On seeing a great blue heron at Cress Creek

I hear you before I see you:
raucous cry rasping from somewhere high above,
thunderous flapping of your spanning wings.
You dive swiftly beneath the jagged canopy of jutting branches
into this narrow time-bound tunnel.

Minnows play unaware.

Oh ancient creature of the Nile!
Once you were not, and then you came to be -­
as suddenly into being as you dive and strike,
as swiftly then as now.
Sharp eyes, sharper beak, crooked neck, stilt-like legs -­
A present witness to a primitive grace.

Your name bears evidence of a long unspoken tongue,
lost words that once enfolded worlds I know not of.

Your name is 'No Name' --your name alone,
derived from no other, singular and without meaning,
without etymology, without explanation.
Your name means You, but You -- to me -- are mystery.

Now in Cress Creek
you stand so still.
Without movement, without sound, you wait.
One with the water, one with the trees,
one with the sunlight and dancing shadows,
one with the breeze, you wait.

You stand so still.
The world around you relaxes.
Squirrels chirp and jump from tree to tree.
Geese form "V's" and honk boisterously overhead.
Coneflowers and pye weed stretch toward the sun.
But still you wait.

Commingled of earth, air, water and fire,
of hunger, yearning, passion and desire,
starkly still, you wait.

In a flash your head plunges toward the water.
You who taught lightning to strike
now pinion your prey with the spear of your beak.
You toss it up and swallow it,
whole.

Then, filling the thicket
with your rustling, spreading wings,
you lift your head skyward
and rise through the trees toward the sun.
You circle above my head,
long legs folded back, talons clearly visible.

Come to me, I plead. Swallow me. Consume me.
Lift me above this stream
of incomprehension. Carry me away. Bear me
into the presence of that which knows everything
but "then' and 'now,' 'here' and 'there,' 'me' and 'you.'
I watch you circle overhead,
and I wait.

© Poem by Budd Friend-Jones
Photo by Ann Bridges

The Making of a Shenandoah Sufi

  I spent nearly every Wednesday evening of my childhood in the social hall at St. Luke's Church. Wednesday evening was Prayer Meeting night. The faithful gathered at 7:30 to drone through a few familiar gospel hymns and listened to Rev. Fulk elucidate, verse by verse and phrase by phrase, a chapter or two or three of the Bible book of the month. We shared our prayer concerns; then we entered our "Season of Prayer."

To the eight-year-old I was, or the teenager I became, these were the most tedious moments of my life. We sat on hard metal folding chairs; my feet dangled above the dark green tile floor. I stared through rows of attentive elders. I looked out through the open windows into the backyards of my neighborhood. I heard an occasional crack of a bat against a ball, accompanied by screams and cheers. I heard dogs barking, bicycles skidding, crickets chirping. I heard adults engaging in languid, lazy conversations on their front porches.

The voluptuous aromas of honeysuckle and baking bread or the ionized purity of storm-washed air would waft through the hall on a summer's breeze. I squirmed in my seat. I poked my sister's ribs. I fanned myself or the woman in front of me with one of the cardboard fans donated by Brown's Funeral Home. On some of them, Jesus stood forlornly at an ancient door, knocking and knocking, week after week. On others, he sat gloomily with his hands folded piously in prayer, his face raised devoutly toward a distant light, his feet tucked snugly under a boulder.

The Bible study was difficult to sit through; the Season of Prayer was impossible. It could last for thirty minutes, thirty of the longest minutes on earth. Prayer time was never over until Rev. Fulk said, "Amen." He never said Amen until everybody had had their chance to pray.

Over the years, I observed that there were different kinds of pray-ers. Some were timid, lifting up their concerns in quiet, inaudible voices that only G_d could hear. Some were topical; they regurgitated what they had read in the daily paper. Some were sincere, offering heartfelt prayers from within their various states of pain or gratitude. 

