Wednesday, January 13, 2021
The Rev. Anne Williamson
Resilience
Resilience – when I hear that word I think of the women in my family who are wonderfully, amazingly resilient. Today, I am thinking particularly of my great grandmother, who was born in the 1880’s, profoundly deaf but who never let her hearing impairment keep her from engaging with the world, widowed for more than four decades, who lived long enough to see cars replace horses as the main means of transport, women win the right to vote and men walking on the moon. At the age of 89, she was carried out of the fire at her retirement home on the shoulder of a firefighter and declared ‘My, my, I will never forget that if I live to be a hundred!’ Nannie didn’t quite make it to one hundred, nearly though, and I was so blessed to have known her into my young adulthood.
I start my day sitting in Nannie’s blue wingback chair. I read the full Serenity Prayer and hold my loved ones, the St. John’s Community, our world in all its beauty and brokenness, in my heart and prayers. One of the lines of the Serenity prayer which so resonates with me is ‘Taking, as Jesus did, this sinful world as it is, not as I would have it;’ Most days I say some form of Morning Prayer, read the St. John’s daily reflection and the prayer offering from Steve Garnaas-Holmes; all these practices sustain me in my daily walk with God, in the joys and sorrows, in times when resilience is needed.
I cannot remember a moment in my life when collective resilience was needed more than the moment in which we find ourselves today. Sharing resources for resilience, sharing our hopes and concerns, sharing this journey will enable this much-needed collective resilience, in the knowledge we walk together and Jesus is with us. Following is Monday’s prayer from Steve Garnaas-Holmes – I hope and pray it gives you comfort and encouragement, and contributes to our collective resilience in this moment.
Beloved, you have not given up on us.
Shine your light within us.
Crucified One, you have been here before.
Sustain us with your presence.
Give us the wholeheartedness
to mourn our brokenness
and then to rise and get to work.
Give us the resilience to stay faithful,
even in the shadow of evil,
to do justice and to love mercy.
Loving One, lead us.
Redeem our fear, redirect our despair
and revive our spirits.
Give us hope and dissatisfaction.
Give us strength and patience.
Give us humility and courage.
Give us love that will not quit
in the face of evil.
Be among us, be with us, be in us.
Faithful God, hold our hearts in yours,
and grant us your peace.
Amen.
Steve Garnaas-Holmes