Yesterday, I celebrated my Mass for the new generation, the new poets, the fighters for peace, and my novices. There is in many of them a peculiar quality of truth that older squares have driven out of themselves in days of rigidity and secure right thinking. — Thomas Merton, December 9, 1962 (A Year with Thomas Merton: Daily Meditations from His Journals, p. 407)
“It may well be that we will have to repent in this generation. Not merely for the vitriolic words and the violent actions of the bad people, but for the appalling silence and indifference of the good people who sit around and say, “Wait on time.” ― Martin Luther King Jr., A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches
“My ancestors had four harvest festivals throughout the year. Gathering with family, enjoying our company, sharing our blessings and giving thanks for all that we have is a good thing. I say have more thanksgiving events throughout the year. I also ask that you take a moment in that day to remember what happened to my people and the history as it was recorded and not the narrative that we had been given in the history books.”—Steven Peters, Wampanoag Tribe spokesman
“There is just so much hurt, disappointment, and oppression one can take. . . . The line between reason and madness grows thinner.”—Rosa Parks
Nothing is sweet or easy about community. Community is a fellowship of people who do not hide their joys and sorrows but make them visible to each other as a gesture of hope.
In community we say: “Life is full of gains and losses, joys and sorrows, ups and downs—but we do not have to live it alone. We want to drink our cup together and thus celebrate the truth that the wounds of our individual lives, which seem intolerable when lived alone, become sources of healing when we live them as part of a fellowship of mutual care.”
Community is like a large mosaic. Each little piece seems so insignificant. One piece is bright red, another cold blue or dull green, another warm purple, another sharp yellow, another shining gold. Some look precious, others ordinary. Some look valuable, others worthless. Some look gaudy, others delicate. We can do little with them as individual stones except compare them and judge their beauty and value. When, however, all these little stones are brought together in one big mosaic, portraying the face of Christ, who would ever question the importance of any one of them? If one of them, even the least spectacular one, is missing, the face is incomplete. Together in the one mosaic, each little stone is indispensable and makes a unique contribution to the glory of God. That’s community, a fellowship of little people who together make God visible in the world.
“Love doesn’t make our struggles vanish. It doesn’t mean carrying perpetual optimism into our days or even having to believe that everything will be okay. It does mean that I believe Love is the foundation of everything and holds us in our sorrow as well as our delight.”
— Christine Valters Paintner, PhD,Love Holds You: Poems and Devotions for Times of Uncertainty
How does Love sustain you in times of struggle?
To know ourselves truly and acknowledge fully our own unique journey, we need to be known and acknowledged by others for who we are. We cannot live a spiritual life in secrecy. We cannot find our way to true freedom in isolation. Silence without speaking is as dangerous as solitude without community. They belong together.
At first silence might only frighten us. In silence we start hearing voices of darkness: our jealousy and anger, our resentment and desire for revenge, our lust and greed, and our pain over losses, abuses, and rejections. These voices are often noisy and boisterous. They may even deafen us. Our most spontaneous reaction is to run away from them and return to our entertainment.
But if we have the discipline to stay put and not let these dark voices intimidate us, they will gradually lose their strength and recede into the background, creating space for the softer, gentler voices of the light.
These voices speak of peace, kindness, gentleness, goodness, joy, hope, forgiveness, and most of all, love. They might at first seem small and insignificant, and we may have a hard time trusting them. However, they are very persistent and they will be stronger if we keep listening. They come from a very deep place and from very far. They have been speaking to us since before we were born, and they reveal to us that there is no darkness in the One who sent us into the world, only light. They are part of God’s voice calling us from all eternity: “My beloved child, my favorite one, my joy.”
“Whatever may be the tensions and the stresses of a particular day, there is always lurking close at hand the trailing beauty of forgotten joy or unremembered peace.”—Howard Thurman, Meditations of the Heart
After a morning spent dodging raindrops (a slight understatement) on Granville Island, Denise and I retreated to our hotel to warm up and enjoy a drink while reading. I discovered this book yesterday and bought it (on Kindle) last night.
As we continue to process what happened in the United States last week, Fr. Berrigan seemed to be the perfect writer/prophet/poet to spend some time with.
We met some protesters last night on the way to dinner and had a great conversation with one woman in particular. They were protesting the lack of transparency that surrounds the city decision to remove 20,000 – 30,000 trees from Stanley Park. The trees are dead thanks to a hemlock hooper moth infestation that has killed a lot of trees in the park. She asked where we were from and when we said the United States, she offered her support and encouragement in the same way that we offered her ours.
So as we spend time in my late Mother’s hometown, we continue the process of rest, reflection, and seeking our way forward in the mess that continues to rise following the elections and will only get worse in the US. For me it is something as basic as how to respond as a retired military chaplain and pastor. In both my writing and my preaching, there is so much to address. These words from Fr Berrigan make sense to me in this reflection:
What we are living through in the United States is so irrational and so incomprehensible to the majority of our people that one constantly has the sense of being in the middle of a nightmare which has no termination and no inner coherence.
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One cannot level one’s moral lance at every evil in the universe. There are just too many of them. But you can do something and the difference between doing something and doing nothing is everything. (The Trouble With Our State, p. 11)
Daniel Berrigan died on April 30, 2016. He had spent his whole life as a priest working for peace, justice, and equal rights for all of God’s children. He wasn’t afraid to speak as a prophet and spent a good bit of time in jail as a result of his work for peace. My hope and prayer is that he will teach me how to be such a voice and a presence in these disturbing times where the rights of so many are being squashed by the privileged elite.
Pastor Michael Moore's Blog 