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10
Sep
2020
What good are memories when there’s no one who shares them? Or cares about them? And yet roses do bloom in December, because memories are sometimes just as real as reality, and so my mother’s knitting needles still click as they knit my sweaters and socks. My dark road unfurls ahead, leading who knows where, over the hills and far away, because the granddaughter who once rode my ankle to the bounce of a cock horse going to Banbury Cross has gone away too, and my empty arms can still feel rocking her through the black pit of an Ethiopian night.
My baggage brims over with memories, transcending time. Some hurt. Still, I’m grateful each time the wisps of fog pull aside and let me re-live the past.
Categories: Soft Edges
Tags: memories, fog
6
Black people in the U.S. Indigenous people in Canada. Jews in Germany, during Nazi rule. Japanese on the west coast during WII. Doukhobors in the 1950s.
If you’re not one of them, it’s almost impossible to imagine what it’s like to be one of them.
But suppose people who share your faith and your beliefs were being persecuted? Could you identify with them?
Such as Christians in India.
In Canada, we treat Christianity as the norm.
But what would it feel like if the Christian culture you take for granted turned you into a persecuted minority
Categories: Sharp Edges
Tags: India, Persecution Relief, Christians
4
I had my 84th birthday earlier this week. It’s a privilege to have lived this long.
Franciscan priest Richard Rohr has written several books about the process of aging. Basically, he suggests, the first half of life is about acquiring -- possessions, wealth, friends, family. The second half is about letting go -- of our acquisitions, our ideas, eventually our lives.
Recently, he’s been writing about a pattern of spirituality. He calls it Order, Disorder, and Re-Order.
In his terms, we inherit from our parents, our friends, and our social culture an understanding of the world we live in. That’s the Order. We don’t question it; we just accept it.
Then as we mature, we discover that the old Order doesn’t work as well as it should. So we reject bits and pieces of what we used to take for granted.
And then eventually, we re-organize our lives and our understandings into a new Order.
Tags: Rohr, order disorder reorder