New Directions, Light in the Darkness

I am not the leader of one of the historic mainline Protestant denominations. That is likely a very good thing. But I am an ordained Presbyterian minister and a hospital Chaplain in Behavioral Health for over two decades. I listen to people for a living. I listen with an ear to truly, deeply understanding their pain and, with close attention, to the whispers and movements of the Holy Spirit in their hearts and in their living.

I know that the great majority of the people I see are deeply longing to be lifted out of despair and anxiety, they are longing for a reliable voice of hope in the dark, wilderness of these difficult and confusing days. More and more, I listen to people who cannot hear or identify that voice in the mainline Protestant Churches. Often, they would like to but even if they hear a word of hope and grace, of forgiveness and compassionate direction, they fear, based on strong experience, they cannot trust the actions of the leaders and the people to be follow suit.

We church people are quick to defend that among leadership and the people, Christ calls and gathers sinners and the broken. That is most certainly true, I am a huge sinner and quite broken—as are we all. But defenses, especially, those often practiced and employed, prevent our growth toward deeper and more authentic union with Christ. The more we practice them, the more the relieve us of our faithful responsibility of inviting the Holy Spirit to heal and grow our hearts and communities of faith beyond the boundaries of our broken-sinfulness into deeper and more authentic union with Christ. Jesus is the way the truth and the life (John 14). To know Jesus’ truth, to grow closer to God, to live our great mission of participating in bring about God’s Kingdom in this world, we cannot hide from our own sin and brokenness—our own truth.

Mainline Protestants leaders, local pastors and congregations now have an amazing invitation to stand on a national and world stage (pulpit) proclaiming the truth of the heart of the Gospel before the mania, mayhem and message of Donald Trump’s run for President of the United States.   

In my email I have received statements by two of the major Protestant Denominations denouncing Trump’s latest statements about banning our Muslim sisters and brothers from our nation founded on religious freedom. It seems opportune for the leadership of these denominations, and all others, to take a more public and united stand. And, it seems well for the rest of us, clergy and lay, to follow suit from the pulpit, in adult and youth/children’s education, around the water cooler, board room table and on the 19^th hole to do the same.

Based on what I hear from people who are honestly, and in earnest, seeking places of spiritual, communal and social compassion and integrity to call home, such a prayerful, public, faith-filled commitment to concerted action might be a good way to witness being Church in new way for this new mullein. Witnessing our faith in Christ with the integrity of our actions such that the people trapped in the land of deep darkness can see the shining light of Christ (Is. 9).  Jesus is the way, the truth and the light….

PCUSA:
https://www.pcusa.org/news/2015/10/2/clerk-issues-letter-trump-refugees-immigrants/

United Church of Christ: http://www.globalministries.org/ucc_doc_statement_on_vilification_of_muslims

Baptist:  http://www.abc-usa.org/2015/12/08/general-secretary-addresses-recent-attacks/ 

Being a Chaplain in a Psychiatric Hospital and not a parish pastor has led me to develop a bit of a niche adapting to the Spiritual But Not Religious seekers. With Thanksgiving just past and Christmas on the horizon, I was asked to develop a seasonal practice for a mother to share with her daughter to focus in gratitude and compassion.

Below, I’ve outlined a two part practice that based on an adaptation of Loving-Kindness Mediation combined with a focus on service and justice for them to share in the weeks leading up to Christmas.  

Part I. Nightly Loving-Kindness Meditation—I know this looks long on paper and can seem long at first but with regular practice it’s about 10 minutes. You can play Native American flute music or some other background music—youtube is full of music for meditation, find one you two like. You can also use chants, Christmas music…. Light a candle, have a little pine bough and flower in a vase, invite the dog…. Whatever makes it a Sacred and special time for you both.

              

Lead her in this guided breath meditation:

                                Have her focus on her breath…. In-out-in-out. Relax…. Relax… Relax…. Have her picture in her mind’s eye a person, pet, place or activity where she feels safe and compassionately held. Focus on your breath in this place of safety and compassion…. And,….. relax……

                Now wish for yourself, or pray for yourself: May I be safe, may I be well, may I be happy, may I be peaceful.

