’t have. But the specific divides that I am here to represent are those on university campuses between adjunct faculty—who really have no status and are paid very badly, have no benefits and so on—and really the rest of the university community. Today, for instance, at St. Louis University, we’re having what we’re calling, a ‘fast for faculty.’ People are gathering in the center of the campus, talking with one another, talking with folks who come by, and fasting today in recognition of this event in hopes of catching the attention of the Pope Francis and his entourage as they are on their way to this country, to represent the Jesuit Just Employment Policy that we hope can be adopted by Jesuit institutions around the country.

So the divide that I am particularly interest in is that one and what I’m doing today to try to bridge that is participating in this kind of silent event really, in which we are talking to folks at St. Louis University about adjuncts and the situation that adjuncts face. We’re a long way at St. Louis University—well I shouldn’t say that—we’re a way at St. Louis University from making a big push toward organizing a union. However, we’re planning to do that. We hope, of course, that we can have the cooperation of the University faculty, the University’s professional faculty, and the University administration, as we work towards doing that. I was talking this morning with a friend of mine who’s a member of the professional faculty—full-time faculty—who’s very much on our side and who is speaking to folks in his department, his colleagues. There are others like that at St. Louis University who will support us. Many of the folks who are participating in this fast this morning are students. In fact, I noticed as I was sitting in the middle of the campus this morning, there were probably more students there than anybody else at that hour when I was there. So I guess that’s the answer to your question.

Here in South Carolina, I see so much polarization between Democrats and Republicans. It is so important that we find areas of agreement and learn to have civil, constructive discussions about how we can solve our problems together. As state team lead for NETWORK of SC, I feel called to help grow our network of members and friends, already in every congressional district in South Carolina, to connect and collaborate with all who want to bridge those divides and transform politics for the benefit of the 100% of Americans.

There’s a lot of discrimination that I’ve faced so many times in my life, throughout the nine years—nine, ten years—that I’ve been living in St. Louis. I’ve gone to McDonald’s, I’ve gone to Walgreens, even in my own school there’s a little bit of division with the girls or anything… Just by the way that the way that you walk into a place, they just see you as different—different skin color—and they’re just immediately saying “Okay, this one we got to watch out for.” So, I think when it comes to division, immigrants face a lot of it, obviously, because we have a different language, different skin tone, different culture. Any time that we are out, there’s some type of judgement, there’s some type of, I don’t want to say resentment, but there a little bit of people not wanting you to be here and it shows. You can sense it.

We were waiting on the two people before us to go ahead and pay. The other register opened up obviously, and she said “I can help the next person.” We were waiting for the older lady that was in front of us to go because we didn’t want to get anybody upset, because had been waiting for a while. The thing was that a man from the back, the back of the line, he just…The woman in the register said—she said it twice—she said “I can help somebody that’s next.” We just stood there because we were waiting for her, just respectfully waiting for the other lady to go and the man says “They don’t speak English. Don’t ask them anything because they don’t understand what you’re saying.” My mom and I turn and I just looked at him straight in the eye and I said “It’s alright, sir, we’re just waiting for this young…or older…or this lady to go because it was her turn. She can go ahead. Or you can go ahead.” That was it. That was the time that I spoke up verbally…really the first time ever in my life. It was something horrible at the very end because I felt scared, that there was going to be some conflict because I spoke up.

One of the first things I noticed when I moved to East Wheeling after growing up in the country is that kids had very little connection with things natural. So, even if it was bugs or insects or snakes or dirt or mud, things that grow, all the things that I found really cool as a kid and made me feel connected to the ground that I stand on weren’t happening here in East Wheeling. So that was my original motivation to try to get kids off the concrete and get some kind of connection with the natural world.

Food was a really neat way to do that because what kid isn’t excited when they plant a cherry tomato seed and a few months later they get to pluck a cherry tomato off the vine and eat it? Grow Ohio Valley works to do just that, to connect people to their food. We work to try to teach kids how to grow food.

We try to give people gardening opportunities who want them but don’t have them, such as senior centers or housing projects. In the meantime, we also work on food access. We have a mobile farmers market goes around to different communities making healthy local food available while we grow a pretty significant quantity ourselves at our urban farm and at our rural farm. We’re trying to get out a holistic picture of what it means to get a community connected back to the roots of its food.