Then there were the heavy hitters. This was their moment to shine. I learned to recognize the same phrases, the same cadences, and the same passions week after week. They jockeyed for position, waiting to be closest to the last "Amen." They sparred with one another in their prayers. Tears often streamed from their eyes. They quoted scriptures, taught theology, and voiced their politics in their prayers.

Sometimes I tried to find the gumption to pray something, too. (I once prayed for the immediate end of the world. I guess I really wanted out.) More often, as I started to speak, someone else intoned a "Dear Jesus" more loudly and more quickly than I, and I lost both my nerve and opportunity. I managed a few vocal prayers over the years, but my un-vocalized prayers were every bit as earnest. I prayed for my mother, father, and grandmother, of course, but most of all I (silently) prayed for the Season of Prayer to end before the last inning of the game.

Yet I have come to recognize that some of the most important directions of my life were laid down in those prayer meetings. I came to know and even love G_d because of them. My deepest faith and my heart's vocation were established during those "Seasons of Prayer."

Over the years, I discovered that I am something of a "contemplative." Silence has never felt empty to me. On the contrary, much of the noisiness of modern life oppresses me; quiet time is restorative. (Gretchen says that she's going to have "Alone at Last" carved on my tombstone!) Silence can be full, fertile, and refreshing; it can be intimate and embracing. It has the capacity to enfold, soothe and heal.

As a child, I sometimes rose before dawn to hear the first bird sing; it is still one of my greatest pleasures. As teenagers, several of us — Jewish, Orthodox, and Protestant — rode bicycles to the park, hunkered down in a circle, read a few verses from our scriptures, and then we just sat. Silently. It was glorious. We discovered that we could be together — really together — in silence and prayer when we could not be together in the public worship services of our respective faiths.

To quietly paddle across a lake, to noiselessly hike a mountain trail, to rest on a porch swing as thunder roars and rain falls, to walk hand in hand with the love of my life, to watch a candle flicker, a star twinkle, a dragonfly flit lightly across the surface of a river — these experiences contain more constructive significance for me than more glamorous or costly pursuits.

But back to Wednesday nights. During those prayer meetings, there were long — very long — pauses between the prayers. I called these "The Silences." In these moments, in that room stilled by reverent expectations, in that holy hush, when the sound of my own breathing encountered only an occasional cough or creaking chair, when the sound of my own heartbeat was so near and the sounds of playing children so very far, it was then that I encountered G_d and G_d entangled me.

It took many years to discover this simple fact. Unfortunately, I had identified "religion," "truth," "G_d," and "faith" with the words that others said about them. Because I had trouble with so many of those words, I was left with a kind of spiritual schizophrenia. I was unable to affirm the words required of me and unwilling to deny the innate awareness of the Holy One in my life.

Another aspect of those prayer meetings stands out after all those years. It was the absolutely ordinary quality of our concerns and our prayers. Week after week, year after year, we established a communal discipline of regularly bringing the substance of our lives to G_d in prayer. Rev. Fulk wasn't a guru from India. We weren't high rollers or high-wire artists, but common people with common concerns: a new home, a baby's illness, a daughter's graduation. We expected "no sudden rending of the veil of clay." The quietly transforming presence of Christ's Spirit in the midst of our routine and average lives was quite enough.

Finally, there was a real communion among us. Of course, we annoyed each other. Can you tell? But we also cared deeply for one another, prayed for each other, and shared the substance of our lives. In the same room where we gathered for prayer on Wednesdays, we gathered for food, fun, and fellowship on other evenings. We were encouraged to pray for those we most resented and examine our own behavior in the light of Christ's claim on us.

The whole intent of our congregational life might be summed up in a single word: "sanctification." Sanctification involves the gradual but deep transformation of our very being. Our sincere desire to yield to the sovereignty of Christ meets with G_d's exceeding graciousness toward us. It is a lifelong journey toward wholeness and a return to our original nature. It is Christ residing in us, love growing in us, the divine presence overshadowing us.

