Throughout October and November, Haley Hamblin led a small group called “Koinonia: A Journey of Justice and Belonging with the Apostle Paul.” During our final week, Haley invited us to write letters to a community, fashioned by Paul’s letters. This practice was deeply meaningful, so we are going to share some of the letters we wrote:
Julie Crandall’s Letter:
To my fellow Americans, with whom we collectively imagine how best to live, work, serve and govern in the spirit the common good. Brothers and sisters (as aren’t we all formed from the same source of love and life? aren’t we all struggling with the same pain and fear and uncertainty in this life? And aren’t we all headed toward the same sure final destination, whether it be hour or minutes or decades from this very moment?)…. Greetings, peace, love. Whatever is you deepest need, may you be blessed with it within a community of shared longing and concern for other.
We are in a battle for the vision of who we, as citizens are and who we want to be in world. At times we’ve forgotten the suffering of others…the desperate need of those fleeing hunger and violence in places where darkness has overcome rules and laws. We’ve slammed doors in the faces of those who don’t look like us or speak the same language; but brothers and sisters, they bleed the same as we do, they weep for their children too; they’d risk everything to see a brighter light on the horizon. These are the people who formed our country.
Inside our wall we’ve often chosen to not see the suffering our ancestors caused to humans they enslaved, treating them and their descendants as less than human and ignoring a legacy of horrors, evils and wrongs. We’ve forgotten that divine light shines in all people and that when we sweep away the past it always grows larger in the distance, gaining energy and power that threatens a great reckoning.
We’ve let lies and fear cause us to turn inward, to see those beyond our own small groups as the enemy, as the ones to be feared, the ones we must crush before they crush us.
But don’t you see that in crushing anyone, we are crushing ourselves? When there is violence toward anyone’s parents, it is violence toward our own parents? When there’s a mass shooting at any school, it’s at our own child’s school? When a million souls die from a virus that we can help stop from spreading, each of those souls are as beloved as you are or your spouse or your best friend.
Beloveds, you’ve never ceased to be worthy of love and belonging, but neither has the one who is mocked, made fun of, abandoned, beaten or abused. We must protect those who are weak, lack power, are without homes, those suffering any kind of pain. Each and every one of these is the Christ.
We must move closer to each other and in so doing, we move closer to God. Do we not reflect that which is holy when we reach out again and again to those in our schools and neighborhoods and work places, on the street and in the grocery store and on Facebook and in the nursing home and prisons?
Stay awake to the humanity of each person you encounter.
Only then do we experience true community. Koinonia.
Justice be among all; only then there will be true peace.
