Wednesday Meditation

The language of a dream is the language of hope. It is the language of reality being changed by a new possibility.

Dreaming – impractical, foolish, impossible dreaming – gave us the very real civil rights movement. Dreaming gave us a South Africa freed from apartheid. Dreaming, as I see it, has saved me and many others from turning to despair and destruction in the darkest days, when evil seems to be winning. Dreams are love’s visions – the boundless faith that the world can be remade to look more like what God hoped for in creation.

Time and time again in history, the positive, miraculous – even crazy – energy of dreamers has saved us. In insane times, it’s sanity that kills us – the sanity of complicity with the present nightmare. The only people who have ever changed the world or anything for the good have been those who have dared to dream of an alternative reality, another possibility than the one that confronts us day by day.

[Love is the the Way by Michael Curry: pgs. 73-74]

I feel a great many of us are going to be grieving three things that will be missing on this national holiday: our lack of unity, the loss of rationality, the demise of cooperation. Those old expectations may seem lost to us as a nation this year, and I expect we will feel their absence at the Thanksgiving table. So we need to be ready to put our faith to work because as spiritual medics we are going to need to reassure and comfort our national family over the next few days. 

[Steven Charleston]

Ever-present God, be with us in our isolation,
be close to us in our distancing, be healing in our sickness,
be joy in our sadness, be light in our shadows,
be wisdom in our confusion, be all that is familiar when all is unfamiliar,
that when the doors reopen
we may with the zeal of Pentecost
inhabit our communities
and speak of your goodness to an emerging world. For Jesus’ sake. Amen.

(A prayer by Andrew Nunn, Dean of Southwark)