“I ask you sir, to have patience with all that is unresolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like closed rooms, like the books written in a foreign language. Don’t try to find the answers now. They cannot be given away, because you would not be able to live them. For everything is to be lived. Live the questions now. Perhaps you then may gradually, without noticing, one day in the future, live into the answers.”

– Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke (translated by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy) 

Reflection

I found this passage many years ago before I read the book. The passage meant a lot to me because  I had unresolved questions about what I was feeling in my heart. The passage gave me comfort knowing that someday, with the passage of time, the answers might reveal themselves.

Prayer

May those unanswered questions flow like waves of water over rocks and pebbles, letting ourselves flow with the current that will reveal itself as we flow into the peace that passes all understanding.

Amen.

“The best arguments in the world won’t change a person’s mind. The only thing that can do that is a good story.”

 – from The Overstory by Richard Powers

Reflection

Humans are rationalizing creatures; we can often explain our actions and reactions through an internal series of justifications. This also means that we are not always rational or logical. We can easily twist and bend in the face of arguments to suit our own desires.

But we cannot escape stories. We are story-telling and story-receiving beings that explain our own pasts and futures through stories. The way we live our lives and interact with ourselves and communities tells everyone around us a story. We are living, breathing, embodied stories.

What story are you telling?

In this season of reflection and healing, how can we each individually and together pay attention to the stories we are living? How can we live stories of love, forgiveness, compassion, and joy?

Prayer

God of many names and voices, rescue us from our arguments and dwell lovingly in our stories. Amen.

“That on the first day of January, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty-three, all persons held as slaves within any State or designated part of a State, the people whereof shall then be in rebellion against the United States, shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free; and the Executive Government of the United States, including the military and naval authority thereof, will recognize and maintain the freedom of such persons, and will do no act or acts to repress such persons, or any of them, in any efforts they may make for their actual freedom.” – Excerpt from Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation.

Reflection

It took a few years before all enslaved people in the US became legally free. People in Texas didn’t hear the news until June 19, 1865 when General Gordon, of the arriving Union Army announced the fact. Enslaved people in Union states became officially free with the adoption of the 13th Constitutional Amendment on Dec. 6, 1865. Members of the Chocktaw indigenous nation enslaved in the “Indian Territories” were freed in 1866.

Juneteenth, also known as Jubilee Day or Emancipation Day, is the longest running African-American celebration of emancipation. Freedmen in Galveston, Texas created the first organized celebration on June 19, 1866. Juneteenth was recognized as a US federal public holiday this last June 17th, by the 117th Congress (2021-22). African-Americans have been celebrating their freedom from slavery ever since they became aware of the President’s Proclamation. It took the US Government 158 years to acknowledge that releasing people from slavery is something to be

celebrated, or at the least, that a significant sector of the American population celebrates it.

I’m realizing that Juneteenth is important to me, too. If President Lincoln had not freed slaves in the Confederate states, I might still be living in a society that condones enslavement of humans. I and my family might still be enslaving people, as we did in the late 1630s.

Prayer

God of freedom, it’s time we stop segregating holidays by race. I’m starting to plan my Juneteenth party for next year! Amen.

“I believe that people will not merely endure: they will prevail. They are immortal, not because they alone among creatures have an inexhaustible voice, but because they have a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet’s, the writer’s, duty is to write about these things. It is their privilege to help people endure by lifting their hearts, by reminding them of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of their past. The poet’s voice need not merely be the record of humanity, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help people endure and prevail.”

 – William Faulkner, Nobel Prize acceptance speech (gender-neutralized)

Reflection

This helps me understand the Bible. It is a collection of hopes and fears, tragedies and triumphs, collected to help people endure and prevail, and it has succeeded remarkably in doing so. The authors and assemblers of the Bible weren’t looking for historical accuracy, they were looking for truths that would strengthen people, that would give us the courage to persevere.

Prayer

God, give me more courage to love my neighbor, to see all people as my neighbor, to suffer their indignities and delight in their joys, to share their losses, to desire their health, to help them find good food and housing and learning, to open more doors for them and close more jails.

Amen.