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Spiritus Christi Church
Welcome to the Spiritus Christi Podcast. We feature a diverse rotation of amazing and inspiring homilists and guest homilists including Rev Myra Brown, Rev Mary Ramerman, Fr Jim Callan, and Mike Boucher as well as various members of our staff and community. Each person on our preaching team shares their own personal experience of God, family, and spirituality in our world today.
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He took bread, said the blessing,broke it, and gave it to them.With that their eyes were opened and they recognized him.When I studied sacramental theology at St. Bernard’s here in Rochester, my professor, Dr. DavidStosur, asked the class to read an article written by Enrique Dussel, an Argentine-Mexicantheologian, whose work centers on liberation, ethics, and global politics. The article is entitledThe Bread of the Eucharistic Celebration as a Sign of Justice in the Community and its mainthesis is this, “Bread is life to the destitute and it is murder to deprive them of it.” Dussel andStosur taught me that the words – I was hungry and you did not feed me – not only havesacramental meaning, but also economic meaning. To offer a sacrifice from the possessions ofthe poor is like killing a child before their mother’s eyes. Put another way, justice is the practicalcondition that makes possible the Eucharistic celebration, which saves.I will try to help you understand what all that means with a story. Some years ago, as I walkedinto a salon, I had not anticipated that the visit would take on so much significance and symbolicmeaning. It had been many months since my last visit, because my stylist had taken an extendedmaternity leave after giving birth to her second child. She had been gone for so long that togetherwe joshed about whether she’d actually given birth to an infant or a small adult. As she gentlyheld my head while stroking my hair and laying me back into the basin of running water, shecalmly said to me, “Elijah was killed. Well, actually he was murdered.” I jumped up from myreclined position, tightly wrapped my arms around her and for a long while stood with her “in theblood of Christ.”In that embrace, Monique and I came to a shared understanding about just what it is that murderand deprivation really mean. Settled back into the ritual of washing, Monique poured water overmy head, and as she worked the lather into a comforting rhythm, she told me about the death ofher love and helpmate, Elijah. She said the sight and sound of the blood rushing from his woundwas like milk being poured out by the gallon. “Now,” she told me, she understood in real termsthe magnitude of the moment that I had related to her during an earlier visit, the moment when Ifound myself staring down at a pool of blood, with mop in hand, in, of all places, the “living”room, where my Uncle DJ had been left for dead. He was awakened in the wee hours of themorning by an intruder, who broke into his home and fired a gun. And as I stood there staring atblood on the floor, it was revealed to me that it was not simply the intruder’s bullet but rather hisdeprivation-induced depravity that took my uncle’s life.And so, Monique too found herself facing deprivation, economic deprivation. Though she wasn’tmarried to Elijah, his death, in effect, had left her widowed. With newborn and one-year olddaughters to feed, she returned to work in the salon one month after the murder of her partner.
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She and her daughters became the face of the poor. And like many working poor, Moniquehoped, despite the structural injustices that enable the rich to appropriate to themselves the hardlabor of the poor, that she and her children would not be separated from the product of her labor,bread. It is life to the destitute. It is indeed murder to deprive them of it.Where there is no wonder at creation, known as human life, that is violently laid to waste, thereis no wonder at creation, known as nature, for it too is spent without thought and laid to waste.Murder, here in the City of Rochester and cities across the country, is the ugly manifestation ofenvironmental racism that those who shield themselves in a cocoon of privilege do not wish toacknowledge or confront. It is not a crisis separate from the environmental movement in whichpeople of faith, who purport to be genuinely concerned, can simply opt out of, excludethemselves from, or turn away.The injustice of environmental racism – social, economic, and political divestiture – deprivesalready distressed urban communities of the basics to survive and flourish. And too often,investments that could be used to help create healthy environments and give life are insteadsteered by the privileged into projects that memorialize their benevolence and achievement.Consequently, each such act of institutionalized deprivation perpetrated against those, whom thedominant culture has discarded, destroys lives; some through the slow, painful progression ofsuffering from want and others with a bullet, in the blink of an eye.Environmental theories and practices that 1.) fail to understand that human ecology conditionsand is conditioned by natural ecology, 2.) make no expression of moral outrage at the epidemicof violence in inner cities, and 3.) resist confronting the institutionalized socioeconomic andpolitical structures that bind historically oppressed peoples to distressed environments therebygiving rise to a culture of violence, these omissions are symptomatic of privilege that rendersinjustice invisible. Carl Anthony, an ecologist and professor of biology, brought this point homewhen he stated “without justice in cities, there will be no solution to problems of wilderness andopen space, endangered species and natural beauty” that the privileged are wont to claim forGod, country, and the future benefit of their heirs.The act of conservation or rather claiming open space and natural beauty “for my grandchildren”is an act that, in and of itself, further disadvantages already historically disadvantaged childrenconsigned to distressed environments and, in some instances, disadvantages them literally todeath. The choice to act on behalf of the child, who is the beneficiary of white privilege, overand against the child who is disadvantaged by it, is not environmentalism, but the very definitionof environmental racism. Where the bread of life is not shared, it is the bread of death, and theone who eats it “eats damnation to himself.”
