For You Were a Stranger in Egypt
There are many biblical passages calling people to offer hospitality to the stranger. Here is one from the 19th chapter of the book of Leviticus:
When strangers sojourn with you in your land, you shall do them no wrong, the strangers who sojourn with you shall be to you as natives among you, and you love them as yourself; for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.
—Leviticus 19:33-34
We are called to remember that each one of us comes from people who were captured and stolen away and from people who migrated. We are a species who moves. All of our ancestors – though some very distant in the past – came out of Africa.
Each of us has cause to thank our ancestors for their survival skills, for their perseverance in living. Recently my congregation showed the 2011 film, A Better Life, which shows the courage and love of a Mexican undocumented father and his teenaged son. It is both heartbreaking and inspiring, and it is a contemporary version of a very old story. Immigrants come seeking a better life, especially for their children. And they become strangers in a strange land, often yearning for home as they struggle to make this new place their home. They work hard providing services to their new homes. They work hard to survive.
Each of us in our own lives has had times when we felt marginalized, unheard, invisible. Each of us has experienced times of yearning for something lost or left behind. We are reminded to remember, “for you were strangers n Egypt.” We were strangers and we can provide hospitality and sanctuary. Eboo Patel is a contemporary American religious leader, the founder and Executive Director of Interfaith Youth Core. He wrote:
“I am an American Muslim. I believe in pluralism. In the Holy Quran, God tells us, ”I created you into diverse nations and tribes that you may come to know one another.” I believe America is humanity’s best opportunity to make God’s wish that we come to know one another a reality.”
A couple of weeks ago, bombs exploded at the finish line of the Boston Marathon; perhaps Mr. Patel, like me and many others, prayed that the bombers would be white. Let the bomber not be one the larger culture labels “other.” I guess my prayer wasn’t specific enough! The young brothers were white, but also Muslim and immigrants.
There are some folks that go right to hatred and not even hatred for the persons, but widely generalized hatred – for all immigrants, all Muslims. It was two brothers, not all immigrants, not all Muslims. We don’t need to go to hatred. We need to remember that we were strangers in Egypt. We can provide hospitality and sanctuary. We can grow in compassion and our ability to listen to and understand each other. One way to know each other more deeply is to hear our stories, including the stories of our ancestors. Today, I invite you to reflect on the courage and perseverance of your ancestors and to share those moving stories with others. If you don’t know names of ancestors, then reflect on the qualities of their characters that allowed them to survive.
Jim McGovern wrote on philly.com about this last Sunday’s Philadelphia Interfaith Peace Walk:
“The 10th annual Interfaith Walk for Peace and Reconciliation is scheduled for this Sunday. When I heard the news I wondered if we would still walk. Of course, we will. . . . Walking together will be Muslims and Jews, Christians and Sikhs, Buddhists and seculars . . . We will honor and celebrate our fellowship and the messages of peace and connectedness found in all these great religions, but even more so in the crevices of our hearts.”
For you were strangers in Egypt . As we remember that we were strangers in Egypt, may we also help others to remember. In the words of the great American poet Gwendolyn Brooks: “We are each other’s business; we are each other’s harvest; we are each other’s magnitude and bond.”
Before the Court
As I write, the Supreme Court is just finishing up oral arguments on the Defense of Marriage Act. Something, presumably, is going to be decided about same-sex marriage, although what exactly that might be is anybody’s guess. But the thing is, everyone knows the eventual outcome. Everyone—at least everyone who is honest—regardless of how they feel about same-sex marriage, knows that whatever this court decides, same-sex marriage is going to be the law of the land. The scales have simply tipped too far to go back.
By now, most people know gay folks. If they aren’t in their families then they are neighbors or co-workers or folks who volunteer at their children’s school. And when you see people and their actual lives it’s very difficult to come to any conclusion other than…who cares? It turns out to be patently obvious that most gay and lesbian relationships are simply not very interesting, in the way that most straight relationships are not very interesting. People have lives. They do what people do, which is largely working and shopping for groceries and pulling weeds. Gay people just don’t do it very differently.
And when you’ve seen enough gay people picking up their kids from school or their partner’s laundry from the dry cleaners it becomes hard to argue that something that is obviously the same is really totally different. When the best argument you can come up for why opposite-sex marriage is special is that marriage is for procreation and straight couples can get pregnant by accident, then it is pretty clear that your ship has taken on quite a lot of water, and is headed toward the bottom sooner rather than later.
