Next In-person walk: Saturday, October 11, 9-10 a.m.
Covenant Presbyterian Church back parking lot, 2222 at Mo-Pac, Austin
Next Zoom discussion: Saturday, October 11, 10:30 a.m. Central Time (U.S. and Canada)
Zoom link
By Janet Davis
Walk In: Losing Our Lives by Stepping Away from Institutionalization
If you wake up in the morning, you’ve got another day. And everywhere you go, people should talk about you, and not necessarily
be saying good things.
The earth should move beneath your feet.
The “foreverness” within you should never be institutionalized.
Say to yourself “I know where I am; I am familiar with this condition. I am stepping away from this place to find the rest of who I am.
There is no guarantee of success. I must go past the point of no return.
When you leave your parent’s place, you are really stepping out into the Universe.
Life’s challenges are not supposed to paralyze you, they’re supposed to help you discover who you are.
The voice I have now, I got the first time I sang in a movement meeting, after I got out of jail . and I’d never heard it before in my life.
If you’re in a coalition and you’re comfortable, you know it’s not a broad enough coalition
I don’t care if you haven’t ever sung it before. If you don’t get out of the track you are in, you can’t make a new thing
Questions
What “institutions” with their long-standing fixed (and maybe lifeless) patterns within or without are you being invited to step away from right now?
What response or emotion rises when you consider that there are parts of yourself that you have yet to discover?
Are you in a track that is preventing you from making a new thing? Are you being invited to leave it?
Center: Meeting the Holy One in God’s Newness
But the God of the gospel is always making new. And we are always on the receiving end of God’s newness. Our nostalgia will not stop the newness from God. It will only make the newness more painful for us. God’s truth is indeed marching on. And we are at the work of catching up with that newness-receiving, embracing, and taking responsibility for that newness. God’s truth is marching on, and all of our illusionary nostalgia will not stop that march toward justice, peace, and freedom by way of mercy and compassion.
Ancient Echoes, pg 23, 24. Walter Brueggemann
Questions
The nature of God is always doing a new thing, whether we like it or not!
Where do you see new invitations, new life around you? Be mindful that these may well be disquieting or unwelcome realities, visions, thoughts, ideas, or desires that hold both grief and the seeds of hope just like this image of the ruins of a once beautiful cathedral in Glastonbury.
Where are you resisting God’s newness, caught in nostalgia that may on the surface feel comforting but, in its resistance of God’s newness, is actually creating pain for you?
Walk Out: Saving our Lives by Welcoming the Invasive, Infective, Resilient Love of God
Mold
God won’t suddenly jump in and fix the world
any more than this poem will. But listen.
God is the mustard seed of goodness
that slips down between the cracks, and roots.
God is at it, in infinite small ways,
like a virus spreading, like radioactive waste,
like knotweed you can’t get rid of.
God crawls down into the lowest places,
creeping deeper and deeper, under stuff, behind things,
always the dirtiest places, the poorest, most ignored.
God is the mold in the basement of the Fortress,
spreading the love that rots the timbers of cruelty.
The Empire won’t suddenly turn generous,
the Presidential Palace sheltering refugees.
But it can’t seal itself against spring,
against the fragrance of mercy.
The realm of God is like an infection
for which there is no cure.
The world won’t soon be fixed,
but it can never be purified of love.
Questions
As we walked through ruin after ruin in Ireland and England, I was struck by the power of seeds, moss, and lichen that had implanted themselves and flourished in the midst of a graveyard or the detritus of an institution that did not survive. Though a body or any single form of church may be diminishing, the essence of the love of God alive in the world is not. God is simply doing a new thing we are yet to grasp.
Where do you see signs of new life? Have you looked in the cracks and roots and dirty, hidden places in your own heart and in the world around you? Can you find a mustard-seed-sized piece of Love you’d like to tend today? What would that look like?
Remembering the angel’s words to the women, “Why do you seek the living among the dead?” (Luke 24:5), where are you looking for new life?