I've been sorting and weeding my bookshelves.  In the process, I've run across a few gems.  Books I'd forgotten I owned.  Books I can't even remember acquiring.  One in particular caught my eye: “Engaged Spirituality:Ten Lives of Contemplation and Action”Janet Parachin. I paused, picked up the book, and thumbed through the pages.  Some of the people profiled were people whose work I had read or still read--Thich Nhat Hanh, Elie Wiesel, Howard Thurman and Marian Wright Edelman--and some were new to me.  One in particular caught my attention.  I'd heard of her before.  One of my friends had written a master's thesis on her.  But she was too far out there for me to read.   There she was in the second chapter. Simone Weil.  A Parisian.  Well off.  A nominal Jew.  A woman who lived in solidarity with the poor, the outcast and finally, at the end of her life, soldiers fighting for the French Resistance.  
Weil was a woman who had to learn and to know through experience.  She lived with the poor.  At one time in her life, she worked on the assembly line in a car factory.  Later, in a solidarity with members of the French Resistance, she lived on a diet so meager that it cost her her life.  
"What have you to say to me," I wondered as I turned those pages.  "What have you to say to me, a woman who likes her comfort as I do?"   Then I read these words Weil wrote describing the effect of her time in the car factory, 
"What I went through there marked me in so lasting a manner that still today when any human being, whoever he may be and in whatever circumstances, speaks to me without brutality, I cannot help having the impression that there must be some mistake...."
Faces flashed before my eyes:  the quiet students that sat in the back of classes I had taught, women at the shelter--their heads down, their eyes half closed, shop clerks I thought were rather surly.  Could it be that they, like Simone Weil, had grown accustomed to a measure of brutality in their lives?  I wondered to myself, "Had they learned to steal themselves against brutality?"  
 Then I remembered a prayer I once read.  Here it is: Our Father, we pray for the qualities which can help build thy kingdom on Earth.  We ask that we may be given the wisdom to see Thy will, courage to do it, strength to resist our own desires which might cause us to put our will before Thy will, humor that we may be acceptable to others and not foolishly pious, and kindness because we know that Thy will must be done through love.
Faces again moved before my eyes:  the gentle woman who once said, "I never use that word 'hate'"; the kind-eyed man who stands in the back of the church on Sunday mornings and quietly cheers the altar party on; the people at Live at Five receiving one another with a tender kindness and a warm embrace.  
There is so much brutality in our world.  We have only to open the morning paper or turn on the TV or check our browser screen to catch a glimpse of the news on our browser page to get a sense of the rawness of many people's days.  And yet there is a different way to live in this raw world of ours.  The Kingdom Way.
This Sunday we will have a chance to hear how one group of people is living from and sometimes in this Kingdom Way Christ calls us to.  Justin Remer-Thamert will be with us at worship and the potluck supper. Justin is Program Director of the New Mexico Faith Coalition for Immigrant Justice. He will talk about his organization and the work they are doing with the New Mexico Conference of Churches in response to immigrant children arriving from Central America - and how we can be involved in offering them moments of and avenues to tenderness and peace.  
This Sunday we'll also be starting a new custom for Live at Five's Fourth Sundays--we'll be celebrating birthdays and anniversaries with a prayer, a blessing and a song.  This Sunday we'll be celebrating all August and September birthdays.  On the fourth Sunday in September, we'll be celebrating October birthdays.
In gratitude for all of you whenever your birthday falls.

Susan+

This morning,  people from our community and people from Navajoland gathered in an empty lot on the west side of Albuquerque.  With broken hearts and dashed hopes, people gathered at the scene of last week's brutal beating and violent murder of two members of our community, two citizens of Albuquerque who died at the hands of three children of Albuquerque. The faithful offered prayers, a politician spoke, the site was hallowed, and people came forward to smudge themselves before they went their separate ways. All surrounded with the aroma of sage and cedar being burned.  A moment in time when a segment of our community came together to mourn the deaths of two homeless men from Navajoland.  
Two men dead, five lives lost, at least three communities struggling to make sense of it all. Earlier this week, a man who worships at St. Martin's came up to me and said, "Susanna, I've served in the Mexican army.  I've seen a lot.  I've never seen anything like this.  Two men.  They were sleeping, Susanna.  Such violence. Children did this."  He shook his head and stood there in silence--the horror sinking in. 
The people we worship with the second Sunday of even-numbered months--the people of St. Martin's--are not new to violence.  Random acts of violence are part of their lives.  They learn to protect themselves as best they can, but still violence stalks their days.  In the last six months, one member of our community was shot by police, another run over and killed, two more hit and killed by hit-and-run drivers.  
But these deaths are different--they strike at the core of our shared humanity.  Try as we do, we can't make sense of it.  Children smashing the heads of people asleep on a mattress in a back corner of a vacant lot.
It's senseless.  And perhaps even trying to make sense of it is like jousting with windmills.  
But we can make meaning out of this tragedy.  Maybe a little of that was going on today as people gathered on that empty lot.  Lives honored, deaths mourned, commitments made.  You and I and the part of the Body of Christ we call Live at Five can be part of that effort to give meaning to these senseless deaths.  
In one of the last parables in the Gospel of Matthew, the King says to the person standing before him, "As you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me"(25:40).  In the face of senseless violence, we can live lives of connectedness--connectedness to one another and connectedness to those who share this time and this place with us.  A connectedness that just won't let one of our brothers or sisters go hungry or sleep in a place that is not safe.  A connectedness that cares as much about other people's children as we do about our own.  A connectedness born out of the realization that weare brothers and sisters for we are all children of one God. 

 Susan+