Reading, Peace, Reading

When I was a tender seminarian I heard William Sloan Coffin (recently retired as minister at Riverside Church in NYC and formerly the Yale chaplain who started Clergy and Laity Concern during the the VietNam War) speak about being involved with what’s going on in the world.

Coffin talked about the importance of being involved. At the end someone stood up and said, great for you, you’re on the speaker circuit… You blow in, blow up and blow outta town (ah you gotta love a hall full of ministers!).

Coffin admired the hit and then asked… how many of you have read a book on something other than ministry? How many of you have read a serious book this year. Less than 25% raised their hands.

And he said, yeah… no excuse for that. That’s part of your ministry.

I admit his seeds fell on fertile ground. I love reading. And I believe it’s important. And I’m lucky that the UUs feel it’s important and that my congregation agrees. And so I take this time very seriously and stuff my brain — with things that pertain to what we’re up to and to what I think I and all of us might need to think of. And with things that are going on and we can’t help but look at. There’s so much to wonder about. So much hard (reading) work to do.

So reading. I find Peace in it. In its turn it stirs me to look for Peace. It’s a cycle I’m lucky to be able to indulge. Just a couple weeks of stuffing ahead, and then look out world! I’m back! Wake up world! Time to step up!

13-Year Peace(s)

How bizarre that the only people in my life today who knew me when I was working in New York are my Swedish and American family. I have friends from my seminary days. And loads of friends from my California days. And then some very old friends but mostly new from my life back in Pennsylvania.

I’ve had a wonderful life, but it has, I think more segments than many people’s… Not everyone changes careers in midstream (taking a long time with a slide through another course of study to get where I belonged) and I’ve always known lots of folks. My friend the epidemiologist uses me as an example of people who know a lot of people with terminal diseases simply because I know so many people — and have been supportive. Great, another thing to put on my resume, I’m a statistical anomaly!

But I’m happy to know and love all these people. Happy to have known and loved these landscapes. Who doesn’t love NY? Who doesn’t love the Bay Area? And as many of us remark, the central Susquehanna Valley is paradise, except for those for whom it is not…

I seem to have dug in here. My husband’s happy playing here. I love my work, my friends, and my life. My family has changed a lot in the last 13 years, a couple gains, a lot of losses. But still this seems like home. And so I stay and try to figure out what great fun can i get up to in the time ahead? 13 more years and I’ll be, gasp, 76… And hopefully still doing what I love to do!

We’ll see… In the meantime… I’ll keep looking through the lens of Peace and see what I need to get up to next.

Peace and Blessings, my friends, and may you love and be loved where you live.

Peace on a Porch

For me, there is really nothing quite like reading on a screened in porch. Add in the sweet breeze off the bay and a cool glass of tea or lemonade or gasp even a shandy and i’m in heaven.

I had great books to read. They ranged from the meaningful to the totally useless. What a lovely buffet!

While i was alternately either stuffing or emptying my head, Steve was living in his own wonderland. We slept in a little cabin up a rise from the main cabin. So cozy. And he could practice and practice and practice and sleep and sleep and sleep. We both did a lot of that. Gotta get up to the cottage before you have to use your iphone flash light don’t you know.

But my cousin Doug’s a Quaker and so is Steve. So they could talk and talk. They’re both COs… more stuff to talk about. Steve doesn’t go to meeting much around here, because Sunday mornings are worship of another kind for him: jazz workshop! and have been for the last 19 years.

So to have the opportunity to go to meeting to hear Doug take the message and then to just hang with him was fun for all of us.

But the men sat and told their stories about being COs. War stories of a peaceful flavor. War stories we forget about. War Stories people need to hear. War stories that they needed to tell. Peace is not easy; it’s quite hard work actually. It demands conviction and commitment. Both these men have that. I was proud of them and happy for their stories.

Peace needs us to work on its behalf. To stand firm. Always.

Thunder Moon Rumbles Demand Peace

Gay Marriage and a continuation of horrific painful death penalties. Fair housing and denials of climate change. ACA and massacres. Life is unsettled.

The Thunder Moon rumbles.

The question is, what are we going to do about it?