                Focusing on your breath….. and…. Relax…..

May I be safe; safe in my own mind, safe in my own heart, safe in my own body, safe in my own life. May I be safe……

                                                (pause)

Now wish for yourself, or pray for yourself: May I be well; may I be in healthy relationship with myself; free from suffering and anxiety, free from grief and fear, free from loneliness and pain. May I be well in my relationship with myself. May I be well.

                                                (pause)

                Now wish for yourself, or pray for yourself: May I be happy; may I know the happiness that is my birthright, the happiness that comes from living deeply from the most authentic part of my being. May I be happy.

                                                (pause)

                Now wish for yourself, or pray for yourself: May I know the peace that passes all human understanding; the peace that lies in the deepest and most silent recesses of my soul, that deep secret place where the Divine dwells.  May I know peace.

                

This pattern is then repeated calling to mind her family, loved ones, good friends (pets can be included too).

                Then the pattern is repeated for all those struggling and suffering in the world. You can name specific groups, like children living at Home of the Sparrow or PADS, children living in violence in the Westside of Chicago or among refugee families.

Part II. Called to Serve With Compassion and Gratitude.

                Find a focus for each week before Christmas (this time in the Church is called Advent, a season of spiritual preparation for the birth of Jesus)— children living at Home of the Sparrow or PADS, children living in violence in the Westside of Chicago or among refugee families. You will tie this into the loving-kindness meditation above. Just to get your started check out: http://www.rlcw.org/ Look up their “Ministries” tab. http://www.diaperbankni.org/events.aspx or, Woodstock Bible Church Food Bank and Soup Kitchen, http://www.woodstockbiblechurch.com/

               

  Hope this is what you had in mind. Hope you and all those you love are happy and well.

Take good care,

Advent from the Underside: Symbols of Compassion

A rosary ? Why, yes. Despite my deep Protestant roots, literally centuries deep, decades of chaplain training have made certain I always have a few in the glove box in the car. 

 What exactly does a Menorah look like? Let me google it on my phone and we can look at a picture together.... Half an hour or so and several sheets of construction paper later- an almost perfect representation if the Wikipedia pic. 

The hope of divine compassion real in human life. Light overcoming darkness. The comfort of familiar ritual- centuries proved. Human suffering knows no bounds, cares not for doctrine or belief. It seeks only the blessing of relief, the strength beyond strength of hope amid overwhelming grief, suffering and unrelenting pain. 

At a shelter for the homeless, unmedicated mentally ill: Advent from the underside. Come Emmanuel, come soon.  

 

Here is what I learned today:  Church matters. It matters, I think, enough or even more to the folks who are not in the pews than it does to us pew sitters.  What should matter for  us churchy folk is  the mirror of cultural perception. All those Spiritual But Not Religious, Lapsed Whatevers,  Grew Up In A Tradition But Quit Goings, still care about what we believe, what we say about the Bible and their lives. They are sitting home and watching the Discovery Chanel, the National Geographic Chanel, the History Chanel and they are filtering what they are hearing through the lens of whatever they remember from as much Sunday School as they got. They are filtering it through the who they year the Christian church is on the news and they believe what they are told, at the same level of faith development that they had when they were 6 or 7 or 12 years old.

All these things do not make sense to them and how they have experienced life and who they are and who they fear they are…. So they are not in our churches. They look to google and drink, sex and sports and drugs and whatever else they  can find to distract or numb or forget or avoid.

I learned this because something deep inside me, the Holy Spirit me thinks, got me responding to a question in my morning group with a brief overview of how the cannon was developed —they had no idea that there was an oral tradition and that the Bible as we came together as the result of men sitting around deciding what parts of the tradition to include and exclude— and the realities of “Biblical Authority” –they’d never considered that folks who claim it to support their position have picked over and left out all kinds of Biblical injunctions that they’ve decided no longer have hold over their lives.

And because there were gay folk in the room, I gave a brief overview of how the Bible once was used in this country to unreflectively enforce slavery and to subjugate women (issues I am aware upon which we still need to work). I told them briefly about the overwhelming medical evidence supporting the truth that same gender sexual orientation is as natural as heterosexual orientation.

