A few days ago I was mumbling to myself about not being eager to enter 2025. Then I read an editorial in the NCR by John Grosso whose words lent credence to my apprehension. Grosso describes what he perceives in regard to the coming year: “…the country and the world stand on the brink of unprecedented emotional and social chaos… Mass deportations. The desecration of public lands. The erosion of public health. A disastrously unqualified cabinet, …we are on the precipice of a long, cold and dark winter in America.”
With that bleak observation, I took myself out for a walk in the rain. As often happens when I stroll alone in the hallowed space of nature, something positive takes hold of my spirit. I looked at the drops of water on my raincoat and smiled, recalling a marvelous novel, There Are Rivers in the Sky by Elif Stafak. The author uses a drop of water to reveal what happens in the lives of four people living in different eras and lifestyles. (Each drop of water contains its own journeyed story.) Hope surged within me when I paused by a tiny creek to listen to its rushing water. I thought, “Each raindrop falling into the stream holds sparse influence, but if it joins with lots of other raindrops, it contributes to the dynamic energy coursing through the creek, a voice that is usually only a whisper. With every drop, the stream gains strength.”
I saw, then, how individuals are like a single raindrop, but when we join with millions of other persons who also desire greater good to thrive, then our voices and actions have the energy to hold fast and meet what the future heralds. Together in kinship we gain strength to live in a way that enables truth and justice to serve as guidelines and catalysts. As if to confirm this realization, when I returned home a message waited from a good friend who reflected on a recent gathering of folks to pray for peace. She wrote, “Something was clearly at work yesterday, a sort of collective soul I felt in the room. Every face I could see was open and engaged and expectant. It was quite something.” Yes, quite something!
Our persistence depends on how connected we are to one another in whom the Source of our values and convictions resides. (“Where one or more are gathered, there am I –Source of All Good—in the midst of them.” Matthew18:20.) It is here that we find what Lindsay McLaughlin wrote about in a Friends of Silence newsletter. She refers to the term “refugia” that Kathleen Dean Moore uses in her book, Great Tide Rising. “Refugia are pockets of safety, tiny coverts where life hides from destruction, secret shelters out of which new life emerges. Refugia are why Mount St. Helen’s mountainsides are lushly covered with grasses, prairie lupines, and alders, despite the eruption that erased 1,300 feet of the mountain and burned 230 square miles. Refugia are small and hidden and full of darkness, but they are potent. They may be characterized as sanctuaries, but they are cauldrons, wombs, incubators. They are everywhere: in a poem, the eyes of a friend, a preserved landscape, a permaculture garden, a prayer in the wild.” (And yes, in a gathering to pray for peace.)
If we feel as though we are standing on a “precipice of a long, cold and dark winter,” let us not allow 2025 to steal our focus or dissipate our energy by letting what lies ahead shove aside our dreams for a compassionate and peaceful world. Remember how strong a single drop of water is when joined with many others. Seek refugia when hope wanes. Abiding in the Source of All Good we can stand strong in the bleak weather of what may come our way.
Abundant peace,
Joyce Rupp
