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Contents:
Madeleine L’Engle, “Moses: dialogue with God”
Come.
/ When? / Now. This way. I
will guide you.
Wait! Not so fast. / Hurry. You. I said you.
Who am I? / Certainly I will be with thee.
Is nothing, then, what it is? I had rather the rod had
stayed a rod and not become a serpent.
Come. Quickly. While the blast of my mouth
opens the sea.
Stop. I’m thirsty. / Drink water from this rock.
But the rock moves on before us. / Go with it and drink.
I’m tired. Can’t you stop for a while?
You have already tarried too long.
But if I am to follow you I must know your name.
I will be that I will be.
You have set the mountain on fire. / Come. Climb.
I will be lost in the terror of your cloud.
You are stiff-necked and of a stiff-necked
people.
YOUR people, Lord. / Indubitably.
Your wrath waxes hot. I burn. / Thus to become great.
Show me, then, thy glory. / No one may see my face and live. But I will cover
you with my hand while I pass by.
My people will turn away and cry because the skin of my face shines. / Did
you not expect this?
I cannot enter the tent of the congregation while your cloud covers it and your
glory fills the tabernacles. Look. It moves before us again. Can you not
stay still!
Come. Follow.
/ But this river is death.
The waters are dark and deep. / Swim. / Now will I see your face?
Where are you taking me now? / Up the mountain with me before I die.
/ But death / bursts into light.
The death is / what it will be.
These men: they want to keep us here in three
tabernacles. But the cloud moves. The water springs from a rock that journeys
on. / You are contained in me.
But how can we contain you in ark or tabernacle or –
You cannot.
/ Where, then? / In your heart.
Come.
Still? / I will be with thee.
Who am I? / You are that I will be. Come.
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One of the most significant among the Jewish ancestral memories is that
. . . when the people could not till the ground for food, God provided the
miraculous food of manna. Exodus treats the word “manna” as if it
were a pun. Literally, meaning “What is it?” “manna” comes to denote
“bread given by God.” It is as if food from God is the believers’
answer to the fundamental human inquiry, “What is this?”
(Gail Ramshaw)
In my dreams, I walk among the ruins of the old
part of town
looking for a bit of stale bread.
My mother and I inhale the fumes of gunpowder.
I imagine it to
be the smell of pies, cakes, and kebab.
A shot rings out from a nearby hill. We hurry.
Though it’s only
nine o’clock, we might be hurrying toward a grenade marked
“ours.”
An explosion rings out in the street of dignity.
Many people are
wounded – sisters, brothers, mothers, fathers.
I reach out to touch a trembling, injured hand.
I touch death
itself.
Terrified, I realize this is not a dream.
It is just another day
in Sarajevo. (Edina, 12, from Sarajevo)
Moses dwelt in the desert with those around him. He grew vigilant,
watching a movement by which he deserted himself. Many not as active
as he languished without their former comforts and hiding places.
They could not leave. When they were hungry, manna fell from heaven,
and they were fed; but a disquiet robbed them of a vision of the miracle.
There was only deprivation and their unforsaken greed. They lived
for a promise and a dream, oblivious to the holy place of their passage.
(David Appelbaum)
As bread that was scattered on the hillside, was
gathered together and made one, so too, we, your people, scattered throughout
the world, are gathered together around your table and become one.
As grapes grown in the field are gathered together
and pressed into wine, so too are we drawn together and pressed by our times
to share a common lot and are transformed into your life-blood for all.
So let us prepare to eat and drink as Jesus taught
us: inviting the stranger to our table and welcoming the poor.
(adapted from The Didache)
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Why is
it, O sea, that you flee? / O Jordan, that you turn back?
O mountains,
that you skip like rams? / O hills, like lambs?
Tremble,
O earth, at the presence of God, / at the presence of the God of Jacob, / who
turns the rock into a pool of water,
the flint
into a spring of water.