I actually filed for and received disability in 2013. At that time, I had COBRA insurance, which was a little over $700 a month, which is more than half of the disability that I bring in, so I had to drop my COBRA. I had some money in a 401k, therefore I was not eligible for Medicaid and had to wait two years to get Medicare. 60 days from getting my Medicare, I was hospitalized—taken to the hospital in an ambulance, had to stay for three days, had tests ran—and now I am stuck with those hospital bills to pay on my disability income. I’m drowning. I was $117 from being able to get Medicaid until my Medicare came in. $117 a month. It left me with nothing. I did not have a doctor. I did not have prescription medications that I needed. I had no access to tests and things that I needed to help with my health, to help me live a healthier lifestyle. I’m stuck in the system. The spend down, they wanted me to spend all of my 401k that I had before they would help me with anything. I am just stuck in the middle of this with no way out. Hopefully, the hospital will help me with a financial scholarship program to help pay some of those bills, but I don’t really know the way out for me with this current hospital bill that I have. This just happened to me two weeks ago. I was 60 days from getting my Medicare.

I’m not really sure what to do, besides make certain that our government knows how many thousands of people are stuck out here in this spend down. We are sick. We are on disability. It’s not something that comes easily. You have to have doctors and tests and be evaluated. If you receive that disability, you are sick. You need medical treatment. You need medical care. We’re stuck in this gap again. You have a little bit of money, so we can’t help you. I don’t know how else to help with the situation, besides putting the word out there and letting it be known. There has to be hundreds of thousands of us out here in this same situation.

By the time women get to the streets, there are several illegal hustles they rely on. Using drugs to deal with everyday life, theft, and then it’s just a revolving door from jails, prisons, rehabs, psych wards, streets. A lot of my sisters never made it out alive. I just came to terms with that as “God decided that they had enough and took them home.” It’s obvious that a broke community got them out there. It only makes sense that a loving community can get them back. She says “I wanna open a house. I don’t wanna receive state or federal funding. I wanna give them a sanctuary. I want to love them lavishly. Let’s see if this love heals.” There’s a myth out there that women like us don’t heal. If you look around it’s very evident. We do heal. When we heal, you can watch us go because we are truly survivors.

She went to prison, got 5 women with no less than 100 arrests on their records and they were the pioneers of the whole thing. 5 women. So, it is housing first. You can’t try to heal when you’re worried about paying rent and you don’t think you have any…

Sr. Simone (off-camera): Amen, any place to go.

Clinger: Well, you don’t think you have any skills other than what you’ve been doing. 95% of the women have been sexually molested, physically molested, or abandoned and/or all of the above before the ages of 10 and, on average, hit the streets between 12 and 15. So, it does a lot of damage in those young lives. So, she found out that the women were healing, loving them, and…two years is up and finding out we can’t get jobs because of criminal histories, lack basic job skills. She says, “If you’re really going to love people, you have to worry about their…you have to be concerned and worried about their economic freedom. A livable sustainable wage.” We could find jobs, but it was not enough to support ourselves.

She found out that love is good business. Now, that business that I was in was not love business, that was just greed and…yeah. This is true love business and an attempt to love you.

Sr. Simone (off-camera): Amen.

Clinger: The thing is is that women get their children back and save the state money from foster care. We no longer go to prisons and jails, saving the federal government money from that. To house a woman at Magdalene is about half the cost of putting them in jail for a year.

This is Thistle Farms. It started in 2001 with 3 products at the church, Vandi campus. It was a body balm, a lip balm, and a bath salt. It’s grown to all this without state or federal funding. We use all natural ingredients. There’s just as good for the Earth as they are for the body. Every recipe–we have over 30 products now–every recipe gets carefully mixed, carefully measured. They get poured one at a time. Labels, coats, barcodes, sense-stickers all go on one at a time and we are in over 480 retail stores. We go out to events. We’ve got the store-front here. We are growing. Only so many women can make a soap or lotion at one time, so we have to be growing. We’re on capital campaign.

By the time we get through Thistle Farms, you’re just going to get a really good of an idea of how –thanks that you’re here–that we are all growing global and that we can make the world a better place for our children and grandchildren.

We have a lot of people who are not registered to vote in Kansas. There was a very low turnout in the last governor election, so that is one way Republican and Democrats can work together to get people out there and get them voting.

Another thing that Judy and I are both very passionate about: community gardens.Community gardens can solve a lot of issues, but they take a lot of work- hard, sweat, “your hands are going to hurt,” “your back’s going to hurt”–work. That’s something that I see a lot of people resistant of, is doing the actual work.

I want to talk about the need that Dr. Martin Luther King called for a year to the day before he was murdered, for a “radical revolution of values” away from profits and property to people and personhood so that we began to work across racial, religious, income, class, and regional lines that began to focus on militarism, materialism, racism, and now classism, sexism, and xenophobia. These are the issues that challenge us. Dr. King called for this. It was why he was killed. It is what we still must overcome.