Navigating through the Storm

From our Noonday Meditations:

I would like to say a word on behalf of all of us who are not statistics. I hear a lot of talk about whether the Covid-19 pandemic is really that bad because testing only shows more cases as opposed to more deaths. I want to remind our leaders that those numbers are both only the tip of the iceberg for the suffering being endured in this nation. Many of us are not a case or a death to be counted, at least not yet, but we live every day in a suffering we could not have imagined a few months ago. We are cut off from those we love with no clear idea of how long it will be before we can once again walk into a senior living facility to see a parent, or make a trip to be with grandchildren who are growing up so fast without us, or take our spouse out to dinner without being afraid. Do you know what that is like? Do you know how that feels? Please notice us. Please think about us. We are not statistics. We are not cases or deaths, but we are millions. Look out from the Rose Garden and see the millions of us who have been hurting so much for so long, and will go on hurting until this crisis is over. Then let us hear you say that you understand and that you care. Not for the numbers, but for the people. For us. ~ Steven Charleston (7/15/20)

Nothing will keep us from the light, no power yet dreamed, no fear yet formed, nothing that darkness can throw up to mask the truth or dread can spin like webs of worry to snare hope and hold it. The light is our birthright. It is our promised inheritance, the natural realm of our existence from which we came and to which we will return. Open, free, transparent, clear, the world of justice and mercy, the land of love and redemption. We may bear shadows for a while, but nothing will keep us from the light, so strong is our faith in its source. ~ Steven Charleston (3/29/17)

Source: https://www.facebook.com/bishopstevencharleston

People of Hope

It is no accident that we've been born in these times, that we find our lives unfolding now, with our particular histories and gifts, our brokenness, our experience, and our wisdom. It is not an accident. In talking about the fate of the earth, we know that its fate is really up for grabs. There are no guarantees as to its future. It is a question of our own critical choices. Perhaps what we need most is a transforming vision, a vision that's deep enough, one that can take us from where we are to a new place; one that opens the future up to hope. More than anything, we must become people of hope. - Miriam Therese MacGillis

We are needed for this time #resist

To remember why we are here, doing what we do:

Maha Ghosananda: "Ordinary people can be creators of peace: There is little we can do for peace in the world without peace in our minds. And so when we begin to make peace, we begin with silence, meditation and prayer. When we stabilize our posture and calm our mind, we can realize peace within ourselves. Then we can radiate loving kindness to those around us, our family, our community, our nation and the whole world.

Peacemaking requires compassion. It requires the skill of listening. To listen we have to give up ourselves, even our own words. As we come to trust one another we discover new possibilities for overcoming conflict. If we listen carefully we can hear peace growing.

Peacemaking requires selflessness. There is little we can do for peace as long as we think we are the only ones who know the way. Peacemaking requires wisdom. Peace is a path that is chosen consciously. It is not an aimless wandering, but a step-by-step journey."

Steven Charleston: "What seems broken now will one day be made whole again. As people of faith, that is our belief and our witness. We carry on with our work of justice and reconciliation, no matter how hard the job may be, because we believe that is how we do our part for the greater plan of healing. How long that will take, we do not know. We are committed to working for as long as it takes. We will be faithful to our call and invite others from every walk of life to join us. We are the people of hope, the people of vision, the people of the Spirit. We come from all sacred directions and we will not cease our work until peace and mercy have been assured. We do this not for reward or recognition, not for political gain, but for the future of all life. We do it because we know in our hearts that what seems broken now will one day be made whole again.

You are needed for what is to come, for the struggle against fear, the turning point toward peace, that is why you are here, in the place you are, among the people you call community, to be a wise counselor and a calming presence, to invite others to work together, amid the pulls to extreme, against the rush to partisan, you are a center of hope, a balance of compassion and common sense, that will help to halt the rise of anger, and allow reason to guide the tiller of tomorrow, that is why you are here: you are needed for what is to come."

"

Vocation of the Baptized

“Thus the vocation of the baptized person is a simple thing: it is to live from day to day, whatever the day brings, in this extraordinary unity, in this reconciliation with all people and all things, in this knowledge that death has no more power, in this truth of the resurrection. It does not really matter exactly what a Christian does from day to day. What matters is that whatever one does is done in honor of one’s own life, given to one by God and restored to one in Christ, and in honor of the life into which all humans and all things are called. The only thing that really matters to live in Christ instead of death” ― William Stringfellow, Instead of Death: New and Expanded Edition

Live Not by Lies

“Live not by lies,” the Russian dissident novelist Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote.

Watch this:

Also you can read this:

https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/in-the-trump-era-we-are-losing-the-ability-to-distinguish-reality-from-vacuum

Resistance to Evil in the World

One of the things that surprised me when I first read the New Testament seriously was that it talked so much about a Dark Power in the universe a mighty evil spirit who was held to be the Power behind death and disease, and sin. The difference is that Christianity thinks this Dark Power was created by God, and was good when he was created, and went wrong. Christianity agrees with Dualism that this universe is at war. But it does not think this is a war between independent powers. It thinks it is a civil war, a rebellion, and that we are living part of the universe occupied by the rebel. Enemy-occupied territory that is what this world is.
Christianity is the story of how the rightful king has landed, you might say landed in disguise, and is calling us all to take part in a great campaign of sabotage. When you go to church you are really listening-in to the secret wireless from our friends: that is why the enemy is so anxious to prevent us from going. He does it by playing on our conceit and laziness and intellectual snobbery. I know someone will ask me, Do you really mean, at this time of day, to re-introduce our old friend the devil hoofs and horns and all. Well, what the time of day has to do with it I do not know. And I am not particular about the hoofs and horns. But in other respects my answer is Yes, I do. I do not claim to know anything about his personal appearance. If anybody really wants to know him better I would say to that person. Don’t worry. If you really want to, you will. Whether you’ll like it when you do is another question.