To my amazement, the folks in the group were on the edge of their seats. They were finding the words of grace for which they’d been longing. Even the souls, who, by the everyday beliefs and practices and configurations we live in most of our churches, we’d consider the most reprobate, couldn’t get enough of this unexpected grace.  “I like what you’re selling,” is a compliment from a reformed gangbanger with several stints as guest of the state, especially one committed to trying to turn his life around.

These folks who are not in our pews need to be, not for us so we don’t die. Are we not to follow Christ’s command to be proclaiming the salvation of humankind? And isn’t the salvation of God’s compassionate live for their very lives, exactly what they are looking for.  

It matters then for more than just us churchy folk, what we say we believe and how we live what we believe and how we treat one another and the least among us.  Was not the marker of the earliest followers the proclamation from those who were not among their numbers, “See how they live one another?” And, do we not love Jesus loving our neighbors, especially those who are the least? In these we exhibit the Kingdom of heaven to the world.  

 

 

Day 14

 

Gather.

Daily, compassionate hands gather to offer hope and healing to any who would come.

When 2 or 3...

 

 

Day 13

 

Justice

Safety. Compassion. Outward and visible. Finding some order suffering's chaos.



Approaching Advent From the Underside

Advent is soon here, though the stores seem to have it full throttle Christmas already with Thanksgiving dinners not yet prepared. It is easy for Christians to make ourselves feel holy and above it all by judging and criticizing the retailers and their love of money and those who are so spiritually vacuous that they are already buying Christmas.

But, this is not the truth of Advent’s coming . The truth of Advent lies in the reality of what is to come, in Advent we are waiting for the Cross—the cross of suffering and the cross of resurrection. Without them, Mary’s boy would have been just one more Jewish born to struggle against ancient infant mortality rates, perhaps surviving to become a man struggling to survive the tyranny of the Pax Romana and whatever fates consigned children born without benefit of wedlock in the 1st Century Ancient Near East. As we come upon Advent, we are waiting to struggle, once again, with just what it means for God to join with us, to make his presence in our hearts and minds and lives so real, so palpable, so intimate that we no longer need to judge ourselves and others.

This is so difficult. So foreign. It is so contrary to the habits and haunts of our hearts and minds. It is contrary because it begins with us. The baby, the cross of suffering and the cross of salvation ("sozo" in Greek, bring to safety, restore, get well) are for our lives. It is so Other. It seems too impossible to be true. Those old ingrained habits of thought keep our worlds organized and orderly, so we divide things up, us and them . All the while waiting anxiously for someone who seems never to come, like Vladimir and Estragon, in Beckett’s, “Waiting for Godot.”

The difference is, of course, that the God we wait for is come. This baby we wait for broke down all those old barriers of our too frail and worn out human ideas about God out there and us down here, of us in here (the church) and those out there. Immanuel, God with us, is just that: God with us, and we are with God. There isn’t much else for us to do.

It is exactly the most simple and the most difficult thing in the world for us to truly believe that we are truly, deeply, intimately, dearly loved in Advent and on Christmas, and every day, with a grace so strong it would suffer and die for us, and with a hope so real it needs only for us to pray to open our hearts and minds to it in midst of the uncertainties and griefs, the differences and dissimilarities between us and the harsh realities of our living. Emmanuel will join us right where we are saving us, healing us into closer relationship with our Father, bringing us into that same compassionate connection with one another.  Amen

Here is what I Iove about basseting, besides the bassety stuff: Conversations about the weather (horse people always talk about the weather), the plight of aged parrots whose owners die, the genocidal practices of humans against whales (Disney) all in the name of entertainment and money, really good husbands and post-Thanksgiving relocation to Wellington,  good Port, the Hunt Ball, and of successfully  prosecuting sex offenders  and what the Swedes and  Germans do (permanent sterilization is an option) and of deep love and commitment and the beautiful  tender sufferings of how easy and how hard it is to  love someone  in sickness as well as during all those healthy days. And, I saw the real and beautiful truth of  compassion and kindness. And, we conversed about the weather, because we really do love to talk about the weather.

