Winter Peace

It is cold outside, I have to acknowledge that. But I’ve decided not to fret about it this year. It’s not going to be too cold. It’s not going to be too hot. It’s going to be life. I live in the Northeast. We have winter. It rains. It sleets. It snows. It’s cold and windy. It is what it is. Because you know what? Life gets cut short. And then there’s no time to spend together.

And if we spend our time together wishing our way our time together, we’re not having time together. I spent a lot of time last year working on improving my relationship to the dark and searching for the mystery. I think I’ll spend a lot of time this winter looking for (and finding!) the beauty.

I’m going to buy marvelous potions and lotions and slather myself in them.

I’m going to wrap up against the cold and take long walks. I’ve got the gear. Why not try it out?

I’m going to hope for snow and be glad to shovel.

I’m going to light candles in my house and keep the tea and oranges coming. I’ll keep my house clean and cozy.

And I’m going to give up wanting the clock to move in anything other than its stately progression. I’m going to work to be present and self-reflective. Because this is the time I have with you. This is the time I have with me.

So Winter is going to be all about Peace for me. It’s going to be about wonder and the sacred, sacred Dark. It’s going to be more work on living my life as a prayer of thanksgiving. I hope it will be for you as well. Because it certainly is beautiful. And this is our time.

Steppin’ Out Sabbath Peace

Such a simple statement. We have the power. And so, we conclude, we don’t do anything because we’re frightened? Uncertain how to begin? What Peace and no poverty might look like?

Some might say it’s because we’re entitled, but my experience (and I know, I know, we can’t just generalize from experience, but still), my experience tells me that if you show people a path, they’ll walk it. If you lead, people will walk with you. If you get up to follow a leader, others will come along.

So we have to make sure that the leaders we choose to follow are leading toward Peace and the absence of poverty. And then as the song says: “We have to keep on Walking… ”

So something to think on this brilliant, frigid Northeast sabbath. Why not consider… where you would like your next step to head…

The Power of Peace

I hadn’t really thought of it in such straightforward terms before. But there it was in Kennedy’s “Ask Not” speech. “For man holds in his mortal hands the power to abolish all forms of poverty and all forms of human life.”

Pretty stark, eh? We don’t think of ourselves as capable of abolishing poverty. We wring our hands. We decry other people’s actions (and rarely our own inaction.) The notion that we can change this, whether through governmental action or personal grit, has slipped from our grasp.

What would that be like, for us to erase poverty?

At the same time the notion of power to abolish humankind (what a difference 50 years makes in language, right? Women are now included. Just like that 51 percent of the population is added to the make a difference team.) We can stop that too. There’s John Kerry in Switzerland negotiating away from nuclear options. If you were born after, what the mid 60s, you probably don’t think much about that. That threat loomed over our heads through much of my childhood. There’s a group that believes in Zero Nuke possibilities, that negotiates ceaselessly for that to happen.

So, if “they” think we could abolish nuclear threat, couldn’t we do something about abolishing the threat of guns or at least lessening it a lot?

Could we really be that powerful? Could we really be unwilling to make poverty disappear and Peace appear, or were we just ignorant of our options? Perhaps we’d better step up to the challenge.

Remembering Shattered Peace

50 years ago today. I know where I was. I was in 5th grade. Home sick with a cold. My father called, he was crying, saying the president has been shot. Turn on the TV, tell your mother. (Dawns on me I called my sister and my parents, crying, on 9/11).

It was just the start of what would be a hard decade, where people decided the way to change life was to kill people. John, Malcolm, Martin, Robert. (Oh, heaven, I think of how impossible it was to lose my sister’s kids five years apart. One to suicide, one drunk driving. Impossible to fathom. Impossible to believe. What must it have been like for the Kennedys with two boys shot within five years.

What must it be like for people in the ghettos and the trenches with all their children dying whether one by one in drive by shootings and gang violence or in a group in a bomb in some war-torn place in our world. How do parents stay sane? How do they keep going… but of course few people really do die of a broken heart.

