Author Archives: Patricia Wild

The Good News continues:

Our Prison Fellowship Committee’s fundraiser dinner on Friday night raised $1,200!

But here’s what I want to tell you:

Three African-American women, whose lives have been impacted by  the mass incarceration of African-American men in ways I will never experience, came to the dinner. And contributed store-bought cookies and a jar of freeze-dried nuts.

And just as I can never know how it feels watching so many men from your community—including members of your own family, perhaps—sent to jail, I cannot adequately express how deeply touched I was and continue to be about their contribution.

Today at Meeting, an elderly widow sheepishly handed me a $10 bill for the Cambridge Bail and Legal Defense Fund *: “I wish I could give more,” she whispered as she handed me the money.

So, of course, I thought about the widow’s mites story (Generally this Bible story is called just that, employing an old word meaning coins of little value):

Once [Jesus] was standing opposite the temple treasury, watching as people dropped their money into the chest. Many rich people were giving large sums. Presently there came a poor widow who dropped in two tiny coins, together worth a farthing. He called his disciples to him. “I tell you this,” he said: “This poor widow had given more than the others; for those others who have given had more than enough, but she, with less than enough, has given all that she had to live on.”

Now, to be truthful, the Meeting widow is not destitute—but, nevertheless, like most old people, has to be very careful with her money. So her contribution feels like what Jesus was talking about: that a modest gift, donation, contribution given in love  and with an open heart—yet with some hardship—is beyond price.

The widow’s selfless act this morning also makes me think about another Bible passage: Isaiah 61: 1:

The spirit of the Lord God is upon me because the Lord has anointed me; he has sent me to bring good news to the humble, to bind up the broken-hearted, to proclaim liberty to captives and release to those in prison.

Maybe the Meeting widow’s heard this good news, too?

* This is a fund started by Friends Meeting at Cambridge’s Prison Fellowship Committee so that we can help those in need whom we’ve met while doing prison ministry. Currently, we are raising $ to pay the legal costs for a man in prison so he can appeal his life sentence. [See my February 2, 2011 entry]

Today’s Good News is courtesy of Thomas R. Kelly, the Quaker writer, teacher, philosopher (1893-1941).

Your response to the following passage might very well be: “You call this good news? What planet are you from?”

OK, call me crazy—but I find  Kelly’s words, written after visiting Germany in 1938, enormously comforting:

“An awful solemnity is upon the earth, for the last vestige of earthly security is gone. It has always been gone, and religion has always said so, but we haven’t believed it. . . There is an inexorable amount of suffering in all life, blind, aching, unremovable, not new but only terribly intensified in these days.

“One come back from Europe aghast at having seen how lives as graciously cultured as ours, but self-deluded by a mild veneer of religious respectability but unprepared by the amazing life of commitment to the Eternal in holy obedience, are now doomed to hopeless, hopeless despair. For if you will accept as normal life only what you can understand, then you will try only to expel the dull, dead weight of destiny, of inevitable suffering which is part of normal life, and never come to terms with it or fit your soul to the collar and bear the burden of your suffering which must be borne by you, or enter the divine education and drastic discipline of sorrow, or rise radiant in the sacrament of pain.”

Although I have been accused of finding good in nuclear war (for real), there’s precious little to find good about what’s happened in Japan. Reflecting on this (after watching countless videos of the massive destruction), feeling that disaster, I walked through the rain to the Market Basket, a supermarket half a block from my house.

Always crowded, the store was especially packed today. Threading my way through the congestion of shopping carts, customers just finished at the check-out lines and wheeling their carts towards the exits and people like me, simply trying to get past all that to actually get to the food, I overheard a little boy, grabbing a shopping cart, complain to his mother: “It’s wet!” he whined.

Hey, kid, I  wanted to say. How ’bout being grateful a tsunami hasn’t just smashed into this store and deal!

But of course I didn’t.

But I also, at first, was a little nonplussed: How come everyone’s so normal? I wondered. Why’s everyone so intent on their groceries? The trivialities of their daily lives.

Because it IS normal, here, of course. (Duh) It’s a rainy Friday afternoon, people are shopping in anticipation for the upcoming weekend: nothing special. A wet grocery cart, crowded supermarket aisles, a pretty, bright-eyed little girl sitting in a shopping cart kiddie seat and happily eating a cookie—these are precious! Cans and produce aren’t toppling to the ground, no one’s screaming, the floor, the walls are not rolling.

Hallelujah!

Go ahead. Click here. You won’t be sorry.

As a Patricia who wants to be called Patricia, I often have to correct people who, upon first meeting me, ignore the name I’ve introduced myself as and call me Pat.

But today, I received an e-mail adressed to:

Unsupported global element: index = 1; parameter = first_name

At least Pat’s an actual name! (Just not mine.)

But maybe I should let go of my preference to called by a multi-syllabic name?

Naw.