I know this much is true: In my group room can be a Muslim, a transsexual, an atheist lesbian, two folks who would self-identify as “born again,” a Roman Catholic or two (practicing and/or ‘recovering’), a couple of folks who know nothing whatsoever about religion and are on the fence about the fact that my groups are mandatory. I can count on one hand all the times I’ve ever had to moderate any kind of religious argument or negative judgment. I can state with as much certainty as I can about anything in life this truth: at the core of our human experience is our common plight of suffering and that the thing that unites is our shared search for meaning and necessary reliance on one another as we seek to transcend, to heal.


Compassion, understanding comes from understanding, on our most deeply human level , that we are all in this together and that we desperately, yes, desperately in a very deep existential sense, need each other to survive. Most of us have to wait until we are mired in overwhelming life crises and deep suffering to understand this deep eternal truth. I get to sit witness to its grace everyday and to the miracle of the human and divine spirit at work in the courage of faith’s redemption and human transformation.



   

Imperfection and struggle at meditation, prayer; in life. Anxiety. Grief. Even anger. Always returning, in all  gentleness  to the practice, the discipline. Trusting  the breath, the Spirit, the Imago Dei within, my Buddha nature   more than  my  own frail efforts, more than the instructions or the service of worship that feel awkward or off.  There is Maitri or Metta, Hesed and Rachem . Sneaking  in through the slivers of silence,  slowly, gracefully the consolations of  Christ, resting in the green valley fed by the depths of the stillest waters,  dark valley in the distance.    

Overheard this morning: “Yes, I have a job. I support myself and my four children on $8.45 an hour….” If the poor are always with us, it simply cannot be so that we harden our hearts blocking out their presence and pain while tending to the things of Jesus (Matthew 26:11). My hunch and prayer is that the poor, the least among us, anyone longing for justice and mercy, dwell in our midst the Word made flesh. In tending to them, we now tend to Jesus.

They whisper to us from deep within, the still small voice of compassion’s prayer; uttering not loudly nor in the market place, “Thank you God for all that I have, there but for the grace of God go I!” Rather, calling us to hearts of no doubt hard come, nut nonetheless tender humility, praying carefully behind the closed doors of our fleshy heart’s room, “Here I am, my sister, my brother. Dear Father, how would you send me?” (Matthew 6:1-4 and Luke 18:11-14).

It’s my 57th Birthday! I talked with my biological mother this year for the first time, shortly before Mother’s day. Now, for the first time in my life, I’m celebrating another year of living knowing the story of how and where I was conceived and the story of my birth… that against all the misguided 1950’s wisdom and rules about “what’s best for theses mother and their babies,” she insisted on holding me before surrendered me to the care of unmet strangers with the benediction, “I love you.”

In those first blessed and fragile movements of this life, where grief and love mingled in all tenderness and hope, the course of my living was set. This past half-century-plus, I’ve surrendered time and time, a thousand times again, to moments as heavy laden as my first. I have been called time and time again to learn that, faith and hope are all that abide, and that there is no stronger force, none in life or in death, greater than the arms of that same Love which, long awaited, held me for what could never be time enough, relinquishing me, in all sadness and uncertainty to all the precariousness that is living.

Faith, hope and that same Love have nurtured me into a heart of grace for the patients that we serve: My birthday wish for year 57 is prayer and meaningful action. Too many times, we must surrender lives struggling with addiction, mental and physical illnesses to a society’s system (healthcare, mental health, social services) were no real help is available. We cannot say things like, “go here and they will help you try to end your unrelenting physical or emotional pain, or with a place to live, or food to eat, money for car insurance or gas so you can know the simple human dignity of paying for those thing with money you earn from the job that small bridge of financial assistance afforded.” Or things like, “go here and you will be able to get the best possible treatment for your normal human reaction to growing up in a family where those who ought to have cared for you betrayed that sacred trust.”