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So, what, then, is the community of faith to do about climate change and environmentaldegradation? In today’s readings from the Book of Acts and the Gospel, according to Luke, Jesusis presented to the faithful as a Prophet unjustly executed by the lawless, but released from thethroes of death, and exalted at the right hand of God. Understand that the role of the prophet is toact as an intermediary between God and Israel, to hold the faithful to God’s standards ofrighteousness, compassion, equality, and justice, to call the people to worship the one true God,and to threaten judgment for transgression. And so, it is the prophet Jesus, who beginning withthe Book of Genesis, reveals himself in and through Israel’s long prophetic history to open theeyes of the two disciples traveling along the road to Emmaus.If you accepted Mother Earth’s Lenten invitation to read the encyclical Laudato Si written byPope Francis, you might recall reading that he points to the Book of Genesis that makes explicitthe fact that human life is grounded in three fundamental and closely intertwined relationships:with God, with our neighbor, and with the earth itself. And as the prophets through the ages,from Moses to Jesus, have time and again proclaimed, these three vital relationships have beenbroken, both outwardly and within us. “This rupture,” Francis writes, “is sin. The harmonybetween Creator, humanity and creation as a whole was disrupted by our presuming to take theplace of God and refusing to acknowledge our creaturely limitations. This in turn distorted ourmandate ‘to have dominion’ over the earth, to ‘till it and keep it.’”And so from Moses and all the prophets to the revelation of Jesus the Nazarene, the propheticcritique of these three vital relationships was and is a voice for life in a world, bent on death. It isa critique that decries the accumulation of land by the wealthy for Airbnbs in the face ofepidemic homelessness, the extraction of economic surplus through taxation of the poor to thebenefit of the rich, the acquisitive lifestyle of the moneyed elite, increased deprivation andhunger in urban centers, debt slavery, unfair trade and commerce, and the questionable ethics ofour judicial system.In response to the prophetic voice and to the breaking of the bread, heavily freighted withsymbolic meaning, the task of the community of faith is prophetic action – to open our eyes andbegin to do the hard work of restoring right relationship with God, with neighbor, and with theearth itself.I am so very honored to be able to share with you today that Spiritus Christi is undertaking avery special project of prophetic action to do our part, as a community of faith, to help restoreharmony between God, people, and earth. Last month, Spiritus – through the efforts of theMother Earth Committee in collaboration with the Prison Outreach Ministry and Nielsen House –was awarded a grant administered through a partnership between The Monroe County Soil &Water Conservation District and Cornell Cooperative Extension. The grant is providing enoughresources to help Nielsen House finally realize its dream of planting a community garden in its
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backyard. With five 8’x4’ raised garden beds and one 4’x4’ bed of pollinators (flowers), and allseedlings courtesy of EquiCenter’s 3-acre organic farm, the garden is expected to yield 150-300pounds of produce in its first season that will provide food for Nielsen House, Jennifer House,Grace of God as well as prison outreach ministry graduates and their children residing inapartments in the city of Rochester.The grant will also provide urban gardening workshops and offer residents the opportunity todevelop a mutually beneficial relationship with soil, water, flora and fauna that they might nothave previously had. It is an opportunity to develop ecological sensitivity that obliges people tocare for and make use of the earth’s bounty responsibly, and to recognize its value not simply forits utility to humanity, but more importantly because of its mere existence, the earth with all thatis within it, blesses and gives God, the Creator, glory.I’m going to bring all this home now by sharing that I recently watched a news story about themusician and activist Erykah Badu, who has been described by some as the incarnation of BillieHoliday. Some of you might recall that she headlined Rochester’s International Jazz Festival atthe Eastman Theater some years ago. Ms. Badu was being interviewed by MSNBC reporter, AriMelber, who asks her to share her thoughts about Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’ remark, “Wewill never ever surrender to the woke mob. Florida is where woke goes to die.” You see Ms.Badu popularized the word “woke” with her 2008 song Master Teacher, wherein she makesprophetic observations about the signs of the time. The chorus is “I stay woke.” In response tothe governor’s remark, Ms. Badu says she believes woke has become another way to say Blackor thug. She further says, “I can tell you what woke means…It just means aware. Being inalignment with nature, because if you’re in alignment with that, you’re aware of everything that’sgoing on…”And it happened that, while he was with them at table,He took bread, said the blessing,Broke it, and gave it to them.With that their eyes were opened and they recognized him.Stay woke!