How are you and I going to weigh in? What thread will we unravel? Racism, injustice, unequal access, automatic weapons, climate change, the death penalty, economic justice. Pick one, pick any one.

Peace is waiting for us to step up. Let us do so — by the light of the silvery Moon. Because it is time. Because it is our work to do.

A Thunder Moon Sabbath to Remember

The Thunder Moon is really rattling. Every day it seems, we have a thunder boomer.

And last night the sweetest rain to sleep by. zzzzzzzzzzzz.

Today is Father’s Day… may your memories be sweet and may you make new ones as sweet and juicy as this season’s berries.

Today’s the solstice, giving us a whole sweep of bright and shiny days with long hours of sun (over 15!) well, sun behind the clouds, because that’s what’s going on here! May we be illuminated… May we use the light to look clearly at what is going on in our world. May the beauty we see empower us and keep us strong in the face of the work to be done.

And there’s a lot of work to be done.

Today in my valley we will commemorate the nine who died in Charleston. We will pause and weep. We will decide what if anything we’re going to do to make a difference here. Or at least have a start at it. Let us remember those who died for no reason other than hatred. Our family has lost children. It’s awful. I can’t imagine losing children — or anyone — simply because they existed. To have them targeted and executed. Assassinated. May we be moved to act against the hate — and act in ways that make a difference.

Peace was never more urgent; never more confusing. Let us Peace.

Tears in Paradise, Act for Peace

Two days home from a workshop on Undoing Racism, taught by the People’s Institute for Survival and Beyond, I wake up to the news of the death of nine Black people by a white gunman. They were shot at church in a Bible Study.

I’d already sent out the day’s musing about how we who live in Paradise don’t make room for everyone, don’t insist that Paradise is abundant. And then this, proof.

It could be one crazy guy except we tolerate crazy white guys doing this. This is a thing. This is a trend. This is a movement. White people killing bunches of Black and Brown people. Will his religion be on trial the way the Boston Marathon’s religion was? Will we (finally) wonder what it is in White culture that causes so many to go so wrong? Because it’s about time we do.

And in all the pictures of the aftermath, people kneeling in prayer, people holding hands in prayer, not a white face in the picture. “And I didn’t hear nobody pray.” And oh right, I didn’t hear anyone say, there is an epidemic of white exceptionalism and it’s killing our neighbors. But it’s true. I didn’t see anyone say, “I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry.”

Ramadan starts today. Maybe while our Muslim sisters and brothers are refraining and reflecting, we might do the same.

I’m sure that some people like those in the AME church would be grateful to wake up in Not Hell. But Paradise is possible, if we understand the need to throw open the Garden gates and welcome the world. Do we believe in Life?

It’s time to wake up, step up, show up for Peace. It’s time to redefine and transform Paradise. Each and every one of us is needed for this hard and precious work.

Thunder Moon Peace!

It’s a new month… and there were choices to make about names. Thunder Moon seemed a fairly clear winner given the storms of the last couple days.

This could be a month of seeing what’s true. It’s soon the longest day with the brightest sun for a slow and steady reveal. And there will be slashes of light casting a different look at things… We’ll be waking up early, because the Sun’s insistent. Shall we use the time to step up?

And things can be, should we choose, be shaken up in the time of the Thunder Moon — or we could begin to see that in fact things are already different from what they’ve been, or we’ve thought they’ve been…

It’s time. Are we ready? People, the Earth, All God’s critters really shouldn’t have to wait any longer on us, should they? All in for Peace?

Preparing the Ground for Peace

It’s amazing how hard this work is to hear. Incredibly sobering to think I am called to help teach it.

Because they’re making no mistake about this. If I’m here, they’re clear, I’m here to do the work.

Yesterday was a challenging day for all of us. I knew going in, of course I did, that I was going to be confronting my privilege. I don’t know if my Black colleagues understood how very challenged they and their work would be.

At the end of the day there were a lot of headaches and and heartaches.

Tell, us, you say…

The broth isn’t cooked yet, I can tell you that. It hasn’t clarified. I believe that what will result will be health-giving. For me. For the social service directors I’m in class with. For our communities. And I believe it will set up a fire in our bellies to do the work.