And really, that sooner rather than later is the most remarkable part of the whole thing. Of course there is still prejudice against gay people. But the rate at which that prejudice has faded is astounding. It turns out that, in the end, people have a hard time denying rights to the people they already know. As more and more people are open about their lives and relationships then more and more of their family members and neighbors and friends have to admit into their hearts the fact that we are talking about people. Real people. Just people. Who would like to have the same rights and privileges as everyone else, and probably deserve them.
It turns out that much of the time it’s just not that hard to love your neighbor. The real religious challenge is to love the person who lives across the tracks, across the world, across lines of race and class and culture. So let’s have an enormous cheer for the great progress that we’ve made on the full inclusion of same-sex couples in our society, and let us pray that the Supreme Court comes down on the side of both love and reason. And then let’s get on with the difficult and never-ending work of expanding the circle of love and justice.
Standing on Principle
As the budget sequestration looms, it seems that the government is caught in a stalemate as both sides “stand on principle,” unwilling to compromise on core values. Which would seem to be a good thing. After all, isn’t that what we ask of ourselves and our friends—that we stand up for what we believe in, that we hold fast to what is most dear?
The problem is that most of the values that those in the budget non-conversation are clinging to aren’t actually values. Lower taxes is not a value, nor is smaller government. They are strategies. As are Medicaid, Social Security and Obamacare. Independence is a value. Compassion is a value. Liberty is a value. Equality is a value. These are things that one can stand for on principle. But the defense budget or health insurance for children, or any of the thousands of other things that are part of the government purview are simply means to an end.
So here is my modest proposal: maybe we should start with the values, the essentials, and work outward from there. But how do we know what the essentials are? Who gets to decide what the government is really here for? Well, as it turns out, we already have that statement. If you are of my generation, perhaps you memorized it (and the accompanying tune) from Schoolhouse Rock: “We the People, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution.”
Now, I’m not saying that it is in any way obvious how every given decision should come down when you hold on to these essentials. How much money goes to the common defense and how much to the general welfare? But here’s the thing. While we take these essentials as given, any of the strategies to achieve these ends can be tested and evaluated. Does investing $6000 per taxpayer in a fighter jet system that has yet to function properly most efficiently provide for the common defense, or might the money be better spent elsewhere? Does subsidizing corn or fossil fuels promote the general welfare, or might the general welfare be better off if we put our shared money into fresh vegetables and renewable energy? Does a tax structure that leans most heavily on the wealthiest help out domestic tranquility and the general welfare, or have we found more tranquility and general welfare when the tax burden shifted toward those on the lower end of the economic scale?
Information is never perfect, and past performance does not guarantee future results. Nonetheless, data exists. Strategies have been tried and if we know what results we are hoping for we can evaluate which strategies have proven most effective. It’s not that hard to agree that we don’t want people to starve, but we also want people to be self-supporting, relying wherever possible on their own efforts rather than government support. Rather than getting stuck in complaining about uncaring fat cats or parasitic welfare queens, wouldn’t it be more useful to try to tease out what programs work most efficiently for helping people out of poverty and into self-sufficiency? Rather than scaring ourselves with the specter of socialism or with resentment of wealthy insurance executives it might be more helpful to have a look around the world and see who gets the best health care for the most people for the least money, and try moving our system in that direction. Really, it would seem that those who are the most enthusiastic about a corporate model for government would be the most eager to promote the familiar model of having a vision and a mission, and creating goals and objectives to achieve that vision and mission.
Of course, it’s not that simple. Our government runs largely on sponsorship rather than logic. But isn’t it nice to imagine a government of the people, by the people, for the people, loyal to the guiding principles set out in our Constitution, and led by reason and science to serve the needs of ourselves and our posterity? It doesn’t hurt to dream.
Salvation
I am a Unitarian Universalist who believes deeply that salvation is an inherent aspect of my 
faith. Not just my own personal salvation, though through this faith that has happened, but the salvation of the world.
My faith is not about the salvation of individual souls for a perceived afterlife. I believe that whatever happens to one of us when this physical human life ends, happens to us all. I do not believe in the “Divine Sifting” of souls. That afterlife might be a heaven, or it might be a continuation of being, or it might be reincarnation. But whatever it is, it will happen to us all equally. We are all saved.