A kind PCB friend said to me, not all that long ago, “you could have chosen to do horses or anything, but you chose this (things religious).” What she didn’t know is that, I could not, cannot, choose anything less than living the Love of my mother’s benediction of my life; to pray and try to live as if the Word has a bit of flesh on it and to pray and try to act Compassion’s love in the world…

Please spend some time today praying and acting for a more just, compassionate system for the least among us….

Powerful Women Empowering

I am currently attending the Nigerian Women Empowerment Award Dinner and Leadership Workshop Conference at the Mid-America Club on the 80th floor of the Aon Building in Chicago--the view is amazing and today was a prefect day for it.

Many things about the day impressed me, but perhaps most was the preamble to the oath of office the new leadership one of the host organizations, the National Councils of Women's Societies of Nigeria in the Diaspora. It went something like this, "We in Nigeria are a very religious people. So now, whatever religion you are, whatever God you pray to; if you take this oath, know that God will hold you responsible. We are not playing at this, the lives of our children depend on what you do..."

Let us come this week to prayer. Let us come from the diaspora of our living--the scatteredness of our stress-full, hectic, demanding lives before that which Unites us and Endures. Let us ask that we are given all good strength and focus of compassion for our living such that all that we do might be presented as an offering worthy to lay before the feel of whatever God we pray to. And, that always in our hearts and in our minds is some glimpse of the vision of the impact of who we are and what we are doing on the world we are building for the children of us all. Amen. 

Image: Her Excellency Dame Patience Jonathan Goodluck,First Lady, Federal Republic of Nigeria patron of sponsoring societies: the The Association of Nigerian Women Leaders In Diaspora and the National Council of Nigerian  Women's Societies. 

I don’t know about you, but when Sunday’s violence just up the road in Oak Creek, Wisconsin was occurring I was sitting safely in my pew next to a good friend who is worried about her father’s progressing Alzheimer’s and in front of a lovely older couple who are worried about some of the declines in health that you might imagine. As the events in the Sikh Gurdwaw (meaning the Gateway to the Guru), or temple, were reaching their horrific climax, our congregation was singing:

“O for a world where everyone/Respects each other's ways,/Where love is lived and all is done/With justice and with praise… O for a world preparing for/God's glorious reign of peace,/Where time and tears will be no more,/And all but love will cease.

Our pastor had just finished preaching a sermon titled, “When our Theology Goes on Tilt,” responding to the horrific events of the previous week in Colorado. She was trying to help us all begin to right ourselves, make some meaning amid news stories that filled our struggling hearts and minds with the awful and the evil (the official definition of evil being, simply, the absence of good). She told us what she admitted she needed to hear; it was what we all needed to hear. It is what, I confess to you, I need to hear once again in these days…

She reminded us how unhelpful it can be when other people offer consolation to us by defining God’s will in the face of horrible tragedy, and of how our greatest and most certain consolation is always that God is with us during these times, so closely, that it often quite hard for us to see him. She affirmed that God was most tenderly with all who died and with all who are suffering and grieving. That God is most tenderly with us and our loved ones right now as we are trying to right ourselves once again in the wake of more senseless violence, death and loss; and that God is with each of us in all our times of grief and pain, uncertainty and fear. She affirmed that, despite our inclinations towards believing all the evidence to the contrariety, God is with each of us as we struggle to pick up the pieces of our shattered world views, our broken hearts and souls.

In an interview with Sojourners Magazine, responding to the events in Wisconsin, Ralph Singh, an international Sikh leader, offered these words: “A Sikh, wherever they go in the world, is committed to building community a community of peace, an inclusive community to stand as an affirmation of what we now call pluralism," and asks that we join the Sikh community in sharing our stories, personal and those of our faith traditions so that we all might work toward the goal of Sikh communities which is working toward building a more compassionate and inclusive society.

To my ear, our stories sound quite alike.

Let us pray this week to see more clearly God with us, whatever the circumstance might be and for the deep consolation and profound comfort that our hearts need. Let us ask for the grace to become partners with God, and with one another, in creating a more compassionate and inclusive community. Let us pray for a world where everyone respects each other’s ways, a world where all that we do seeks justice and love, and in sings praise to God. May all that we are and all that do sing of our prayer for a world of peace and unceasing love. Amen.

image credit:  India Post: the Voice of Indians World Wide, February. 2011. A meeting of the Indianapolis Interfaith Hunger Initiative. 

