… watching for the brushstrokes of God
On May 27, 1992 a mortar killed 22 people waiting in front of a bakery in Sarajevo. Vedran Smailovic, the cellist of Sarajevo responded to the trauma by playing cello in public spaces for two years. When a reporter asked him, “Aren’t you crazy to be playing cello during the shelling?” Smailovic replied, “You ask me am I crazy for playing cello, why don’t you ask them if they are crazy to be shelling?”
What questions need to be turned around?
When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.” Wendell Berry
When are you free?
“Each one of us has lived through some devastation, some loneliness, some weather superstorm or spiritual superstorm, when we look at each other we must say, I understand. I understand how you feel because I have been there myself. We must support each other and empathize with each other because each of us is more alike than we are unalike” Maya Angelou
What are you facing into?
“Grief work is soul work. It requires courage to face the world as it is and not turn away, to not burrow into a hole of comfort and anesthetization. Grief deepens our connection with soul, taking us into territories of vulnerability, exposing the truth of our need for others in times of loss and suffering.” Francis Weller, The Wild Edge of Sorrow
Today is the third anniversary of the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville that led to the deaths of Heather Heyer, and state police Jay Cullen and Berke Bates. It exposed racism as something that had always been here. How has our community changed as we revisit the trauma of that weekend?
How do you remember and mark this day? What have you learned about white supremacy in this country? Are you praying with your feet?
“A greeting from my heart to Beirut
kisses to the sea and to the houses
to a rock shaped like an old sailor’s face
She is wine from the people’s soul
She is bread and Jasmine from their sweat
So how does her taste become? A taste of fire and smoke…” Lebanese singer Fairuz
How do we mourn loss upon loss?
With the Eyes of the Heart 