As we become increasingly aware of the magnitude of our frailty and sin and our stubborn resistance to grace, we are driven toward remorse and humility. As we become increasingly mindful of G_d's trustworthiness and our deep unity with G_d's creation, we are given an ecstatic appreciation for the radiant beauty that dwells within creation.

Sanctification involves aligning our will with G_d's and our energy with the life-giving energia of G_d that permeates and percolates through the world. I suspect this is close to what Orthodox Christians mean when they speak of deification and what Benedictines mean by our "continual conversion to Christ."

©Gilbert Friend-Jones

based on a chapter (“Sanctification”) 

in Faith in a Minor Key

The Polarization Paradigm

“Polarization” is a term much in the news today. It refers to inter-group antagonisms that have become so fierce that they threaten the stability of the social order. It often is identified with race, religion, gender, economics, nationality, geography, political party, ideology and a host of other factors. It usually is thought of as bi-polar conflict in a zero-sum game: two sides are locked in a struggle for power in which there can only be winners and losers, oppressors and oppressed. If one is right, the other must be wrong. If one is good, the other must be bad. 

Religions have contributed to this depressing phenomenon in obvious ways. We exacerbate polarizing situations when we allow ego and expediency to overcome the fundamental thrust toward unity, and the values of humility, respect, forgiveness and compassion at the core of every faith. One of the essential roles faith communities can play, however, is to question prevailing paradigms – in this case, the paradigm of polarization. 

What if there are not two “poles” but many? What other voices are not being heard? What if every conflict actually is also an opportunity for cooperation?   What if “zero-sum” (win/lose) is precisely the opposite of the nature of the world we inhabit?

Robert Wright has synthesized a vast array of biological, anthropological, and historical data to suggest that a “non-zero-sum dynamic” crucially shaped the unfolding of life on earth and brought us to our present state of being. If this is so, how can we turn inter-group conflict away from “your victory is my defeat” and toward a more imaginative understanding of our common humanity in the face of the daunting issues we face? 

How can our mutually threatening “identities” become mutually enriching instead? How can we learn to see our identities as intersectional manifestations, provisional processes, and uniquely given to share? How can we develop enough confidence to loosen our tenacious grip on this or that position and come to recognize that all identities are incomplete, all imperfect, and all in need of supplementation? What fears, ambitions or other obstacles prevent us from reaching out to the “other” side? What unique resources do our faiths offer for precisely this kind of challenge?

© Budd Friend-Jones

Beauty

I listened intently. An Orthodox nun was responding to a question about which I care deeply: how to nurture spirituality in children. As a parent and pastor, I often ponder this question but Mother Rafaela's answer took me by surprise. "The question really is," she said, "how to put beauty into a child's life."

Both beauty and ugliness have the power to shape and transform our lives and our communities. Mother Rafaela's point seems as relevant to stopping violence and curbing teenage pregnancy as to spiritual formation. How can we put beauty into a child's life? Or, as Plato observed about the purpose of education, "How can we teach our children to take pleasure in the right things?"

Beauty occurs as readily in unadorned nature as in our most elegant gardens. It is not always "pretty.' It is not merely decorative. It may be — should be — cultivated, but beauty must not be confused with art. It is both less and more than art. The artistic function in our culture encompasses all manner of expressions, only some of which are beautiful.

When we experience beauty, we enter a dimension of life too deep for words, a dimension that transcends much of the ugliness, pain, and fear that are our daily bread. We are touched by a gracious order. We are enabled to reach a new level of spiritual integration. We encounter a "lightness of being" (Tolstoy) that frees our spirit. Perspective, balance, and catharsis are among the gifts that beauty bestows. The divine in us resonates with the divine in all creation.

