Daily Dose (April 7 – 10)
TUESDAY APRIL 7 — Rich is not about what we possess. Or own.
In our culture, we’ve turned wealth into a way to objectify stuff and people and relationships, predicated on having, possessing and preening.
So. Here’s our paradigm shift: Rich is about the connections—with one another—that honor dignity, and promote the value of love, empathy, inclusion, compassion, and kind-heartedness.
As we learned in our story yesterday, “How do we know they are rich?”
“They serve one another.”
Let’s think of this as a new wealth account, allowing us to see the world with new eyes. We are not weighted down by consumption and comparison. We can be present. In this moment.
Meaning that we can be present (we can see, making space and room) for those around us. In times of gladness, and in times where pain and suffering are real.
Speaking of the permission to be present in order to see and make space (yes, to literally honor), I love this story.
Sarah is an ordinary woman with a peculiar habit. You see, every Saturday, when the Jehovah’s Witnesses make their neighborhood rounds, she invites them in. And begins by saying, “I’m glad to see you. I’m not going to covert you, but you all are welcome to stay for tea.” And every Saturday, the missionaries do just that.
Another time, a salesman dropped in—just an old-fashioned door-to-door salesman, selling vacuum cleaners.
“Come on in,” she tells him. “I need to tell you that I’m not going to buy, and my baby is asleep, so no loud demo, but you look like you’ve had a long day, would you like a cup of coffee?”
“Why?” the salesman asked.
“Well, this may sound strange, but I actually believe that God may be found in any person, so I’m offering you coffee because you might be Jesus.”
I’m certain that for the salesman, it was easily his strangest house call ever; but even so, he sat for a spell, and enjoyed the coffee.
There was a time where I would have overlooked this story (adapted from Lauren Winner’s, “Still”). Or more likely, would have dismissed it. It falls under the category of too-good-to-be-true.
But here’s the deal: more than ever, we need it.
In a world where it’s too common to hear, “I feel like I can’t even relate to them (family and friends) anymore.”
In a world where, because of fear and apprehension, we mistrust just about everyone, and everything. And yes, even kindness. Especially kindness.
I read that in some countries it is the ruse of would-be pickpockets. They pose as persons needing direction, and when kind strangers stop to help, those who help are fleeced. Is it the exception? Yes. But even so, fear carries the narrative of our time, and our relations, and our conversations.
“If we have no peace,” Mother Teresa reminded us, “it is because we have forgotten that we belong to each other.”
That’s why I love this story about Sarah. And I do have a hankering for kindness.
But, this is not a Sabbath Moment about kindness. Per se. Because our temptation is to bottle up whatever Sarah had, or find a way to teach it or market it online.
Lord knows, we find multiple ways to complicate life.
It is not enough, apparently, just to offer a smile, a kind word and a cup of coffee.
Sarah’s story is about letting life in. Every bit of life.
Sarah’s story is about making space. About the healing power that flourishes when we root ourselves in love and hospitality, and warmth and generosity.
“They serve one another.”
Let us pause this week, and take the time to reach out and to say “thank you” to those who have made space and shelter for us.
WEDNESDAY APRIL 8 — I love hiking in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. My favorite, an old Cherokee Indian trail, where you make your way up to Hemphill Bald, the highest point in the Cataloochee Divide.
On the ascent, we will pass an old misshapen white-oak tree. While stately, it’s easy to walk on by, and save for noticing that the bent trunk is in the shape of a lightning bolt, giving the tree little thought.
Until I learned the story of the tree.
The 70-foot-tall oak—somewhere between two and three hundred years old—is not merely a freak of nature. As a sapling, the tree was “trained” (intentionally bent) by Cherokee Indians. The purpose? To communicate with every trail-walker.
The tree is literally, a signpost, or a message for generations of Cherokee travelers to let them know that they could stop here, and from the shape of the tree, find their bearings.
Those who know the park, simply call it the Cherokee Tree.
And yes. When life unravels (detonates), we can, and we do, lose our bearings. I resonated with this today from Psychologist Michael Valdovinos, who said, “Anytime people repeatedly participate in or witness actions that violate their moral framework and they feel unable to change it, you create the conditions for moral injury.” He goes on to say that the wild political situation in the US now is leaving more citizens in moral distress than ever before. However (and I loved this), the key to feeling better (to finding our bearings, and our resilience), also lies in other people. We are on this journey together.
So, yes, with Frodo (“I wish the ring had never come to me. I wish none of this had ever happened in my time.”), we wish none of this incivility had ever happened in our time, which means that we do need the invitation of the Cherokee Tree.