How can we believe that violence is the answer? I didn’t understand then. I don’t understand much better now. “There is no way to Peace, Peace is the way.” Let there be Peace on Earth and let it begin with me.” Peace. May I be Peace. May you. May we together be Peace.

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.

No Love, No Peace

It’s easy to mourn from a distance. It’s easy to be infuriated. It’s not my tradition. It’s not my rights, either to marry or to perform a ceremony that are being abrogated. I am not married because some of you cannot marry, but that was an easy gesture for Steve and me to make; we had no compelling need to marry.

But I’m far sadder than I thought I’d be, both because of the hatefulness and the willingness to allow hate to overshadow their very real responsibilities to Love.

I believe in church. I always have. It is where I have found meaning. It’s true that the meaning I have sought and found has changed over the years. I’m very happy being a Unitarian Universalist for all so many reasons. (you know spell check really should learn to recognize Universalism as a religion and stop telling me I’m wrong!)

But this is where I have immigrated, it isn’t where I was raised. That was sweet and wonderful time for me that eventually didn’t hold the meaning I needed. We held my sister’s memorial in the church we grew up in, and it was clear that that may not have been the best choice theologically, although it was an emotional tie. Too long gone. And way too much theological distance between us.

My early tradition taught me to choose Love. And when I did. When I realized that I would have to grow or lose the friends who were discovering or uncovering their sexuality, I chose Love. This may have been my first step into adulthood (the first step out of Eden?). I danced in and out of that garden gate for a while and eventually left.

And now it seems barbaric to waste time, energy and resources fighting about people’s Love (a pastor’s for his congregation, a father’s for his son, a son’s for his husband) and not about real injustice. Jesus never enjoined folk to hate. “Do you love me, feed my children.”

This year more Americans are going to go hungry. It seems people who style themselves as religious ought to be worrying about that.

I’m sorry for my clergy friends in other traditions who are living with these limitations. I pray for your finding your way forward. I’m sorrier for the differently-loving that you are told, over and over again, that your Love is not worthy. Those who tell you that are flat wrong. My prayers are with you all.

And I’m really, really sorry, that too many of today’s mainline churches would rather pick nits than do justice… and in the name of nit-picking commit sad and sorry injustice.

Autumn Peace Swimming

I love swimming. You can’t have read these for long and not have gotten clear about that. And swimming out of doors, whether in a creek, the ocean or a pool. The best. But swimming anywhere? I’ll take it.

The pool where I swim in the winter is in a room on the end of the building, windows all around. No matter what’s going on outside, the water remains a cozy 84˚. The air is even more balmy (unless you get too close to the doors on a winter’s day.). Sometimes I get to the pool in the afternoons and it’s empty except for the guard and I do my work out chatting with Tara and enjoying nature. It’s wonderful. Oh, look, there’s an eagle. Funny that wind last night didn’t take all the leaves off that tree…

But it’s also wonderful in the early mornings, when the pool’s open before class. The ladies come drifting in for their stretching and aerobics classes. It’s such a delight to hear them chatter. Catching up on their days, talking of bargains, of plants and old friends. Giggling. Comfortable in their bodies and in their lives. Grumbling a bit about the inconveniences, but present. Showing up to life and the moment. Counting their blessings and sharing them with the person next to them and the one across the circle.

May I be such a one. Swimming still. Reveling in the full-bodied embrace of water on flesh. Enjoying my friends and the morning gathering. Life is still rich and they’re generous with stories and lessons and laughter. Ah… Keeps me going back because this is the exercise that feels most like joy to me. And that makes the exercise sacred for me. Joy in my body. Joy in my heart. Peace in my mind and soul. It doesn’t get better than this for me.

Candlelit Peace

I don’t know what it is that candles do for me… or rather I know what, but I don’t know why.

OK, throw that all out. I know that sitting in a room with lit candles calms me. I also know that when I light them with intention, that I might be present, that I might be calmed, that I might appreciate the beauty of where I am (where I live!) and the gift of the dark.