The beauty I am able to perceive or create intimately shapes the meaning of my life. "Consider the lilies of the field," said Jesus. Our community's so-called "amenities" (natural and cultural) feed my spirit and shape my soul. The pursuit of beauty in worship, conversation, and a life lived well is among my most important motivations. Why should it be otherwise for children?

The composer Ottorino Respighi surely was one of the great joy bearers of the modern world. According to critic Geoffrey Crankshaw, beauty of expression was his perpetual aim. He hated ugliness and eschewed any tendency toward the brutal." One could do worse than leave such a legacy to the world.

It is said that, when Adonis arrived in the underworld after his death, only one question was put to him by the shades: "What was the most beautiful thing you left behind?" If this were the standard to which all of us are held, I wonder how our children's world would change.

 © Budd Friend-Jones

Faith in a Minor Key, 2010

Posted: February 11, 2022

“We Shall Overcome” - An appropriate Christmas song?

I was searching YouTube last week for traditional Christmas music to marinate my holiday nostalgia. I was feeling classical, so I checked out a few of my favorites - the St. Olaf College Choir, the Atlanta Boy Choir, Chanticleer, the Cambridge Singers. Finally, I landed at the Konzerthaus in Vienna[i], surely the most opulent setting for Christmas music in all Christendom. Right on cue, four of the world’s greatest soloists came on stage, in resplendent dress, and they began to sing. Their first song?

“We Shall Overcome.” 

In German, of course.

What?

Richard Harrington in The Washington Post called this song a “Hymn to Hope,” an “extraordinary song that remains at the heart of an extraordinary movement…” Rooted in American slavery, developed in the labor struggles of the '40s and counterculture of the late '60s, it became the identifying anthem of the US civil rights movement. It was the song on Viola Liuzzo's lips when she was gunned down during the march from Selma to Montgomery. It was on the lips of the young son of slain Freedom Rider James Chaney at his father's funeral, where he sang bravely while tears streamed down his face… It resounded from the war-wounded in Beirut, students in Korea, farmworkers in the American Midwest, children in the (former) Soviet Union, peace activists in England, and the disenfranchised in Northern Ireland…[ii]

And now, behold, it launches the Christmas season in one of the world's most exalted artistic venues. 

At first, I felt a bit of cognitive dissonance. Did Mary dream of a White Christmas when she made her birth announcement? Hardly. Hear what she said: "He brought down the powerful from their thrones,  and lifted up the lowly; he filled the hungry with good things and sent the rich away empty." 

Perhaps this is the song the angels actually sang. I like to think that "We Shall Overcome" is what “Glory to God in the Highest” really means. It's not an obsequious groveling before an autocratic Deity, but true liberation from all that oppresses, from all that weighs us down. 

“We Shall Overcome!” We are not alone. We are not afraid. We’ll walk hand-in-hand. We shall live in peace. We shall all be free. 

Can you think of a better song to sing over this child's manger? 

Or today too? As we face Covid, climate change, and corruption in high places, is there a better song to sing? “Oh, deep in my heart, I do believe, that we shall overcome some day.”

 

---

[i] “Christmas In Vienna 2018”, YouTube, December 24, 2018.

[ii] Harrington, Richard. “The Hymn to Hope”, The Washington Post, August 28, 1988.

© Budd Friend-Jones

December 2021

Babi Yar

 Eighty years ago, September 29-30, 1941, the killings at Babi Yar began with the mass execution of 34,000 Jews. The estimated total of those who were massacred at this site now stands at between 100,000 and 150,000.  I wrote this shortly after visiting Babi Yar in 1990.

Outside the lovely city of Kyiv a towering and stark monument rises tragically from the depths of a vast pit. Tangled human bodies reach upward into the weeping sky. Some are strong Ukrainian sailors. One is a defiant young woman. They are Jews and homosexuals. A mother raises her child in desperation as she is pulled downward. An old man — dead — slides back into the pit. Clinging to him is another woman, not comprehending the magnitude of this savagery. She too is being sucked into the muddy, bloody oblivion of Babi Yar.