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Love Your Enemies – Luke 6 (2/20/2022)
A guy was out in a remote area of the Grand Canyon hiking alone along one of the trails. His footing gave way and he fell over the cliff. Luckily he caught hold of the branch of a tree and found himself hanging precariously – with the bottom of the canyon being a loooong way down. He decided to pray.
He yelled out to the sky, “God if you are up there, help me!”
The man hears a booming voice reply, “I am here, Kevin, and I hear you!”
The man says, “Thank You!! Can you help me?”
God says, “Yes I can. Kevin, do you trust me?
Kevin says, “Yes, Lord, I trust you!”
God says, “Then let go of the branch….and I will save you.”
Kevin looks down at the canyon floor and thinks for a minute. He then yells back, “Is there anyone else up there?”
When I read something like today’s gospel, I find myself wanting to yell, “Is there anyone else up there?” and this reading from Luke would very much fit into a small volume I’d like to write titled, “Things I wish Jesus had never said…” Historically I think this passage has been one of the most difficult for his followers to take up or even take seriously.
We hear Jesus say, “love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you and pray for those who mistreat you.” Perhaps we wonder, “He can’t be serious, right?” Is Jesus really asking us to sit back and passively accept mistreatment and injustice? Is he suggesting we let people step all over us and do whatever they want to us? Should we pretend like nothing happened and just ignore those who hurt us?
Hardly.
Jesus is fully aware of the harm that people do to each other. He personally knew the pain of oppression and betrayal. He walked among those who had been marginalized and abused.
And he wanted it all to stop.
But Jesus – like other prophets throughout the history of humanity – knew that you cannot fight harm with more harm.
He wanted healing for the world – which even included healing for the people who harmed others. And he tried to show his followers how to do this by giving us a path that addresses harm and violence without causing more harm.
And so he says to us, “Don’t do back to them what they are doing to you.”
At this point in the conversation, I would want to say, “But, Jesus, slapping them would make me feel so much better!”
And he would reiterate, “Don’t do back to them what they are doing to you.”
Now it probably goes without saying that the counsel of Jesus rubs up against something very deep inside of us. When we get hurt by somebody, we want to do something about it. We want to react, and “loving someone” isn’t, generally, what we are interested in doing!
Furthermore, we live in a culture that tells us that violence is an acceptable response when we get hurt and that punishment equals accountability. Violent and punitive responses have become so normalized that they simply appear to be the nature of things and are considered “what works” to address conflict and harm.
So when we hear Jesus say to love our enemies and do good to those who hurt us we think it can seem so impractical and out-of-touch. That’s just not how the world works, Jesus.
I also have to say that when Jesus uses the word “enemy,” he means it literally – like the Roman army that occupied Palestine where he lived. But he also used it to mean the people who insult us, try to exert power over us, demean us, gaslight us and trigger us. It might be the people we think are stupid or judge to be beneath us. And it can be the people who have hurt us – physically or emotionally. So while you may not have enemies in the literal sense, but I’m guessing that you have people in those other categories.
And we’re supposed to love these folks?
Kazu Haga – a modern prophetic voice for nonviolence in the tradition of Martin Luther King – says that whether we recognize it or not – “violence has an impact – on those who experience it, those who perpetuate it and those who witness it…” When we respond to violence or intimidation or harm with more violence, intimidation or harm, it does something to us, and what it does is not, ultimately, good for us.
Now the reality is that few of us have had much practice with something other than violence and models of retribution. We rarely study it and seldom see it modeled for us.
