Category Archives: God/Spirit/Light/Love

Remember how utterly astonished you felt when you learned that the light from now-dead, far, far away stars still glowed?

That’s the spirit of today’s posting:

I’m feeling that glow from the deep-winter fires of ancient Ye Olde England—from the time when Anglo-Saxon was spoken (did you know that “wassail” is A-S for “be whole”?) when people who probably looked a lot like me brought greens inside and, huddled together to keep warm, celebrated Light/Birth in the midst of death and darkness.

I’m feeling that wonder—and their faith that, yes, Spring would come.

Recently someone asked me when I first sensed Something beyond myself (some people call that prickly feeling God). My answer? Looking up at the night sky when a kid.

Trouble is, these days, living in a dense city, only the brightest stars or strategically located planets are visible. I miss that sense of utter wonder; I miss stars!

So last week, on a moonless night, while on a family vacation in Palm Desert, CA, my husband and I drove up a windy mountain road and, almost to the summit, found a conveniently banked as to completely block off any light from the valley below dirt road and, lying on that dirt road, I saw stars. Millions of them. Bonus: A shooting star, too.

Home now, that sense of wonder stays with me—well, maybe slightly dimmed but, hey, I KNOW they’re up there. I’ve been reminded.

Just as I KNOW amazing, loving, compassionate things are happening.

Like this: As I learned last night at a wonderful talk in Cambridge, the ground-breaking Our Bodies, Ourselves is now translated into 27 languages. Each version has been carefully and collectively written by the women (and, sometimes, men) of countries around the world, each version addressing the women’s health issues most needing instruction and gentle guidance in their own communities.

Doncha love that!

How grateful I am to the Occupy movement for demanding that all of us look at and discuss money: “Wall Street,” that all-purpose phrase incorporating a host of ills, bank bailouts, how politicians are bought and sold, the student loan crisis; how grateful I am that, thanks to those courageous souls of  Zuccotti Park et al, these conversations form the fabric of public conversation.

And how grateful I am to the Transition movement for teaching me to look at the world around me systemically (I still have much to learn!)

Thinking more deeply and more interconnectedly about money has had one immediate effect, I’m noticing: My reaction to Christmas, a holiday I usually LOVE, is pretty muted this year. In fact, verging on “Bah, humbug.” I see Christmas lights, for example, and think, “What a waste of money and energy!”

I have faith that the essential Christmas Spirit will prevail—maybe, as it often does for my husband, in January, February! Meanwhile, I’ll try to take comfort from these words from Faith and Practice of New England Yearly Meeting of Friends‘s twelfth query: “. . . When discouraged, do you remember that Jesus said, ‘Peace is my parting gift to you, my own peace, such the world cannot give. Set your troubled hearts at rest, and banish your fears.”?

Last night I went to a very special evening at the UU church in Harvard Square to hear two heroes of mine, Bill McKibben and Wendell Berry, talk about civil disobedience, Thoreau, mountain-top removal, the projected pipeline, et al.

The minister of that church, Fred Small, noted that such a stellar evening felt like listening to William Lloyd Garrison and Frederick Douglass! Small’s referencing those two abolitionists was particularly apt given our New England protestant church setting, the enormity of the issue being discussed, and the towering presence of those two men.

The seventy-seven-year old Berry had reluctantly left his farm in Kentucky and flown to Boston in order to receive the Howard Zinn “People Speak” Award, given by PEN New England. How do I know he was reluctant? Because he’d commented on his growing reluctance to leave home these days and the irony that he had to expend fossil fuels in order to speak out against fossil fuels!

Since I have sufficiently gushed about Bill McKibben in previous posts, I shall celebrate this national treasure this way:

THE PEACE OF WILD THINGS

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

— Wendell Berry

[Thanks be to e.e. cummings, of course]

i thank You God for most this amazing
day: for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky; and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes

(i who have died am alive again today,
and this is the sun’s birthday; this is the birth
day of life and of love and wings: and of the gay
great happening illimitably earth)

how should tasting touching hearing seeing
breathing any–lifted from the no
of all nothing–human merely being
doubt unimaginable You?

(now the ears of my ears awake and
now the eyes of my eyes are opened)

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.

Another incident from yesterday’s rally on Beacon Hill in solidarity with the workers of Wisconsin (I’m getting a lot of mileage out of that, aren’t I):

Coming home from the rally, I took the Red Line, getting on at Park Street. Waiting for the train, I heard a loud, agitated voice further down the platform; a stairwell blocked my view to see who was so upset. But just as the recorded voice announced that an Alewife train was approaching, an angry African American man (and, yes, his ethnicity is important to the story) ambled towards me, cursing, muttering, shouting, kicking trash.

He will come right up to me, I thought. I am a magnet for mentally ill T riders. Bracing myself—and hoping that train would come—I recalled a radio talk show conversation I’d heard a couple of days ago re mentally ill people and why in the world do we send such troubled people to jail? So when, indeed, the guy did come right up to me, shouting “They call me a nigger? They’re a nigger!” I was already in a place of compassion.

I smiled, I looked right into his eyes, I flashed the peace sign to him. He stopped shouting and began to talk. Earnestly. Like he really wanted me to understand him. Trouble is, I couldn’t make out what he was saying: it sounded like gibberish but maybe he was speaking a language I’d never heard.

The train rolled in. I pitched my voice low and as gentle as I could possibly be: “I wish you well. I really do. Take care of yourself. Please.”

The train doors opened. I stepped into a car. He followed me. So I stepped out of the car and began walking quickly towards the next car. The platform was, by now, empty.

Hey, if they shut the doors before I get to the next car I’ll just wait for the next train, I decided.

The doors remained open. Whoa! I realized. I’m being watched. The conductors or maybe surveillance cameras saw this whole exchange. This train’s gonna wait for me! So I slowed down, got to the next car, entered, the door shut behind me, and the train took off.