(Psalm 114:5-8)
And in that
drowning instant as / the water heightened over me
it suddenly
did come to pass / my preterite eternity
the image
of myself intent / on several freedoms / fading to . . . myself in yellowed
basel-print / vanishing . . .
into ghetto
Jew / a face among the face of
the rapt
disciples hearkening
the raptures
of the Baalshem Tov / explaining Torah . . .
vanishing
/ amidst the water’s flickering green
to show me
in old Amsterdam / which topples . . .
into a new
scene / Cordova where an Abraham / faces inquisitors . . . the face /
is suddenly beneath the arch
whose Latin
script the waves erase
and flashes
now the backward march / of many
I among them
/ to / Jerusalem-gate and Temple-door! . .
For the
third time my body rises
and finds
the good, the lasting shore!
(A. M. Klein)
Somebody
yelled something was falling. We didn’t know if it was desks coming out.
It turned out it was people coming out, and they stared coming out one after
the other. . . . We saw the jumpers coming. We didn’t know what it was
at first, but then the first body hit, and then we knew what it was. And
they were just like constant. . . . I was getting sick. I felt like I
was intruding on a sacrament. They were choosing to die, and I was watching
them and shouldn’t have been. So me and another guy turned away and looked
at a wall, and we could still hear them hit.”
NYC firefighter Maureen McArdle-Schulman, from
archive of radio calls and oral histories of 9/11
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“Spirituality is nothing more or less than putting God in first place.
Responding to the still, small voice that demands – everything.”
“Journal of Adrienne Hogarth”
Return of the Wolf, Martin Bell, 1983
“The line between good and evil, hope and despair, does not divide the world
between ‘us’ and ‘them.’ It runs down the middle of every one of us.
I do not want to talk about what you understand about this world. I want to
know what you will do about it. I do not want to know what you hope.
I want to know what you will work for. I do not want your sympathy
for the needs of humanity. I want your muscle. As the wagon driver
said when they came to a long, hard hill, ‘Them that’s going on with us, get
out and push. Them that ain’t, get out of the way.’”
It was on Fire When I Lay Down on It
Robert Fulghum, 1990
“God’s judgment is the same as His mercy. In other words, He will not
let us go to hell in peace.”
“Sweeping Meditations #12 & 17”
Return of the Wolf, Martin Bell, 1983
“He was an alleged rapist and murderer. She was tied up in a bathtub,
clinging to the wreckage of a life that was barely afloat. One was a monster,
the other a woman unable to care for her 5-year-old, looking for cigarettes
in the dark. And out of that came something, well, beautiful. He
saw his purpose: to serve God in prison, to turn his life around, even as it
may have been saturated in the blood and pain of others. She saw hers:
to make that happen. These people weren’t saints. Grace arrives,
unannounced, in lives that least expect or deserve it.” From an essay
about Ashley Smith held hostage at gun point by Brian Nichols.
“When Grace Arrives Unannounced”
Andrew Sullivan, Time Magazine, 3/28/05
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“Starvation within Harvest,” Glenn Jetta Barclay,
New Zealand/Northern Ireland
Starvation within Harvest!
Have you ever noticed that the English word ‘harvest’ can be altered to a word
that means the very opposite? I can be altered to an anagram meaning the
total lack of resources for life. Set aside the ‘h’ of harvest to make
‘arvest,’ bring the last two letters to the fire, and there is ‘starve.’
It is ironic that within the noun meaning ‘gathered-in supplies’ is a verb meaning
the total lack of the same.
And what might the ‘h’ stand for – Hope, Health, Happiness, Hell, Hopelessness?Harvest
implies Health. / Harvest implies Happy Completion of sowing and reaping.‘H’
is also for helpless. / Humankind feels helpless about the starvation of millions
of people.
The starving people feel helpless.
How do we ensure that the ‘h’ factor of harvest allows for distribution of supplies?
In humility we pray:
O God of Harvest, great and various, / help us to find ways, large, little
and diverse,to co-operate with creation; / to re-structure our economies;
/ to share our harvests so that the potential to ‘starve’ hidden within
‘harvest’ is not activated but remains a warning that the good ‘harvest’
may not last as such; that harvest should be hope for all, therefore
healthy harvests need to continue. May we always value fruitfulness
from planting as a gift from You, Creator God, and use it wisely and generously.
Amen.
