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The Cloud of Witnesses

The Cloud of Witnesses

The Creator will take away the cloud of darkness that hangs over people, nations, and all creation.  In mercy, God will bring to an end the humiliation of people and the earth, wiping away anquish and destroying the power of death forever.
From Isaiah 25:7-8 [1]

Allhallowtide spans three significant days: Hallowed Eve (also known as Halloween), followed by All Saints’ Day (Saturday), and then All Souls’ Day on Sunday.   Apart from the festivities of Halloween, All Saints’ Day is an observance that does not deny the pervasive power of darkness.   It acknowledges the aching vulnerability each of us faces, including the inevitability of death that comes to each of us and every living thing on this planet.

Yet All Saints Sunday also resoundingly affirms that a cloud of witnesses surrounds each of us.    Though their earthly lives have come to an end, the presence of this cloud of witnesses remains fueled by grace and the power of love.   Such that they cannot nor will not be silenced.

And this is Good News

Prayer: Holy One, in this time of perilous darkness, as diabolical forces appear to devour whatever is and peacable and good, let us take heart that your cloud of witnesses declares we are not alone.   Though feeling buffeted from all sides, let us hold fast to the scripture that reassures us, saying, “…since a great cloud of witnesses surrounds us…let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us, fixing our eyes on our Redeemer, the pioneer and perfecter of our faith.” [2]

And let all of God’s people say, Amen!

 

[1] From this Sunday’s lectionary, the Book of Isaiah 25:6-9, adapted

[2] From the Letter to the Hebrews, 12:1-2, adapted

 

 

 

 

Blessed Are You…

11 ‘Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. 12 Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you.”  [1]

This past week, millions in our nation and worldwide witnessed the ceremonies and funeral of Jimmy Carter, the 39th President of the United States. After lying in state in the nation’s capital, Carter’s funeral service took place at the Washington National Cathedral, the second-largest church building in the United States. Every pew in that capacious sanctuary, which seats 4,000 people, was filled.

Born and raised in Plains, Georgia, Carter came from unassuming roots, spending his childhood and teen years working on his father’s farm.  Yet he was an archetype of a statesman in countless other ways.  A man of unwavering faith, Carter was a conciliator of peace between Israel and Egypt, a recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, a champion of civil rights and the environment, a humanitarian dedicated to disease eradication and prevention, a promoter of democracy, a fervent supporter and volunteer for Habitat for Humanity, and founder of the Carter Center. 

Ironically, Carter weathered intense criticism during his lifetime, if not downright ridicule.     Scoffed at as naive, condemned as a failure as leader and President, and chided for seeking dialogue rather than resorting to war, Carter knew firsthand the scorn of public humiliation and contempt by others, particularly those involved in state affairs.   Brushed off as a mere ‘peanut farmer’ and dubbed a ‘weirdo’ when remaining true to his faith, Carter’s legacy was to continue living into the Gospel even when it was disadvantageous to do so. 

When we hear Jesus’ words from the Sermon on the Mount, “You are the salt of the earth” and “You are the light of the world,” we must remember that these verses were offered in the context of far more difficult ones.   These essential sentences undergird the price of being as salt and light.   ‘Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account.  Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you.”

Prayer: Divine Maker, in this time of gathering darkness, when your creation burns to the ground, and mass deportation looms; in this time of rising anxiety, when a convicted felon will assume the highest in the land, and children are callously sacrificed as the price of war, forgive us, we pray for forfeiting what you alone lovingly created and hence called good.    Kindle within us a renewing of your Spirit so that we may heed Christ’s summons once more.   So even when the good we do is misunderstood or ridiculed, remind us that as bearers of light and the salt of the earth, You have blessed us beyond measure in your realm of peace.  We ask this in all the holy names of God. Amen.