In his book, Healing Resistance, Kazu reflects that something like Army basic training is about 10 weeks followed by weeks or months of other specific forms of training after that. He wonders how much “basic training” we have had in nonviolence and learning to love those who hurt us?
And I think about people like James Lawson – one of the architects of the lunch counter sit-ins of the 1960’s civil rights movement. He required the sit-in participants go through WEEKS of preparation in the theory and philosophy of nonviolence. Then they would practice getting punched, spit on and yelled at so when they got to the actual lunch counter it would not be the first time that they encountered that treatment.
Imagine if we all committed ourselves to weeks of practice and study on how to respond to harm when it happens?
Now Kazu – who I mentioned earlier – believes that “there is always a nonviolent response that is at least as effective as a violent response” – but because violence is so familiar we’re generally not creative enough to think about alternatives.
He is also careful not to get on a high horse and judge people who might “use violence or retribution as a form of resistance, self-defense or self-preservation…” He reminds us that we all contribute to systems of violence each and every day, whether it’s the wars we fund with our tax dollars, the violence embedded in the food we eat, the wars fought over petroleum products…or the suffering built into the [metals] inside our computers and cell phones…”
He goes on to say, however, that while the use of violence and retribution might be able to do some things, they are “limited in one very important way…[they] can never create, restore or strengthen relationships.” So if our goal is to end the cycles of harm and stay in right relationship with each other (which was the goal of Jesus), then hurting someone back or using violence will never get us what we, ultimately, hope for.
I saw a meme this past week that said, “I’m nonviolent in action…But I beat up eleventeen people a day in my thoughts!”
Which is why Jesus then goes on to talk about our thoughts and judgments!
Jesus was a great student of the human heart. He knew that our thoughts and judgments form the basis of our actions. When we judge people, we change how we view them.
So he offers 2 practices. Bless and pray. Again, I think we need to work at these because they do not automatically happen, and like we hear in the reading from Corinthians – we start with the human level and move towards the spiritual. But the bottom line of the practices of bless and pray is that they begin to shift how we think about the other. Instead of rehearsing thoughts that cut us off from them, Jesus encourages us to lean in and connect with their humanity.
Many of you have probably seen the Emmy award winning series called Ted Lasso. For those who haven’t seen it, Ted Lasso is about a college football coach who gets hired by the spiteful owner of a British soccer team to come and coach a sport that he knows nothing about, in a town that despises him, on a team that has no confidence in him and with a press corps that eats him alive. But Ted does not see enemies in other people. He is relentlessly kind and loving to the people around him – even the people who work against him and betray him – and he tries to hold space for them to think and act differently. At times, he seems naïve and out of touch, yet he is purposeful in not giving up on people and trying to connect with their goodness.
Ted Lasso’s approach to life reminds me a lot of people in the Transformative Justice movement. Transformative Justice is a movement to not only address an incident of violence but also to address the conditions that lead to violence. Furthermore the Transformative Justice folks work to do this without relying on violent and punitive institutions like prisons and police.
People like Patrisse Cullors – a Black queer woman and one of the co-founders of Black Lives Matter recently put out a marvelous book called An Abolitionist’s Handbook: 12 Steps to Changing Yourself and the World. Now Patrisse is someone who knows firsthand the damaging effects of interpersonal and state harm and yet some of her “12 Steps” include “Forgive Actively, Not Passively”; “Commit to Not Harming or Abusing Others” and “Practice Accountability.”
She names these steps because she wants to develop a world where we can all stay connected to each other and create the conditions and social mechanisms that say “I believe you can transform” to people who do harm – which at some level – is all of us.
Martin Luther King Jr – perhaps our country’s greatest proponent of loving your enemy and doing good to those who hate you – said in a sermon called “Loving Your Enemies” – “Now first let us deal with this question, which is the practical question: How do you go about loving your enemies? I think the first thing is this: In order to love your enemies, you must begin by analyzing self.”
This is the starting place for us today – ourselves, our lives.
Do we believe that those who have hurt us can be transformed?
Do we believe that we can be transformed?
What do we do when we get hurt and angry, betrayed and mistreated?
What do we do with our desires to punish, retaliate and get even?
How do we engage the hard work of forgiveness and release?
What do we need to study, practice and reflect on to move further on this journey?
This path that we are invited to follow today has been criticized by many throughout the years as being impractical and encouraging passivity. People might quickly say, “Nonviolence doesn’t work…” and we see this playing out around the world today. So we revert to what we know. We threaten violence to try to stop violence and the cycle continues.
