Warm greetings to all Friends of Silence this month of Valentine love, celebrated so commercially, and the beginning of Lent -- the journey to the Passion of Christ, celebrated in the hermitage of each hear where Love abides. While Valentine's Day invites us to express love and affection to special people in our lives, Lent calls us to reflect, pray and respond to Love that lives in the suffering world. One cannot be a contemplative and be spared the Cross ... the cries of the poor, the anguish of injustice and oppression, the agonies of those afflicted by war, disease, famine, disasters, the raping of our mother earth ... One only has to read the daily news to encounter over and over again the Cross.
I try to be like water. Water goes to the humblest, lowest places and provides moisture. My place in the world is pinpoint small, but it goes down deep. The residents of this bleak, barren, and disjointed community have taught me that there can be profound wisdom, wonder, and love in a place of almost total despair. Our neighborhood may be nothing like the pristine hallways of a gallery, but we do art here. Our art holds our feelings, the feeling that we care deeply -- like water, like life.