Category Archives: Strands

“My Cup Runneth Over”

“This is not a referendum,” I told myself the day before. “I know I am loved.” Not said out loud: There’s Honk! There’s Indigenous People’s Weekend; folks are out of town. There’s a nor’easter coming, terrible weather is expected. This is a crazy and hectic and hard and overwhelming time—who wants to come to a book reading about grief and loss? Nobody. That’s who.

But just as the rain and wind began Sunday afternoon, the Friends Room at Friends Meeting at Cambridge and its D-10 screen began to fill. Estimates run from forty to seventy people, both in the room and on Zoom, attended the reading. But as Wonderful Man as he is known in Strands (or “Birthday Boy” that day) joked: “Cambridge police reported twelve!”

Looking out at that loving and supportive and  beaming crowd of dear, dear friends, teary and overwhelmed, I found myself repeating what I’d said maybe forty-five years ago, the very first time I found myself on my feet, my heart pounding, at a meeting for worship: “My cup runneth over.” For surely goodness and mercy have followed me all my life.

 

“Nobody Else Can Do It For You”

Yesterday at my Quaker meeting, we labored over a minute about Gaza. A challenging task complicated by my faith community’s propensity to wordsmith, I remained silent while we’d grappled, believing that holding the space and the people I love in prayer was what I was called to do.

It was only in the wee, small hours of this morning that I realized that I’d recognized a dynamic being played out before me. Would it have been helpful to stand and to name what I sensed? Perhaps. But the words had not yet come. And as we’d been reminded by the reading at the beginning of our meeting, “God’s Time” takes its time!

So here’s something like what I might have said: “For far too long, each of us has taken in the absolute horror happening in Gaza. We have been horrified. The work to truly acknowledge the profound and utter devastation perpetrated with our complicity and in real time is lonely work. Desolation is lonely work. Grief is lonely work. People of faith, people of peace, people who believe, as did James Naylor, that “There is a Spirit, which I feel, which delights to do no Evil nor revenge any Wrong,” we have individually grappled; struggled. Yet as people of integrity, we knew we must. So we did. Like that old spiritual, we did it by ourselves. Coming from those individual and lonely places of utter grief, although the writers of this minute have collectively struggled and labored, some of us here this afternoon may be struggling to move into a shared space. Yet we must trust that our horror, our grief is shared! Everyone here and on Zoom has walked that lonesome valley, too.”

 

“Everywhere As Blue As Mine”

Recently, as bombs continue to hit civilian targets in Ukraine, someone posted this deeply moving video.

The last time I’d sung this version of “Finlandia” had been in 2008, in Cuba. A member of a small group of American Quakers visiting that beleaguered* country, our group joined the Gibara Friends Church congregation to sing this song of peace together—first in Spanish, then in English.

And I shall never forget, as we’d all sung the Spanish words to But other hearts in other lands are beating/ With hopes and dreams as true and high as mine, how one Cuban Quaker woman and I locked eyes. And nodded. And smiled.

THIS IS MY SONG

This is my song,
O God of all the nations,
A song of peace for lands afar and mine.
This is my home, the country where my heart is;
Here are my hopes, my dreams, my holy shrine;

But other hearts in other lands are beating
With hopes and dreams as true and high as mine.
My country’s skies are bluer than the ocean,
And sunlight beams on clover- leaf and pine.

But other lands have sunlight too and clover,
And skies are everywhere as blue as mine.
Oh, hear my song, O God of all the nations,
A song of peace for their land and for mine.

To the melody of Finlandia — Lyrics by Lloyd Stone

*Beleagured much because of my country’s policies