Like the little boy in our Sabbath Moment story about a very wealthy man who took his son on a world-hopping trip visiting “underprivileged” countries, with the firm purpose of showing his son how “poor people” live. What I value (and need to embrace) is the boy’s recognition, and appreciation about real wealth. “They serve one another. They have friends to protect them,” he told his father.
Yes. That is a Cherokee tree.
That is where we find our bearings for resilience.
That regardless of fear, we can choose hope.
That regardless of uncertainty, we can choose to trust other people.
That regardless of ugliness, we can choose to give and receive grace.
That regardless of discord, we can choose to seek harmony.
That regardless of animosity, we can choose kindness.
That regardless of intolerance, we can choose inclusion.
Or John Pavlovitz’s reminder today for the child in every one of us. “And I’ll remind them that even when bad people are rewarded, doing the right thing is still the thing most worth doing.
I’ll teach them that when hatred seems the most treasured currency, love is still worth more than gold.”
Rev. Cameron Trimble’s reflections were good for my heart today. “Howard Thurman wrote about the ‘growing edge’ of a society, the place where new life is possible because people refuse to accept what diminishes human dignity. That edge is not held by those in power alone. It is held by communities, by individuals, by those who choose to remain grounded when the systems around them begin to lose their balance.
We cannot control the interior life of those who hold high office. We can decide how we will live in response.
We can refuse to mirror instability with instability. We can resist the pull toward fear-driven thinking. We can stay rooted in relationships that hold us accountable and keep us connected to reality.
This is the work of disciplined, mature leadership. It is the work of remaining human in a moment when power itself seems to forget what that means.
The biblical witness does not promise that such moments resolve quickly. It does insist that they do not have the final word, because power that loses its mind eventually collapses under its own weight.
What remains, and what rebuilds, are the communities that learned how to live with clarity, courage, and care in the midst of it.”
As I write this, a shoutout to the crew in Artemis II for their photos from the other side of the moon. And to the support from all the men and women at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston. What a gift, to go where no man or woman has ever gone before.
And yes, in case you are wondering, I am very proudly wearing my Michigan Blue today. Congrats to the University of Michigan basketball team.
THURSDAY APRIL 9 — “If we have no peace,” Mother Teresa reminded us, “it is because we have forgotten that we belong to each other.”
Our stories this week have been about the healing power that flourishes when we root ourselves in love and hospitality, and warmth and generosity.
Affirming the little boy’s recognition, and appreciation about “real wealth”. In the villages he visited with his father, he watched the people, and after the trip told his father what he learned about what it meant to “be rich”.
“They serve one another. They have friends to protect them.”
It my “business”, it is easy to talk about what we believe. Yes, much easier to talk about it. Practice is another thing altogether.
Because we can simply recite a creed. And this I have learned over the years: beliefs are valid as a verbal affirmation, but they only come to life, (they only have bearing and impact), when there is skin—with faces, and names, and skin—attached.
Which takes me to my very favorite story to tell an audience, and to habitually retell myself.
A little boy was having nightmares. The kind that requires a momma’s reassurance. (Dads, at least from my own experience, are typically not wired for nightmare duty.) So, to his momma’s room the boy went, “Momma, momma, I’m having nightmares.”
“It’s okay honey,” she told him, “Here’s what I want you to do. Go back to your room, kneel down by your bed, pray to Jesus, and he’ll fix it.”
Back to his room, the boy knelt by his bed, prayed to Jesus, hopped back in bed, and… more nightmares. All mommas know this story. Back and forth to momma’s room, throughout the night.
On the sixth visit, “Momma, I know, I know the drill. I’m going to go back to my room. I’m going to kneel down by my bed, and pray to Jesus, and he’ll fix it. But before I do that, can I just lay in bed with you, and have you hold me?”
“Sure honey, why?”
“Because sometimes I need Jesus with skin on it.”
Yes. And today, more than ever, we can be—and we need to be—Jesus with skin on it. Voices of mercy. And Compassion. And Welcoming. And Healing.
Speaking of names and faces and Jesus with skin, I just read this today in Religion News Service. A story about reporter Aleja Hertzler-McCain’s travel to El Paso, Texas, in March, to shadow two Catholic sisters as they accompanied detained migrants and their families in immigration court.
Part of the Scalabrinian religious community, which focuses on serving migrants, Sisters Leticia Gutiérrez Valderrama and Elisete Signor have built a comprehensive ministry and network of volunteers that has accompanied more than 1,000 people in immigration court since last June — and has continued to work with hundreds more in detention centers, as well as their families.
“I go because he is a human being. He is a migrant who is, at this moment, possibly lonely, depressed, scared,” Signor told Hertzler-McCain in March as they waited to visit a detained Sudanese migrant.
When Signor emerged from the visit, she came back with a task: “He likes crosswords, and I’m going to buy him one tomorrow.”
