Advent's Long Road

“I learn by going where I have to go.”        Theodore Roethke

When was it ever a perfect time to prepare for Advent? 

The road to Bethlehem was long for Mary, looking for a place to birth her child in the most ungracious of surroundings.

The journey  of the magi was long and arduous,  with  unscheduled interruptions,  inclement  weather, and even some doubts as to the final outcome of  following the star.

This year the road to Advent for me is fraught with grief over the thousands who died in a killer storm that destroyed a region of the Philippines, my home country.   The magnitude of this disaster is hard to comprehend.  Why the Philippines?  Because, according to an MIT meteorologist, the country has the warmest deep ocean in the planet that spawns monster storms.  But why the poor?

 Why were the impoverished families of fisher folk  who lived by the sea  swept away by the storm surge? 

Perhaps Mary must have also asked why she had to take on such a difficult role in the salvation story.  “And a sword will pierce your soul.”  ( Luke 2:35 )   Perhaps the three kings in search of the Christ child  must  have sensed ,with foreboding,   Herod’s evil intent to slaughter innocent babies in his lust for power.  Perhaps killer storms leave people like me reeling from the onslaught of nature “red in tooth and claw.”    How does one find meaning in randomness?

This obviously is no Hallmark greeting card reflection.  In a season when merriment is the norm, the Philippine disaster  goes against the grain of  falalalala.  I did not plan on this interruption.  My holiday calendar , until a week ago when the storm struck, was already starting to fill up with Christmas cheer.

Yet this catastrophic event is making me pay attention this year, more than any other time. I am paying  attention to Simone Weil’s statement :  “Two things break the human heart – beauty and affliction.”   This week ,while comforting a Filipino friend who had not heard from her family in the epicenter of the storm and who did not know if they were still alive,  I happened to look out of my kitchen window as I held the phone to my ear  and saw the most breath-taking  sunset in the autumn  sky.   The tears came.  How can such beauty coincide with such bad news?    Is this “the irrational season “  that Madeleine L’Engle refers to? 

In a deep way, I feel more humbled this Advent season, perhaps because my heart has been broken. 

I will still wrap presents, sing carols, look at Christmas lights.  But with a different heartbeat,

Because halfway across the world, in a cluster of islands, a cyclone from hell has knocked me off my comfort zone,  even threatened to unhinge my illusions of safety. 

But that’s not all bad.   In ways I had not planned for myself or wished upon the people in my country of birth, this Advent is teaching me to cling closer to God,  to Jesus --- the rock, the hiding place, the ultimate shelter, in times of desolation and chaos.

In this Advent’s  difficult  path towards God’s blessing,  like Mary and  those who searched for the Christ child,   “I learn by going where I have to go.”

Submitted by Priscilla Lasmarias Kelso 

Thanks

Thanks is ubiquitous, often in a mechanical way. We say thanks at the end of tedious emails to Customer Service or Human Relations. We exchange mumbled thanks at the checkout. We prompt children for ‘the magic words’. But sometimes we slam on the brakes in the nick of time and say ‘oh thank God’. So why dedicate a whole day to giving thanks, especially a day burdened with the hype of football games, creeping Black Friday sales, traveling relatives, and lots
of cooking?

A basic truth about thanks, worth pausing to think about in the midst of our busyness, is that every thank you from the most grudging to the most profound, is a tiny, powerful connection to the world outside ourselves. Thanks is an acknowledgement that we can’t do it all ourselves. We need each other, depend on each other, for everything from getting our tall decaf white peppermint latte with extra whipped just right to keeping us company on the roller coaster ride
from birth to death.

If thanks helps us pause and recognize the web of relationships connecting us to the wider world, we might also linger for a moment in the marvel of it all. The beauty of backlit blues and grays at sunrise. The harmony of teenagers belting out the eleven o’clock number in the high school musical. The endurance and grace in the raised arms of the athlete crossing the finish line. Thanks pulls us out of ourselves and into our relationships with everything that is beyond us: the world, the people, the wonder that is beneath, within and beyond it all.
And so we say thanks.

~submitted by BJ 11.21.13
for more reflection on praying thanks, check out Anne Lamott’s Help, Thanks, Wow: The Three Essential Prayers (NY: Riverhead Books, 2012)

On All Souls

Reflections on Grace

If you’ve lived in Boston for even a little while, and you own a car, chances are you’ve had the perilous experience of driving on the Jamaicaway, a road that was built long before every household had 2 cars and one of them was an SUV. Just getting on the Jamaicaway from any feeder road is an adventure, especially at rush hour. And having the fortitude to do that requires something of us that is not in great supply these days. Before I heard Liz Walker speak at Sacred Threads last Tuesday night, I would have said that what we need more of is patience. Lots of it.  But now, I know it requires something much greater than patience. It requires grace.

