empire

For Such a Time as This

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

In the past decade, I have often thought of Uncle Mordecai’s advice to his niece Queen Esther. I paraphrase: “Who knows but that you have come to your royal position for such a time as this?”

And here, thousands of years later, are we, in the generations following the horrors of World War II and the Holocaust. Here are we, who have been raised on the writings of J.R.R. Tolkien and his vision of the smallest and most vulnerable-seeming ones taking up the hardest task simply because it was laid on their shoulders. Our books and movies have been filled with people (often teenagers) taking stands against tyranny, fascism, Imperialism, oppression, and cruelty.

We’ve been primed and educated for the coming days.

Here are some of the things I am telling myself:
1. Limit your news intake to a few trusted sources.
2. Unplug as much as possible, especially from the dire and angsty and shrill.
3. Post and share images and stories–actual and fictional–of people resisting Empire.
4. Watch the inauguration or don’t watch the inauguration–do what your heart needs and don’t apologize to anyone for the choice you feel is right for you to make.
5. Differentiate between thoughtful satire and unkind snark.
6. At least, don’t punch down. Punch up. And keep it classy.
7. Express your feelings.
8. Listen to others expressing their feelings. Don’t minimize or explain them away.
9. Commiserate without contributing to negativity and panic.
10. Keep reaching out to your friends. Keep checking in on your friends.
11. Build larger and larger circles of community so no single person has to have the burden of holding you together when you fall apart.
12. In a time of destruction, create things.
13. In a time of cruelty, be inexplicably kind.
14. In a time of rampant lies, speak truth from your heart, and honor integrity.
15. Who do you admire? Emulate them.
16. Breathe, and breathe, and breathe. Stretch and breathe.
17. Use your power and privilege to shield and protect those with less.
18. Stand in the gap.
19. What are you willing to put on the line for others?
20. Do not let your voice be silenced.
21. Do not give money a voice.
22. stay grounded. Every day, meditate or pray or make a magic spell that goodness and peace will prevail.

Gratitude List:
1. Such a beautiful snowstorm (hmmm-I accidentally write snowstory, and I want to make that an official word, please)
2. So many circles of dedicated souls ready to stand up and speak out
3. Tea
4. I have finally found a tool that is helping me with task initiation and task completion. I am feeling so satisfied, and much more full of energy
5. Great horned owls calling through the darkness last night.
May we walk in Beauty!

“Things don’t really get solved. They come together and they fall apart. Then they come together and fall apart again. It’s just like that. The healing comes from letting there be room for all of this to happen: room for grief, for relief, for misery, for joy.” —Pema Chödrön

“How will we ever reconcile with those from whom we feel so estranged? How will we forgive the wrongs we believe have been done? How will we be able to trust one another again? Those are the kinds of profound questions that many of us need to have answers to…but the hurts are so new, the pain so fresh, we are not sure when or how we will ever come to a point of healing. To be honest, I do not have answers to any of these questions, not right now, but that does not trouble me. Why? Because I know, over time, the Spirit will bring us to the answers we need. She will show us paths to healing we never imagined. I am confident she will slowly guide us to wholeness in a manner that is most just and most empowering for us. Therefore, I do not feel anxious about how I will forgive or rushed into relationships I am not ready to embrace. I may not be able to trust others yet, but I do trust the Spirit, and that is enough for now. I will follow where she leads and when she leads, knowing that what I cannot comprehend now, I will understand later.” —Steven Charleston, 2021

“The artist deals with what cannot be said in words.
The artist whose medium is fiction does this in words. The novelist says in words what cannot be said in words.
Words can be used thus paradoxically because they have, along with a semiotic usage, a symbolic or metaphoric usage. (They also have a sound—a fact the linguistic positivists take no interest in . A sentence or paragraph is like a chord or harmonic sequence in music: its meaning may be more clearly understood by the attentive ear, even though it is read in silence, than by the attentive intellect.)” —Ursula LeGuin

“Keep walking, though there’s no place to get to.
Don’t try to see through the distances.
That’s not for human beings.
Move within, but don’t move the way fear
Makes you move.” —by Rumi (Barks)