An Original Poem by Julie Ann Monroe, HUC, CADC,PSC

Pause


By: Julie Ann Monroe, HUC, CADC,PSC

 

The morning is dark and cold

The rain has turned to ice

The golden arches of McDonalds

are like a sunrise to me.

Warm coffee and Spanish music for my drive.

The hospital stands above the other buildings as a wary

beacon of sorts

it's lights are always on

someone is always home.

I tiptoe across the sidewalk and enter

the quiet warmth

The elevator hums and stops at each floor and

I pause...

Whatever my problems are I am reminded to

bring my heart into this day.



There are visitors and families in huddles as each door opens

for a brief second

I can see the grief on their faces

the worry

the wrinkled clothes from yesterday.

Their lives, like mine are suspended in a state of change.

Still, here in this place, we are all human,

there is no hierarchy for pain

there is no prize for suffering

and there is no status that serves

that is better than the human heart...

and love is the language

that I hope can jump the chasm

my eyes to your eyes quickly

before the door closes again.


Poet and Author Julie Ann Monroe has been working n healthcare for over twenty years. It is my great preasure to have worked with her for the past nine.

4th of July Parade Garage Sale Wisdom

By way of India: Celebrating the 4th and this country's blessings...

Best post 4th of July Parade garage sale-ing find: “….we women, especially after menopause, are much closer to God. A man, if his child is in trouble is moved to protect, but we women are moved to compassion, to want to take it on and take on their suffering…. I told my husband four years ago that he had made enough money. He is a PhD in computer science and has a big job. I told him, ‘I did not marry a pile of money’, I married him to be my companion, it is time now, we can’t eat all this money, he must quit. In six months we will get in that camper over there and give back to this country that has been so good to us (they are both emigrants). There is so much trouble and suffering and we have benefitted so much from what is available here it is our phase of life now give back. This is the divinity of women….”

I would only add: Amen.

The True Value of Compassion

There is so much good will and heart in this land as we struggle perceive and respond to the depth of the devastation in Haiti. But, there are places also where the sad, shallowness of our propensity for myopic self-involvement are only too visible. Perhaps it is because I struggle so against my own "myopic self-involvement" that I am frustrated and must say:

There is a misperception among many, especially those of good fortune and comfortable means, that opportunities for the tangible expression of compassion are for the balm and betterment of the lives of those whose lives are marked by suffering and want. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Jesus, please help me today, and all days, to know the true value off all that you place before me. Amen.

Pray Truth and Freedom

Library of Congress title:

A. Lincoln showing Sojourner Truth the Bible presented by colored people of Baltimore,

Executive Mansion, Washington, D.C., Oct. 29, 1864.

“Truth is powerful and it prevails.”
Sojourner Truth (b. November 18 or 26, 1797)

According to Women in History: Sojourner Truth was born into slavery into in New York State, Truth suffered its inhumanity and degradations, including being sold at age 9 years with a herd of sheep, being sold numerous other times to violent owners; suffering beatings, rapes, being told who she could and could not marry, and separation from her children. In 1827 New York completed legislating the abolition of slaver. Shortly before 1829, Truth, whose given name was Isabella Baumfree—changed later to reflect her understanding of God’s calling in her life—had a religious experience she came to describe as becoming "overwhelmed with the greatness of the Divine presence" therein she was inspired to preach and quickly became known as an rousing and “miraculous” preacher.

Her preaching brought Truth into contact with influential abolitionists such as William Lloyd Garrison, Frederick Douglass, and David Ruggles. In the spirit of the times, she was eventually drawn to the utopian cooperative ideal, joining the Northampton Association of Education and Industry in Massachusetts. There she met Olive Gilbert and began dictating her memoirs The Narrative of Sojourner Truth: A Northern Slave was published privately by William Lloyd Garrison in 1850.

In 1854, Truth was invited to speak at the Ohio Woman's Rights Convention in Akron, Ohio, she gave her most famous speech -- with the legendary phrase, “Ain’t I a Woman.”


