That was the day of the white chrysanthemums, so magnificent I was almost fearful…And then, then you came to take my soul…
Rilke

For someone way beyond middle age Amour is, as we used to say, quite a trip. To those unfamiliar with this Oscar winning French film, it chronicles the illness, degeneration and death of an aging French piano teacher, who is cared for by her loving, stoic husband. The acting is superb, the writing spare and focused, the pacing almost in ‘real time’ as the camera lingers on the woman’s first stroke, being bathes by an attendant, the husband’s excruciating attempts to get her to eat some oatmeal. In the end the husband, overwhelmed with grief for his wife’s guttural cries of pain, her loss of even a shred of autonomy or dignity, and perhaps also his own exhaustion, frustration, and anger, takes matters into his own hands.

After dinner the other night, a friend who’d recounted the rather impressive incompetence of the powers-that-be at his workplace said that he tried not to think about how messed up things are in the larger world beyond his 9 to 5, because when he got in touch with all that could go wrong, it terrified him.

I see his point, of course. If the course of events on a global scale were actually determined by the blind-spots and shortsightedness of individuals who – like those running my friend’s workplace – had been promoted to their level of incompetence, I doubt a single train would run on time.

I must confess that forgiveness is difficult for me.

I think about it, speak about it and write about it. (See: http://justpeacetheory.com/files/Thoughts_on_Forgiveness.pdf) When the time comes for me to forgive, I pray the prayer of Jesus on the cross: “Father forgive them for they know not what they do.” (Luke 23:34 KJV) I pray this prayer until I am able to say inside my own soul: “I forgive.”

President Obama continues his “charm offensive” this week with trips to Congress to speak with members about a compromise on various important issues – the federal budget, immigration, gun control to name a few. On March 6, 2013, President Obama invited a group of Republican senators to dinner at a fancy Washington DC restaurant at his own expense. He wanted to speak with them in an informal setting about how to move forward on various pieces of legislation that would benefit the country. This is the kind of effort that I advocate in my work on just peacemaking. I say that just peace requires the ethics of commensality, the ethics of the table meal where the bread and wine of communion not only help us to remember the life, death and resurrection of Jesus, but also become symbols of sustenance and joy which are the ethical goals of life.

The senators came from the dinner with good things to say about the evening and prospects for a better working relationship with the president. I trust and believe that this will be the beginning of a less toxic atmosphere in Washington, the beginning of a new and better working relationship between the president and Congress.

I’m grateful to Tyler Wigg-Stevenson and the conversation he’s invited with his new book, The World Is Not Ours to Save. It is a challenge for high-strung activists who come from privilege to acknowledge our limits and learn to lean on the Lord.

For folks who consider themselves “progressive,” it is a call to more conservative religion.

The confession at the heart of Tyler’s book is one that exposes how much the early 20th century Social Gospel and the late 20th century Religious Right had in common-namely, the assumption of power and privilege. At different times and in different settings, these movements had differing opinions about which way to steer history. But the purchase of each-the energy that drove the activists in both movements-was the belief that it is our job to save America.

As a white person who was captivated by the latter movement in my teens, I know this temptation well. But as someone who has spent the past fifteen years learning social engagement from America’s black-led Freedom Movement, I don’t see “cause-fatigue” as our greatest challenge. True, if you’re a 20-something who thinks you’re going to change the world by ending nuclear armament or drilling a million wells in Africa, you’re going to wear out. There’s not a smart phone smart enough to keep you fighting windmills like that into the second stage of life.

We are almost always counting, Precious Lord. Teach us soon to count our blessings. We are in a terrible hurry. Put something in the way of our rushing about and let us trip over it, finding a new appreciation for interruptions. Amen

We pray, O God, for that thing called integrity, that exciting marriage between our inner and outer lives. Help us to pay attention to our own nourishment and what we put into our bodies, our arms and our hearts. Help us find energy, to know that health is not so much the absence or disease as the presence or vitality. Make us into inner-actives; people who move with grace from the inside out and the outside back again. Help us to be both morally nimble and morally solid. Let us not be afraid of our confusion but rather embrace it with the power of wisdom in you. Amen

Shekinah, Spirit, draw near and dwell among us. Settle us down and when we have come out of BUSYNESS as usual, change us. Animate us. Brace us. Mystify us. Change us. God you come into our life to change us and to be yourself be changed. Like a parent is changed by a child, you are also changed by us. Show us how much you love the world, so much that you are willing to be changed by it and us. Show us how much we matter to all others and to you. Amen

I’ve changed my faith or religion or spiritual practice a lot over the years. I was born to parents of Jewish ancestry, but they were Unitarians, or Jewnitarians, as their friends joked. I was born to hybrids.