— C.S. Lewis

The Resistance consisted, day after day, of small efforts to calculate their actions abetting escapes, circulating mimeographed news, hiding fugitives, obtaining money or needed documents, engaging in various forms of noncooperation with the occupying authorities or the quisling bureaucrats, wearing armbands, disrupting official communications in terms of odds against the Nazi efficiency and power and violence and vindictiveness would seem to render their witness ridiculous. The risks for them of persecution, arrest, torture, confinement, death were so disproportionate to any concrete results that could practically be expected. Yet these persons persevered in their audacious, extemporaneous, fragile, puny, foolish Resistance.

— William Stringfellow

For Christianity is a fighting religion. It thinks God made the world-that space and time, heat and cold, and all the colors and tastes, and all the animals and vegetables, are things that God "made up out of His head" as a man makes up a story. But it also thinks that a great many things have gone wrong with the world that God made and that God insists, and insists very loudly, on our putting them right again.

— C.S. Lewis

Every word that proceeds from Hitler’s mouth is a lie. When he says peace, he means war. And when he names the name of the Almighty in a most blasphemous manner, he means the almighty evil one, that fallen angel, Satan. His mouth is the stinking maw of hell and his might is fundamentally reprobate. To be sure, one must wage the battle against National Socialism using rational means. But whoever still does not believe in the actual existence of demonic powers has not comprehended by far the metaphysical background of this war. Behind the tangible, behind that which can be perceived by the senses, behind all factual, logical considerations stands The Irrational, that is the battle against the demon, against the messengers of the Anti-Christ. Everywhere and at all times, the demons have waited in darkness for the hour in which mankind is weak; in which he voluntarily abandons the position in the world order that is based on freedom and comes from God; in which he yields to the force of the Evil One, disengaging himself from the powers of a higher order. Once he has taken the first step of his own free will, he is driven to take the second and then the third and even more with furiously increasing speed. Everywhere and at every time of greatest danger, people have risen up – prophets, saints – who are aware of their freedom, who have pointed to the One God and with His aid have exhorted the people to turn in repentance. Mankind is surely free, but he is defenseless against the Evil One without the true God. He is a like rudderless ship, at the mercy of the storm, an infant without his mother, a cloud dissolving into thin air.

I ask you, you as a Christian wrestling for the preservation of your greatest treasure, whether you hesitate, whether you incline toward intrigue, calculation, or procrastination in the hope that someone else will raise his arm in your defense? Has God not given you the strength, the will to fight? We must attack evil where it is strongest, and it is strongest in the power of Hitler...

We will not keep silent. We are your bad conscience. The White Rose will not leave you in peace!

- from the fourth leaflet of the White Rose

William Stringfellow on Living Humanly in the midst of Death

"Why would human beings take such risks?"

It is not, I think, because they were heroes or because they besought martyrdom; they were, at the outset, like the Apostles, quite ordinary men and women of various and usual stations and occupations in life. How is their tenacity explained?...Why did these human beings have such uncommon hope?

The answer to such questions is, I believe, that the act of resistance to the power of death incarnate in Nazism was the only means of retaining sanity and conscience. In the circumstances of the Nazi tyranny, resistance became the only human way to live.

To exist, under Nazism, in silence, conformity, fear, acquiescence, obeisance, collaboration--to covet "safety" or "security" on the conditions prescribed by the State--caused moral insanity, meant suicide, was fatally dehumanizing, constituted a form of death. Resistance was the only stance worthy of a human being, as much in responsibility to oneself as to all other humans, as the famous Commandment mentions. And if that posture involved grave and constant peril of persecution, imprisonment, or execution, at least one would have lived humanly while taking these risks. Not to resist, on the other hand, involved the certitude of death--of moral death, of the death of one's humanity, of death to sanity and conscience, of the death which possesses humans profoundly ungrateful for their own lives and for the lives of others.

The other recollection which now visits me from listening to those same Resistance leaders concerns Bible study...

[In the Resistance] the Bible became alive as a means of nurture and communication; recourse to the Bible was in itself a primary, practical, and essential tactic of resistance. Bible study furnished the precedent for the free, mature, ecumenical, humanizing style of life which became characteristic of those of the confessing movement. This was an exemplary way--a sacrament, really--which expounded the existential scene of the Resistance. That is, it demonstrated the necessities of acting in transcendence of time within time, of living humanly in the midst of death, of seeing and forseeing both the apocalyptic and eschatological in contemporary events. In Bible study within the anti-Nazi Resistance there was an edification of the new or renewed life to which human beings are incessantly called by God--or, if you wish to put differently, by the event of their own humanity in this world--and there was, thus, a witness which is veritably incorporated into the original biblical witness.

So those are the two techniques Stringfellow describes to support "the Christian resistance to death": 1) small acts of dissent within dehumanizing systems to preserve sanity and conscience and 2) nurturing this resistance by living within the apocalyptic narrative of the Bible. - Richard Beck

Read more here.