Talia Raymond
March 11, 2018
Gratitude Meditation
There are people who cast long shadows in our lives, those who have had a lasting influence on us. I would like for you, if you are willing, to call to mind one such person who has been a force for good in your life, a careful guide or inspiration. In Buddhist practice, these people are called “benefactors.” A benefactor could be a mentor, teacher, grandparent, parent, family member or friend. Reflecting on these people and their generosity toward develops gratitude in us. So often we tend to focus on those who have harmed us in some way, forgetting those who have rooted for us too. It’s important to remember these people and reflect on our gratitude for their place in our lives and how their presence envelops us in protective shadows even now. Science shows us that expressing gratitude, in addition to increasing empathy and enhancing relationships, can actually heal us, both physically and physiologically. So, for just a moment, let’s practice gratitude:
1. Get comfortable
2. Place your right hand over your heart, knowing that this is optional and if your arm gets tired or this is an uncomfortable position for you, please choose another or just let your arm rest easy.
3. When we reflect on the people who have supported us in our lives, gratitude can arise naturally. So to begin your practice by inviting one of your mentors into your heart space. Reflect on this person—what you appreciate about them and how they have supported you.
4. To your benefactor, offer the following four sentiments, imagining your benefactor enjoying these qualities:
1. May you be safe.
2. May you be happy and peaceful.
3. May your spirit be healthy and strong, embraced with love.
4. May your works of love not be in vain.
(Meditation adapted from Charlotte Bell)
The Turkish playwright, Mehmet Murat Oldman wrote, “We often walk without knowing the beautiful and the mysterious art created behind us by our shadows.”
Who we are leaves a mark, or, as the activist Mary Rubin said: “Everything real casts a shadow, and the shadows are real.” We can call to mind those whose shadows we live in, those who have protected and nurtured us, followed and led us. Then there are the long shadows, cast by the leaders of movements, that bring glimpses of a miracle, of wholeness and healing for creation.
The idea that miracles occur has been a part of human storytelling in some form throughout human existence. Not, perhaps, as literal events of history, but, as the theologian John Shelby Spong writes, “Perhaps [miracles] are really external attempts to play a powerful internal experience into words… It’s the opening of people’s eyes to see what life can be. We do not need to pretend that we believe supernaturally unbelievable things to be disciples. We only need to see all that life can be – the ability to have our eyes opened to the vision of wholeness, and a new sense of what it means to be divine can emerge.
Health, in the biblical perspective, is wholeness within oneself and in community with humankind, God, and all of creation. People with physical or mental afflictions were shunned for fear of contamination or abandoned because they were unable to contribute to the community in a financially productive way. Healing was so much more than an antibiotic, it was about being a full member of the community, about being welcomed and included with support and care as you were, not rejected and forgotten.
In this passage from Acts, we are told that more than ever, people were coming to believe the teachings of Jesus, both men and women in great numbers. People were bringing the sick out into the streets to be healed by Peter’s shadow – and they were. They were finding a community not of rejection and ridicule, but of wholeness and health outside of an unjust system. Being in the shadow of the followers of Jesus brought healing to people who were suffering.
The story goes on to tell us that the Apostles are preaching the good news in the temple at Jerusalem, despite repeated threats of arrest and imprisonment from the authorities. For the second time, they are arrested and brought before the officials of the Sanhedrin, a body with religious authority that had previously given strict orders that they not teach in the name of Jesus. Despite this, the apostles continued to spread their teaching all over Jerusalem. The apostles’ response to the accusations brought against them is simply “we must obey God, not any human authority.”
Mitzi J. Smith, a Professor at Ashland Theological Seminary wrote: This episode marks the second time that some religious leaders and Sadducees arrested, detained, and interrogated the apostles for preaching the resurrection of Jesus. Previously, Peter and John were imprisoned because the same religious authorities were “much annoyed” at their preaching Jesus’ resurrection (4:1-4). This second time they are motivated by “jealousy” (v.17). And when brought before the Council, they again declare their resolve to privilege the voice of God over human authority.
In other words, they were warned, they were given an explanation. Nevertheless, they persisted.