 

 

 

 

 

 

An Icon of American Defiance

These are dark, if not dangerous, times. Aside from questions concerning our current president’s ability to win this year’s election and yet another disastrous Supreme Court ruling, last Saturday’s violence at a campaign rally compounded the assault on our senses and sensibilities. There is this sense of foreboding and displacement with a mere hundred-plus days remaining before November’s election. What will become of us?

Then, just last evening,  I discovered a historical icon recalling another dark and dangerous time. Situated on the side of a brick building in Cambridge, Maryland, near where she was born, the mural depicts Harriet Tubman reaching out her hand, offering a pathway to freedom despite the treacherous journey ahead.  In contrast to the image of Trump’s bloodied fist raised in defiance following last Saturday’s attack, Tubman’s hand is outstretched in a gesture of solidarity for the road forward.  Writes author and commentator Diana Butler Bass when gazing upon this image:

“This is an icon of American defiance. Harriet’s hand is reaching toward me, breaking through the wall of division and pulling me into freedom — as if offering herself as a guide through the woods and waters of despair: Brutality, enslavement, violence, imprisonment, and death. She defied them all. To lead others — to lead us all — to freedom. This is an invitation: Follow me.

To be honest, hers was a fight, too. And Harriet knew it, ‘I prayed to God to make me strong and able to fight, and that’s what I’ve always prayed for ever since,’ Harriet is to have said.   Yet Follow me is defiant. If you follow the right way, it can lead to conflict. I think Jesus knew that. I’m pretty sure Harriet Tubman knew that Jesus knew that.” [1] & [2]

Prayer:  Divine One and Source of All Compassion, when recoiling from the assault of all that we hold dear, still, You ask us to Follow You, despite our fear and trepidation.   For Your Liberty is NOT grounded in justifying capitalism’s violence over ecological, social, and racial justice.  Nor does Your Expansive Freedom grant license to ignore the cries of the poor, the hungry, and the dispossessed.  So in your mercy, Gracious and Benevolent Maker, instill Your Holy Defiance within us.   So that as Your Followers, we will seek Your Liberty and Wholeness for all of God’s children and this planet we call home. We ask this in all the Holy Names of God. Amen.

[1] Artist, Michael Risoato, Harriet Tubman Mural

[2]  An Icon of Defiance, Diana Butler Bass, from The Cottage, July 14, 2024

 

 

Love Your Neighbor – Vote

“Voting is one of the most powerful tools we have as people of faith.” 

It is no accident that the Gospel’s directive to ‘Love Your Neighbor’ is frequently written off as mixing politics with religion.    But what if the teachings of Jesus, by addressing the necessity of compassion and care for the least of these, are not just political but profoundly so?  Indeed, if the definition of politics (from the Greek word, polis) asks, ‘How do we take care of each other,’ imagine if our sacred text is the most political of documents?

 Yes, we are overwhelmed by the number of consequential, if not existential, issues facing us. Be it climate change, poverty, hunger, healthcare, immigration, housing, or violence waged against the most vulnerable, we are in a state of polycrisis, as when multiple challenges are affecting our world simultaneously.  Yet what if politicians bankrolled by fossil fuel corporations and other big-money interests lost an election?  What if they were voted out of office by the very people adversely affected by their greed and complicity?  

Imagine if, all along, democracy has been the engine that has the means to change the levers of power. What if the unassuming, humble voting booth where ordinary citizens go to cast their vote is the basis for sacred ground? 

Prayer: Holy One, when tempted to relegate politics beyond the scope of what our faith requires of us, teach us to remember that the love of one’s neighbor requires otherwise.   Remind us that our actions, especially towards the least of these, were never intended to be separated from the faith we profess to hold.   In your mercy, restore us to your likeness, we pray.  Pour out your life-giving Spirit upon us so that we, as your people, will do whatever is necessary to protect and preserve your creation and all of humankind.   Let your grace dwell richly within us so that, as citizens and people of faith, our actions will testify to your all-encompassing love.   We ask this in all the holy names of God.  Amen.  

