On My Knees (Sunday Night)

Tonight, after a long, long, long day, I fall to my knees in thanksgiving for the relationships that sum up the work that I do and the path that I'm on.  I praise God for the queer marchers and straight allies in today's PRIDE extravaganza.  I whisper sweet 'alleluias' for the mothers and lovers, for the children and grandparents, for the organizers and followers, who came out in so many ways to show that justice and joy go hand in hand.  And I thank my sweet Jesus for blazing this path for me and so many others, shattering boundaries and insisting on love, only love as the way forward.

Thomas Merton

I'm reminded here of Thomas Merton's bold letter to a young activist, and its insistence: "In the end, it is the reality of personal relationships that saves everything."  And this, for me, is what discipleship, ministry, even humanity is all about.  Personal relationships.  Solidarity in friendship. Finding ways to march and pray, even and especially when prayer comes hard.  And marching seems beside the point.

"Do not depend on the hope of results. When you are doing the sort of work you have taken on, essentially an apostolic work, you may have to face the fact that your work will be apparently worthless and even achieve no result at all,if not perhaps results opposite to what you expect. As you get used to this idea, you start more and more to concentrate not on the results but on the value, the rightness, the truth of the work itself. And there too a great deal has to be gone through, as gradually you struggle less and less for an idea and more and more for specific people. The range tends to narrow down, but it get much more real. In the end, it is the reality of personal relationships that saves everything."

And there was more, even more, much, much more, to my day.

On my knees tonight, I lift up the struggle for justice and peace, the hard work required of those who claim nonviolence as a fundamental commitment.  I lift up three different delegations I've had the privilege of leading with a colleague on trips to Israel and Palestine.  And I recall a whole network of relationships: Jews and Christians, Israelis and Palestinians, secular activists and religious visionaries.  I give thanks to God for the two dozen who gathered tonight, the two dozen who've traveled together and wrestled together in the Holy Land, over three different delegations.  We met--deep into the night--to reflect on our commitments and experiences, to question strategies of nonviolence and reconciliation.  We remembered faces, stories, testimonies heard.  And we held in our hearts a variety of disagreements: around an initiative in the UCC to divest from companies profiting on the occupation of Palestine.  

We expressed bewilderment, hope, respect, disappointment, often in the same breath.

2011: Wahat al Salaam/Neve Shalom (in Israel)

And in all that, we held together the promise of friendship, even in seasons of disagreement.  We held together the value of collaboration, even in moments of profound uncertainty and fearfulness.  We found that the rich substructure of Jewish faith and Christian discipleship can be strong and resilient and good enough--to hold all this.

And somehow, in all of this, we honored a whole set of relationships beyond our walls: with Palestinian activists struggling in their own lands for liberation and peace; for Israeli families aching for freedom from fear; for Jewish colleagues wrestling with rising concerns around bigotry around the world; for UCC allies acting out of faith and conscience, in solidarity with sisters and brothers in crisis, in Bethlehem and Gaza and elsewhere.

All this comes to me on my knees, tonight, in the darkness.  In the space of grace and bewilderment on my living room floor.  All this comes to me through a minion of others, a myriad of others, gay marchers and transgender pioneers, Christian mystics and Jewish trailblazers, the suffering ones so far away and the defiant activists in my own neighborhood.  I am made whole by their courage, emboldened by our many differences, inspired by this great humanity.  All of it.  All of it.  Always, all of it.