Refusing to be silenced, the apostles talked back to and/or sassed the authorities who unjustly and unnecessarily brutalize and detain them as if to say: #ResurrectedLivesMatter; #Jesus’LifeMatters; #OppressedLivesMatter. The Sadducees and their allies denied this, insisting that #AllLivesMatter. Thus, oppressed people deserve no special intervention or action. But, with God, we know Black lives matter; Muslim lives matter; Jewish lives matter; refugee lives matter; poor lives matter; women’s lives matter; incarcerated lives matter; teachers’ and students’ lives matter; the most oppressed among us matter. God’s people should be agents of reversal. We are to embody good news to the poor, imprisoned, and those oppressed. The apostles’ ministry of healing and preaching intervenes in the lives of the oppressed. Peter and the apostles persist, maintaining that God raised the Jesus of Nazareth whom politics lynched by hanging on a tree. The apostles refused to stop talking, insisting that death does not get the last word.
The only reason the Temple police did not violently arrest the apostles was because they feared the mass protests. They fear that their brutality would be captured by the masses and result in their mobilization and retaliation (Acts 5:26). If it were not for the willingness of the people, the masses, to disrupt injustice, to protest, the apostles would have been the fatal victims of police brutality. When injustice and oppression permeate religious, social, and political systems, nothing short of mass activism will transform them.
We have learned time and time again, although it is painful, and it is not ok, that sometimes violent death is what it takes to resurrect our consciousness and be the catalyst that leads to the dismantling of unjust systems. So it is, that violence has woken the young, and thank God for them. When Rev. Dr. Bernice Powell Jackson was here in January, she looked our young people in the eyes and said “Don’t let anyone tell you that you don’t have power. Nothing good has ever happened in this country without the young people. You have all the power.”
The youth of today are in good company; they follow in the footsteps of many, both famous and anonymous, who’ve challenged power that has terrorized and oppressed people and propagated a narrative to legitimize it. In fact, youth have been key figures in nearly every major social movement in modern history. During the U.S. Civil Rights movement, Claudette Colvin was just 15 when she was arrested for refusing to give up her seat on a Montgomery Bus to a white person (nine months before Rosa Parks), not to mention The Little Rock Nine, Freedom Riders, and the Children’s March. Courageous undocumented youth activists including Jorge Gutierrez, Nancy Meza conducted sit-ins that, in 2012, convinced President Obama to grant DREAMers a reprieve from deportation. Brave young people, including Ashley Yates of Millennial Activists United, forged a coalition in a fierce form of non-violent direct action under the banner of Black Lives Matter in Ferguson, MO. – Just three examples in a very long list of those youth who cast very long shadows. Becky Johnson shared with me that just last Tuesday, a large group of young people along with supportive adults staged a “die-in” on the rotunda in Tallahassee, forcing legislators to walk around their bodies on the floor. On March 24, 648 marches organized around the world, by teenagers who ask us to join them and March for Our Lives.
At that end of their Mission Statement, are these sentences: “Change is coming. And it starts now, inspired by and led by the kids who are our hope for the future. Their young voices will be heard.”
When people move together, marching for a cause, they make shadows, shadows that touch even those of us that watch from the sidelines. Will we allow ourselves to be healed? Do we have the same unfailing faith in the cause that healed those who gathered to be touched by Peter’s shadow? I hope so, for the actions of those who move us forward on the journey to justice and wholeness have the power to heal us all.
John Dominic Crossan said, when explaining why the message of Jesus lasted while others, like his cousin John’s, did not: “John had a monopoly, but Jesus had a franchise” John was one person on one riverbank doing individual healing. Jesus was a movement, a community, a way, and taught communal healing… and that communal healing didn’t die with him. It’s still here.
And so, we march, hoping that the shadows we cast will be long and that they will bring wholeness to a broken creation. “Here are the shadows left behind by a thousand moments, a thousand moods, of needs traced here on the wall by [those] who are gone. [Here, in the words of the survivors and in Jack’s powerful, glorious poem], is the record of their being here.”
I invite you to join me in another practice of gratitude. For those who march, and those who organize, for those who bring healing in the shadow of their wings.
1. Get comfortable
2. Place your right hand over your heart, or your own positioning.
3. Call to thought those who act in the name of love and compassion, those who walk in the protection of the long shadows of those who have come before, and cast living, healing shadows on us all.
4. To the benefactors of creation, let us offer these sentiments:
1. May you be safe.
2. May you be happy and peaceful.
3. May your spirit be healthy and strong, embraced with love.
4. May your works of love not be in vain.