Hello, dear reader. I don’t have much to say today. In addition to daily prayer, I’m in a posture of listening and learning. Do you know the poet Claudia Rankine? Here is a powerful poem from the amazing 2014 book, Citizen. Please read it, and listen to her read it.

I have always especially loved these lines, and the idea behind them:

“The beautiful thing is that a group of men began to stand behind me like a fleet of  bodyguards, she says, like newly found uncles and brothers.”

Let us have the courage to stand with others in ways that support and strengthen them. Let us be newly found aunts and uncles, sisters and brothers to each other in the midst of all the harms around us.

The scripture that keeps coming to mind is the well-known passage from First Corinthians. It may be overly familiar, but it never loses its power for me. Let us step out in love, as citizens of God’s kingdom.

13 If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. ² And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. ³ If I give away all my possessions, and if I hand over my body so that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing.

⁴ Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant ⁵ or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; ⁶ it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. ⁷ It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

⁸ Love never ends. But as for prophecies, they will come to an end; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will come to an end. ⁹ For we know only in part, and we prophesy only in part; ¹⁰ but when the complete comes, the partial will come to an end. ¹¹ When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became an adult, I put an end to childish ways. ¹² For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known. ¹³ And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love.