Streams of Mercy
“I’m grateful for the opportunity to bring the message at this year’s Interfaith Service, for this time to stand together seeking common ground and understanding, affirming our common humanity, and giving thanks for the blessing of life together in this time and place. I’m grateful for the opportunity to speak from the heart truths I hold dear in this open, free and safe place as we experience in this time together “faith without borders.”
A lot of what we hold in common with one another has been lost, and we’ve fallen out of a sense of belonging to one another. There are just too many spaces between us these days- life experiences and lifestyle; political views and economic status; race, gender and nationality; religion and faith. We’ve fallen out of a sense of belonging to one another; we’re separated, even, from the persons we were created to be.
A few years ago, I think it was on the tenth anniversary of this Interfaith Service, Dr. Dudley Crawford told the story of a little girl who asked God who it was who drew all the lines on the earth to separate the world’s peoples! Indeed, who drew all the lines? How did we come to have so many spaces between us? We are “sojourners all” on this good earth!
Our times are desperate for meaning and belonging. We must recover our sense of belonging to one another and our sense of belonging to God who created us. We work to lessen the spaces between us, we debate and reason, dictate and argue; we legislate and mandate and struggle to understand – but those spaces between us are still there.
In his book “To Bless the Space Between Us”, John O’Donohue speaks of the need to recover the lost art of blessing. We must begin to learn how to bless one another, and to bless the spaces between us. Blessing the spaces between us creates a space for God, however we understand God, to shine healing light, to illumine a truth and to show the way.
A blessing is a gracious calling out for help and support, protection and inspiration- a gracious calling out that touches the heart of God. A blessing is a circle of light drawn around a person or a situation to protect, heal and strengthen. A blessing calls forth a place where everything comes together, where loss will be made good, where blindness will transform into vision, where questions will have answers and where the wanderings of life’s journey will find a homecoming. A blessing can be like the discovery of a fresh well in the desert. A blessing sheds light on a person or situation, and things can be seen in completely new ways; at a dead end, a new path appears. A blessing is a breath of fresh air in a troubled and divided world, suggesting that no life is alone or unreachable- that our lives flow into each other as wave flows into wave, and there can be no lasting peace and joy for one until there is peace and joy for all.
While we seem to have progressed to become experts on so many things and have gained ground in so many areas, we have lost the gift of presence to one another and the gift of belonging. Blessing is intended to strengthen human presence and belonging. To believe in blessing is to believe that our being here, our very presence in the world is itself a blessing.
The greatest honor we can give God, in all the ways we understand the Almighty, is to love one another, and to see each other through the lens of love, secure in the love of God for all God’s children. Let us never miss the chance to love! Together let us seek and find all the barriers within us that we have built against love, and let our hearts be broken again and again, until they open to one another, and from our hearts we bless the spaces between us.”
(taken from “Blessing the Spaces Between Us,” a message shared by Rev. Elizabeth Forester at the 13th Annual Interfaith Thanksgiving Service at Temple Beth Shalom, on November 18, 2018)