Meetings and Sabbath Peace, llvl

It is perhaps an odd notion that meetings can be on a sabbath occupation and there will still be room for sabbath to get some attention… But small organizations fit their meetings in where they can. And weekends are often what we have.

But small organizations are run on human hearts and human ingenuity. Things need to be done and so you do them. Here’s to all the folks who take the time. Because small organizations are the engines for much of life that matters… they get things done and they plan for the future. This is as true whether you live in a large metropolitan area as it is in small rural regions.

There’s something wonderful about being part of the engine, of contributing your gifts and making something you care deeply about work. It’s probably even more true because none of us, or at least few of us, love committees and boards. But they do the work. And we’re grateful for the investment of time and love. This is doing good to make your community (and your world) better.

So go to your meeting and then take the time off to enjoy the day some other way… Happy Sabbath, you wonderful Peacemakers!

Encourage Love during Advent Peace

To encourage the Love. Is there anything more important that we can do in this world?

And the sacred season of Advent is built for exactly this possibility. Of all the holidays I left behind as I became Post-Christian, Advent is the one that has most called to me across our differences. I have been unable to release the feeling — don’t you hear Leonard Bernstein’s “Something’s coming, something Good — I don’t know when…”

For that to happen, we have to make space in our lives, our hearts, our souls. We have to encourage it. I started writing about Peace in these musings a year ago. My sense that it is possible has only grown — and I haven’t even left Dodge! I know more people for whom this is a concern. I know more people who are not like me and we are forging conversations and even doing good work. Little Dreams are taking root, and growing.

It’s got to happen where we are — here where I am, there where you are. And as it spreads. As we relax into Love, we relax into Peace. We start naming it, we start letting it be important. We start doing things that are not, perhaps, on the surface about Peace, but which create Peace in their wake. Because we’re caring for people. We’re feeding them. We’re fighting pollution in their name. We’re standing up against ecological disaster. We’re each doing the things we do, and widening our scope a little. Perhaps even gentling our touch.

There’s something that each of us can do to encourage Love. One of the great things about it is that it’s habit forming. If we’re kind. If we’re generous. If we’re thoughtful or resourceful or determined. The Love makes the setbacks bearable. The Possibilities of Peace illuminate the journey. We have a place we’re bound. There is more Love, more Peace, more Grace. And I’ve found it in your company.

Oh who you are and the work you do are worthy of all the encouragement I can give you.

Do-It-Yourself Peace

I’ve had a lot of cause to be thankful to FB over the last couple months. I wasn’t really seeing anyone, so, my friends around the corner were reaching out on FB the same way my friends in Sweden were. And it was great. I am so thankful. Because I still haven’t been able to turn my hand (okay, my heart) to my thank you notes or to casual phone calls or tea encounters.

But in the same time period, and perhaps always, but I’m just a bit more sensitive at the moment, there has been a whole lot of whining going on.

Now, i am a champeen whiner. The tireder I get; the more vigilant I have to be. wah… Life is too hard. My (fill-in-the-blank) doesn’t understand me, was mean to me, doesn’t know i’m alive. We all need to do some whining it lets off pressure, but then, I believe, we need to stop whining and get back into it. Because i don’t feel better when I sing that song, I feel justified. And that? Gets us nowhere!

Right now the political whining is at a frenzy. It’s their fault, she(he)’s a horrible person so I can complain and do nothing to help the rest of society. As a favorite shrink used to say, “where is it written?”

Here’s the deal folks. People are hungry. In our country we collect money in plastic canisters in stores to pay for life-saving operations for children. People are living without heat, without shelter. None of these things, none, is acceptable.

We don’t get to Peace; we don’t get to Justice; we don’t get to full-bellied children by doing nothing. We don’t get to any of those places by going backward. We only get to those places by moving forward. By forging coalitions. Much of what we have to give up in forging those coalitions are entitlement and whining. We have to want what’s best for someone else as well as ourselves.

In the next two days, I’m going to go fix the page at Love Flows, in case you’re local and you want to donate money to help the UUCSV feed people in the Susquehanna Valley, I’ll give you the link.

