“We urgently need to bring to our communities the limitless capacity to love, serve, and create for and with each other. We urgently need to bring the neighbor back into our hoods, not only in our inner cities but also in our suburbs, our gated communities, on Main Street and Wall Street, and on Ivy League campuses.”
― Grace Lee Boggs
Category: Uncategorized
Live and die in God’s Love
From Franz Jagerstatter, in one of his last letters before he was beheaded on August 9, 1943 for being a conscientious objector in Germany
Just as the man who thinks only of this world does everything Possible to make life here easier and better, so must we, too, who believe in the eternal Kingdom, risk everything in order to receive a great reward there. Just as those who believe in National Socialism tell themselves that their struggle is for survival, so must we, too, convince ourselves that our struggle is for the eternal Kingdom. But with this difference: we need no rifles or pistols for our battle, but instead, spiritual weapons–and the foremost among these is prayer…. Through prayer, we continually implore new grace from God, since without God’s help and grace it would be impossible for us to preserve the Faith and be true to His commandments….
Let us love our enemies, bless those who curse us, pray for Those who persecute us. For love will conquer and will endure for all eternity. And happy are they who live and die in God’s love.”
Wanting Clean Water
“Someone needs to explain to me why wanting clean water makes you an activists. And why proposing to destroy water with chemical warfare doesn’t make a corporation a terrorist.” Winona LaDuke
Be Still
“Be still and know that I am God.” -Psalm 46:10
I am with you
“I am with you. Let us together say from the heart: no family without lodging, no rural worker without land, no laborer without rights, no people without sovereignty, no individual without dignity, no child without childhood, no young person without a future, no elderly person without a venerable old age. Keep up your struggle and, please, take great care of Mother Earth. I pray for you and with you, and I ask God our Father to accompany you and to bless you, to fill you with his love and defend you on your way by granting you in abundance that strength which keeps us on our feet: that strength is hope, the hope which does not disappoint. Thank you and I ask you, please, to pray for me.” – Pope Francis
Our Children
For people of all colors.
In all of our conversation about Charleston, we have not focused on the children who witnessed this terror and how this traumatizes them. I know the trauma of being young and witnessing a white supremacist murder of a friend. Our children like all other children must have the space to grow up without having to raise their hands and say do not shoot. Black people if we do not stop this terrorism of our children, no one else will. Nor will they respect us or trust us not to abandon them. We must gather around them and let the world know that young Black lives matter. Either we protect them or they will protect themselves and trust me,it won’t be pretty.
This is an American problem, and people of all colors must stand up and declare that Black children deserve to be safe and grow up with the confidence that they can move freely in the world with the abandonment of youth.
Ruby Sales
Working Out Our Salvation in the Wake of Charleston
By Lindsay Airey, LMFT
In the wake of the Emmanuel A.M.E. massacre, it’s hard not to succumb to the dueling poles of cynicism or despair, grandiosity or silencing shame. It is so easy to feel powerless and hopeless in the face of widespread white denial. Or exasperated and enraged at a grandiose white culture that wants to dismiss this as “not a race issue.” It’s about mental illness, they say. Or easy access to guns.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for gun control. And, as a licensed marriage & family therapist, I most certainly want policies and practices in American culture that lead to more compassionate, empathic & constructive understandings of and responses to mental illness. Taking refuge in culture war issues in the face of the horrific slaughter in Charleston, however, only pours more emotional salt in the gaping wound of a people who, around every corner in American history, has had to deal with the deadly consequences of white denial in all its subtle, and not so subtle, forms. Continue reading “Working Out Our Salvation in the Wake of Charleston”
Just One Request
From Osagyefo Sekou, Harvard educated theologian, community organizer and active participant in the community resistance in Ferguson, MO:
If I can just make one request. My request of you all in this room is that when this protest doesn’t look the way you are used to it looking, I ask you to look deeper: Yes it’s profane and it’s angry because we have betrayed our children. And so rather than beginning the sentence or conversation with “If they did it this way,” take seriously the way they are doing it. Take them seriously. Take their humanity seriously. I was born again on the streets of Ferguson. I got saved, as we would say in evangelical parlance, by some kids with gold teeth and tattoos and sagging pants, and so I’m asking you to look at their humanity. So when the media start that “They’re violent,” remind them that they’ve been nonviolent for the vast majority of their protest even after America betrayed them on every occasion. I ask that you keep track of their humanity…they are just trying to find their way trying to make sense of it all.
And my other request is that you put your body in the way. Now let’s be clear in this moment, your whiteness will not save you. They shot a white woman with a collar on. So they will shoot you, but you put your body in the way for them because these are your children too. When you feel like you’re losing your way and you don’t understand I want you to think about your baby, yours, lying in the street for four and a half hours. You’re looking at your baby, you can’t touch your baby just lying in the street. They got police dogs around your baby, keeping you from getting to your baby who you brought into the world, lying in the street, bleeding out. They won’t let paramedics get to your baby. And then you will understand why these folks are so angry and we should be celebrating that there isn’t a riot every 28 hours in America. These people called black have been so disciplined, and America betrays them, and they still refuse to shed her blood. We should be celebrating them. Lifting them up. The way you do that is, next time they shoot one down here you show up. You don’t say a word, you just show up because these are your children too. That is what I ask of you on the behalf of the people in Ferguson.
The Women’s Witness: An Eastertide Reflection
By Ched Myers
Note: This is an ongoing series of Ched’s brief comments on the Markan gospel readings from the Revised Common Lectionary during year B, 2015.
—————–
I wish to offer another brief midrash on Mark’s spare but evocative Easter narrative, highlighting a central aspect that is routinely overlooked.
Let’s begin with the body. According to Mark, after Jesus’ execution, his body was granted by the Roman procurator Pilate to Joseph, a member of the Judean council that had condemned Jesus. As described in 15:43-46, this has all the hallmarks of a political move aimed at prohibiting those in Jesus’ community from executing their duties according to Purity and custom, thus further cutting off the new movement and preventing occasion for more protest during the volatile season of Passover. [1]
Continue reading “The Women’s Witness: An Eastertide Reflection”
Patient Trust, Prayer of Teilhard de Chardin
Above all, trust in the slow work of God.
We are quite naturally impatient in everything
to reach the end without delay.
We should like to skip the intermediate stages.
We are impatient of being on the way to something
unknown, something new.
And yet it is the law of all progress
that it is made by passing through
some stages of instability—
and that it may take a very long time.
Continue reading “Patient Trust, Prayer of Teilhard de Chardin”
Radical Discipleship 