No, the salvation that I speak of is salvation in this world, of this world, and for this world. To use Christian language, the salvation that I believe in is the creation of the Realm of God here, and now. It is the reconciling of humanity with each other, and with the world in which we live.
This, I believe, is the vision of salvation that rests at the heart of Unitarian Universalism, a faith which calls us to work with our time, our talent, our treasure, and our dreams to heal this world, to make this world whole.
It means to work for the salvation of this world from the evils of racism and human slavery.
It means to work for the salvation of this world from the evils of war and genocide.
It means to work for the salvation of this world from the evils of poverty and inequality.
It means to work for the salvation of this world from the evils of greed and political apathy.
It means to work for the salvation of this world from the evils of torture and injustice.
It means to work for the salvation of this world from the evils of the closed mind and the closed heart.
It means to work for the salvation of this world from many more evils than this, but it also means to work for the salvation of this world by promoting the good…
It means to work for the salvation of this world by promoting the good that is found in loving your neighbor as yourself.
It means to work for the salvation of this world by promoting the good that is found in learning to love, and forgive, yourself.
It means to work for the salvation of this world by promoting the good that is found in protecting the environment, without dividing ourselves from others.
It means to work for the salvation of this world by promoting the good that is found in joining with others in communities of right relationship, be they found in the family, in the church, in the workplace, in the nation, or (could it be possible) in the world.
It means to work for the salvation of this world by promoting the good that is found in finding where your values call you to bring people together, instead of tear them apart.
It means to work for the salvation of this world by promoting the good that is found in working with others to find their own call to work for this salvation.
This is, for me, a mission of salvation… truly a mission to save the world. It is a mission that I believe must be inspired by a religious vision of what our world would be, could be, will be like when we, the human race, finally grow up. It is a vision of creating the Realm of God here and now… not of depending on God to do it for us.
This is my vision of salvation, and the power behind my Unitarian Universalist faith.
Yours in Faith,
Rev. David
In 1492…
In fourteen hundred ninety-two
Columbus sailed the ocean blue…
So began the ditty that most of us (children in U.S. schools) learned about Christopher Columbus, who (we were taught) “discovered” America. I remember making little replicas of the Nina, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria out of walnut shells, play dough, and toothpicks. This was great fun because we had to perfect our walnut cracking strategy to get an intact hull, and then got to eat the nuts. And who didn’t like to play with play dough? I remember stories of bravery on the high seas, storms, and hardship, which had special meaning to me because my father was a naval officer, often at sea (as I would also be in adulthood). It was also novel, and seemed somehow grown-up to learn as a first or second grader that the Pilgrims weren’t the first Europeans to make it to the “New World,” as we had been taught as early as we can remember eating Thanksgiving dinner at the kid’s table (and for which we also made walnut boats, but usually with adult help in the cracking).
I don’t remember when I learned that even Columbus wasn’t the first European to land in North America (presuming the Bahamas are considered North American soil. I’ve been there, and it’s very different, but close enough, and seemed to suit Columbus just fine). Tales of Vikings landing in Newfoundland centuries earlier were much more exciting. Those horned helmets rocked!
The other thing I remember about these stories is my grandfather’s delight is telling us every Thanksgiving that most “American” ancestors came over on the Mayflower, but our ancestors met it! Although I am mostly of European descent, I have Cherokee ancestors on both sides of my family, recent enough that it is apparent in the facial features of most of my family. Had I chosen to affiliate with a tribe, I could have received access to special scholarships for college.
And so, even though I received the same education as other children in the U.S., I always questioned the idea of discovery. At best, to discover something is to be the first person to realize its existence or witness it first hand (I’ll concede to being anthropocentric here). Columbus, the Vikings, and the Pilgrims no more discovered this continent than I discovered the joy of cracking a perfect walnut.
Anthropologists still don’t have indisputable evidence of when humans first migrated from East Asia to North America. It could have been anywhere from 40,000 to 16,500 years ago. That changes our little song altogether…
In the year… oh never mind.
Heres the thing. The victors always get to write history. And so the history of North America has been told for generations from a Eurocentric perspective. My ancestors met the Europeans (who were also my ancestors), and whether or not there really were instances of friendship and cooperation as all such stories include, they were over the ensuing decades, slaughtered and corralled. I grew up mostly in South Carolina, where nearly 50% of my high school classmates were of African descent. Their history was told for centuries from the master’s perspective, at least until Alex Haley wrote Roots and we all later watched the mini-series in amazement.
