Grief and gratitude, intermingled

I went to bed last night with news of the shooting at the Shoreline Plaza apartment building on my heart. Sadness and anger at the unchecked and unnecessary steady march of gun violence in our community coursed through me, and still do. Gratitude came, too: gratitude for the people who moved toward each other to help in moments of danger and fear, gratitude for the downtown congregations who opened their doors immediately to serve as Red Cross shelters and Family Reunification Centers for the residents displaced from their homes, gratitude for the relationships among the leadership and clergy of our interfaith congregations and the ability to show up with and for each other and for the larger community and point a way of compassion and care across difference, gratitude to be a part of this religious community where so often I get to see the best of us as human beings in the moments when I am also witnessing the worst of what we can do to one another. 

This morning, fresh from my morning meditation and prayers, I read the news of Gloria Steinem’s death. Sadness rose again for me, paired this time with the sure knowledge that this was a long and well-lived life. I pulled up an interview of Gloria Steinem describing decision points in her life. Her big turning toward her own awakening and what would become shared leadership of the women’s movement took place in a church basement. Sitting in that basement listening to women describe their experiences of accessing illegal abortions and seeing those experiences taken seriously showed her that another way was possible—a way and a world in which the needs and experiences and the leadership of women could and would be taken seriously, a world where women could and would make decisions about their own lives and their own bodies. 

Earlier this week, we learned of Wendell Berry’s death. Writer, poet, environmentalist, mystic—I first encountered Wendell Berry’s words in a Unitarian Universalist church. You can turn to the back of our hymnal to find his words, reminding us that out in the peace of wild things, we can find a place of rest even in the midst of despair and know ourselves connected. This week, I’m sitting with these words of his:

The fragment of the earth 

that is now me is only on its way 

through me. It is on its way 

from having been a tree, 

a school of fish, a terrapin, 

a flock of birds. It will pass 

through all those forms again. 

In church basements where people dare to tell their truths and organize for a better world, in moments where we know our interconnection and feel the awe of the natural world of which we are a part, in moments of crisis when the doors of congregations are flung open wide and we turn toward one another and those we don’t yet know with care instead of fear, when we remember who we are and who we can be and know our power together, when we act our way into the world of mutual thriving and love that we dream about—this is the best of us. I see it here at church. 

See you at church,

Rev. Jen