National Poetry Month

National Poetry Month 

April means that it is national poetry month!! Poetry to me is a time to slow down, listen closely, and make space for the creative voice within each of us. This month, we have the joy of hosting a poetry writing workshop with the help of Faye. Together, we’ve explored not only the elements of poetry, but also the vulnerability it takes to express and share something honest and personal. Creativity is both a gift and a practice, and its been a blessing to do alongside beloved community.

In our most recent class, we focused on blessings and odes. These are forms of poetry that ask us to pay attention to all that is around us that is worthy of our praise, gratitude, or wonder. It can reminds us that creativity is not just about producing something “good,” but simply about seeing the world with care and intention and highlighting those elements along the way.

In that spirit, we invite you to join us for our Open Mic Night on May 20th at 7 p.m., held at the church and online. Whether you’ve attended our class or are simply curious, you are welcome!! Come to read, to listen, or simply to be present. There is something powerful about gathering to celebrate creativity in all its forms. It reminds us that every voice matters, and that beauty often emerges when we make space for one another. An important part of what it means to be community is celebrating each other and our unique gifts.

As we prepare for our open mic night, you are invited to write your own ode or blessing. This could be to a person, a place, a moment, or even something small and easily overlooked. What might change if we chose to honor the ordinary, as well as the extraordinary?

We close with a blessing by Imtiaz Dharker, whose work beautifully captures struggle and grace and abundance:

Blessing

The skin cracks like a pod.
There never is enough water.
Imagine the drip of it,
the small splash, echo
in a tin mug,
the voice of a kindly god.

Sometimes, the sudden rush
of fortune. The municipal pipe bursts,
silver crashes to the ground
and the flow has found
a roar of tongues. From the huts,
a congregation: every man woman
child for streets around
butts in, with pots,
brass, copper, aluminum,
plastic buckets,
frantic hands,
and naked children
screaming in the liquid sun,
their highlights polished to perfection,
flashing light,
as the blessing sings
over their small bones.

—Imtiaz Dharker

Imtiaz Dharker is a Pakistani-Scottish poet, writer and artist. She lives in London and Mumbai, writes in English. In her poetry she takes on topics such as homeland, freedom and travel in an imaginative and questioning way and points to cultural and geographical conflicts within society and gender politics, which has brought her the 2014 Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry and the Cholmondeley Award.

For Such a Time as This...

I have been to countless conferences, workshops, and trainings focused on this iconic phrase from the book of Esther. In nearly every commissioning for something new, to bless us over the threshold moments in our lives, in ordinations, installations, and blessings this phrase is invoked to send urgency into our being that perhaps it is true that we are the ones we’ve been waiting for, for such a time as this. 

On my best days, I can look in the mirror and see myself and you with me, saying “yes” it is us, it is you, it is me. Then some days, I can’t even bear the image in the mirror because I’ve looked at the images in the newspaper first. When I look into my own eyes, I see the eyes of starving people half a world away, I see skeletal children with empty bowls begging for mercy, I see the screams of mothers holding the lifeless bodies of their babies who have starved to death. What can I do in such a time as this? What can any of us ordinary citizens do? 

This week, this poem by Rosemerry Wahtola Tommer arrested me and brought tears to my eyes: 

In the Airport, I wonder about enough

Could they ever be enough,
these stumbling attempts
to bring kindness to an aching world?
Enough, this holding the door for a stranger,
this saying I’m sorry, this holding a place in line?
How could it be enough, asks the ache,
when today I saw the photo of the mother
holding the starving child in Gaza,
his brown legs as thin as my wrists.
I am sick with helplessness.
What does it mean, enough?
Beside me on a bench,
a man I have never met is humming.
His tune blooms like a sun in my chest.
The warmth twines with the beat of my question,
How could any small act be enough?
Until the child in the photo and all children
are safe and fed and loved and held by loving mothers
who are safe and fed and loved
and held by loving others who are safe
and fed and loved—until then,
how could anything ever be enough?
The old man beside me has started to sing.
His eyes are closed, and his
low gentle voice braids beauty
into everything around him.
Even the questions that will never
have answers. Even this terrible ache.
How deeply I want to believe
it is not too late to save this world.

