Words from the World

WEEK 4

Monday

Hospitality

“The Guest House” by Rumi

This being human is a guest house. / Every morning a new arrival. // A joy, a depression, a meanness, / some momentary awareness comes / as an unexpected visitor. // Welcome and entertain them all! / Even if they’re a crowd of sorrows, / who violently sweep your house / empty of its furniture, / still, treat each guest honorably, / they may be clearing you out / for some new delight. // The dark thought, / the shame, the malice, / meet them at the door laughing, / and invite them in. // Be grateful for whoever comes, / because each has been sent / as a guide from beyond.

Rumi was a 13th-century Persian poet, Islamic scholar, theologian, and Sufi mystic born in the area that is now Afghanistan. https://grateful.org/resource/guest-house-rumi/

Tuesday

Mystery

Blessed Are You By Steve Garnaas-Holmes

Blessed are you
who guard your joy so tenderly
because you’re also heartbroken for the world.
Blessed are you who, in passing moments,
feel a flutter of dread
for what is larger than you, but more threatened,
for oceans and forests, peoples and generations,
and how they might suffer,
and how you could ever let them know you loved them.
Blessed are you when you see the child on the news
and something in you collapses a little.
Blessed are you when you wake in the night
with worry for the world,
with sand in your throat for weeping
and yet who carry on in hope.
Blessed are you, for your hope is not wishing,
but trust in the unseen, already rising.
Hold your thread of grief, and do not let go;
follow it into the darkness. It will guide you.
It will not sap but strengthen your courage.
You will go on. You will be true. You will be blessed.
Your very breath is the hope of the universe moving in you.
And still, beloved, guard your joy tenderly.
It, too, is holy.

Wednesday

Friendship

ELCA hears from Indigenous boarding school survivor ahead of National Day of Remembrance
Religion News Service, September 20, 2023. By Emily McFarlan Miller

George McCauley can still hear the school secretary’s voice calling his name over the loudspeaker on the wall of his 11th grade English classroom.

He can still remember walking back to his dorm at the Flandreau Indian School in South Dakota, wondering what he had done wrong, and the school official who met him there, telling him instead that his mother had died.

More than 50 years later, he can still feel the numbness of that moment, far away from his family. Only recently, he said, has he realized how his experience at boarding school created abandonment issues that impacted his life long after he graduated in 1971.

McCauley, a citizen of the Omaha Nation in northeastern Nebraska, shared his experience as a boarding school survivor on Sept. 13 in the first of a monthlong series of online classes and presentations hosted by the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America’s Truth and Healing Movement.

“I think we need to recognize the trauma that is still here and with the ones that have been to boarding school — the trauma that is felt by all relatives across Turtle Island,” or North America, McCauley said.

McCauley told participants that his experience attending high school at Flandreau was “not bad” compared with many Indigenous people’s experiences of abuse at boarding schools. Every survivor he’s talked to has had a different experience.

But “not bad” still meant marching every day during gym class and making his bed every morning with military precision. The federal boarding school system, after all, was modeled after the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania, which was founded in 1879 by Lt. Richard Henry Pratt with the motto “Kill the Indian, save the man,” McCauley said.

It still meant cutting his hair, which traditionally is worn long. He hasn’t cut his hair since he graduated, he said.

It meant separation from his family and culture, and what McCauley called “educational neglect.”

“I think it’s a very important thing that we talk about it so the healing can begin of what happened, and the way to begin with that is hearing the truth. The truth can’t be changed, the truth can’t be denied, and it can’t be ignored,” he said.

Thursday

Pilgrimage

“Alabama Has a Horrible New Way of Killing People on Death Row”
New York Times. September 18, 2023. By Bernard E. Harcourt.

After botching a series of executions by lethal injection, the State of Alabama is planning to use nitrogen gas to put condemned prisoners to death. The first execution will amount to a human experiment, because neither Alabama nor any other state has ever tried to kill people this way.

Late last month, prison guards distributed the state’s new execution protocol to prisoners in solitary confinement on Alabama’s death row. One hundred and sixty men and five women await execution in Alabama. They would be secured to a gurney, their noses and mouths would be covered by masks, and nitrogen would be pumped into their lungs until they suffocate.

Alabama is seeking to conduct the first such experiment on Kenneth Eugene Smith, who already survived a botched execution. (Last November.) It is hard to imagine a more ghastly ordeal than being marched back a second time to face the executioner and a new method of execution that has the possibility of unknown agony after decades in prison awaiting death.

We do not even reserve this fate for dogs or cats. Nitrogen gas asphyxiation was previously used to euthanize pets. However, the American Veterinary Medical Association no longer recommends nitrogen asphyxiation for nonavian animals, citing data that indicates those animals may experience panic, pain and severe physical distress before dying. The group states in its 2020 guidelines that nitrogen gas “is unacceptable” for animals other than chickens and turkeys.

What past executions amply demonstrate is that the State of Alabama is not competent at performing the task. … Three of the six known failed executions since 1946, …have taken place in Alabama, and all of those have occurred since 2018.

“Alabama Has a Horrible New Way of Killing People on Death Row” by Bernard E. Harcourt, September 18, 2023. New York Times. Copyright © 2023 The New York Times Company. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/18/opinion/alabama-executions-botched.html

Friday

Friendship

From Rockettes to Riverside: Senior minister Adriene Thorne leads NYC church
Religion News Service. September 22, 2023. By Adelle M. Banks.

Depending on the week, when the Rev. Adriene Thorne steps up to the prominent pulpit of New York’s Riverside Church, she invites people to hum, stretch or roll their shoulders before she starts her sermon.

“We’re creating space in our bodies, but also space in our spirit, to receive the message for the day,” she explained in an interview Wednesday (Sept. 20), days after her installation service. “Sometimes the stories in the Bible are traumatic. They are brothers fighting each other. And so creating some room and settling ourselves to receive that is really helpful for the message that I’m going to bring.”

The senior minister knows about the spiritual as well as the physical. Years before pursuing her call to ministry, she danced with the Rockettes five miles away at Radio City Music Hall.

Her journey to the pulpit at the renowned neo-Gothic church, where leading preachers such as Harry Emerson Fosdick, William Sloane Coffin Jr. and James Forbes Jr. made their mark, has also been unconventional. Thorne, 56, was raised Catholic, ordained in the Reformed Church in America and transferred her affiliation to the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) when she began leading the First Presbyterian Church of Brooklyn in 2016.

I love bringing dancers that I know into the space. We had some at my installation on Sunday. What I think is so powerful, about the arts, in worship, particularly dance: There are ways that we touch the holy that can’t be spoken. Even though in my tradition we center the spoken word, we center the sermon, what people remember when you talk to them years later, is that dance that they saw, that musical piece that they heard, that ritual of receiving Communion. That is what drops into the heart of people and drops them into the heart of God, faster than any sermon that I deliver.

Saturday

Friendship

“One Family” from the Bantu peoples

We offer our thanks to thee / for sending thy only Son to die for us all. / In a world divided by color bars, / how sweet a thing it is to know / that in thee we all belong to one family. // There are times when we, unprivileged people, / weep tears that are not loud but deep, / when we think of the suffering we experience. / We come to thee, our only hope and refuge. / Help us, O God, to refuse to be embittered / against those who handle us with harshness. // We are grateful to thee / for the gift of laughter at all times. / Save us from hatred of those who oppress us. / May we follow the spirit of thy Son Jesus Christ.