But you may not live right here. We’d be happy to have your money, but so would your hometown. How can you get involved?
Build something constructive rather than tearing something down that someone else has done.
Add to life, don’t take away from it.
Get informed — not about how stupid others are — but about what’s needed.
Work locally to make a difference.
Join with others to make life better.
And stop whining. Because it doesn’t make you look smart. It just makes you look mean.

Then let’s just get busy building Peace. And Hope. And Justice. Because we’re just the folks to do it.

Present for Peace

Everyone’s life is busy. And when you add our illusion of control to our to do list, we begin to think our tasks are monumentally important. And it’s clear, says one over her head in tasks, that sometimes tasks require an immense amount of attention.

However, in the midst of that busyness, we are often asked by friends or even strangers to show up. Every instinct screams that we don’t have time… sometimes that’s right, but we need to be sure.

Because often the very most important thing we can do is to do less than our stellar best on a task and make time for a relaxed, human encounter. My parents drilled this into me. They were at a friend’s house once. The friend was dying. They’d gone for a visit. “Stay,” he said. “Tasks,” they said. He died that week. “Never do that,” they said to us. “Never.”

We need to prioritize Friendship. We need to prioritize Love. We need to prioritize Life’s Sacred Passages and show up for them. Houses may be messy, grass un-mown, but cups of tea and glasses of beer or wine will be had, shoulders will be cried on. Funerals will be attended, conversations will be frank, people will get the ride they need to the doctors appointment or the medicine from the drug store. Doing good work and good works is the most important work. Stepping up can be hard work, yet, in doing that, simple presence will be offered and life will be transformed.

Extending our hands beyond our normal circles of caring begins to build great possibilities, and starts us down the road toward a Peace that is bigger than we are. All because we rearrange our time and our priorities. It’s sometimes messy and frustrating and inconvenient, but Peace and Caring? as the ad says… Priceless.

Peace of the Moment

Living in the moment. ack. According to most traditions, being present is what is asked of us. We are to delight in the moment. Pay attention heretics… it’s not all about the next life. Why would we have this life if we weren’t to enjoy it?

There are those glorious moments when it’s easy. Look. Life is grand!

But most of life is? Not that.

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about ‘way over yonder recently. Not so much the ‘way over yonder of death, but the ‘way over yonder of “if I can only finish this, life will exist on the other side.”

Hello! Lying to myself. Life is in the mess. In the packed dishes, mine and my sister’s mingling, in the paper on the floor, in the box spring that doesn’t go up the stairs.

It’s not about snapping and whining that life is too hard. It’s about opening and going through. Because, in fact, I have a box spring that doesn’t go up the stairs in my cozy little home. I have stuff. I had the most remarkable sister. I had a great family whose mementos surround me. I have great family who love and laugh and bicker. I have friends who pack my stuff, who move my stuff, who hold my hand, listen to me moan, weep with me. Life is right here.

If I fail to be grateful, I miss the point. I miss the Peace. … dammit. Once again, here we are, lookin’ for love in all the wrong places. It’s not about sitting on the mountain top, it’s about living in the muck. In the summer, I need to remember I love the feel of mud squishing between my toes. In the winter? I’ve got great boots. forward ho!

Present and accounted for. Until, of course, it gets hard. And then I can learn this lesson again.

Gleaning Peace

I’ve said it a million times, I’m a religious not a political animal. When a vote is taken by our lawmakers, whether it’s posturing or not, to deny poor people food, I’m aghast.

75 percent of SNAP households include a child, a disabled or an elderly person. And yet that’s still not the point. People are hungry. They must be fed. We are our brothers’ and our sisters’ and our neighbors’ keepers. We are.

I feel naive and stupid… I don’t understand how this thinking enters our worldview. And it is our worldview. I don’t want to hear people say, it’s “their” fault, because people’s being fed and housed is everyone’s responsibility. That’s not socialism, that’s my moral understanding of a just world. Or maybe it is socialism, because I believe our government should provide, I don’t care. I believe that no one should go hungry in a land of plenty. That’s not an equivocating statement, that’s the most forceful statement I can make.