But in the meantime the chopping, slicing and dicing is laborious. Yesterday my Black colleagues had to deal with the fact that the in addition to the pain they felt as they’re disregarded in their work is only part of the picture. They also sat through hearing that the work they’re doing may be, by its very nature, damaging rather than helpful to the constituents they work with. The trainers’ argument was compelling enough that no one was really thinking the trainers were wrong… It just makes you tired… and sad.

There was lunch eating with kind, but confrontational women. Even with the best of intentions, we often miss the point. Or at least I do.

And after lunch the work was about White folk… You couldn’t have listened to the morning’s talks and not known this was coming. It was about the privilege we have at every moment of the day conferred upon us by a system built upon people’s being one down.

My work this weekend, so far, has just been to stay open, to try and hear what’s being said. To hear the critical analysis. To hear the way the world impacts people of color. To hear the pain of these highly educated, well-paid, very talented executives.

And then to allow myself to feel my own sorrow, to see my unconscious acceptance, and to not let any of that stop me from being part of a group who does things to make a difference.

To recognize that I’m only a Peacemaker when I’m making Peace for everyone. I’m only a Peacemaker when I’m waking up, stepping up to the hard work of social action. When I’m creating not only the beloved community, but the just one. No Justice, no Peace, Bob Marley told us. I’ve sung it… have I ever really listened to the words? or listened to my heart after the words? we need to… the world needs us.

Lost Words of Peace

The grief and hunger for a lost language are so much bigger than I thought when I first began to explore this. (and, man, reading stuff like this makes me wish that I’d had a much better adviser in college.) I feel as if I’ve stumbled into something much bigger and truer than I suspected… something has profound implications for Peace and something that helps me understand how much more complex Peace is even when it’s also simple.

The article I read by Joshua Fishman “What Do You Lose When You Lose Your Language?” takes an anthropological view. Now I wonder about the psycho-spiritual views.

I was a language major in college. I majored in language because I learned languages easy, not because I was interested in literature. (Not that I’m sorry I read (past tense) well! There’s so much more reading I should do!) But anthro or religion and linguistics might have been a much better fit. If only they taught those things where I was — or I’d have known they existed!

We’ve all read about “civilizing” invaders who eradicate language and custom in the native born. Most of us live in a country where we’ve seen it. It’s happening today all over the world. And the results are hugely disabling. I’m not talking about language that evolves, although things are lost for what’s gained in them as well, I’m talking about the erasure of Native languages by conquerors.

So we come back to hard questions… What is it in humans that creates such fear that we feel a need to stamp out another’s world view completely, to eradicate culture? We’re certainly seeing that in some of the political campaigning. And then how do we create Peace out of all those forsaken Peace words? How do we help people find them again and help ourselves come closer to Peace… I wish I knew. But I suspect there are many seeds to Peace in that which has been lost — especially violently… What are the possibilities? What is the work? Where is that Peace?

Peace of the Little Things

Yesterday was a day of plowing through this and that. And indeed this and that was accomplished. Since the day before had been a pretty big slog, it was a joy to get things done. Even the one thing I had to do again because I had deleted it from my computer.

Sigh. and Ah well. It actually was much better the second time around.

So much of the work i do is work that has no finish point, it often just morphs into the next thing. So when I can tick a lot of things right off the list, I’m in heaven.

So little, but so sweet. And maybe only so sweet in my life because it’s not every day, but I’ll take it.

And those conversations, those little snippets of catching up and loving each other. I’ll take that too! So much of life is not about grand gestures. So much of it is about the sweet little moments.

And for me, yesterday, the sweet little moments held me upright for the hard moments of letting go a friend who died. Her memorial was on Thursday evening and yesterday we interred her ashes. She was only 44. She left a daughter who is only 12. and a heartbroken mom. So hard, so hard. I’m so thankful that I have work I can do, ways I can support that are useful, words I can find even when words can’t get at the deepest of the sorrow. I am grateful that the Earth receives us at the end of our lives after having supported us through it. I am grateful that nature is so beautiful. and I’m very sad.

I’ll take the Peace of the little things in the Beauty of the Berry Moon. They soothe the heart.

Sacred Village

Building a World of Peace, Village by Sacred Village.

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