In 1864 Truth worked among freed slaves in the Washington D.C. area meeting with President Abraham Lincoln. A famous painting, and subsequent photographs of the event, depicts President Lincoln showing Sojourner the 'Lincoln Bible,' given to him by the black people of Baltimore, Maryland.

After the Civil War ended, she continued working to help the newly freed slaves through the Freedman's Relief Association, then the Freedman's Hospital in Washington.

In the days ahead, let us pray for truth.

Let us pray for freedom.

Let us pray to be “overwhelmed with the greatness of the Divine presence.”

May we come in these days to experience the grace and mercy

of the truth of our own beings and of our lives.

May we begin to know the blessed freedom of living and being in truth toward

our selves and our sisters and brothers.

May we begin, in these, to know the limitless compassion of the presence of the Divine

in the living of our days.

Amen.

Prayer for 9/11

Photo by, Joe Woolhead, from the National September 11 Memorial & Museum at the World Trade Center website

“You make a living out of what you get; you make a life out of what you give,”
Winston Churchill.

The National September 11 Memorial and Museum at the World Trade Center has published a study guide for its film, “The Spirit of Volunteerism: 9/11 and Beyond.”

Among many stories:
"Ada Rosario Dolch, was principal of a high school just two blocks form the World Trade Center and on 9/11 safely evacuated 600 students. In memory of her sister, Wendy Wakeford, who died on 9/11, Ada helped build a school in Afghanistan that opened in 2005. Ada currently works with school leaders, and lectures on the topic of emergency preparedness, response and recovery for m disasters."

"Mickey Kross, is a retired NYC firefighter who survived the collapse of the North Tower of the World Trade Center on 9/11. He volunteered to search and recovery missions at the site in the months following the attacks. After Hurricane Katrina, Mickey traveled to New Orleans, serving as a volunteer in New Orleans firehouses and helping with their clean up efforts."

"Albert Capsouto, kept his Lower Manhattan restaurant open in the aftermath of 9/11, providing first responders and downtown residents with free meals and a place to rest. He advocated for the needs of small business downtown and played an active role in rebuilding his community."

May we continue this week to pray for those whose loved ones perished in senseless acts of violence and for those who continue to reach down inside themselves to find, amid life’s greatest losses, a spirit of compassion and hope, and the courage and endurance to share these with others in greatest need. And may we pray as well for the grace in our own lives to find, in our deepest needs, our greatest gifts and hearts to share. Amen.

Whatever Comes Thy Will Be Done

I found a first edition of Thomas Merton’s, Thoughts in Solitude, at a Used Book Sale awhile back. I’ve read a little Merton almost every day for several years now, so I was quite excited about the find and also about the price, $1.50. After a long week at work solitude seems a necessary prescriptive* so I’ve been reading and meditating on small passages. I am particularly drawn to this: “What is the use of praying if at the very moment of prayer we have so little confidence in God that we are busy planning our own kind of answer to our prayer?” (p.31).

Not my will but thine be done and we are seized with Abrahamic faith, raising the knife poised to strike down our most cherished and dearly beloved, those very things, or ideas, or whatevers which are sign and the seal of our blessedness. Prayer is radical business. Growing in faith requires an ever deepening willingness to trust more and more of ourselves to God. Especially, the very things which we have come to believe are God’s special gifts for our lives and our living.

Today, I will pray to learn to trust my work to God, for in truth it is not mine but God’s work. All that I bring to it are God’s gifts to me and the doing is God’s blessing for my life. If this past week it seemed to big and too much and too many and more than I could imagine doing, and people somehow still felt cared for and felt compassion and knew grace and went home with a little bit more wholeness, and if God showed up and cradled us all in her hands and kept us safe it had little to do with me and everything to do with God. A miracle of grace in every group and pastoral-therapeutic encounter.

I pray for confidence in the coming days that whatever comes thy will will be done. Amen

*Truthfully however, this is a second-line medication, last night all I had the strength for was renting “Mall Cop” and watching it half comatose on the couch.