Metropolitan Community Church
Guerneville, California
Article published in the Forestville Gazette, May 2004
Keeping Dreams Alive
In the recent news, I have felt the continuation of a theme of retaliation played over and over within news events - families retaliating against each other, groups seeking revenge, countries seeking retaliation against another country. It has become tiring to hear of such countless acts, as an end does not appear to be in sight. I keep searching for the lesson of peace, and in this cycle of inflicted pain, I cannot find one. At times like this, I find myself looking to wiser sources for answers.
The poet David Whyte writes:
"This is not the age of information"
This is the age of loaves and fishes.
People are hungry".
A statement as true in the early centuries as it is in our time. Such hunger, the kind that can be nourished and truly satisfied, is not a hunger for retribution, but for peace.
I have worked for many years in acute psychiatry and a while back, was present when we admitted a teenager - a Navajo Indian male. His mother stopped by early the next morning to see him and I immediately heard words of negativity voiced by the nursing staff. Conversations about the mother's whereabouts the night before, why she was not at her son's side, that the family was very dysfunctional, and that she was then attempting to arrive during 'non-visiting hours' were shared among the staff. She was asked to return in the morning.
The next day, when I started speaking with the mother, I discovered that the young teen and his older brothers had been living with their grandmother on a reservation. Their father, an alcoholic, had died sometime before and all three brothers had drinking problems. The young teen had begun self mutilation - cutting himself, and someone called the reservation and the police, who brought him to a hospital. The mother, however, had been clean and sober for eight years, and was working a second job in the evenings to make ends meet as a single mother.
I watched the mother approach her child, and it was as though I saw their history in panorama behind them. I saw a people struggling to survive, many of their ancestors killed, land taken away. Even today, Navajos are engaged in legal battles over their land. I saw the effect of not enough work and a high level of alcoholism on the reservation. Those are acts of injustice within many levels; far too many to describe.
Unfortunately, every act of injustice, in some way or another, ends up in someone's body. In these two people, the injustice they had lived out, became visible. It was almost ironic that this
family ended up in a psychiatric unit where they are quickly diagnosed by white psychiatry as dysfunctional. It was unfortunate that what observers experienced was a need to punish - due to their ignorance.
In order for society to function on a higher level, we must remain sensitive to the needs and sufferings of others, and hold up grace and peace as attainable dreams. If we are
not on a regular basis deeply disturbed by injustices around us, it means we have bought into the silence, that we have stopped seeking this dream. A contemporary woman poet said: "I turned my face away for a moment and it became my life".
I used to like the story of the loaves and fishes, wherein we're presented with a scenario of a hungry people, and disciples who couldn't figure out how to feed anyone else, so they were cleaning their nets and 'calling it a day'. They'd apparently worked all night, catching nothing. The Greek word used there is "kopiao" which means "growing weary, to suffer exhaustion". It is in those moments of our own turmoil, that we can become insensitive to the needs of others. But then in the story, Jesus tells them, "Throw out your nets on the other side". Those are moments of unexpected grace. Rather than turning away, we can choose to live in love, rather than in fear. Sometimes, we just need to stay open to moments of tremendous grace, of experiencing the beginnings of new life, of suddenly seeing a new possibility.
I love the way that Howard Thurman describes that dream: it need not be a concrete outpouring of a world-shaking possibility - such may be crucial for a particular moment of human history. But it is not in these grand ways that a dream nourishes life. Sometimes a dream is that quiet persistence in the heart that enables us to ride out the storms of churning experiences. It is the ever recurring melody in the midst of the broken harmony and harsh discords of human conflict. There must be global ways to achieve such grace, to hold that dream as a reality, rather than resorting to retaliation or apathy.
We are called to build new possibilities in the world: a spiritual place for all people, a place where we live out the vision that people from all kinds of backgrounds and traditions can walk together, a vision that is larger than the different histories we come from, a place where we believe that as every act of injustice rests within someone's body - so every act of justice, grace and peacefulness, no matter how big or small will also rest there and will benefit somebody's life. This is a hunger which can be nourished, a dream which can be fulfilled.
Reverend Elisabeth Middelberg
Metropolitan Community Church of the Redwood Empire