My brother called tonight. “Hey,” he said, “You playing or working hard? I shook my head and audibly sighed no to the playing part. I told him I had this newsletter column to write. Looking back over the years, I now recognize some version of his call has happened several times. Usually I shake my head because I’m working on a sermon. Then the call settles into a form. We go off on some topic for a while and then just before we’re about to hang up Richard volunteers, “I’ve got a thought that may give you something to write about.”
I usually shake my head again thinking this is just what I need. But tonight we had talked earlier about how moved both of us were by the March for Our Lives and how articulate and simply clear the young people had been.
We named how their focus felt like a gift and a challenge. Richard held up how the students were demanding and also holding the mature conversation that we as a country have failed to have. We talked about how it is our job to support them and their voice, to do what we can to help hold the space for open and honest discussion and to do what it takes to be sure the energy carries forward and the changes they are calling for become real.
And then he observed, “You know, how many times in our lives have death and tragedy gotten the country talking together and working together to make a difference? The Vietnam War, the deaths of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King. (April 4 it will have been 50 years since MLK was killed in Memphis.) (Richard’s list was quick and incomplete, but made his point.)
“Maybe this can be, is going to be,” he said, “one of those times.”
Maybe, I thought. Maybe this can be nothing less than Easter for each and all of us. Jesus seminar founder and scholar, Marcus Borg, writes that on Easter, God said “No” to the powers of domination and exploitation and “yes” to justice and the end of violence.
The students of Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School have created the gift and the opportunity for the lives taken to live on in our lives and our actions; they have challenged each of us to make Easter real. They have challenged each of us to say “yes” over and over, day after new day, to a vision and a commitment for life and love.
New life is possible always. Lives lost can live on in us. Life can begin again. Life does its part and gives us the chance. Now we must do ours. This is the message of Easter. Easter can be, it should be, and underneath all the layers, it is as articulate and simply clear as that.
May the message of Easter come alive for you.
On another but very connected note for anyone interested in the Heart of Hendersonville project I wrote up in last month’s column and the Five Habits of the Heart I talked about in March. Please sign up to be a part of a four-part book study group using Parker Palmer’s book Healing the Heart of Democracy.
Contact the office by phone or email.
Several of you expressed an interest in a group but wanted to be with people other than just UUFH members. We heard you and the organizers are creating just such diverse groups, but it will help for us to establish a small group or two that they can direct people to. Be an integral part of community (common – unity for the common good) growth and change.
Begin to develop your own “Heart Healthy” habits.
–Rev. Jim McKinley, Minister
Banner image: Fibonacci Blue/Flickr, CC BY 2.0