Blessing for the Brokenhearted
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There is no remedy for love but to love more. —Henry David Thoreau Read more →
From Your Minister
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As another gardening season begins to come to a close, I offer gratitude for all of the lessons that I learn from my garden. Read more →
REsources for Living
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I have a fairly big front lawn—or what passes for a large lawn in my suburban California location. If, that is, it passes for a lawn at all. Read more →
Audio Recordings
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You can listen to audio recordings of Quest Monthly, read back issues or get electronic versions of the text to share with friends (and much more) at questformeaning.org Read more →
Ra’s Army
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From a distance they look like miniature, yellow-helmeted soldiers marching along next to the fence, sort of an invasion of Ra’s army. Read more →
Persistence
October 2018
First forget inspiration. Habit is more dependable…. Habit is persistence in practice. ―Octavia E. Butler
Articles
And Not Grow Weary
My son learned a song at Village Green preschool that he made me sing with him all the next day. Maybe you know it. Read more »
Perseverance
Until my stroke four years ago, at a very healthy 61 years of age, I did not know what perseverance was. Read more »
Offering Comfort and Support
Across the decades, through changes in technology and staff, through world crises and institutional crises, the CLF has been there, offering people around the world comfort and challenge in the form of our liberal faith. Read more »
Swimming Lessons
My first sermon at the first church I ever served (which is also the only church I have served) was called “Swimming Lessons.” Read more »
Cinders as Far as the Eye Can See
While I explored central Idaho’s Snake River Plain, I camped at Craters of the Moon National Monument. Read more »
From Your Minister
As another gardening season begins to come to a close, I offer gratitude for all of the lessons that I learn from my garden. Read more »
REsources for Living
I have a fairly big front lawn—or what passes for a large lawn in my suburban California location. If, that is, it passes for a lawn at all. Read more »
Audio Recordings
You can listen to audio recordings of Quest Monthly, read back issues or get electronic versions of the text to share with friends (and much more) at questformeaning.org Read more »
Ra’s Army
From a distance they look like miniature, yellow-helmeted soldiers marching along next to the fence, sort of an invasion of Ra’s army. Read more »
Persistence
First forget inspiration. Habit is more dependable…. Habit is persistence in practice. ―Octavia E. Butler Read more »
The Losing Team
Another election has come and gone. Some people, presumably, are delighted, while others are filled with gloom. OK, it was mostly gloom on my Facebook page. Maybe you worked really hard on behalf of a candidate you truly believed in, and that candidate didn’t win. Maybe the one who did win is the worst kind of corrupt imbecile, totally in debt to the moneyed interests. Maybe you feel like the country is going to hell in a hand basket, and we are all at the mercy of people who think that Ebola is washing our shores on a wave of Black people and climate change is a hoax invented by scientists who want to further their careers.
It could be that we are doomed, and if your plans for this week should happen to include an adult beverage or a childhood comfort food, well I wouldn’t blame you.
But eventually we always come round to the question of what now. Now that the election is over and we get a break from the ads. Now we know just how vehemently we might disagree with our neighbors or family members. Now that the whole cycle of hope and possibility and things not ever living up to their potential starts over again. Now what?
The same thing as always. Sorry, but I don’t have a better answer. Now we make dinner and pet the cat and read the kids a story and decide what to wear to work tomorrow. Now we look for a job that will pay the bills or an apartment that won’t break the bank or a date who won’t turn out to be a complete waste of time. Now we call our friends to comfort them or be comforted. Now we wait to hear back from the doctor or we wait to hear whether there will be an indictment from Ferguson. We visit the rest home, we take the children to soccer or to dance, we cry or look at videos of cats.
Maybe we remember other elections that swept us up in a tide of hope or despair, and we remember how after those elections we kept on doing what we do. I’m in no way saying that elections don’t matter, or that it’s not worth being deeply engaged in the political process. The government sets policy, and those policies affect really important things like who gets deported, who gets health care, whether people can manage to live on minimum wage, what efforts are made to combat climate change, what kinds of transportation we have access to, whether there is funding for research, what is supported and not supported in our schools, and on and on and on.
Politics matters. Having a voice matters. Speaking up for your hopes matters. But it doesn’t necessarily matter in the way that we would like. Paying attention and voting and making calls and writing letters and campaigning door to door doesn’t always result in the person or policy we support winning. And, sadly, even if they do win it rarely means that everything is rosy and the world is organized the way we would organize it.
Whether we get what we want is not what defines our efforts. We are called to care, and to love and to work for justice. Whether or not things go our way at any given moment. I used to serve a church in the same neighborhood as Wrigley Field in Chicago. Although I am not, myself, a baseball fan, I learned a lot from my Cub-loving congregants. The Cubs lose. Everyone knows that. Historically, currently, the Cubs are just not what you would call a winning team. Which doesn’t stop the fans from rooting for their beloved Cubbies, year in and year out.
You love what you love, and you go out and yell on its behalf, following the statistics or the players or whatever markers of success or defeat you might have. You show up and cheer. When your team wins you get a parade. But when your team loses you have the opportunity to gather with your friends and mourn the losses and plot how next year will be better.
Or maybe two years from now, when elections roll around in 2016.
Nelson Mandela
The great Nelson Mandela has died. Peacefully, after a long illness, surrounded by the love of his family, his nation, the world. To lose a hero is always an enormous grief, and yet Mandela was one hero who got to see his work through. This time we got the whole inspiring story – not just a man who stood up for his people and who suffered for his rebellion, but also a man who emerged from his long years in prison with a whole heart, with his capacity for love intact. Who was able to lead his country in the path of truth and reconciliation; who was able to walk a long ways down that road toward the land of freedom and justice.
What a gift. Too often we have the stories of the martyrs, the heroes cut down in their prime who live on in our memory and our aspiration, but who never got to step into the Promised Land. Of course South Africa is not a perfected Land of Milk and Honey. This is the real world and grave problems are never simply erased. But Mandela got to see his people choose justice over revenge. He got to see his country tear down barricades, reach across chasms that seemed like they could never be crossed.
In Mandela we had the story of a great man who suffered for his cause, but this time the suffering was the middle of the story, not the end. And as much as we owe to the martyrs, to Martin Luther King Jr. and Victor Jara and Megar Evers and all the rest, we owe still more to the people who live out decade after decade of speaking truth in the spirit of love, who never stop pushing the world toward justice.
Of course, most of these people we never hear about. So today, I will remember the tremendous legacy of Nelson Mandela. But I will also remember people like Molly Piontkowski, who came to this country as a young woman and never stopped working to make it meet up with her hopes of what she would find here. Who was already in her 80s when I got to know her, and was still pushing on the city of Chicago for fair housing, for services for seniors, for shelter for abused women. Who I remember not for the saintly gentleness we expect of elderly women, but rather for her cranky determination that the world simply needed to be a better place than it was.
Molly, like Mandela, is gone now. But we still have Bill Moyers and Wendell Berry—and thousands, maybe millions of you who keep on doing the work of justice and love and truth and peace because it is there to be done. The need won’t go away. I give thanks daily for the people who won’t go away either.