I don’t know what Jesus would say about what’s happening in a place like Ukraine. What I do know, however, is that if we had been devoting as much time and energy into nonviolent pursuits as we have been devoting to violence and military buildup for the last 50 years, we would live in a different world. But this is our decision to make – individually and collectively.
Some of you may know my friend, Peter Veitch, who shared with me an article about Ari Mahler. Ari was a nurse working in the emergency room in Pittsburgh, PA the night of October 27, 2018. Ari, who is Jewish, was in the ER when they brought in Robert Bowers – the shooter in the Tree of Life synagogue massacre who himself was shot during a shoot out with police after Bowers had killed 11 worshippers at the synagogue. Bowers even spewed anti-Semitic hate as he entered the hospital. Putting aside his feelings in the moment, Ari attended to Bowers as he would any patient. “I wanted to show him empathy,” he said. Ari would later reflect, “Love as an action is more powerful than words, and love in the face of evil gives others hope. It demonstrates humanity [and] is the ultimate force that connects all living beings.”
People like Ari hold out hope for us that there is territory beyond our hurt that offers our world a new form of healing. May we have the courage to put this kind of love into motion this week – in our lives and in the world.
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Like many of you, I have been seeing the photos and videos of the devastation coming from the tornadoes that ripped through places like Kentucky. It is gut wrenching to witness the damage. In one video, I watched as a woman stood expressionless in front of a pile of rubble and wood that was her house. Her neighbor, who also lost her house, came up beside her and gently put her arm around her. It was only then that the first woman started to sob, and they held each other tightly – trying to make sense of what this all means for them.
An old Irish proverb says: It is in the shelter of each other that the people live. And I am finding this to be more true than ever – and we hear echoes of that in today’s gospel reading.
Just before the reading we hear today, Mary says yes to what the angel has proposed. The famous pastor and writer Nadia Bolz-Weber says, “I know people get hung up on believing the virgin birth thing, but for me the harder thing to believe was that the Angel Gabriel actually found someone to say yes [to this job]!”
Have you ever said a BIG “Yes” to something – a job, a relationship proposal, an opportunity – and then after started to realize what this was actually going to mean in your life? I remember when I wrote a letter to the editor back in 1998 about the situation at Corpus Christi…as soon as I hit send, I knew that my fate was sealed.
I am guessing this was happening to Mary at the start of today’s reading. She started to more deeply realize the implications of her, “Yes.” And the implications were serious.
Mary’s visit to Elizabeth was not a social visit. This was not OMG – we’re going to have babies – posting baby-bump selfies…Elizabeth lived about 90 miles away from Mary. No uber. The journey was a hard and potentially dangerous one and we’re told in the reading that she “set out in haste”. Why the rush, Mary? Mary is an unwed pregnant woman and I have no doubt that word spread fast in her home town. She was likely not safe there – emotionally and physically – and needed to find a place where she could go for a little while.
I remember a few years ago, I was talking with a young woman who had come to counseling. Christie said that a few months earlier, she had been fleeing a difficult situation in CT and was broke, alone, and scared. Desperate, she jumped on a bus to Rochester and showed up unannounced on her grandmother’s doorstep. Her grandmother opened the front door and Christie just collapsed into her arms crying. The grandmother – who had known that Christie had been into all kinds of things over the past few years – didn’t ask any questions, but just said, “Come in, sweetie…” Christie slept for about two days and all her grandmother said to her was, “When you’re ready, tell me what happened…” Christie said that her grandmother’s welcome was the beginning of her healing process…
I’m guessing the same happened for Mary. Elizabeth took one look at her and said, “Come in, sweetie…and when you’re ready, tell me what happened…”
Instead of shaming or rejecting Mary, Elizabeth just takes her in – even blesses her – and that this was very healing for Mary under the circumstances.
The great theologian Joan Chittister notes about this passage – and it is something I had never thought of before – that in the face of the overwhelming nature of her situation, “Mary does not go to her fiancé, Joseph, for understanding. She does not go to her father for protection. She does not go to the priests of the Temple for vindication. No, Mary…travels to the hill country to be with her old cousin Elizabeth, who is also pregnant, also dealing with overwhelming change and the isolating implications of it in her life.”
What is interesting here is what Mary and Elizabeth do during a period of intense stress.
