PASTORAL REFLECTION

NOVEMBER, The Month of Gratitude and Grace

Our sense of gratitude for food and family gets expressed about the same time each year at Thanksgiving. It is appropriate to the season of the harvest when the earth pushes up bushels of food for the coming of the winter cold. Through the thick, soft and rich soil that has been groomed and cared for since the time of the spring planting, mother earth provides for us, year after year. And in places around the globe, where the people still maintain their closeness to the land, the earth rhythms pulse with familiar vibrations connecting humans to their Source with a dramatic aliveness that the city dwellers can't know.

Here in Oakland, we have our own share of dramatic aliveness, but of a different sort, as we continue to meet with our neighborhood partners about the violence that permeated our streets. At the Oakland Coalition of Congregations Friends Dinner last month, Mayor Ron Dellums outlined his ten-point plan to bring about the transformation that we have all been praying for. He was eloquent and the room was filled with a sense of commitment and purpose, dedicated to helping him make it so. There was something else to be thankful for. Those goal, that moment of dedication need to be nourished with our prayers.

On our corner we meet with other Project Mosaic team strategists mapping out a program of activities to engage our neighborhood young people. We are grateful when these collaborations bear fruit; for we are planning for our own kind of harvest. We dream of peace filled days and evenings where children and families can stroll along High Street, confident of their safety. We are impatient that now; we only plant seeds.

Yet, when we get still to notice, there is grace everywhere. There is grace in the energy of our strivings; people feeding each other with hope. We are fed when we meet in small circles talking about change and working to make it so. There is grace in the spaces between things that go wrong, allowing us to pick up and go forward anyway. There is grace in simple humor expressed in tiny ways, bringing forth soft smiles and warm hearts. Praise God, that in enormous wisdom, God made us for each other. In the dozens of ways that we experience community, we are given the means to navigate in the world of our city and hold onto hope and wonder. It is so great to be alive, so awesome and wonderful and mysterious and blessed.

We face the cold of winter, but we face it together as community, as the family of God, in all our imperfections, but also in great gratitude for the Grace that is at the center of our lives. Happy Thanksgiving.