East Shore friends, members and newcomers,
I wrote this as the beginning of my board report and I want to share it with you all:
Love:
Love of self.
Love of Neighbor.
From each according to ability,
and To each according to need –
The existential resilience of the now – A hope-ish feeling, a non- or low-anxiousness, a dialectic amongst the warm and cold fronts converging
A return to
Love…
I’m mixing a few notable ideas with that statement, inter-meshing ideas from 13th Century theologian St Thomas Aquinas’s philosophically “putting your oxygen mask on first, then your neighbor’s” with an idea from 18th Century French Utopian Étienne-Gabriel Morelly about the ways we might build community, with the theological ideas of Anthony Pinn’s humanism. But I think this is an idea bouquet that is needed. Sometimes the situation warrants flowers, and sometimes the situation warrants ideas.
We are sitting in the swirling of the election, and the fear in that waiting. We are sitting in the uncomfortable place of having to begin to decide some things about our church – the church-building maintenance, the building next door. And we sit in the ways that we are becoming – not everything is like it used to be 🙁 and not everything is like it used to be 🙂
And, everything is happening. In the situation of the now – political attacks on rights, the lowest unemployment in a long time, national food scarcity lower than before the pandemic, limited access to care, and a loneliness epidemic. The solution is to sit with this – perhaps at the Welcome Table, at Beverage and Banter, or even on a Zoom call with an old friend – sit with all of this, and know…
In this moment we say no to oppression.
In this moment we offer peace with each breath.
In this moment we can make a difference.
This difference is in the vote that we cast. It is in the calmness of a moment we can muster. It is in the laughter with friends, and the crying upon shoulders. It is in the times we sing together, and pray, and mourn.
I hope in all of the political ads, the war-torn world and the fear, that each of us can Love, Revere Discover and Connect – if only for a moment, or a breath.