Modern science has told us that, in general, under stressful situations, people respond in one of three main ways – fight, flight or freeze. Have you heard that? We’ve been told that these are the 3 primary things that people do in the face of something that is overwhelming or very stressful.
But about 20 years ago, a research psychologist named Shelly Taylor at UCLA was studying stress responses and realized that most of the 50 years of research about stress had studied people who identified as men. Dr. Taylor found that when she studied the stress responses of people who identified as women, she found another response was present and she called it “tend and befriend.”
Dr. Taylor recognized that, under stress, people can also take care of one another rather that engaging in aggressive or escape behaviors. They protect, connect and work to deepen the ties that bind us. And while we see this more often in women’s responses to stress, it is something that is available to ALL of us.
Tend and befriend. Connection calms our nervous systems.
What we have also discovered is that some of the folks who know how to tend and befriend the best are the people who have been left out of the systems of power and privilege. And that’s why I think Mary went to visit Elizabeth. She knew she’d be understood.
One of my recent favorite authors is Mia Birdsong and she has written a lot about community and how we show up for one another. What she has noticed in her work is that the people who have achieved the success of the so-called “American dream” are often the ones who lack meaningful community in their lives because “success” in our culture seems to require many forms of disconnection.
I think Mary and Elizabeth – as women living in a patriarchal society, as poor people living in the shadow of the great wealth of a few and as Jewish women living in a Roman occupied country – understood something that we can learn and need to from today.
The world of empire that we currently live in and that Mary and Elizabeth lived in – is not based on tend and befriend. It is based on winners and losers. On competition. On profit. On scarcity, fear and insecurity.
And I don’t think it’s coincidental that after Mary and Elizabeth come together – Mary is able to sing her Magnificat – where she says explicitly that God will turn the world upside down to make it right again
Scattering the proud. Bringing down the powerful. Lifting the lowly. Filling the hungry. Sending the rich away empty.
This alternative vision of the world reflected in Mary’s song is not a new song. People have been singing this song for ages. As the great Sam Cooke said, “it’s been a long time coming, but a change is gonna come!”
Change is only going to come, however, if we have the courage – literally the heart – to dare to do something different. Mary said yes to this new vision. Elizabeth said yes to this new vision, and they held each other up as they moved into an uncertain future together. And then their sons said yes to this new vision.
Author and pastor Barbara Brown Taylor says that “Like Mary, our choices often boil down to yes or no; yes, I will live this life that is being held out to me or no, I will not. Yes, I will explore this unexpected turn of events or no, I will not…You can decide to take a risk. You can decide to take part in a plan you did not choose, doing things you do not know how to do for reasons you do not entirely understand.”
Now maybe you are going through something these days that makes it hard to hold on to hope. Maybe you have had an unexpected turn of events and feel a sense of disorientation, loss or grief. Maybe you are being invited into a plan that you did not choose, being asked to do things that you do not know how to do for reasons that you do not entirely understand. If that’s true for you, then you are in good company today.
Between COVID resurgences, natural disasters, political tensions, economic insecurity, mental health challenges, supply chain disruptions, employee shortages and holiday pressures, I can’t say I know too many people who aren’t stressed and overwhelmed these days.
We need to tend and befriend like never before, and I think it is this sacrament of friendship and connection that helps us all to carry what we are asked to bear in this life.
At the end of a job interview, the Human Resources Officer asks a young engineer fresh out of RIT, “So what kind of starting salary are you looking for?” The engineer replies, “I don’t know, maybe around $125,000 a year, depending on the benefits package.” The interviewer says, “Well, what would you say to a package of five weeks vacation, 14 paid holidays, full medical and dental, a company matching retirement fund, and a company car…” The engineer sits up straight and says, “Wow! Are you kidding?” The interviewer replies, “Of course I am, but you started it.”
The vision of the world that we’re being offered today and during Advent is not some pipe dream or joke. Like everything about the kin-dom of God it is already in our midst and it is in our memory.
Mia Birdsong whom I mentioned earlier says, “I believe that somewhere inside us, we all have ancestral memory of what it’s like to live connected, interdependent lives. We may be cut off or too far away from those traditions to claim them or access them, but I think we can find our way back to them by listening deeply to our longings for belonging and wholeness. We can learn a way of being in the world that honors and makes tangible our connections to one another, to nature and to spirit.” This Advent and during this whole Christmas season may we all find our way back to the shelter of each other.
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