The annual blessing of the fleet— of water trucks—went well today. Regular volunteers and board members were joined by Buddhist Jewish Lutheran and Episcopal clergy as well as the current vice-mayor of Tucson. Attendees gladly laid their hands on the trucks, at the invitation of our convener, adding their own blessings...
Humane Borders Blessing of the Fleet Participants, March 31, 2019
The Rev. John Leech
Priest of the Episcopal Church
Rev. Mateo Chavez
Pastor, San Juan Bautista, Lutheran Spanish Language congregation
Vice Mayor Richard Fimbres
Life long resident of Tucson,
32yr career in Tucson Sheriff's Dept.
US Army Vet during Vietnam era
Br David Buer, OFM
Franciscan Friar .. intentional small community living
Rabbi Avraham Alpert
Cantor, Congregation Bet Shalom
Abbot Ajahn Sarayut Amanta
Tucson Buddhist Meditation Center and Wat Buddhametta
The Rev. Steven Keplinger
Rector, Grace-St Paul's Episcopal Church
Dinah Bear
Chair for Humane Borders Board of Directors
Rev. John Hoelter
Director, Humane Borders
https://humaneborders.org/
Here is the prayer that I offered on Sunday afternoon 31 March 2019:
Bless these trucks,
accompany their crews,
as you accompany us
in all our journey --
LORD prepare us to receive
the gift of the stranger.
Even as they are far off
let us embrace them as
long lost family. May we not
be jealous of your Bounty
but
fully let the living water
of your love refresh
the wanderer, the homecomer,
the lost, the bereaved,
the watchful, the joyous,
and all in the name
of your Love. Amen.
Sunday, March 31, 2019
Thursday, March 7, 2019
fishing for souls - in the desert
For the Coracle - in the desert - February 26, 2019.
By the time you read this, certainly by the Day of Pentecost, the situation will have changed.
(What is really going on will remain; what is happening will be new - or is it always the reverse?)
Right now at the end of Epiphany season, at a former monastery - the shrine of perpetual adoration - the place has been transformed into a hospital in the best old Christian sense - like the hospital of Saint John near the church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem - serving as a place offering respite for weary travelers, who receive hospitality: welcome, food, attention to medical needs, sleep, warm clothing, and a chance to connect with the folks ahead on their journeys and the people back home.
Here, quietly, with need for no fanfare, volunteers from various churches meet individuals and groups of people who seek asylum in the United States. They have been interviewed and released by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and are headed by bus to connect with sponsors diaspora’d across the country - friend or family in Houston, New York, Chicago, D.C., Florida. They have come from Guatemala, Hondoras, El Salvador, Nicaragua. They tap the flags on the wall of the comedor as they go by, to show where they come from.
Fewer people than for many years now are arrested between legal ports of entry - though that continues, so does the desperation and the deaths alone in the forbidding desert - but more and many flood through the gates, released after initial interviews, found plausible in their cases for asylum.
There are cousins I have who exist because their father and his family, refugees from civil war, became citizens. He met a girl whose mother arrived as a small child from a faraway country. Now they are here and citizens.
Today’s travelers, gathered at the former monastery currently serving as a way-place of hospitality, have been accompanied by Our Lady of Guadalupe, or the Holy Child of Atocha. A century and a half ago, some of my ancestors were accompanied by a different holy figure, a former slave named Patrick. But they too sought sanctuary, freedom, and I hope a respite on the way served by hospitable people who saw what was really going on.
“It’s now, it’s real, it’s bad, it’s us, and there’s hope” — that is how an eminent scientist recently summed up for me the crisis of climate change. But it can serve to characterize also what is happening among immigrants today, on the U.S. southern border, in the Mediterranean, and between countries in south Asia.
That “there’s hope” means we’re not off the hook; there is something we can do.
What is really going on - people move, that’s what they do — continues. Our Lady of Guadalupe, our Saint Patrick of the captives of Ireland, Child of Atocha, pray for us. Jesus dwell with us forever.
—- John Leech, Tucson, Arizona.
The Coracle is the magazine of the Iona Community.
By the time you read this, certainly by the Day of Pentecost, the situation will have changed.
(What is really going on will remain; what is happening will be new - or is it always the reverse?)
Right now at the end of Epiphany season, at a former monastery - the shrine of perpetual adoration - the place has been transformed into a hospital in the best old Christian sense - like the hospital of Saint John near the church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem - serving as a place offering respite for weary travelers, who receive hospitality: welcome, food, attention to medical needs, sleep, warm clothing, and a chance to connect with the folks ahead on their journeys and the people back home.
Here, quietly, with need for no fanfare, volunteers from various churches meet individuals and groups of people who seek asylum in the United States. They have been interviewed and released by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and are headed by bus to connect with sponsors diaspora’d across the country - friend or family in Houston, New York, Chicago, D.C., Florida. They have come from Guatemala, Hondoras, El Salvador, Nicaragua. They tap the flags on the wall of the comedor as they go by, to show where they come from.
Fewer people than for many years now are arrested between legal ports of entry - though that continues, so does the desperation and the deaths alone in the forbidding desert - but more and many flood through the gates, released after initial interviews, found plausible in their cases for asylum.
There are cousins I have who exist because their father and his family, refugees from civil war, became citizens. He met a girl whose mother arrived as a small child from a faraway country. Now they are here and citizens.
Today’s travelers, gathered at the former monastery currently serving as a way-place of hospitality, have been accompanied by Our Lady of Guadalupe, or the Holy Child of Atocha. A century and a half ago, some of my ancestors were accompanied by a different holy figure, a former slave named Patrick. But they too sought sanctuary, freedom, and I hope a respite on the way served by hospitable people who saw what was really going on.
“It’s now, it’s real, it’s bad, it’s us, and there’s hope” — that is how an eminent scientist recently summed up for me the crisis of climate change. But it can serve to characterize also what is happening among immigrants today, on the U.S. southern border, in the Mediterranean, and between countries in south Asia.
That “there’s hope” means we’re not off the hook; there is something we can do.
What is really going on - people move, that’s what they do — continues. Our Lady of Guadalupe, our Saint Patrick of the captives of Ireland, Child of Atocha, pray for us. Jesus dwell with us forever.
—- John Leech, Tucson, Arizona.
The Coracle is the magazine of the Iona Community.
Tuesday, March 5, 2019
dig out the muck
If leaf trash chokes the stream-bed,
reach for rock-bottom as you rake
the muck out.
- Marie Ponsot b. 1921 Springing: New and Select Poems
http://www.edgeofenclosure.org/lent1c.html
The summer of "Stairway to Heaven" I worked at Gaithersburg Car Wash and I'd hear that song over and over on the radio playing as I greased the fittings inside the machines. We had a particularly gritty chore once. The (primary) owner backed his old jeep up one day to the front end of the track (the belt that pulled the cars through the washing machines) with a little trailer attached. The muck and filth from the cars washed down into a pit at that end of the car wash - a pit about the size of a gas-station rest room, 6x8x8 or so, and we'd clean it out once in awhile. The owner, Bobby T. Lee, would haul it away in his jeep trailer to dump it out at his farm on some waste land. But how it got there - how the filth got out of the pit - was hands on and up to us. One of us would jump down into the pit and stand upon a piece of plywood board supplied for the purpose, and shovel the muck (on which the plywood - and you - balanced) into a bucket to be hauled up and away (by rope at first, held by a watching companion) and off to the farm, ultimately. You had to dig deep to get to the real filth. I suppose the farther you'd go, the more toxic it became.
10
First Sunday in Lent
Year C
RCL
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