Sabbath Devotional :: Lamplighters

(Sharlee Mullins Glenn and Linda Hoffman Kimball have asked me to share a post from my personal Facebook page. Credit must go to Kimberly Harris Wagner who first shared these beautiful poems and stories with me.)

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I am speaking here in the congregation of my friends, many of you I’ve known and loved for years. Some of you new and dear as if we’ve known each other all our lives.

Dear ones, inhabitants of my heart, each of you whose absence would darken my world : We are in a story that ends well.

I just peeked at the end of the book and it’s true. Good prevails. Darkness fails. It’s a great ending.

I have a friend who told me yesterday she felt she wasn’t doing enough in face of all that’s bleak. And then today she sent words to me that relit my own darkened lamp. I’m passing on the words my friend found and passed to me.

And a great shout out for all lamp-lighters!

Who lights your lamp?

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An Adrienne Rich poem:

My heart is moved by all I cannot save:

so much has been destroyed

I have cast my lot with those who,

age after age, perversely,

with no extraordinary power

reconstitute the world.

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And from John Lewis ( civil rights activist and congressman), from his memoir:

‘Lewis shares an experience from when he was a boy growing up in Alabama, with extended family as neighbors. One afternoon, he and about fourteen cousins were playing in his Aunt Seneva’s dirt yard when a storm rolled in. As the winds became more severe, his aunt ushered all the kids into the small home. “And then it got worse. Now the house was beginning to sway. The wood plank flooring beneath us began to bend. And then, a corner of the room started lifting up.

‘I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. None of us could. This storm was actually pulling the house toward the sky. With us inside it. That was when Aunt Seneva told us to clasp hands. Line up and hold hands, she said, and we did as we were told. Then she had us walk as a group toward the corner of the room that was rising. From the kitchen to the front of the house we walked, the wind screaming outside, sheets of rain beating on the tin roof. Then we walked back in the other direction, as another end of the house began to lift.

‘And so it went, back and forth, fifteen children walking with the wind, holding that trembling house down with the weight of our small bodies.

‘More than half a century has passed since that day, and it has struck me more than once over those many years that our society is not unlike the children in that house, rocked again and again by the winds of one storm or another, the walls around us seeming at times as if they might fly apart.

‘It seemed that way in the 1960s, at the height of the civil rights movement, when America itself felt as if it might burst at the seams — so much tension, so many storms. But the people of conscience never left the house. They never ran away. They stayed, they came together and they did the best they could, clasping hands and moving toward the corner of the house that was the weakest.

‘And then another corner would lift, and we would go there.

‘And eventually, inevitably, the storm would settle, and the house would still stand.

‘But we knew another storm would come, and we would have to do it all over again. And we did. And we still do, all of us. You and I. Children holding hands, walking with the wind. That is America to me — not just the movement for civil rights but the endless struggle to respond with decency, dignity, and a sense of brotherhood to all the challenges that face us as a nation, as a whole.” ‘

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And last of all Victoria Safford, though not least by any measure. These excerpts are from her essay called The Small Work in the Great Work. A friend of hers had worked with a student who subsequently died by suicide, which affected her deeply. She shared with Safford’s group, “You know I cannot save them. I am not here to save anybody or to save the world. All I can do — what I am called to do — is to plant myself at the gates of Hope. Sometimes they come in; sometimes they walk by. But I stand there every day and I call out till my lungs are sore with calling, and beckon and urge them in toward beautiful life and love.”

Safford goes on to say, “Our mission is to plant ourselves at the gates of Hope — not the prudent gates of Optimism, which are somewhat narrower; nor the stalwart, boring gates of Common Sense; nor the strident gates of Self-righteousness, which creak on shrill and angry hinges (people cannot hear us there; they cannot pass through); nor the cheerful, flimsy garden gate of ‘Everything is gonna be all right.’ But a different, sometimes lonely place, the place of truth-telling, about your own soul first of all and its condition, the place of resistance and defiance, the piece of ground from which you see the world both as it is and as it could be, as it will be; the place from which you glimpse not only struggle, but joy in the struggle. And we stand there, beckoning and calling, telling people what we are seeing, asking people what they see.”