When I was twelve, we moved to Israel, largely because my Dad felt guilty for not teaching us kids about our Jewish history. It seemed to me to be too much too late. It was an alien country and faith to me. I felt terrible about the holocaust, and I understood Nazis would kill me whether or not I felt Jewish, but I still didn’t feel like kissing the ground when we landed in Israel.

At thirteen, I went to Quaker boarding school in the mountains of North Carolina. As students, we didn’t go to Meeting much, but we spent our days and nights outside in nature. You might say it was in the mountains I found God. I came home to myself and fell in love with the streams, rhododendron, sandy mica paths, and black mountaintops. I loved sliding down rocks in the South Toe river, sliding down mountain sides in the snow, skating and swimming in natural ponds, resting in wild grasses and staring at the stars on windy nights. My house parents had to drag me inside to go to bed at night.

An Ash Wednesday Reflection

"Spirit of the River," Yuba River near Nevada City, California

Today is Ash Wednesday, the beginning of Lent. In Christian tradition, on this day ashes are used to symbolize two things: repentance and mortality.

As we consider the destruction of the earth and the suffering of our fellow creatures, both human and nonhuman, repentance and humble acceptance of our own mortality seem appropriate. In Ash Wednesday services the imposition of ashes is a way to show our repentance, our intention to turn away from harmful actions and to turn back toward God. As we consider harm to the earth we are called to repent of our own violence, greed, and over-consumption, our participation in ecological destruction and human misery, our complicity in the harm caused by the institutions and systems of which we are a part.

Source: Wikipedia.org

Yesterday a bit of work stuff threw me for quite a loop and left me feeling like the world and life were in complete tumult. Then, this morning, after the storm had somewhat subsided, Jim Burklo’s latest “musing” arrived and I thought “Gee, if only I had known about dorodangos and gombocs yesterday!”

So, just in case my friends at Tikkun Daily don’t know about dorodangos and gombocs, here is Rev. Jim Burklo’s latest musing.

“Muslims and non-Muslims should realize that we all are just travelers in this temporary world,” photojournalist Sadaf Syed tells me. She adds that we all should act on this realization “by opening up and getting to learn about each others faith, cultures, tradition.”

Photographer Sadaf Syed pays respect to the victims of 9/11 at Ground Zero in New York City.

Since she was two months old, Syed has traveled throughout the United States with her family, exposed to different cultures, religions, and people, including Muslims of different ethnicities. After picking up on many different customs and traditions, Syed became inspired to tell stories about this diverse group of Muslims.

Syed began her photography career with wedding photography and portraiture. Years later, her career shifted to amplifying the voices of people whose stories are seldom heard, giving them the chance to share their journeys, emotions, hopes, fears, abilities, and disabilities. As a visual storyteller, Syed is always looking for ways to inspire and educate people through her photography.

“You’re not a storyteller in words and writing, but you’re a storyteller visually, so you’re always looking to stimulate people visually,” she says.

In 2010, Syed, a Pakistani-Muslim, self-published iCOVER: A Day in the Life of a Muslim-American COVERed Girl, a book about Muslim women breaking stereotypes across the globe. The book features page after page of everyday Muslim women of different ethnicities and backgrounds, presenting photographs of them alongside captivating captions, quotes, and stories.

The personal is the political, has always struck me as incomplete. It was Teilhard de Chardin who first said “we are not human beings having a spiritual experience, we are spiritual beings having a human experience.” The ‘personal is the political’ assumes an incomplete worldview, a cosmology of separation where the individual is forced to turn to the political as the end we seek – as though we were fundamentally political beings.

Grasping onto a worldview of connection, of interbeing, we hear nature whisper that we are fundamentally spiritual beings, quanta of spirit, mind and body, integrated. We weave our lives as spiders do their webs, out from ourselves and binding us to one another. Our fulfillment is in making these connections, in participating in a whole. That is what I see as spiritual politics: being accountable to the inescapable whole of which my life is just one of many, a unity masquerading as a diversity. When the personal is more than the political, when it is the sacred, I become whole.