Liz Walker is a former WBZ-TV Boston anchor and award-winning journalist, who is now a minister and a preacher at the Roxbury Presbyterian Church.  When she began her Sacred Threads talk last Tuesday night by talking about the challenges of getting onto the Jamaicaway, I wondered what that had to do with grace. Of course, I KNEW what she was talking about; I used to live on the Jamaicaway where a regular sport was watching the daily accidents, yet I still wondered: “Why is she talking about THIS? Isn’t she supposed to be talking about grace?” And then, it hit me, how the challenge of getting onto, and driving on the Jamaicaway, is a perfect metaphor for discussing the topic of grace. Let me tell you why.

As Liz says, “the Jamaicaway is not a gracious road.” What getting on to it and driving on it does, however, is force you to find a place within you where grace exists and let that grace take over instead of all your instincts to push forward, edge out the cars around you, and drive in attack mode.   Anne Lamott says, “Grace is not something I DO, or can chase down; but it is something I can receive, when I stop trying to be in charge.”  To find grace in us, no matter what we are doing (like driving on the Jamaicaway), Walker tells us to do just that- to let go and stop trying to be in charge, so we can receive grace. Let the anxious drivers go ahead, stop trying to be first, and even bless them as they go. A tall order on your best day, but that’s what grace is all about.

Liz Walker will tell you she’s no saint and she still isn’t always able to be gracious. Few of us are. But, a powerful conversion experience opened her eyes to the need for grace in all of our lives. That happened on a series of trips to South Sudan with a group of Boston humanitarians. It was 2001 and she felt “called to do something else” other than TV news; she thought the trip to South Sudan would yield a good story and might just guide her on a new path.  It turned out to be much more than that. She went there to cover a story as a  “removed” journalist, but she left “touched by grace,” realizing a removed stance from the world’s stories was no longer acceptable for her. Walker says, the lessons she learned in South Sudan were all connected to grace, so she continued to visit there for eleven more years, each trip deepening her commitment to and appreciation of the power of grace in our lives.

On one such trip, the group’s luggage was lost. They were left with no tent, no food, no supplies, no water. Word about their misfortune quickly spread throughout the village and people started to arrive with “gifts” for them; brightly colored cloth to wear, hand hewed cots for sleeping, pots of goat to eat, and children brought sticks for them to brush their teeth. As Walker says of that experience, “the people in South Sudan had nothing, but they were willing to share everything. They had nothing materially, but everything relationally. In that moment I realized that although we came to save Africa, Africa saved us through God’s grace.”

Walker says she now understands that grace is much more than a prayer before meals or a disposition to be generous.  Grace says, “I need to lean on you and you need to lean on me.” It’s the kind of love reflected in Martin Luther King’s philosophy about love and forgiveness, and practicing it takes courage and risk. It’s like the Ubuntu concept of Bishop Desmond Tutu that says, “I can’t be my best unless you are your best.” It’s “I’m going to love you not because you love me back, but because you NEED love.” By their actions, the South Sudanese women showed her exactly what grace in action looks like and she wanted to take that with her and live it and reflect it in her work. 

Walker is fond of quoting Anne Lamott’s statement that, “Grace meets us wherever we are, but does not leave us where it found us.” Grace met Liz Walker long ago in Alabama, came with her to Boston, to television news, to the Harvard Divinity School, to South Sudan and now has taken her to Roxbury Presbyterian Church where she works each day to help break the cycle of violence, build relationships, and pray for forgiveness, grace and love, which, she says, “is not innate. It has to be learned and unless you have a model for it, you don’t know where to begin.” So, she’s trying to model it.

Back to the Jamaicaway, Liz says like most of us, she hasn’t mastered being in grace all the time yet. But, when attempting to enter that busy road, she tries to be conscious, patient and remember what the Sudanese women taught her- “that there is no us and them, only US.”

Frederich Buechner says, “The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.”  We are all glad that the deep hunger in Boston and South Sudan was the place where Liz Walker found her deep gladness, and she heeded God’s call. She is a passionate human being who has chosen to live her life as a testament to the powerful need we all have for grace in our lives. And, I for one am thankful.

  Pamela Econoply Woodnick

11.10.13

Dignity: Holding Us Together

Donna Hicks is a conflict- resolution specialist who has participated in some of the world’s most intractable conflicts such as: Israel-Palestine, Northern Ireland, Cambodia, US-Cuba. In one such situation in Cambodia, after hearing the painful stories of Khmer women who had been horribly violated under the countrywide genocide, she was struck by how they managed to be joyful with such painful memories from the past. Yet, they WERE joyful in the face of that past suffering, when they learned of their new rights under the new Cambodian constitution. She was profoundly moved. On reflection, she realized something that she had intuitively known for some time. That is, “ if indignity tears us apart, dignity can put us back together again.” At that point, she states, “Dignity became the lens through which I made sense of the world from that point on.”

Five minutes with Donna Hicks is all you need to realize she is “the real deal.” Yes she has five degrees, a Harvard Professorship, has worked with presidents of countries and partners on her Declare Dignity project with Desmond Tutu.  But judging her on those superficial facts would be, well, a violation of her dignity. It would not be seeing her, the engaging, flawed, brilliant, yet down to earth human being she is. And that’s what she’s trying to tell us in her book, Dignity: It’s Essential Role in Resolving Conflict.