I read this poem the morning after coming home from our family reunion, which was a time of love, grace, and abundance. I read this after I spent much of the day in the car, catching up on the news and reading a book about rebuilding a world that is closer to the earth and her natural patterns. I read this after going to the grocery store for ingredients for dinners and lunches in the coming days. 

I did my shopping at Trader Joe’s, where you shop in a way that, to me, mimics lining up for an amusement park ride. At the end, instead of a ride on a roller coaster, you get to pay for your groceries, ring a bell for good service, and eat a good snack in the car on the way home. Usually, this snack is an impulse buy in the freezer section, something that glimmers over the frozen blueberries in TJ’s unusual organization. 

This time, as I was returning my cart, I ran into a fellow shopper who meandered through the aisles with me, who also treated himself to a car snack. We exchanged a knowing look with our car snacks in hand en route back to our cars from the cart return. The man was wearing a large kippa; I had on something with a large rainbow on it. He offered me a piece of dark chocolate with orange in it. I offered him some dried mango with chili flakes on it. In this exchange, two strangers from two different backgrounds, likely with very different beliefs, I felt a hope for what we can be when we reach across the borders of our lives with an offering of nourishment. I can’t fix the genocide happening in Palestine, but I can share offerings with a likely Orthodox Jewish man as we both look into each other’s eyes, hoping for an end to the starvation of God’s people. 

Is it enough? I am not sure. But that day, it’s what I had. If we practice the muscles of kindness more often, perhaps the muscles of hatred will atrophy replaced by the muscles of compassion. Perhaps these actions of love can help our prayers to cause a ripple effect that saves a child from starvation. Perhaps trusting that these choices are enough will in fact, be enough to save us on this roller coaster of life. 

God, in your mercy, receive our acts of kindness as actions toward the end of suffering for your people. Be with us in our bewilderment, sorrow, and anger. Show us that our proximate actions can and do make a difference. Meet us in our unbelief. 

In solidarity with those who cry out to God known in so many ways and through so many names, we cry out to the compassionate man of Jesus who taught us what it is like to live with loving kindness, 
Pastor Lauren 

Embracing the Great Turning

A few weeks ago, Greta Thunberg was deported from Israel after boarding The Freedom Flotilla Coalition’s demonstration to bring needed aid to Gaza. In response, she said, “The world needs more angry women.” This week, we lost one of ecology’s most prolific voices, who gave meaning to the anger and grief that comes with facing the climate crisis: Joanna Macy. Perhaps in studying Joanna Macy, we can learn to hold our own anger and grief for all of the degradation of our world; for the hungry, the unhoused, the rise of hatred, and the war-torn places that burn holes into the topography of our planet. 

Macy, whom you can read more about here in this gifted article, offered in her life’s work a reminder that we are connected in the web of life. Therefore, we are connected equally to the suffering of the world and also the joy of it; we are connected in the hopelessness and in the hopefulness; we are connected in the hurting and the restoration. She spoke of a way to use our grief toward action, speaking of the spiral of connection where we: acknowledge gratitude for the world; express pain for the world; “see with fresh eyes”; and “go forth.” 

Perhaps in this, we too can find the courage to say yes to expeditions like Greta Thunberg did, where we take risks to stand with the hungry, the hurting, the disenfranchised, and the voiceless. We don’t have to go further than our backyards to make a difference, as the very soil cries out for refuge from the scorching temperatures affected by our greed. 

So let us take our grief, our anger, our homage to ancestors like Joanna Macy as we participate in the great turning of our world toward flourishing. Today, Macy’s will be our benediction into this kind of work: 

Grace and The Great Turning

-Joanna Macy

When you act on behalf
Of something greater than yourself,
you begin to feel it acting through you
with a power greater than your own.

This is grace.

Today, as we take risks
for the sake of something greater
than our separate, individual lives,
we are feeling graced
by other beings and by Earth itself.

Those with whom and on whose behalf we act
give us strength 
and eloquence
and staying power
we didn’t know we had.

We just need to practice knowing that
and remembering that we are sustained
by each other
in the web of life.
Our true power comes as a gift, like grace,
because in truth it is sustained by others.
If we practice drawing on the wisdom
and beauty and strengths
of our fellow human beings
and our fellow species
we can go into any situation
and trust 
that the courage and intelligence required
will be supplied.

Living into the Great Turning With You,
Pastor Lauren

Photo: First red tomato of the season, a celebration of the joy of our planet.