Busloads of visitors approach the monument in silence. They walk quietly around the pits. Laying stones and flowers on the inscribed plaque, some fall to their knees. Some weep softly to themselves. Some gently intone the Mourner’s Kaddish, the daily prayer to be prayed at the death of a loved one.

There is no record of the names of all who were slain here. In the first five days, more than 55,000 died. Soldiers were told to conserve bullets by shooting two or three at a time. They were ordered to throw children in alive. Witnesses tell us these soldiers grew weary of the bloodletting but were encouraged to be strong. “Let your will overrule your heart,” they were told. “Do not be swayed by children, old people, or women. Kill them all. After the war, a new world will dawn for you and your families. You will settle new lands. You will be cleansed and purified of these horrible deeds.”

The soldiers were implementing the Nazi’s Ost (East) Plan, a plan that had been carefully and rationally developed long before any shooting began. They were to eliminate 100% of the Jews, and 85% of the Ukrainians, Russians, Poles, and Byelorussians. The remaining 15% were to become slaves of the Reich.

This slaughter really happened. This really happened in our time. Intelligent human beings, lovers of Beethoven, Bach and Mozart, rationally decided to exterminate and proceeded to enslave races and nations of peoples. Against all objections about the gross inhumanity of such a project, they counseled, “Let your will overrule your heart.”

Memorials such as Babi Yar are proliferating the world over. No longer tributes to heroic victories, our monuments increasingly offer poignant witness to immense tragedies. Each gives testimony to the violence and suffering that continues to engulf the world. Each represents the heart’s response to the will’s assertion. Each protests, for all to hear, “Never again! We will not forget! Never again!”

It would be less disturbing if this calculated and loathsome brutality were confined to one era, ideology, or circumstance. Then we could isolate and analyze it as a grievous aberration. But sadly, the holocaust did not end. Shoah continues. Other names and nations now offer other rationales but killing fields multiply. From Siberian river camps to Rwandan farmlands, Bosnian highways to Kampuchean forests, urban centers to remote tribal regions, human beings have savaged each other and destroyed all pretense to innocence. We have done it for many different “reasons” and we have done it unto the least of our own.

Is there another way?

In a small village in Kenya, an African woman was carving a sculpture outside her thatched house. She was wearing a dress so colorful that   the rainbow would be jealous. A visitor, Sue Monk Kidd, engaged her in conversation:

‘What are you making?”

‘This is Ujamaa,” came the reply. “What is ‘Ujamaa’?”

"Ujamaa means family.”

“Your family?”

“No. God’s family.”

Would you like to know what God’s family looks like? It is not unlike the monument at Babi Yar, yet there is a profound and life-affirming difference. Imagine an ebony totem. Sitting at the base are five human figures.

Sitting on their heads are five more, and on their heads are five more. It could go on indefinitely.

If you saw it, you would be struck by how inextricably all these figures are intertwined. They grow out of one another. Their heads join, their faces blend. One person’s foot flows from another’s hand. All their arms wrap around one another like vines encircling a great tree. This is God’s Ujamaa. This interconnected human mass is not sliding into a pit, but rising toward the sun, not collapsing from despair but energized by fellow feeling. Where is God in this Ujamaa? Not presiding in some distant realm but within and between all the figures of the sculpture.

Ujamaa and Babi Yar are two striking images of the human race, and both are true. Both evoke the most profound emotions. Through memorials and monuments, we remind ourselves of our capacity to inflict or suffer great harm. Through finely worked art we recognize deep and sacred ties that bind us together. Which image controls the future?

If we were not Ujamaa, would we weep at Babi Yar?

Said Ms. Kidd upon seeing the Kenyan Ujamaa, “This image shattered my illusions of my separateness. It pried open my heart. How can I not help but twine my arms around this vast family?”