Somehow, we have to turn the tide… in our area we have teachers buying food and slipping it into their students’ backpacks so they can eat over the weekend. Lovely sentiment, lousy precedent. what will we do? what will we do?

One friend wrote this: “We all need to bombard our Congressmen with demands that they restore a reasonable amount to allow a person to live on SNAP. $1.40 a day is not sustainable. That amount is 1/100 of the DAILY meal allowance each Congressman receives ($137.41). We as good people cannot allow this insanity to continue!!”

It certainly puts things in perspective, doesn’t it? But some response is needed…There is no Peace when the people are hungry. There is no Peace if we are not doing what is needed, if we are not doing good.

Graduate Peace?

Our graduates are coming out into a tough world. There aren’t lots of jobs available. And there are many things wrong with the world. We’ve certainly given them unrealistic expectations that their lives would be better than ours — a notion the boomers proved to be true in their early work lives perhaps but are perhaps struggling with today.

It’s a great time for leadership. And I’m not sure it’s going to be ours. Because we haven’t led. I realized two things in writing this. 1) well, that was depressing, despite my faith in them and 2) the next poem had better be to their elders, we’d better Peace-up, and start looking for our own solutions.

But graduates? Count those blessings, Review your shortcomings. Do that self-reflection dance. Stay present. Stay connected to your friends with great ideas and the will and ingenuity to implement them.

And isn’t that the work of right now? What’s going in that garden to feed our family? What Peace seedlings are we planting and tending to feed a Peace-hungry world? There’s work to be done. And for too many kids there are choices to be made between doing nothing and doing good. We cannot let these shining stars become discouraged; and they’re of an age where they might want to realize that it will be dangerous for them.

So, an important part of their challenge is to stay involved and inspired in their lives despite a very challenging world. There’s very real danger in their becoming disaffected… we owe our children not to let that happen — and they owe it to themselves.

Cusps and Verges are very interesting places filled with wonder and possibility and fraught with danger…

Love Flows to Staten Island

Dear Friends, I know, twice in one day!

The local UU congregation in the Susquehanna Valley, where I’m minister, got involved in Superstorm Sandy relief not only because it is right to be generous in the face of need but also because many of us in this River Valley had only last year experienced the trauma and destruction of floods. We were so lucky that when we reached out, we found a congregation on Staten Island who was acting as a distribution center for the relief and recovery efforts. We’ve grown a great partnership and we’re very proud and grateful to have been able to have been of some help. We’ve now created a new way that with a little bit of generosity and a wee bit of effort gathering your friends and family to help that we can make a big difference in a both a joyful afternoon for some and a big gift that will benefit many. Here’s what’s on our UUCSV website and here are the instructions for chipping in to be a small but integral part of a sweet and refreshing gift of love.

Since Superstorm Sandy the UUCSV and our friends in the Susquehanna Valley have been sending cash cards to the people of Staten Island which are being disseminated through the UU Church of Staten Island. The Rev. Susan Karlson has been our contact point. What has been great is that we’ve been able to send not only every dollar that was given, but also leverage those dollars and send more than was collected by donating the fundraising profit we get from selling gift cards. It’s been a great boon and the money you’re donating is going right into the hands of people trying to rebuild their lives. We chose this action because people in this Valley know what it means to inundated by floodwaters. People’s generosity has been amazing. We are grateful and proud. Over $9,000 has gone from our hearts to theirs.

We’ve been planning a work day. (May 25, 2013) As Susan and Ann talked about the difficulties of finding work for non trained people at this point, we decided that what would be wonderful would be to take them a garden party. Musicians have donated their time, we’ll be soliciting food from stores and restaurants. But we also thought it would be wonderful to gather a large sum of money as a gift. We need to pay for the bus. But other than that, we could turn your gifts into cards for individuals, or they could find a project that needed a lump sum infusion. The idea of gathering $10 from 1,500 people all over our River Valley and Beyond was born. Do you have $10 to share with the People of Staten Island? Will you ask your friends if they do? You can help make a huge difference in the lives of fellow flood victims. We can give, because we’re generous and because we’ve been there. Love flows: from the rivers to the ocean, and from our hearts to yours. Please give that Love some momentum and donate to our Sandy Relief project today. Here’s what to do. (although stuffing a $10 in my pocket — or better yet a bunch of them works just as well!)

