ATTA YAQUB

In the year 2000, a report was published for Parliament by Lord Parekh with the title, "The Future of Multi-Etnic Britain." He writes, "Britain is a recent creation and colonialism and empire were integral to its making." That's the equivalent of saying in the U.S. that we are what we are as a nation because of the historic and essential role of our minorities. I take this to mean here in the U.K that the peope from India and Pakistan and many other countries of the Commonweath are not in any sense "second class" or "outsiders," but are an essential part of the fiber that makes up England and Scotland and the other areas of the British Isles, just as much as the Anglos.

The Pakistanis, often wearing shalwar kameez -- clothes that are common in Pakistan, are an obvious ethnic minority in Glasgow. Most are Muslim. They make up forty percent of the population in an area called Pollockshields, and almost that many in another section of Glasgow, with a scattering throughout the city. Muslims are the largest non-Christian group in the city.

To embrace the Muslim community and include them in the services we provide, the Transformation Team has employed Atta Yaqub -- a young, energetic second-generation Pakistani. Atta has been a community activist for the past five years focusing on youth -- working as a volunteer with the Youth Counselling Services Agency, with particular concern for the drug and alcohol problems among Muslim and other minority young people.

As in the U.S., the media often describes the economy here as brisk, but below the radar are large sections of the population facing a very shaky and uncertain future. Unemployment is high; entry level jobs are rare and poorly paid. The excitement of violence sometimes substitutes for the possibility of an empty future that many young people face. As Atta says, "Young people from a Muslim background face identity issues. They are trying to be Pakistani, Muslim, western and Scottish all at the same time, and it's a hard formula to balance." As an active football (soccer) coach, he has helped organize sports leagues and events for the ethnic minority youth as a way for them to develop a healthy self-esteem and get engaged with diversionary activities.

To begin his community work with the Transformation Team, Atta has been working with Imams of various Glasgow mosques as well as leaders of other faith-based groups, asking them to consider developing programs in their local neighborhoods to which the Transformation Team would then bring their expertise and resources. He has been getting enthusiastic respoonses.

It doesn't hurt that Atta played the lead role in an acclaimed film, Ae Fond Kiss, and is well known throughout the land. There have been other roles as well, but he is not tempted by a full-time career under the bright lights. As he says, "[Life is] about having a sense of belonging to a place and I feel connected to the people I'm working with, whether I know them or not... My name, in Arabic, means being charitable, to give someone something." His goal is to "give back" to the community in view of all that he has received in his life.

What a joy to have Atta as a deeply empathetic and optimistic colleague and friend!

Alistair McIntosh

In September, just before leaving New York, Gayle was given a book by Fred Weidman of Auburn Seminary -- a book by a Scot, Alistair McIntosh, called Soil and Soul: People versus Corporate Power, which she brought with her to Scotland. It was only after I happened to meet McIntosh at a lecture on poverty that I became interested, and found the book to be one of the most intriguing I have read in a long time. Beautifully written, almost every page is worth quoting; there is a great depth of wisdom here. McIntosh is first and foremost an ecologist, and one who sees the presence of God in every blade of grass -- every stone -- and who manifest his reverence for Creation in his writing, by action "on the streets," and in the halls of academia and power. The sequence is autobiographical. We accompany McIntosh on his journey beginning on the isolated island of Lewis, where he was born and nurtured in the deeply spiritual culture of the Hebrides. He was gounded in the soil and enriched by the Centic music and poetry and by the earth itself; in short, by the spirituality that permeates the islands. He grew up playing around the 5,000-year-old Stones of Calanais, which he grew to respect as evidence that the sanctity of this place has been recognized for millennia. In his journey, McIntosh eventually becomes the teaching director of the Centre for Human Ecology of the University of Edinburgh, which he was later forced to leave on the grounds that he was too activist for such a hoary academic institution. The work of the Centre was praised around the world for its great achievements. A major section of the book describes McIntosh's campaign to undo the damage done by the Highlands Clearances that banished common people from the land that their forebears had lived on for centuries, to make way for hunting grounds and the grand estates of the "lairds." Over years of struggle, working with a few others, he was able to organize the handful of tenants on the Isle of Eigg and expel the playboy owner, restoring the island to the crofters who could enjoy the land as it once was -- common land, held in Trust to be shared by everyone who lived on it. At the same time he was able to prevent the building of a superquarry that would have destroyed a majestic Hebridean mountain, much as the coal mines of West Virginia are raping that beautiful landscape. The testimory of a powerful Mi'Kmaq Native American, Warrior Chief Sulian Stone Eagle, helped in that cause. I encourage you to own Soil and Soul ($10.26 used from Amazon) and to rejoice in the holistic ways in which Alistair McIntosh celebrates life on earth. In the context of his own life story and in his encyclopaedic knowledge, he is asking "the central spiritual issue of our time: How can we invite the spirit back into our world?" And then he quotes from a country bard from the Isle of Lewis, " 'Where can we find the Holy Spirit, that "Arrow of the Lord" with which to pierce the skin of surly selfishness.?' " One final comment: If you long to go to Seminary but, for whatever reason, are unable to, reading and disgesting this book in a community of prayer and justice would be a credible substitute.

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"Towards the end of the book of Ezekiel, the prophet is shown a vision of the land that had once been broken and turned to wilderness. But the bones of the dead have come back to life. The Earth, a new Eden, is restored by a stream that rises from the ground beneath the sacred place.

" 'Wherever the river goes,' Ezekiel is told, 'every living creature that swarms will live, and there will be very many fish.' All kinds of trees will grow. Because 'the water flows from the sanctuary, their fruit will be for food, and their leaves for healing.' Restored natural ecology is to be complemented with restored social justice. Even those of the lowest status, 'the aliens who reside among you and have begotten children' -- that is to say, incomers [immigrants] and refugees who have chosen to stay and who seriously wish to belong to a place -- these 'shall be to you as citizens of Israel; with you they shall be alloted an inheritance of the land...' (Ezekiel 47:12, 21-3)

"This image of a restored human and natural ecology -- a return to Eden -- recurs at various points in the Bible... We find it right at the end, in the last chapter of the enigmatic Book of Revelation... It leaves us with a vision in which loss, destruction and death have been passed through. A new world opens out, beyond all the crucifixions and the suffering. It is as if we pass back through the fire from which we were born, now stripped of ego, of craving and of officious striving for control... Our struggle, the challenge of becoming fully human and the full meaning of our troubled times, is to make it 'back to the garden' -- to return to Eden." (Alistair McIntosh, Soil and Soul, Pg 246f.)