[1]  I am indebted to the Third Act’s panel discussion on the Sacred Right to Vote, held earlier this May.    In particular, those serving on the panel, Rev. Dr. Jim Antal, Rev. Carol Devine, Activist Mubarak Elamin, and Rabbi Stephanie Kolin, illuminated this urgent topic through a well-informed discussion on the intersection of voting and faith.   

What You Do Makes a Difference

 

“You cannot get through a single day without having an impact 
on the world around you.   What you do makes a difference, and you have to decide what kind of difference you want to make.”

Lately, I’ve been returning to this quote when feeling powerless, wondering if I or anyone else can make any difference.   Yet then, Goodall’s observation, ‘that none of us can get through a single day without impacting the world around us,’ harkens to her own experience.  Having worked for decades as a primatologist and anthropologist in seeming isolation, she must have lived fully into each day, with one building upon the next.    

Indeed, in the face of palpable suffering and ruthless exploitation on this planet we call home, my hope is that each day allotted will be lived by us entirely.   Not ignoring the world’s cries, but out of love, doing what we can to make a difference:  
Whether it is serving a meal in a homeless shelter,
tending to those ravaged by severe weather,
serving on a phone bank to safeguard democracy,
caring for those devastated by trauma,
supporting those marred by war & bloodshed,
or resisting rather than resorting to violence…
through love, we have the means to make a difference.

Prayer: Holy One, take my hands, my voice, and my body, and through your grace, use these as a conduit for your love.    When I feel there is nothing I or anyone else can do, remind me that you have appointed this day to do what I can to make a difference in the world around me.    I pray this in all the holy names of God.  Amen.

[1] At 89, Jane Goodall, an English primatologist and anthropologist, is the world’s foremost chimpanzee expert.  Yet she has also championed conservation and animal welfare issues,  serving on the board of the Nonhuman Rights Project, which strives to change the status of animals from property to that of persons.    She is also an outspoken environmental advocate.   

 

 

What every one of us shares….

“We are separated by continents
but share the same vast, beautiful, and sunlit sky.”

Some years ago, our daughter-in-law’s family shared images of a funeral outside Tehran. Held to commemorate the life of a grandmother on her father’s side, and as customary in the Middle East, the funeral procession took place outdoors. Surrounded by family and friends, several men, including our daughter-in-law’s father, carried the deceased. Wrapped in linen cloth, the body lay on a narrow platform hoisted on the shoulders of men who brought her to her final resting place.  

The palpable grief of those during the procession and subsequent burial all took place against the backdrop of a vast, blue, sunlit sky. As the funeral came to a close, our daughter-in-law’s father took the body of his mother into his arms and gently placed her in a freshly dug grave. 

Death comes to all of us. Yet the images of these past weeks from the land of Israel and Palestine are saturated with atrocity. There is death that comes after a long life, and then there is the kind of death that is senseless, depraved, and malevolent. No matter what side we may find ourselves on, can any of us justify the annihilation of children and youth? Can any one of us excuse unleashing weapons of mass destruction aimed not at military targets but at whole neighborhoods and cities?   

I ponder these questions in the face of the mayhem that continues in what is also known as the Holy Land. Located between the Mediterranean Sea and the Eastern Bank of the Jordan River, a land of significance for Jews, Christians, and Muslims for decades, it is also a land saturated by war and grief. But lest we forget, every single one of us shares the same vast, beautiful, and sunlit sky.  

Prayer: Divine Maker, when we find ourselves consumed with anger and grief but at a loss for words, compel us to lift our eyes to the hills from whence your help comes. [2] Through your grace, may we have the courage to refrain from violence, instead asking the difficult questions that persist. For just as grief comes to every single one of us, You hold us in the embrace of the same vast, beautiful, and sunlit sky. Amen

[1]  Sunset off the coast of Rhode Island, January 2021

[2] Psalm 121

Responding to Creation’s Endangerment with Passion

“If we fall in love with creation deeper and deeper, we will respond to its endangerment with passion.”  Hildegard of Bingen

    In the northern part of the state of Utah is the largest saltwater lake in the Western Hemisphere.   Once it was a prehistoric body of water spanning thousands of square miles.   But over the past decades, the area of Great Salt Lake has fallen significantly.  After years of drought and increased water diversion, it has fallen to its lowest area at 950 square miles.