After this Jesus went to the other side of the Sea of Galilee, also called
the Sea of Tiberias. A large crowd kept following him, because they saw
the signs that he was dong for the sick. Jesus went up the mountain and
sat down there with his disciples. Now the Passover, the festival of the
Jews, was near. When he looked up and saw a large crowd coming toward
him, Jesus said to Philip, “Where are we to buy bread for these people to eat?”
He said this to test him, for he himself knew what he was going to do.
Philip answered hi, “Six Months’ wages would not buy enough bread for each of
them to get a little.” One of his disciples, Andrew, Simon Peter’s brother,
said to him, “There is a boy here who has five barley loaves and two fish.
But what are they among so many people?” Jesus said, “Make the people
sit down.” Now there was a great deal of grass in the place; so they sat
down, about five thousand in all. Then Jesus took the loaves, and when
he had given thanks, he distributed them to those who were seated; so also the
fish, as much as they wanted. When they were satisfied, he told his disciples,
“Gather up the fragments left over, so that nothing may be lost.” So they
gathered them up, and from the fragments of the five barley loaves, left by
those who had eaten, they filled twelve baskets. When the people saw the
sign that he had done, they began to say, “This is indeed the prophet who is
to come into the world.”
John 6: 1-14, NRSV
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Alone you stood before God when God called you; alone you had to answer for
that call; alone you had to struggle and pray; and alone you will die and give
an account to God. You cannot escape from yourself; for God has singled
you out. If you refuse to be alone, you are rejecting Christ’s call to
you, and you can have no part in the community of those who are called. . .
. But the reverse is also true: let those who are not in community be aware
of being alone. Into the community you were called, the call was not meant
for you alone; in the community of the called to bear your cross, you struggle,
you pray.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
I must give the people around me credit for encouraging me for doing the
right thing in the right way. I don’t know what would have happened if
they had said, “That is not the way to do it.” . . . In retrospect Harlem was
a great community; it was a very fascinating community. If you had asked
me this forty years ago, I wouldn’t have used these terms. . . . It was a very
cohesive community. You knew people. You didn’t know their names,
but you’d pass people on the street and see the face over and over again. .
. . You knew the police, you knew the firemen, you knew the teachers, the people
on the street. You knew the peddler. It was me.
Jacob Lawrence
We make such a fuss about “seeking God.” We’re anxious about so many things,
and faith, prayer, and searching for God are not excepted. Are we doing
it right? Will a retreat teach us a better way? Which method of
prayer will be most effective for us? What church congregation will best
“feed us spiritually?” Probably the best thing we can do is to relax,
take a deep breath, stop thinking about what we want or need, and forget about
it. Seeking God, that is. Instead we might wait, and begin to silently
ponder the ways in which God may already have been seeking us, all along, in
the faulty, scary stuff of our ordinary lives.
God knows we have problems in letting bygones be bygones, in our families, in
the workplace, in our small towns. Maybe that’s where God has been contending
with us, engaging us in the process of conversion. Most of us have had
family, mentors, friends, and even enemies who have wrestled with us through
the important questions; who have helped us grow up, building something good
out of the ruins we have made for ourselves . . . the worst parts of ourselves
converted into something better, our small expectations shattered in the presence
of God’s great abundance, or as the old hymn puts it, “the wideness of God’s
mercy”
Kathleen Norris
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“Gathered at the River,” Denise Levertov
As if the trees were not indifferent
A breeze flutters the candles but the trees give off / a sense of listening,
of hush.
The dust of August on their leaves. / But it grows dark. / Their dark green
is something known about, not seen.
But summer twilight takes away / only color, not form. The tree-forms,
massive trunks and the great domed heads, / leaning in towards us, are visible,
a half-circle of attention.
They listen because the war / we speak of, the human war with ourselves,
the war against earth, / against nature, / is a war against them.
The words are spoken / of those who survived a while,
living shadowgraphs, eyes fixed forever / on witnessed horror,
who survived to give / testimony, that no-one
may plead ignorance. / Contra naturam. The trees, / the trees
are not indifferent.
We intone together, Never again,
we stand in a circle, / singing, speaking, making vows,
Remembering the dead / of Hiroshima, / of Nagasaki.