Can we stop the violence and halt the bloodshed? I don’t have mega-answers to the mega-suffering of our time. I do know it is time to allow our hearts to overrule our wills.

© Gilbert Friend-Jones, Faith in A Minor Key.

Planning Today for the Yesterday of Tomorrow

 Recent conversations in the newspapers, social media, and on cable news have had to do with our national story. Who are we? What is our country about? What is the truth about our heroes? Our history?

How are we to teach our origins? What is true patriotism? How do we explain what happened on January 6 at the nation’s capital?

When the Pilgrims arrived at Plymouth in 1620, were they escaping the tyrannical oppression of an English king? Or were they bent on impoverishing and disenfranchising a continent full of First Nations peoples?

Were our Founding Fathers visionaries giving birth to a society even more humane than they could imagine, or slave-holding egoists hell-bent on their own aggrandizement?

January 6, 2021 at the US Capital

What shall we make of Critical Race Theory? What was the role of racism in our history?

It is no accident that these questions are bubbling to the surface now. In our reading just now Arundhati Roy said, “pandemics force us to break with the past and imagine our world anew.” That is what is happening now.

In 1984 Tengiz Abuladze, a renowned Soviet director, created a film that altered the nature of political discourse in his country forever. It has an eerie relevance to what’s happening in our country today.

Called Repentance, the film languished, unseen, for years. Those who helped make it were punished for anti-Soviet activity. It took the intervention of Gorbachev himself to stop the censorious persecution and protect the director. Abuladze released the film about the time that the Chernobyl nuclear reactor exploded. It was equally explosive and devastating. (Parenthetically, the film was shown again last month - as a Cannes classic - at the Cannes Film Festival.)

Repentance is the story of a corpse that won’t stay buried. 

Varlam Aravidze, a Stalinesque character, is the mayor of the city when he dies. He is buried with great ceremony. The next day the grieving city awakens to find his stiffened corpse leaning against a tree. He is reburied, but on the following morning, his corpse appears in a park.

“We have to arrest the corpse,” the officers say as they load it into a police wagon and drive off. He is reburied again. A protective metal cage is built over the grave; the door is padlocked. Police with guns and attack dogs take positions. That night a woman is captured as she begins digging at the grave.

“I confirm the facts, but I deny my guilt,” she says at her trial. “For as long as I am alive, he will not lie in a grave. This sentence has been passed and is not subject to appeal. I will exhume him 300 more times if necessary.”

 “It is not my wish to settle accounts with a dead man,” she proclaims, “but I have no choice in the matter.” She tells the story of his rise to prominence and his exercise of power. It is a tale of falsehood, intimidation, brutality, arbitrary arrests, exile, torture, executions, the separation of families, terror, and endless persecution.

The people don’t like her version of their history. Crowds tried to shout her down, but she remained determined. “On my own behalf, and on behalf of all innocent victims, I demand that Varlam Aravidze be exhumed by his kin.”

“Aren’t we to bury the dead?” they yelled.

“No,” she answered. “To bury him means to exonerate him. I say to you again: if you don’t exhume him, I will. I won’t leave him in the earth.

“How many times will you exhume him?” they ask. “Until you stop defending him. Aravidze is not dead. For as long as you continue to defend him, he lives, and he continues to corrupt society.”

Varlam’s corpse keeps showing up at inopportune times and places: when a couple is making love, when a man is doing calisthenics. The re-appearance of the corpse is inconvenient, to say the least, and distressing for the townspeople. But most of all it is embarrassing because it becomes the material manifestation of Varlam’s much more destructive presence in the minds and psyches of the people. Because the leaders refused to face the brutal facts of the past that he embodied, he continued to have all the more power over them.

They are simultaneously victims and collaborators, survivors and sycophants, hardened and vulnerable.

In today’s America, I suggest that these same people would embrace ceremony over accountability, reassurance over protest, 1776 over 1619, fake news, over critical theories of race or anything else.