     With a high salinity that is saltier than seawater, the Great Salt Lake had been referred to as America’s Dead Sea.   Once it had been a haven and habitat for millions of native birds, brine shrimp, shorebirds, and waterfowl.   Now at a record low, it ultimately will become a bowl of toxic dust, poisoning the air around Salt Lake City.   A researcher who’s been investigating its cataclysmic demise calls it an “extinction event.”

  Yet over a thousand years ago, the writer, mystic, abbess, philosopher, and visionary, Hildegard of Bingen, perceived not only ecological peril but saw a way out.   Though it meant adopting a radical counter-cultural approach, the antidote would save the planet and thereby all of us.

  Her remedy?  “If we fall in love with creation deeper and deeper, we will respond to its endangerment with passion,” Hildegard wrote.   However, we must take note that her prescription goes far beyond merely seeking and enjoying the great outdoors, to a radical realignment of what it is we most deeply value.

   Imagine if your child or grandchild was in danger of being hit by a car, wouldn’t you do everything in your power to save them?  Imagine, if your adult child was struggling with alcoholism or drug addiction, or your beloved teenage daughter ran away from home, or your only son struggled with depression; wouldn’t you go the distance?   If the one who meant the world to you was in danger, wouldn’t you do all that you could to save them?

   But children, grandchildren, and members of our extended family are our flesh and blood, we say.  Lush forests and clear streams and huge herds of bison are beautiful even majestic to see but they’re not the same as us.   Nor are they connected to us the way our own children and grandchildren are.

  But what if they are?   What if all of creation is our flesh and blood too?  Such that it not only courses through our veins and inhabits our lungs but is ingested with everything we eat and drink.   What if it is more than just a part of us?   What if we are in creation AND creation is in us?

  What if all of creation is our flesh and blood too?

[1] The Great Salt Lake is shown in the background of the earthwork Spiral Jetty by Robert Smithson Tuesday, Feb. 1, 2022, on the northeastern shore of the Great Salt Lake near Rozel Point in Utah. Last year the Great Salt Lake matched a 170-year record low and kept dropping, hitting a new low of 4,190.2 feet (1,277.2 meters) in October. (AP Photo/Rick Bowmer)

We are Meant to Live in Joy (in spite of everything)

“We are meant to live in joy, [but]
this does mean that life will be easy or painless.”  [1]

      What if we’re meant to live with joy…not just on occasion but as a means of perception?    What if experiencing joy isn’t a form of denial, a lack of caring or responsibility, or even foolishness…but the path to enlarge and even make holy the framework of lived experience?

Observed the late Archbishop Desmond Tutu, “You are able to accept anything that happens to you provided you accept the inevitable frustrations and hardships as part of the warp and woof of life.   Yet the question is not, ‘How do I escape this?   The question is, ‘How can I use [this crushing disappointment, this prolonged suffering, this devastating loss] as something positive?'” [2]

Which leads one to ask, “What if acceptance is the polar opposite of resignation and defeat?  What if acceptance is not caving into inevitability but is a quality of recognition that perceives reality is imploring us…even begging us, to continue on?    What if reality, far from being an adversary, teaches us the necessity of living in the moment…while experiencing the joy that comes in knowing that all of life and creation itself, is a gift?

Prayer: Divine Maker, In the wake of so much loneliness, suffering and despair, teach us to embrace the necessity of living each and every moment in joy.    Remind us that reality need not be oppositional to holiness…but can be a means of clarifying the work that you have asked us to do…however difficult and even arduous it may seem at the time.    We ask this in all the holy names of God.  Amen.

