Valentine’s Day is one of those commercialized holidays that boost the bottom lines of candy companies — and florists. But when I was a little girl, Feb. 14 wasn’t about flowers or even the chocolates in the heart-shaped box that my mother would put on top of my cereal bowl in the morning. (It was always a beautiful sight to see that loving gesture brightening what would have been just another ordinary wintry day for my brother, sister and me. I tried my best not to get into the candy before heading to school, emphasis on “tried.”)
The Rev. Dr. Jacqui Lewis recently recalled for the renamed Association of Partners in Christian Education the scene — including tastes, smells and lasting impressions — of the first time she took communion when she was 7½ years old.
Valentine’s Day is one of those commercialized holidays that boost the bottom lines of candy companies — and florists. But when I was a little girl, Feb. 14 wasn’t about flowers or even the chocolates in the heart-shaped box that my mother would put on top of my cereal bowl in the morning. (It was always a beautiful sight to see that loving gesture brightening what would have been just another ordinary wintry day for my brother, sister and me. I tried my best not to get into the candy before heading to school, emphasis on “tried.”)
Had he been told in advance about the death and heartache wreaked by the pandemic, the Jan. 6 insurrection at the Capitol and the killings of people of color over the past months, “I’d be tempted to run away, to cower in anxiety and fear,” the Rev. Eugene Cho, president and chief executive officer of Bread for the World, said during a sermon featured in the recent Festival of Homiletics. “I’m grateful that God, out of God’s goodness and grace, has invited all of us to be leaders in a church that serves through humble servant leadership.”
During my first year as a pastor, there were certain milestones I knew to look forward to. I looked forward to the first time I stood at the communion table and invited my congregation to share in the feast, and the first time I marked an infant with water and proclaimed how much God loved her in baptism. I looked forward to my first Christmas and first sunrise Easter service. But there were other firsts that I didn’t know about that caught me off guard with their beauty.
The first time I became aware of a connection between race, faith and climate change was in the late 1980s when I was a sociology student in Venezuela. I lived in Caracas with my family. In this cosmopolitan city, there was lots of nonregulated air pollution that caused me to have a sore throat and irritated eyes daily.
I just don’t want to have to feel guilty being white. That’s what John said after my presentation at a family retreat I was facilitating for a church a few years ago. I was talking about the advantages that whites enjoy in American society that people of color do not always receive, referencing a classic article by Dr. Peggy McIntosh titled “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack.” In it, she points out that whites can typically agree with statements like, “If a traffic cop pulls me over, I can be pretty sure that I haven’t been singled out because of my race,” or “When I am told about our national heritage or ‘civilization,’ I am shown that people of my race made it what it is.”
Over the past year amid a pandemic, protests and politics, I often heard many pastors, elders and mid council staff say that they are having a particularly hard time making ends meet. People aren’t giving the way they used to give. These churches and presbyteries are struggling to do more with less, and it’s the same way at the place where I currently serve, the Presbyterian Mission Agency — which has had a 40% reduction of our workforce over the past 10 years. In the end, the need is becoming greater and greater.
Many people of faith have stopped asking big, unanswerable “why” questions. Questions like, “If God loves us and God is all powerful, why is there so much pain and suffering in the world?”
The Washington Corrections Center for Women is both the largest and the only maximum and medium security prison for women in the state. It’s surrounded by barbed wire, and you have to go through five locked gates to get to the main population.
