Book prayer

Book 

You are already hear among us,

risen up like a gift. 

I pray for the patience 

to see you, your pieces and your whole, 

to walk patiently, listen well, 

ask for help, to craft carefully but not to over-shape,

to laugh as much as I cry,

to take it one step at a time. 

I pray

to be faithful to your cacophony

symphony

of Spirit-filled voices, 

Amen. 

To be a Friend

The past 24 hours have been hard for the FGC Gathering community. First, early yesterday a young man fell while skateboarding, badly cracked his skull, and was flown to a hospital in Roanoke. 

That would have been enough, but then yesterday afternoon another member of the Gathering community - an elder and minister among Friends, a long time activist for peace and LGBTQ rights, a mother and grandmother - was killed in a bicycle accident on campus.

Nobody's died at Gathering in a long time. This is hard.  The shock and grief and shock is palpable everywhere, felt by the gathered body. 

Going into lunch today I noticed that people had started "cards" for Tom and his family and for Bonnie's family. As I thought about what I might write, I drifted along the big pieces of flip chart paper to the end of the table. There I encountered a third card, this time for the driver  of the dump truck, who's name we do not know, who struck and killed Bonnie. 

The three were out together, weighted together, equal, there for all to sign. There was clear recognition of the driver's pain too. 

This kind of inclusion and forgiveness, for lack of better words, seems obvious thinking about it, but it is something we rarely see in our adversarial culture. 

In that moment, I felt particularly proud to be a Friend.  

Interesting thoughts on darkness, transformation, racism, and the divine

From China Galland's book Longing for Darkness: Tara and the Black Madonna (excerpted from pages 152-153):

To say that one is 'longing for darkness' is to say that one longs for transformation, for a darkness that brings balance, wholeness, integration, wisdom, insight, I now realize. For a long time I didn't know what I meant when I said that, when I felt it - a longing for darkness. I remember standing in front of that statue of Kali Varanasi and thinking of this Madonna at Einsiedeln. Now I find not only the Madonna but the beginning of words to name that longing and desire. 

Late one night over coffee, when I said that I was longing for darkness, a friend said "Watch out! It's dangerous to say that. You don't know what you're calling to yourself." 

The association of the word "darkness" with something negative, with evil, is precisely the problem I am naming. That kind of association is one of the cornerstones of racism. Racism is evil, not darkness. There is a redeeming darkness and this is what I seek. 

*** 

Seeing the Madonna of Einsiedeln proved to me that the longing for darkness is a deeply felt human need that cuts across, goes beyond, and at the same time includes ethnicity. This is a multivalent darkness. This is the darkness of ancient wisdom, of people of color, of space, of the womb, of the earth, of the unknown, of sorrow, of the imagination, the darkness of death, of the human heart, of the unconscious, of the darkness beyond light, of matter, of the descent, of the body, of the shadow of the Most High. 

***

Like light, darkness has a wide range of symbolic meanings. The color black can signify the stage just before enlightenment in Tibetan Buddhism - imminence. space; burning; the final stage of the soul's journey to beatitude in a Sufi tradition; wisdom; fertility in Old Europe; purity in Turkish tradition;mourning in the West; and the first step in the medieval alchemical process, the nigredo . 

***

The scientific disciplines of astronomy, astrophysics, particle physics, and cosmology have turned the world inside out in the last decade, metaphorically speaking. The world that we see, called the 'luminous world,' is now believed to be only a fraction of what exists. Ninety percent of the universe is apparently made up of dark matter, about which we know very little.

*** 

This elusive dark matter that cannot be seen, only felt, as we observe its gravitational effects on galaxies, is 90 percent of what exists. We cannot see it, know it, or measure it, yet science maintains that it's there. Whether new discoveries will render the existence of dark matter obsolete, paradigmantically we have reached the limits of light. The world is not as it seems. What is, is not evident. The lessons of darkness.