We are holding candles: we kneel to set them / afloat on the dark river
as they do / there in Hiroshima. We are invoking
saints and prophets, / heroes and heroines of justice and peace,
to be with us, to help us / stop the torment of our evil dreams . . .
Windthreatened flames bob on the current . . .
They don’t get far from shore. But none capsizes / even in the swell
of a boat’s wake.
The waxy paper cups sheltering them / catch fire. But still the candles
sail their gold downstream.
And still the trees ponder our strange doings, as if / well aware that if
we fail,
we fail also for them: / if our resolves and prayers are weak and fail
there will be nothing left of their slow and innocent wisdom,
no roots, / no bole nor branch,
no memory / of shade, / of leaf,
no pollen.
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Both were wounded: Jacob at the hip, the angel in his vanity. Yet
they parted friends, or was it accomplices? Jacob accepted his aggressor’s
departure willingly; the latter, as if to thank him, made him a gift: a
new name which for generations to come would symbolize eternal struggle
and endurance, in more than one land, during more than one night.
At dawn Jacob was a different man. Whatever he touched caught fire.
His words acquired a new resonance; now he expressed himself as a visionary,
a poet.
What struck me about that story at that time of great family turmoil
was that Jacob was wounded wrestling with God and in the process all the
names that had worked before left him and he was given a new one.
That was what was happening to me. I felt terribly wounded, and all
the neat categories that had ordered my existence to that point dissolved,
and I was faced with chaos. I was in desperate need of new names .
. .
I had a book of Bible stories when I was a kid. There was a picture
I’d look at twenty times every day: Jacob wrestles with the angel.
I don’t really remember the story, or why the wrestling – just the picture.
Jacob is young and very strong. The angel is . . . a beautiful man,
with golden hair and wings, of course. I still dream about it.
Many nights. I’m . . . it’s me. In that struggle. Fierce,
and unfair. The angel is not human, and it holds nothing back, so
could any human win, what kind of fight is it? It’s not just.
Losing means your soul thrown down in the dust, your heart torn out from
God’s. But you can’t not lose.
May we realize that God’s blessing upon us – that for which we have
wrestled, some of us for so long and so fiercely – is that we be empowered
to welcome and bless those who, like Jacob, indeed, like most of us, do
not deserve to be blessed.
May we sustain the confidence and courage, the compassion and humor,
to realize the sacred power in this stunning opportunity which is ours today,
and will be ours forever.
This blessing will not be taken from us.
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The parables of Jesus help us see two
realities: the reality of a world whose values must be rejected, and the
reality of a new world whose values must be accepted. . . The
American Jesus comes to us rather tamely, tidies up a few bad habits, makes
us better citizens, and sends us back into a “civilization” that is grateful
for our good influence . . . Everything flows smoothly. Christianity
seems warm and right to us. There is no comprehensive discontinuity
between what we have been and what we are or shall be. There is no
rejection of traditional values; sadly, there also is no entrance into the
kingdom of God.
We want to hold onto our little trinkets. We want to hold onto
our status . . . We can’t be fools for Christ . . . But this guy is
ready to sell out so he can get this treasure of great price. This
is the kingdom; this is part of the revolution. To be in the revolution,
you many times have to divest yourself of all earthly possessions.
You gotta make some adjustments in your standard of living. And Jesus
generally calls on people to make adjustments that are downward, not upward
. . . .
Jesus said the kingdom is like a man seeking goodly pearls.
He finally sees one of great price. He goes out, puts up a Going-Out-of-Business
sign on his shop, and liquidates all his lesser pearls to get that one of
great price.
These parables don’t give us the specifics
about what must be rejected, and they don’t tell us the precise content
of the new discovery. They do tell us that the discovery is so overwhelming
that it shatters routine characteristics of our old way of living . . .
Business can’t go on as usual. Jesus is talking about transformation,
not mere reform!
Two questions confront anyone who is serious
about discipleship. 1) Have I discovered the treasure?
Chances are that the treasure is close – perhaps even familiar.
We are like children playing with dynamite. Our problem is that we
don’t know what we’re holding. . . . Listen closely for the clink of the
blade against the box! 2) Has the treasure reshaped my life?
