Dear Friends,
Lately, I have been crocheting hats.
I learned to crochet when I was about 8, but in a story straight out of parable, or at least very telling of my lifelong temperament, my stitches grew tighter and tighter as I worked each row. My rectangles shrunk steadily into triangles. When I was about 13, I managed to complete a baby blanket for my little sister’s doll. I have rarely picked up a crochet hook since. Instead, I have learned every other handicraft – basic sewing, knitting, lace making – all passable, none remarkable.
Twenty years after that pink blanket, I dug out yarn and a crochet hook because our knitting ministry needs more hands to make hats for our unhoused neighbors. They are imperfect things, particularly when I think of the beautiful sweaters my mother-in-law knits (one of which I’m wearing right now), but it is a small thing, an act of healing, of stringing my prayers together to keep someone a little warmer this winter.
It’s also a reminder of what people always say – that when you feel down, the best way through is to do something for someone else. And so, in the midst of this moment when the world seems to be on fire, I’m working through my yarn stash. It’s one way forward.
The Way Knows The Way
Before I write anymore, I want to situate us in this moment. And, simply put, I do not know what to say.
Be with me in that. I do not know what to say – and I wonder if you feel the same way.
There is nothing about our belief that obligates us to have the right words. If anything, scripture, first, and much other art, offers us the words we need. And, when young people come to us with their big questions and worries and distress, it’s not just okay but powerful for us to admit we don’t have the words or the answers.
We do, however, have an entire book of the Bible called Lamentations, among other things. But sometimes it’s something simpler -
After several years of writing to you, it can be hard to remember what I’ve shared. And I mean that both in the long term and in the span of weeks. And so, as I sit on the train, having finally made it back into my office for the first non-Sunday in a few weeks, listening to an August episode of Jen CobbleWorks’s “Everything Speaks If You Listen,” I would have sworn I shared “The Way Knows The Way” here. But maybe I didn’t
Or maybe I did and my attention flags as I look for it, or I thought I would and changed my mind. But let’s trust it. The way knows the way. If I shared it, I will share it again.
You don’t have to know the way. The way knows the way.
Our task, to begin with, is simply to persist. And to say, when it is true, that we do not know what to do or say. None of you began subscribing to this newsletter because I purported to be an expert on geopolitics. I am, however, excellent at resource collation.
The Episcopal Church Office of Government Relations has compiled resources on the crisis in the Holy Land.
Save The Children has been around for nearly 100 years, with a presence in the West Bank and Gaza for the last eighty years. You can help them continue that work through their Children’s Emergency Fund.
Doctors Without Borders/MSF have provided care in Gaza for the past 20 years. Obviously, medical care is a critical issue right now – connect with their work here.
Becoming A Harbor
We are called to be peacemakers, to raise them, to care for those who are victimized wherever they may be. But while we can stand with targets of violence and oppression and show solidarity to our neighbors, we also need to be present to the children we care for and to our own distress. Most of us have little ability to impact global events, but our actions at home matter and can have a wider impact.
Be Present To The Feelings. Grown-up feelings and children’s feelings. Sesame Workshop’s article on comfort strategies for understanding and regulating emotions is a good place to start.
Build Connections. These can be specific – on Sunday, my parish hosted regional neighbors from Holy Land Artwork, who came to sell beautiful olive wood pieces in our parish hall. They spoke of the Christians who remain in the Holy Land, amidst our Jewish and Muslim siblings. A few weeks before this, we had visitors from Sewing Seeds for Hope, a Province 1 grant recipient that helps Afghani refugees use their skills as artisans to deepen their roots here in New England. I wonder what connections you might find in your area?
Pray Together. Of course we should always be doing this, but when we don’t have the words, we can always try praying in other ways. As always, Kayla Craig has a prayer for the grown-ups navigating children’s exposure to scary news, but we also need to create spaces that can hold our collective and solo prayers. A home altar might not just be a place to gather, especially with younger children, but a place youth who are more hesitant to reveal their worries can go to be with their thoughts.
As the nights grow cool, consider bringing a candle outside with some prayers or worries written on flying wish paper for a prayer ritual of release and a special way of delivering our prayers to God.Share A Story. Sometimes we need an anchor for our actions, and one way to create that link is with a related story. Lubna and the Pebble by Wendy Meddour is a fitting link for this moment, tapping into the deeper emotions children may be feeling while also attending to that sense of connection and doing something for others.
Connection. Doing for others. Prayer. Story.
In one way or another, these are all ways of saying love.
And, as Anne Lamott, in Almost Everything: Notes On Hope, puts it:
“Love has bridged the high-rises of despair we were about to fall between. Love has been a penlight in the blackest, bleakest nights. Love has been a wild animal, a poultice, a dinghy, a coat. Love is why we have hope.”
Hope is hard and yet one of our great human gifts is that we are capable of it.
I began writing this listening to the podcast, “Everything Speaks If You Listen,” and I invite you to listen closely this week – you may discover that,
There is more abundant, more abundantly available, and more invitational, into love, than I can even begin to describe… Even when the world is boiling with anger and greed, even with those things going on, there is a web of life inviting us to join our voice, our unique voice and our unique presence to the universal voice and the universal presence that is the sacred, which is speaking through everything. - “The Way Knows the Way: Some Thoughts on Returning Home from Pilgrimage”, Everything Speaks If You Listen (August 7, 2023)
Let us be part of this web of life that is built on connection, thread by thread. Let us extend our arms and form the bonds that will carry us into the future, that will allow our children to live into our hopes, to be the peacemakers that we are trying to be, one prayer, one shared meal, one wall knocked down at a time.
Peace,
Bird