This “corpse that won’t stay buried”, whether in the Soviet Union or in our contemporary reality, represents all the unresolved, unrepented, shadowy, repressed pain and evil that locks people into continuous bondage to their lesser angels. It prevents their growth and thwarts their true liberation.

The gravedigger in Repentance knew intuitively that, in order for the town to heal, the townspeople needed to face their past. They needed to own the harm that had been perpetrated in their name. They needed to acknowledge and repent of the evil that had transpired. “Hurt people hurt people.” People wound others when their own wounds go untended.

For the director, the people were “the dead trying to bury the dead”. They were the unfeeling trying to bury their conflicted feelings. They were the un-alive trying to bury the cause of their alienation. They were spiritually empty. They had lost faith in the future. They had lost confidence in the unknown. They had lost hope for a better world. They were choosing death over life, stagnation over novelty, and cloying respectability over spiritual rebirth.

The grave digger? They called her insane, but she was the community’s one voice of sanity and conscience. She was their witness. Her anguished appraisal promised new possibilities.

She was saying that the way to gain freedom from past harm is to face it with courage. The way to be rid of the burdens of our history is to acknowledge them, repent of them, and move on. Don’t glorify them. Don’t defend them. Don’t bury them. “You shall know the truth, and the truth will set you free.”

Abuladze’s film was powerfully specific to contemporary political realities in the U.S.S.R. Yet he exposed a theme more breathtaking and universal than even he dreamed of.

I once heard a radio announcer from the land of Garrison Keillor describe, in a Keilloresque sort of way, the formation of a fictitious group to be called Future Historians of America. Its motto was going to be, “Planning Today for the Yesterday of Tomorrow”. In an odd way, Abuladze was trying to teach the Soviet people how to prepare for the “yesterday of tomorrow,” for the day when the USSR would be no more.

We’re all deeply interested in tomorrow, and what the future holds.

What do you see? Are you Utopian? Dystopian or Apocalyptic? What must we face today to get to a better tomorrow? What must we do to go from the “no longer” to the “not yet”?

Unfortunately, there are many “Varlams” buried in our consciousness—sins unadmitted, pain unacknowledged, evils unexplored. Their unacknowledged existence will continue to divide and corrupt us until they are acknowledged and healed.

Arundhati Roy is not alone in observing that we stand now at a portal, a gateway between one world and the next. We can, she says,

“choose to walk through it, 
dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, 
our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas,
our dead rivers and smokey skies behind us.
Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, 

ready to imagine another world.” 

 

“Black Lives Matter” knows this. “Me too!” knows this. The Lincoln Project knows this. Conservatives and progressives among us are digging up Varlams from our collective past - not to punish but to heal us.

If we fail to acknowledge and deal with them courageously, they will continue to sap our energy and diminish our vision.

Repentance, metanoia, conversion, a paradigm shift, a changing of mind and heart, ‘making amends’, reparations, letting go—whatever we want to call it—this is the door through which we must pass. We need to learn new ways of listening to one another, respecting one another, learning from one another. This is the only way all that is dead within us can truly die. To repent of harm done and good left undone, to grieve what was and what will never be, to acknowledge our emptiness and the pain of our lot - this is the precondition for our healing.

Despair and cynicism are merely defenses. To experience our fear, feel our powerlessness, acknowledge our shame and take steps to rectify – this is how we begin again.

Let us trust in the goodness of Life to bring us to healing. Let us trust that, in our free-fall, Life will reach into the maelstrom of our own time, catch us in flight, hold us gently, and restore us to the fullness of a healthy social existence. Let us trust that together we can find a way out of no way, and discover real community.

If we find the will, the resources we need to make things right will become available. If we seek to develop a new ability to care for one another, then, and only then, shall we truly cherish the gift of our days upon the earth.

 

 © Budd Friend-Jones

Unitarian Universalist Church of Sarasota, Florida

29 August, 2021