Now as I mourn my sister’s passing. I create a small, quiet, beautifully lit oasis so that I might sit in contemplation.

To give myself that Peace, I must make my space beautiful, a place I want to be… The whole process helps, and indulges the luxury of time and of being exactly how I am, feeling what I feel and feeling wonderful in the midst of it.

I love the sweetness of the dark for all it offers me… May you find comfort in the dark as well. May we leave those sweet oases with Peace on our hearts and go back into the world as its envoys.

Autumn Sabbath Peace

Here where I am, it’s a warm, foggy rainy morning. Watch out, it’ll be slippery underfoot, thanks to all the leaves lying about on sidewalks (really, i could have swept!).

Pretty soon, I’ll get up and get ready for church, but I’m enjoying a few last minutes cozy in my living room, writing to you. I’m preaching about my reluctance to claim myself publicly as a minister. Odd. I adore my work, yet somehow can’t be all braggy about it. I guess I’m just tired of the role churches play and don’t play in the world. so, i’m practicing… Say, did you know I’m the minister of a small, lovely, involved UU congregation. Yep, I am.

Last evening’s walk was gorgeous. Every sense got called to attention. It was a good reminder that every season has moments that call to us. It’s too easy to complain about Fall that turns to Winter. When we do that, we skip right over the beauty each season, each day, even each moment can offer.

The moon was so big and the moment so perfect it was easy to put things into perspective. This is a vast and wonderful world, and I am a very small pilgrim on its crust. Still, in the midst of finding my place, I could feel the world pushing me to speak out, speak up. For Peace. For the Earth. For the Web. (Really, do other people get to just crunch through the leaves and not think about this stuff? I sure do get caught on the meaning!) Here I am: one little flyspeck for Peace, overcome with the Beauty and Abundance.

But as June Jordan reminded us: “We do what we can, more than that, what can anyone ask?” So, today, on this misty Autumn Sabbath, enjoy the moment and speak up for Life. Speak out for Peace.

Peace Connections

I don’t think connections via technology are easy unless you work hard at the discipline of connection. That said, they have all the possibilities (and many of pitfalls) of F2F (I couldn’t help myself, face-to-face) conversations.

After yesterday’s musing, I called my friend Lorraine. Our lives have been more apart than together, and yet our friendship has been foundational to both our lives since it started 44 years ago. When we get to be together, sure there’s catching up to do, but mostly it’s about refamiliarizing ourselves with one another’s physical presences… noticing how we’re aging. We’ve been apart during one another’s cancers and the deaths of our parents. But we’ve never really been far from one another. The telephone, the internet, and maybe facebook (because Lorraine is slow and cautious on FB) are what we have. To label it “not enough” would mean that we would have to let go of the friendship. Because I’m probably not moving to Sweden any time soon and she’s probably not moving to Lewisburg.

So it is what it is. We have what we have, and we can revel in it, or release it. Nope. not letting go.

Here in Central PA, there are religious sects who refuse technology because they feel it interrupts community. One the one hand, I completely understand what they’re talking about. They live slowly. Chores are shared and lives are lived in tandem. (and from what you see at market, there’s no shortage of cake!). I understand the allure of such a life, but for me, that’s a harkening back to the past. I’ve always been more interested in figuring out how to bring the past into where we are. Because you can’t really stuff progress back into a bottle. It happens and it’s both enriched and impoverished life.

But it’s up to us, it seems to keep it rich, isn’t it? So If FB or Skype or even that old telephone is what we have, let’s use it. Let’s enjoy one another. Understanding the importance of friends and friends everywhere, allows us to make more friends. It allows us to stay connected. Cherishing those connections hopefully helps us keep reaching out.

One of the telephone companies’ ad used to be “Reach out and touch someone.” Yes, indeed. Do that very thing. Call one another consciously. How do you stretch your circle? How do you convince yourself to make time for Peace? Because Peace is a slow process.

We need to make the space. We need to use the tools available. The world depends on us. So does Peace — slow, connected Peace.

Sacred Village

Building a World of Peace, Village by Sacred Village.

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