Here’s the other thing. As societies and the individuals in them, we mature, we learn, we grow. As we do, we can “put aside childish things,” as Paul writes in I Corinthians. One of the tenets of Unitarian Universalism, articulated best (but not discovered) by minister and theologian, James Luther Adams, is that revelation is not sealed. There is always something new to learn. We can even re-learn, as I did in childhood about my ancestors.
I read another blog this morning that talked about the misguided nature of political correctness and white guilt. The blogger suggested taking a “balanced” approach of recognizing the bad, but not throwing out the good. I sometimes (but not often) wish life were that simple. And so, it is time to lay to rest our celebrations of Christopher Columbus’s discovery. He and others will remain in the history books. Their travels indeed shaped the course of humanity, but our study should be from a more holistic, mature perspective.
As Maya Angelou writes in her poem, On the Pulse of Morning:
History, despite its wrenching pain
Cannot be unlived, but if faced
With courage, need not be lived again.
Fantasy? Myth?
As a minister, I am constantly learning, and sometimes learning about completely unexpected things. At my congregation, my summer worship services have used movies that are currently in the theaters as the text. I chose the films by reading reviews and story lines online. I chose them before seeing them and sometimes before they were released. The movies have led me to new learning. This week, the text is the independent film, “Beasts of the Southern Wild.” Many critics have praised it as mythical and as fantasy, but my research has led me to believe that it is not fantasy. Indeed, filmmaker Benh Zeitlin said in an interview posted in a Patheos blog, “I don’t think of the film as a fantasy film, I think about it like what it’s like to be six. There’s no real separation between reality and fantasy a lot of the time.” (http://www.patheos.com/blogs/tinseltalk/2012/06/interview-benh-zeitlin-on-beasts-of-the-southern-wild-falling-in-love-with-louisiana-and-prehistoric-monsters/)
What my research showed me was that the film was made on Isle de Jean Charles, Louisiana. The people of the island are indigenous and Cajun, and their island home is literally disappearing. The story of this island and its people is not at all mythical. The people of this real and highly endangered community jokingly call the community “the Bathtub” which is the name Zeitlin chose for his fictional community. It is a very real, very troubling and very urgent tale of environmental racism, climate change and loss. It’s a true tale of loss of culture, loss of home, loss of livelihood and loss of community. It was once a rich and fertile ecosystem for farming and fishing. As we can see in the movie, it is still a beautiful place.
Before 1953, the only way to reach the island was by boat; in 1953, a road was built through marshland. Now, the marshland has turned into open water and the road is often flooded and inaccessible. The island was 11 miles long and 5 miles wide in the 1950s; now it is only 2 miles long and a quarter mile wide. Climate change has led to rising sea levels. Saltwater has killed the forests and made the land infertile. Saltwater flooding is due to the construction of levee systems to protect Louisiana and the canal dredging for the oil industry. State and Army Corps of Engineers decisions left Isle de Jean Charles outside of the levee system because of the cost. Fishing is decreased in part due to the BP oil spill. Once a thriving small community of 400 people, now about 70 people remain, and the tribal chief, Albert Naquin, has urged folks to leave the island. He is hoping that they could sustain their native culture on higher ground. They are probably the nation’s first climate change refugees.
Just like the fictional residents of “the bathtub,” many residents defend their right to stay in their homes. Edison Dardar, Jr. has posted a sign, “Island is not for sale. If you don’t like the island, stay off. Don’t give up. Fight for your rights. It’s worth saving.” Another resident, Delores Naquin, said, “You can’t just uproot – like this oak tree – you uproot it and it will die.” They’ve seen so many hurricanes that some the storms as an annual ordeal to endure in order to keep their connection to their home.
The people of the Isle de Jean Charles may be the first North American climate refugees but they are unlikely to be the last. It is troubling to witness people losing their homes and communities; all the more so because so much of the reason is due to human actions. They need help to find a new home and to sustain their community and culture.
