Nonaligned faith and practice in the present
Some nights, some, mornings, I lay awake or come awake with my mind full of unfinished checklists of things I need to get done in the mundane world. So oppressive. the sense of impossibility—impossible even to prioritize, let alone to do.
How do we ever get through this life? It’s as if we feel we must have each breath, each heartbeat on a To Do list, else we will die. Why do our minds betray us in this way? Why
…
NOTE: I’ve changed the original title, “The microaggression of calling out microaggression,” to clarify the focus of my concern. It is important to educate people about instances of microaggression “in the moment.” What troubles me are acts of “calling out” I’ve witnessed which return the injury done, rather than inviting collaborative healing.
The microaggression of calling out
At the quarterly business meeting of my Quaker Yearly Meeting (regional association of Quaker Meetings), I kept stumbling over my own
…When I entered first grade in 1956, I faced a sort of peer treatment I had never previously experienced.
A little over two years earlier I had survived a bout of non-paralytic polio. My playmates then were happy to see me well. It didn’t affect their friendship that I had lost my resilience and coordination.
In first grade, though, among boys I had not previously known, I was suddenly a “sissy.”
This wasn’t about sexuality. Kids in
…A reading from today’s Global Meeting for Worship
1st Century – 1 John 2:27 (New New Testament version)
“But for you the anointing that you received from the Christ abides in you, and you are not in need of anyone to teach you; but since his anointing teaches you about everything, and since it is a real anointing, and no lie, then, as it has taught you, maintain your union with him.”
Can you not see
that the hurricane
is not
about you
but
around you?
It is not
being done to you. You
simply happen to be
in the midst
of it.
As
…
I saw, also, that there was an ocean
of darkness and death;
but an infinite ocean of light and love,
which flowed over
the ocean of darkness.
In that also I saw
the infinite love of God,
and I had great openings.
As the pastor began to speak the absolution,
I stood up and
interrupted the liturgy.
“Anyone who looks into their hearts
and acknowledges what they find there
also finds the power
to forgive
themselves.”
To the woman on my right
I said,
“You can still make love
…
The world groans.
She cries out under
heartless regimes
propped up by fearful,
hungry people.
The powerless
are driven into homeless exile
in the very battlefields they fled.
Broken,
with their children
stolen from them.
Other ages were more hopeful.
But ours
sees only end times
and flails back
…
NOTE: I originally posted this essay on The Surly Librarian, the blog I published from 2008-2016 during my years as a reference librarian with Jacksonville Public Library. On the blog’s Favorite Rants page, I declared my professional librarianship values:…I take a couple of themes very seriously:
- First, the quality
In much of the world, Samhain/ All Hallow’s Eve (Hallowe’en) /Día de los Muertos /Hanyijie (Chinese “Sweeping of the Graves”) is NOT about play-acting as ghouls.
It is about reconnecting with loved ones who have crossed over, yet who greet us across the veil when it is thinnest during the cusp of October-November, to eat and dance with us once more in memory.
This music video brought me
… 
…