You can read Hertzler-McCain’s full profile of the two sisters and their work to mobilize care for immigrants in their diocese.
This ministry “doesn’t only transform the experience of the people we accompany, but we ourselves are transformed,” Gutiérrez Valderrama said at the volunteer information session.
“We are going to encounter sacred people. What they are going to tell us is sacred,” Gutiérrez Valderrama told potential volunteers. “Because who we’re going to encounter is the Lord Jesus there,” she explained, drawing on Christian theology of Christ’s presence with vulnerable people.
Yes, names and faces. Jesus with skin on it.
So, yes and Amen. “They serve one another. They have friends to protect them.”
FRIDAY APRIL 10 — “They serve one another. They have friends to protect them,” the little boy told his father after visiting villages, relating what he learned about what it means to “be rich”.
Yes. Let’s call it a new wealth account, allowing us to see the world with new eyes. Not weighted down by consumption and comparison. We can be present. In this moment. And, we can be present for (we can see, making space and room) those around us. In moment of gladness, and in moments of pain and suffering. Connection matters.
I resonated with this, from Maria Shriver, “I read an article about what kids need and how certain teachers are best able to help them when they’re having a meltdown. The article said to ask a child, ‘Do you want to be helped, heard, or hugged?’ The writer then went on to say those are actually great questions to ask anybody at this time. I love that. As leaders—be it in our families, our workplaces, or our communities—we will never be able to totally have everyone’s back all the time. That said, we can minister in the gap with our hearts and with compassion. We can minister by listening, by sharing practices, by showing tenderness, and by sharing our own experiences that helped us when we felt alone, afraid, and disconnected. We can minister by apologizing as well when it’s needed. My friends, see yourself on this day and this week as a minister with a pulpit or platform, because you actually have one. Believe that you have a message worth sharing because you do. Believe that you have a presence that can make another person feel protected in this moment because you do.”
“They serve one another.”
Let us welcome what the young boy recognized; that serving and protecting came natural to the people. In other words, it spilled from what had been (and was being) cultivated inside.
Which brings to mind Etty Hillesum’s empowering words, “Ultimately, we have just one moral duty. To reclaim large areas of peace in ourselves, more and more peace, and to reflect it towards others. And the more peace there is in us, the more peace there will also be in our troubled world.”
Thank you Etty. Your words bolster and sustain me.
And let us remember, Etty did not write that sentence from a dispassionate distance. Speaking of a world tilting, Etty was a young Jewish woman who lived in Amsterdam during the Nazi occupation and who died in Auschwitz, one of the millions of victims of the Holocaust. We didn’t know about her meticulous diary until decades after her death. From the day when Dutch Jews were ordered to wear a yellow star, up to the day she boarded a cattle car bound for Poland, Etty consecrated herself to the wholehearted task of bearing witness to the inviolable power of love. To honor the sacred present with sensitivity to human suffering and gratitude for beauty in the everyday.
And we look forward to welcoming the Artemis II crew back to planet earth. I don’t know if you saw some of the photos they took from the other side of the moon. And photos of earth from that distance. My Oh My.
Prayer (poem) for our week…
Making Peace
A voice from the dark called out,
‘The poets must give us
imagination of peace, to oust the intense, familiar
imagination of disaster. Peace, not only
the absence of war.’
But peace, like a poem,
is not there ahead of itself,
can’t be imagined before it is made,
can’t be known except
in the words of its making,
grammar of justice,
syntax of mutual aid.
A feeling towards it,
dimly sensing a rhythm, is all we have
until we begin to utter its metaphors,
learning them as we speak.
A line of peace might appear
if we restructured the sentence our lives are making,
revoked its reaffirmation of profit and power,
questioned our needs, allowed
long pauses . . .
A cadence of peace might balance its weight
on that different fulcrum; peace, a presence,
an energy field more intense than war,
might pulse then,
stanza by stanza into the world,
each act of living
one of its words, each word
a vibration of light—facets
of the forming crystal.
Denise Levertov
Photo… “Good morning! I lived in Lakewood, WA, for three years and never heard about the cherry trees! Did see the daffodils in Puyallup and the tulips at La Conner? And, I was visiting my daughter in the county area of Anderson, IN, and participated in a protest. Just like you, trying to exercise my right to dissent and protest. Lastly, if you use my photo, this is a sunset from my daughter’s property–the sun is hiding in between the trees. Have a blessed Holy Week.” Ina Stickland… Thank you Ina… And thank you for your photos, please send them to tdh@terryhershey.com
Donation = Love… Your gifts make Sabbath Moment possible.
I am so very grateful.
Please Share Sabbath Moment with others.
And find it on Facebook @RevTerryHershey