“My tribal council and I have been traveling far and wide to meet with government officials to ask for help in finding a place for our community to live together again. They all want to listen to our cry, and then we never see or hear from them again. Yes, I get mad and frustrated but we will not give up the fight and ask for your prayers and support and ask that you spread the word about the plight of our community and hundreds of other communities just like us along the Gulf Coast that will soon lose our land, our home and sadly, our culture.” Albert Naquin, Chief Isle de Jean Charles Band of Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw
This community is no fantasy. My theology says that we owe these people and their culture respect as all people have worth and deserve respect. They deserve to flourish as human beings. I believe that we are responsible to help each other. We need to listen to each other about how we can help. Climate change is no myth. We are also responsible to the earth. We must address climate change now. There is no time to wait.
(See http://www.isledejeancharles.com/island.php and http://www.pbs.org/newshour/multimedia/isle-de-jean-charles/ and Can’t Stop the Water on facebook)
The New Face of Courage
Courage comes in many forms and it wears many faces. We often think of those who put themselves in harms’ way for the sake of others as being courageous. The firefighter who rushes into a burning building. The soldier who risks life and limb to save a buddy who’s been wounded. The mother who shields her baby from imminent danger.
This past week, I saw another face of courage. It was worn by a young woman who lives in Arizona, whose mother brought her across the border when she was an infant. All her life she lived in fear. In fear of the knock on the door in the middle of the night. In fear of the police who patrol her neighborhood. In fear that when she came home from school her mother would be gone, taken to a detention center to be deported.
This young woman, now in her twenties, has declared her freedom from fear and has become an advocate for the rights of undocumented people just like herself. She has attended and spoken out at immigrant rights’ rallies. She has “bucked the system” and achieved both a Bachelor’s and a Master’s degree from Arizona State. She has started a “language exchange” in Phoenix, where undocumented youth from her community can come and teach Spanish, thereby earning a little cash to support themselves while they also learn to speak English from their students. (See the video here: Spanish for Social Justice ) She is, in all aspects of her life, proclaiming her heritage, her identity and her status in the face of frightening, brutal and repressive forces. And she’s doing it with joy and love. The face of courage that I encountered last week wears a big smile, and it is beautiful.
After hearing this woman’s story, I’m called to ask myself where courage comes from. Not the “run into a burning building” courage (which, while certainly admirable, often is more a reaction to circumstance), but the kind that says “I’m in this for the long haul, no matter what.” The kind of courage that enables and empowers us to get out of bed, day after day, to face a world full of risk and danger. I have to believe that this kind of courage is grounded in love. In the love that we receive from others and in the love we have for the world.
We need a community of love around us to provide the foundation for all that we do. Knowing that we are loved, no matter what, by our family and our friends gives us the courage to venture out into a hostile world. It also forms the basis of our self-esteem, the basis of our belief that our lives matter and that we can make a difference. This kind of love empowers us to declare our own worth in the face of those who would deny it.
A love of the world calls us to engage with it, in all its beauty and all its horror. When we love the world, like a parent with a troublesome child, we acknowledge its imperfections, yet we cast our gaze to the horizon of its potential. Love for the world allows us, in the words of Bobby Kennedy, “to dream things that never were, and say, why not?” And it creates in us the commitment to do what we can to make those dreams a reality.
As I move through the days ahead, I will carry the image of this young woman with me. She is, for me, the new face of courage.
Peace,
Peter
Paying Tribute
In her best-selling Hunger Games trilogy, Suzanne Collins imagines a world of the future—a dystopian reality in which North American society has been replaced with a world where workers toil for the good of a small elite, threatened with the use of force, and given hope only by the small chance of winning a deadly game.
What makes the world of The Hunger Games so eerie is that we can see remnants of our present-day reality in it—enough remnants that it scares us to think that maybe, just maybe, we are headed down a path towards totalitarianism.
And while The Hunger Games is a work of fiction and of fantasy, we would do well to understand the signs in our current society that make Suzanne Collins’ disturbing imagination all-too-real.
In The Hunger Games, teenagers, called “tributes,” from each of the oppressed districts are forced to fight to the death in a reality television show broadcast throughout the nation. Their gruesome deaths are entertainment for the elite people in the Capitol, and the entire nation is forced to tune in and watch their children die.
That certainly isn’t reality, is it?
The reality is that our nation exists in what Chris Hedges, author of Death of the Liberal Class, calls a state of “permanent war.” Hedges writes, “since the end of World War 1, the United States has devoted staggering resources and money to battling real and imagined enemies. It turned the engines of the state over to a massive war and security apparatus.” We are kept in a constant state of fear that mutes dissent in the name of patriotism and fuels a war machine that benefits a privileged elite.
