Dear Friends in Christ, 

This week I received a disturbing e-mail from Church World Service.  It’s a global aid organization I’ve supported for decades as has every UCC Church I’ve served.  (And, I’ve walked in many of its sponsored CROP Walks for Hunger for many years since I was 16.)

The e-mail informed me that due to cuts in its funding from USAID brought on by the implementation of President Trump’s executive orders, all but its essential staff members – defined as those serving the most vulnerable of clients – were being furloughed.  Amongst the many services ended include those to 4200 refugees in the U.S. fleeing war and persecution in their homelands!  (See CWS’ website for details.)

Now multiply this effect thousands of times over.  Church World Service is but one of many agencies that support the world’s poorest and most vulnerable people.  

In response to the implementation of the President’s executive orders, variously characterized by Washington observers as unjust,  immoral, and illegal (as well as by Christian leaders as un-Christ-like), Christian Pastor Diana Butler Bass wrote a blog for followers of Jesus entitled, “Love Relentlessly.”  And, when poet Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer read this blog, she wrote a poem based on its title.  This is it:

What Comes Next

“Love relentlessly.”  – Diana Butler Bass

“Love relentlessly”, she said, and I want to slip these two words
into every cell in my body, not the sound of the words, but the truth of them,
the vital, essential need for them,
until relentless love becomes a cytoplasmic imperative,
the basic building block for every action.
Because anger makes a body clench. Because fear invokes cowering, shrinking, shock.
I know the impulse to run, to turn fist, to hurt back.
I know, too, the warmth of cell-deep love—
how it spreads through the body like ocean wave, how it doesn’t erase anger and fear,
rather seeds itself somehow inside it,
so even as I contract love bids me to open wide as a leaf that unfurls in spring
until fear is not all I feel.
“Love relentlessly.”
Even saying the words aloud invites both softness and ferocity into the chest,
makes the heart throb with simultaneous urgency and willingness.
A radical pulsing of love, pounding love, thumping love,
a rebellion of generous love,
tenacious love, a love so foundational every step of what’s next begins
and continues as an uprising, upwelling, ongoing, infusion of love, tide of love, honest love.

As I struggle with how to respond faithfully to the non-normative, inhumane actions of political leaders in Washington, I find this poem touching and helpful, if not comforting.  How about you?

Blessings of Faithfulness and Peace,
Pastor Ed