I had the good fortune to attend a presentation by Donna Hicks at Regis College on 10.3.13 that was part of a speaker series called, “Threads of Inclusion: Recognizing the Sacred in our Lives Through Dignity, Grace and Justice.” The series is sponsored by Sacred Threads, an interfaith ministry whose purpose is to create meaningful dialogue through spiritual conversations, circles of reflection and programs of enrichment and growth. Professor Hicks’ presentation was just that: meaningful, spiritual, and enriching.

Hicks began by stating that, “Dignity is the highest and deepest point you can reach. It taps into the spiritual needs of us all, deep within our hearts, and allows the ‘holy’ to rise up.” She explains that through her work in international conflict resolution, she learned that there was always something deeper going on in those meetings than was reflected in the conversations. Something that was “under the table” but very present and quietly influencing every negotiation. She thought if she could put words to it, they would be things like, “How dare you treat me this way? Don’t you realize I’m a human being” and “Don’t you see how unfair this situation is?” Over time, it became clear to her that what she was feeling- what THEY were feeling, was about violations of their dignity. That revelation set her on a seven-year path that resulted in her book and is now the key influence for all her work .

What is dignity, as Hicks sees it? First, it’s different than respect, although many intertwine the two. Respect is earned, but dignity is a birthright. It is our inherent value and vulnerability. It’s not something that comes and goes. It is a piece of our DNA. It’s our internal barometer that indicates how we feel about ourselves, It’s invaluable, priceless, irreplaceable; it’s what gets upset when we are treated as if we don’t matter. Dignity wounds do not heal with time; we have to get them out so we can recognize them and heal them. As Hicks says, “Bottom line, dignity is what makes relationships work.”

So what can we do to be more aware of and live with greater dignity towards ourselves and each other? Hicks has developed 10 Elements of Dignity which include accepting others without prejudice or bias, recognizing and validating others for their talents and hard work, truly listening and validating other’s concerns, creating an environment of inclusiveness, putting people at ease on a physical and psychological level, treating others with equality, encouraging others to act on their own behalf, believing what others think matters, treating people as worthy of your trust, taking accountability for your actions and saying you’re sorry when you violate others. Sounds great. We all want to do it. But it’s not easy. Hicks herself acknowledges she is a “recovering dignity violator” and in truth, aren’t we all? Who among us hasn’t made an unkind remark, judged another unfairly, held back praise or given the ideas of others short shrift because we know we are right or just too busy to listen?

Hicks knows this all to well and names ten specific “Temptations” we face that cause us to violate our own dignity and the dignity of others. She reminds us to not let other’s bad behaviors determine our own. (“You think you can yell; I can yell louder.”) Don’t lie or cover up what you’ve done- own it and take responsibility when you’ve made a mistake or hurt someone. Don’t look externally and to others for validation of your self-worth; dignity is your birthright and no one can take that away. Don’t hang on to false security in situations when your dignity is being violated; stand up for yourself and take action. Look at yourself and examine if YOU are part of the problem, and listen to feedback from others that will help you grow. Don’t “blame and shame” others to deflect your own guilt, and don’t gossip! Being critical of or sharing private information about others who are not present is harmful, and undignified.

In the forward to her book, Bishop Desmond Tutu says of Hicks, “She has the gift, perhaps it is her vocation, of opening to our sight a world where those most basic of human needs - appreciation, recognition, and the feeling of inherent worth – may be attained by all.” While that world may be an idealized one, it’s a world I want to help create and live in. Donna Hicks has put into words for me and countless others, what a world filled with dignity can look like and gives us a roadmap for how to get there.

How fitting that Sacred Threads chose Professor Hicks to kick off this powerful speaker series. As Hicks reminds us, dignity is “the glue that connects us to each other.” Through her, Sacred Threads has provided us with a powerful reminder of how important it is to strengthen the bonds that dignity builds and in so doing, helps us to realize just how connected we all are.

~Pamela Econoply Woodnick

Women Who Make a Difference

Sr. Julia Heslin and Sr. Edna Clark (Sisters of Charity, Halifax) have been supporting a school in the barrio of San Cristobal in the Dominican Republic since 2007. They got involved because the founder, Debora Damiani, a native of the Dom. Rep. worked with Sr. Julia in Catholic Charities Head Start in Bushwick, Brooklyn.

Julia and Edna started by getting funding for shoes for the children so they could attend school. Then came the need for a computer classroom as soon as the school grew beyond elementary to high school. The building needed to expand with the growing enrollment so funding for third floor and new roof was the next project.

Working with the board and visiting the school has enriched them and allowed them to offer their expertise in educational administration, and experience God’s spirit at work one student at a time. Go to www.misiontupuedes.org to learn more and donate if you wish to continue the good work being done there.