In gratitude for your generosity and thoughtfulness… Ann

Balancing Peace

Peace is no different than anything else: people go about it in different ways. What’s hard is that there is in the nature of Peace the imperative to work together. When someone’s approach is so different as to be alien to yours, it makes working together challenging, to say the least.

I work best alone or in consultation with other people who work alone but who are interested in pursuing a particular goal. I can play well on teams, where we each rely on our own expertise, but do not do particularly well in institutional settings. My independence can be an irritant and I can find that work style fairly irritating. I went to a meeting the other day and was reminded that it’s not that I can’t play well with others, I just don’t particularly enjoy organized play! Only team sport I ever competed on was swimming. You put your head down and swam your heart out. That works for me.

When I was a kid, I was good at the massive eyeroll about the slow steady nature of institutional work. Now that I’m clear I don’t have to participate, I can appreciate. Because after all, I really want to do only the work I’m good at. That means there’s a whole bunch of other work to be done. I finally got smart enough to look around and see whose work was complementary! At work for instance, I rely on my Director of Religious Growth and learning to supply denominational enthusiasm. When I started to work there, I knew I needed to find a residential UUist. While profoundly UU in spirit, I’m interested in local or regional community and Peace building. I want impact. I can do that work because Sara reminds me where the institution supports that work. She wants process. Luckily we adore and respect one another and are happy to see through one another’s eyes now and again.

Sara’s pretty easy to love and she’s a grown-up and knows her strengths, which makes it very easy to work with her. We laugh enough and make enough progress that it seems she feels the same. We also trust one another to have the best interests of the community on our hearts. And we rely on each other to do the work we can’t do… and we both cast around to find someone to do the work neither of us are gifted at. And that is Peace. It isn’t my working like Sara, completely out of my element, or her working like me, completely out of her element, it takes both of us doing what we’re excellent at and accomplishing our shared goals. We’re building community the only way you can, together, and we’re building it on our differences rather than despite them.

This works for us because we each know ourselves pretty well, we have enough explicit, shared work, goals and values and we are willing to figure out out how to stand together… but as our buddy Mr. Gibran says… not too close together!

Peace and Magic Making

I’ve been living, as the poem below says, in Mercedes Lackey’s Valedmar, filled with Mages and Companions. It’s been lovely. I was tired and depleted, and it’s been a grand vacation. When you can’t lie on a beach, go to the library!

I don’t read sci-fi in general, rather I read a very small segment of the genre, women’s fantasy, often sword and sorcery fantasy. (and THAT’s about the most I’ve ever admitted in public!) I read it for three reasons, first because it completely interrupts the real world. It helps me stop thinking. When you live in this brain, stopping thinking is an occasional blessed relief — maybe even a rite of holy obligation! Second, I like the that the heros and heroines are always striving for a better world. In my world, I find inertia and stagnation often drags me down, tempts me to ignore my calling to do the same, seduces me to work around my values and beliefs. Heroines on paper? Nevah! Third? I’m beginning to think that authors’ use of magic is really about their longing for to create Peace, which is, I believe, the biggest magic we have available to us in this world.

In this series, I was really struck by the the author’s description of the aftermath of the working of great magic, the disruption it causes in the world. She was envisioning storms arising from a working of great evil, in increasingly larger ripples. But isn’t that how things are? One little action, and sooner or later, ripples begin to spread. With evil-doing, the ripples are two-fold: greater acts of violence and increased indifference them. But isn’t it the same with acts of Peace. One person acts and another is encouraged. One person acts, exposing the ugly root and another sees and acts for the good. We have choices about the ripples we want to put into the world. Indifference or action? Violence or Peace? Willful Blindness or Vision and open hearts?

It’s January, almost February. Here we are, gathering the shards together to begin building our own Dream for Peace, however great or small. Those dreams as we implement them will cause ripples. When people see us act for good, they are empowered to do the same.

Sacred Village

Building a World of Peace, Village by Sacred Village.

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