Posts Tagged ‘Interdependence’
July 4th – Making for Righteousness and Peace – Br. Curtis Almquist
Br. Curtis Almquist
“For the Lord your God is God of gods and Lord of lords, the great God, mighty and awesome, who is not partial and takes no bribe, who executes justice for the orphan and the widow, and who loves the strangers, providing them food and clothing. You shall also love the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt…”
The Book of Common Prayer remembers today as Independence Day which, indeed it is from an historical standpoint: the colonies’ independence from English rule. However, The Book of Common Prayer qualifies in our opening prayer the nature of our country’s independence. We prayed: “Grant that we and all the people of this land may have grace to maintain our liberties in righteousness and peace….”
Righteousness is relational. Righteousness is making relationships right and of keeping relationships right: right relationships between individuals, between groups – racial groups, cultural groups, political groups, religious groups – and between nations, all of which makes for righteous living before God, the Creator of all. Righteousness is about right relationships. We pray for “righteousness” and we pray for “peace.” Peace is not merely the absence of fighting. Peace without justice is simply handcuffing people and terrorizing them to be mute. Peace can only come from equal justice for all. So we pray that we be emissaries of righteousness and peace. Read More
Truth in Love: A Christian Ethos for Climate Emergency – Br. Keith Nelson
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In May of this year I sat in a webinar on climate emergency organized by Episcopal clergy and lay leaders. I listened to Dr. Bette Hecox-Lea, an Episcopalian and marine biologist, speak words of unvarnished truth about how biosphere degradation has activated tipping points that, if left on course, will result in a massive extinction event. On behalf of the scientific community, she said plainly, “We do not know what will come after these points have tipped permanently, other than that the earth will become uninhabitable.” I wept tears of shocked but sober recognition as I absorbed information I have heard before, but this time, truly listened.[i]
Five months earlier, in January, I had brought my weight of grief and hope for the world to the silent winter woods at Emery House. I had left screens and books and words and even food behind me for a time. I found a lone hemlock tree, and dug a clearing in the snow beneath it until I could see and touch the body of the earth. I nestled my weary body against the cold, dark, moist soil and gazed up at the green branches sheltering me. I prayed as though my life and all life depended upon it. Time seemed to stop as I lay there, and as the drops of snow-melt mingled with my tears of gratitude, something happened. My flesh knew the earth from which it had come, and to which it would return; my bones knew that death would be only a door into the Creator’s heart; and my heart knew that while I am alive I am bound by Christ to love him in and through this Creation, from which we are not separate.
In very different voices, a marine biologist and a hemlock tree spoke to me the truth in love. Read More
Our Relationship with Creation – Br. Keith Nelson
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Genesis 2:4b-8; 15-19; Psalm 8; Mark 1:9-13
In a small wooden box in my cell here at the monastery, I keep a few simple mementos: physical objects I can hold in my hand, objects that anchor or center me in the remembrance that I am beloved of God. The simplest and most treasured of all is a cow bone from the desert near Moab, Utah. My best friend and I went camping in Utah a few months before I came to the monastery as a postulant. The trip was a pilgrimage into a landscape wonderfully strange to us both. In the desert, we hoped to taste something of God’s vast, untamed power, just as Jesus did, and just as generations of saints have done from the ancient Israelites to the desert fathers and mothers of Egypt. Perhaps because our eyes and ears were opened by this intention, this expectation to meet this desert God and to travel as fellow pilgrims into our own inner wilderness, God came to meet us everywhere we turned. Every horizon held our gaze and enlarged it, beckoning us beyond that vanishing point where endless blue sky and rippling red stone merged. As we hiked about this desert paradise we wept or fell silent or laughed in wonder, as unselfconsciously as the shooting stars or lightning that flashed in the night sky or the rainbows that shimmered in the rare desert rain. Each moment, we could have echoed the sentiment of author Annie Dillard as she wrote from Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains: “I see something, some event that would otherwise have been utterly missed and lost; or something sees me, some enormous power brushes me with its clean wing, and I resound like a beaten bell.” [i] Read More