Our wars require not only a steady stream of money—taken from our paychecks and pockets and diverted from health care, our social safety net, education, and infrastructure—but also a steady stream of young, able-bodied people willing to die for our country. All too often, they do.
I am not suggesting that the death of US troops is entertainment for the elite, as is the death of young people is in The Hunger Games. But their death serves to reinforce a status quo that there are people whose interests are served by our nation being at war. The death of brave young soldiers helps us silence objections to unjust wars being fought in our name, it helps us dismiss Occupy movement as “fringe elements,” and it helps us rationalize police brutality towards non-violent protesters.
Lest we appear unpatriotic, those of us morally offended offended by the deaths of US soldiers stay eerily silent about what is fueling those wars.
We cannot afford to remain silent about the fact that corporations are profiting from this state of permanent war, and those same corporations have wrested control of our political and economic systems.
As we approach our annual celebration of Memorial Day, we will pause to mourn the lives lost in service to our nation. It is right and good to do this. Once we are done with our moment of silence, however, we owe it to our soldiers to raise our voices.
We must insist on a society where people matter more than corporations. Where the lives of young people are not used as disposable input into a system of profit-making and wealth creation.
We must insist on a society where political power is checked and shared—and not allowed to run amok through Super PACs and corporate donations. Where the wealthy and the poor have equal access and equal voice, where money is not speech, and where corporations are not people.
We must insist on an economy based in love and compassion, rather than fear and greed. We must insist on an economy based in mutuality rather than coercion. We must insist on a nation that treats the “least of these” in the human family as if they were the divine in our midst.
We must raise our moral voices loudly, my friends. We might not find ourselves in the Hunger Games if we do not, but to create the future we want to see we cannot remain silent.
A Wild Patience
Rev. Dr. Michael Tino
A wild patience has taken me this far/as if I had to bring to shore/a boat with a spasmodic outboard motor/old sweaters, nets, spray-mottled books/tossed in the prow/some kind of sun burning my shoulder-blades. -Adrienne Rich, Integrity
Patience is a spiritual virtue worth cultivating, and yet it is something in short supply in my life right now. Last night’s news from my former home state of North Carolina is just the latest in a long string of insults to all people who believe that love is love. And as a gay man of faith, a part of my heart is torn out every time another vote is taken to declare my love to be inferior.
It’s hard to muster patience when your civil rights—or the rights of those you love and care about—are on the line. It’s hard to muster patience when the list of states banning same-sex marriage in their constitutions steadily grows and grows. It’s hard to muster patience when lawmakers fail again and again to have the courage to pass even simple legislation to, for example, ensure workplace non-discrimination for LGBT people.
It’s hard to keep repeating to myself Theodore Parker’s assertion from so long ago that “the moral arc of the universe is long, but it bends towards justice.” That quote has long been a mantra of mine and yet with every passing election, with every legislative session, with every disappointing vote, it becomes harder to say, harder to believe, harder to force myself to think about.
And yet with every vote, it becomes more important to say. It becomes more important to remind myself of the truth in that statement. It is as if I am breathing necessary oxygen on the ember of hope that burns within me, keeping it glowing so that it might one day become a flame. And so, I practice patience.
And then today, our President announced that his “evolving” views on same-sex marriage had evolved some more. Did I hear this correctly? The President of the United States contradicted 61% of the voters in an important swing state? Maybe that moral arc of the universe will bend towards justice after all.
And so it is that I realize that what needs to be cultivated is not mere patience, but a wild patience.
A wild patience that knows when it’s time to wait, and when it’s time to act. A wild patience that sits sometimes, spreading healing balm on burned skin, and gets up sometimes to build, to work, to do. A wild patience that knows the difference between faith and resignation, that keeps the ember glowing amidst the howling storm, that steers the boat toward the shores of tomorrow.
Yes, hope is here. Love and justice are coming. Their arrival requires patience. Their arrival requires waiting, and breathing, and letting things go. And it also requires hard work.
May we find in ourselves both the patience to wait and the impatience to do what must be done. This year, let us be wildly patient together.
Inferno of the Living
A friend suggested that I read Invisible Cities, a short novel by Italo Calvino that consists of dialogues between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan, because she found the stories meaningful. Read more →