. . .We cannot afford to be casual. Our energies and imaginations
have been fired by a new affection. Is it conceivable that we might
let the super pearl slip through our fingers? That we might go on
plowing until our excitement cools and our memory fades?
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“spring song,” Lucille
Clifton
the green
of Jesus / is breaking the ground
and the sweet
/ smell of delicious Jesus
is opening
the house and / the dance of Jesus music
has hold of
the air and / the world is turning
in the body
of Jesus and / the future is possible
“The Parable
of the Sower,” Stephen Mitchell
A sower went
forth to sow. Some of his seeds fell upon stony / places.
Centuries
passed; millennia. And the seeds remained.
And / the
stone crumbled and became good soil and the seeds brought / forth fruit.
“Wait a minute,”
said one listener. “You can’t play fast and / loose that way with natural
facts.
The seeds
would die long / before the soil could receive them.”
“Why would
they die?”
“Because they
can’t hold out in stony places, for thousands of years.”
“But, my dear,
what kind of seeds do you think we’re talking about?”
“Instructions
to a Seed,” David Curzon
Don’t worry.
You’re in darkness / now, and very small
but you have
it in you. / There’s nothing to do except
Grow.
You’ve got to draw / your only nourishment from
whatever surrounds
you. / You can’t change location.
If you fell
among thorns it’s / too bad. You’ll be stifled
or die.
No one will care –
there are
so many seeds / that are also in darkness
with dispositions.
Just grow.
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Doris “Granny D” Haddock to Graduates, Hampshire College
(MA), 2005
Sometimes all you can do in life, in the harder moments, is to put one foot
in front of the other . . . Today will stay in your memory as a reminder that
you have the power to shape your own life . . . For it is the loss of faith
in our personal power that drives the woes of the world . . . When we feel insecure
in our power to take care of our families and direct the future of our own lives,
we fall into a kind of social mental illness that encourages us to distrust
and then hate other people and work against their interests . . . With some
shared power from on High, might not people be able to shape a happier world
– a world where the beautiful differences of lifestyle and belief are tolerated
and celebrated like so many different birds and flowers in God’s garden . .
. .
Our freedom comes first from belief in it. We have the ability to shape
our futures. We are in charge of our communities and our nation.
We bear responsibility for what happens here. The moment we lose faith
in these core beliefs, we are no longer a free people . . . The defense of freedom
and fairness comes best from a loving and tolerant heart . . . Great leaders
lead from a better vision of a possible future. Great leaders – and you
must include yourself in this – lead themselves, their families, friends, communities,
nations, and their world from the great, golden idea that people should be free
and should in every way be encouraged to fulfill their highest potentials and
live life responsibly as they choose. Great leadership comes from love
. . . .
Not long ago I read from the Declaration of Independence in the Capitol Rotunda
in Washington. I was arrested and jailed for doing so. As I thought
that was a violation of my free speech rights under the Constitution, I went
back and read from the Bill of Rights. That landed me in jail, too.
I felt freer in that jail, because I had spoken out as a free person, then I
have ever felt in the open air, and I am not finished being a free American,
whatever happy costs await me . . . I know that courage is freedom, and freedom
is joy. Be fully who you are, letting the world get used to you – it will.
Find a loving community of friends who support your ever-flowering growth, which
is a lifetime proposition. And take seriously your role as an American
. . . It means to take responsibility for mature self-governance. In a
world where the polar ice is melting and atmosphere ozone levels are thinning
daily, and in a world where the divide between the very wealthy and the literally
starving is growing rapidly, where one child in five goes to bed hungry.
We must take our responsible and loving place at the table of power . . . Our
old revolution against oppression and unfairness is never concluded. It
is a joyful revolution. If you will put yourself fearlessly into it, keeping
always an open mind and a tolerant heart – for those are the true flags of justice
and freedom. Let those lofty banners signify your life now and onward
to the last day of your long, happy, meaningful, and love-filled life.
At age 90, year 2000, Doris Haddock walked across
the U.S. to witness to campaign finance reform. She is author of Granny
D: You’re Never Too Old to Raise a Little Hell.
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