[1] from the Book of Joy: Lasting Happiness in a Changing World, 2016 by His Holiness the Dali Lama and Archbishop Desmond Tutu with Douglas Abrams

[2] Ibid.

 

 

 

 

We Are All Just Walking Each Other Home

“We are all just walking each other home,”  Ram Dass [2]

This pathway and vista off into the distance offer an image of the Pilgrimage of Compostela, which in English is the Way of St James.    A network of paths or pilgrim ways leads to the shine of the Apostle St. James the Great, in the cathedral of Santiago de Compostela in northwestern Spain.    Along with Jerusalem and Rome, the route along the Camino de Santiago is known as one of the three great pilgrimages of Christendom.

Wrote the spiritual teacher and author, Ram Dass, “We are all just walking each other home.”   While all of us are on a spiritual journey, Dass perceived that each of us (whether consciously or not) is on a path leading us back to our source.   Wrote another, “Even if you do not believe in life as a spiritual journey or take solace in the notion of an afterlife, the concept of walking each other home is important.   It’s what holds us together.” [3]

Emerging from the isolation of a two-plus-year pandemic, compounded by economic uncertainty, political unrest, unleashed aggression, and the unraveling of our planetary home, is it possible to hold one’s self together?  Or, as evidenced by the centuries-old practice of pilgrimage and communicated by spiritual teachers, writers, and poets, we’re not meant to take all this in alone.   What if instead, despite the brevity of our lives and the frailty of creation, we’re summoned to accompany each other on life’s way, bringing out the best in one another while doing all that we can in the time given us?

Prayer: Divine Maker, In the wake of so much loneliness and despair, open our eyes to see others on the road before, alongside, and behind us.    Teach us that holiness (wholeness) was never intended a private, super-religious affair but one that asks that we look to the welfare of the other….wherever on the journey they may be.  Remind us, that we are all just walking each other home.   We ask this in all the holy names of God.  Amen.

[1]  Photo courtesy of Patrick Mills.  The photo was taken on June 5, 2017, near O Pino, Spain on the Camino de Santiago.

[2] Ram Dass and Mirabai Bush, Walking Each Other Home: Conversations on Loving and Dying, September 2018

[3] Carol Cassandra, https://sixtyandme.com/how-life-is-a-journey-of-just-walking-each-other-home/, adapted

Seeking Refuge: A Reflection & Prayer for the Peoples of Ukraine

 

“In scenes reminiscent of the Blitz, adults, children, and dogs hide from airstrikes, seeking refuge in bomb shelters and subway stations.” [2]

During World War II, an intense bombing campaign was waged against the United Kingdom by Nazi Germany.    For eight months, the Luftwaffe dropped bombs on London and other strategic cities across Britain, from September 7, 1940, through May 11, 1941.    Remembered as Black Saturday, on the first day of the Blitz alone, 430 people were killed and 1,600 were badly injured.

Wrote organizer, educator, and reformer, Saint Boniface, “O God, you have been our refuge in all generations.”  But what of those fleeing war’s aggression?  Or for those unable to take flight from the encroaching chaos and mayhem?    When wanton cruelty and its destructiveness encroach upon and violate the land, what recourse does the most vulnerable, human and creature alike, have?

Martyred in 754 by an armed group of robbers, the aged Boniface was murdered along with 54 others who accompanied him.     Still, his words attesting to God’s faithfulness in the face of aggression and terror remain: urging us to continue to demand justice and mercy for the oppressed, exercise unfailing advocacy for those distant as well as near, while praying that all of God’s children and creation itself, be afforded refuge’s blessing.

Prayer: God who dwells in places of refuge, be with the peoples of Ukraine, we pray.    Yet for those not in destruction’s path, compel us to be nothing less than fierce advocates and champions of the oppressed.   So that together with those distant and near, all may savor your refuge, under the shadow of thy wings and within the hallowed gates of sanctuary.   Amen.

[1] Image from Daily Mail Online

[2] Adapted from CNN’s Chief International Correspondent, Clarrisa Ward