Dear Friends,
As we build the Beloved Community, we pray for you every day that you might continue to bring it about in your little corner of the world.
Today's Meditation presents a reflection "Small as a Grain of Sand" which talks about simple acts of kindness. Today is also the anniversary of the death of Martin Buber who talked about treating people as subjects and not as objects. The two seem to dovetail.
We invite you to join us as we commit
ourselves to working tirelessly to end systemic and structural racism in our society, in the church, in healthcare, in the workplace--wherever it shows up so that everyone may come to have more abundant life. May this meditation nourish our contemplative-active hearts and sustain all of us in action.
In the spirit of our philosophy of co-creating community and our awareness that the Spirit speaks through each of us, we invite you to share your meditations with us as well. We truly believe that it is God's economy of abundance: when we share our blessings, our thoughts, our feelings, we are all made richer.
We hope and pray that you find peace, healing, hope and the infusion of joy in your life!
With our love and care,
Ron and Jean
MEDITATION: Reflection: "Small as a Grain of Sand"
Reflection
Small as a Grain of Salt
Almost one year ago, I moved into St. Francis Catholic Worker House in Chicago’s Uptown neighborhood—a small community of thirteen people in a nineteenth-century farmhouse. The house is a quiet reminder of Peter Maurin’s call for American Catholics to embrace a program of cult, culture, and cultivation—that is liturgy, literature, and tending to the land.
St. Francis House is part of an international movement, the Catholic Worker movement, and a global Church. But the house itself is small, and its program of social transformation begins at the personal level: saying a kind word, asking someone what they need, and then taking responsibility for providing it to them rather than passing the buck.
The identity of a “Catholic Worker” has forced me to step up to a challenge I’d rather avoid: if I am not willing to stop and talk to the man on the street corner begging for a dollar, who will? Often I have no cash to give, but I can stop, talk, and ask his name. Knowing him by name means that Juan is no longer a stranger but a guest—a neighbor I can know and love.
These are such small acts of love—small as a grain of salt. But these miniature moments of conversion flavor the world.
It takes courage to risk relationship, to be countercultural, to stand in solidarity with the ones our society scorns and shames. It takes bravery to embrace the person we would rather pretend we don’t know—the addict, the mentally ill, the unworthy—because we don’t want people thinking we’re like them.
But it is love’s bravery that sets the world on fire.
Beginning with one small neighborhood, one small house—one small kingdom of God.
Renée Darline Roden
Renée Darline Roden is a writer and playwright in Chicago. She holds degrees in theology from the University of Notre Dame and in journalism from Columbia University.