“I think pleasure is really the gateway to feeling connected and inspired.” —Dreamwork with Toko-pa

“Instructions for living a life.
Pay attention.
Be astonished.
Tell about it.”
―Mary Oliver

“Now is the time to resist the slightest extension in the boundaries of what is right and just. Now is the time to speak up and to wear as a badge of honor the opprobrium of bigots.” —Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

“Our lives are a partnership with Spirit. We can choose to be active in this partnership or passive. We can opt out at any time, but we can also increase our involvement. We can grow, change and learn. We can do more good than we ever imagined possible. The key is in the relationship we have with our partner.” —Steven Charleston, 2025

“A common woman is as common as a common loaf of bread, and will rise.” —Judy Grahn

“The plan, a memory of the future, tries on reality to see if it fits.” —Laurence Gonzalez

“I saw the backyard cedar where the mourning doves roost charged and transfigured, each cell buzzing with flame. I stood on the grass with the lights in it, grass that was wholly fire, utterly focused and utterly dreamed. It was less like seeing that like being for the first time see, knocked breathless by a powerful glance. The flood of fire abated, but I’m still spending the power. Gradually the lights went out in the cedar, the colors died, the cells un-flamed and disappeared. I was still ringing.” —Annie Dillard

“When you walk a path you love, there is something deeper calling you forward on it, like a beautiful question that can never be answered.” —Toko-pa Turner

“A well-read woman is a dangerous creature.”
―Lisa Kleypas, A Wallflower Christmas

“Our only hope today lies in our ability to recapture the revolutionary spirit and go out into a sometimes hostile world declaring eternal hostility to poverty, racism, and militarism” —Martin Luther King Jr.

“Courage is an inner resolution to go forward despite obstacles.
Cowardice is submissive surrender to circumstances.
Courage breeds creativity; Cowardice represses fear and is mastered by it.
Cowardice asks the question, is it safe?
Expediency asks the question, is it politic?
Vanity asks the question, is it popular?
But conscience asks the question, is it right? And there comes a time when we must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular, but one must take it because it is right.”
—Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

“We are all silent witnesses to the drama of our own lives. We see behind the curtains. We know the origin of our story, the characters who fill its pages, and the main events that have carried us over perilous seas to where we find ourselves today. Only a small fraction of this saga ever gets told, even around the firelight of family, but we keep it in our hearts the way books were once written by hand. The story lives within us and finds its completion through us. We carry it forward in sacred procession, not knowing when our own role will end, but bound by faith to take our part for as long as love allows.” —Steven Charleston

“How will we ever reconcile with those from whom we feel so estranged? How will we forgive the wrongs we believe have been done? How will we be able to trust one another again? Those are the kinds of profound questions that many of us need to have answers to…but the hurts are so new, the pain so fresh, we are not sure when or how we will ever come to a point of healing. To be honest, I do not have answers to any of these questions, not right now, but that does not trouble me. Why? Because I know, over time, the Spirit will bring us to the answers we need. She will show us paths to healing we never imagined. I am confident she will slowly guide us to wholeness in a manner that is most just and most empowering for us. Therefore, I do not feel anxious about how I will forgive or rushed into relationships I am not ready to embrace. I may not be able to trust others yet, but I do trust the Spirit, and that is enough for now. I will follow where she leads and when she leads, knowing that what I cannot comprehend now, I will understand later.” —Steven Charleston

Dystopia

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

What a dystopian movie I watched last night. I didn’t catch the name–it was something like Evening News. It was a powerful commentary on what happens when empire uses religion to prop itself up. The opening image in the movie is a birds-eye view of a park in a marbled city. There are clouds of tear gas wafting above the park, and crowds of peaceful protesters running to safety. There is the sound of concussion grenades exploding. Cut to a close-up of a man gasping for breath, holding his stomach, where he’s been hit by a rubber bullet. Through the veils of tear gas, you can see a phalanx of black-suited riot police with their shields up, moving in on the panicked crowd.

The nation in the film is experiencing an uprising of thousands and thousands of people taking to the streets to demand justice for ALL the people instead of just for the ones who had historically claimed power. There is looting and burning and violence, and there are thousands upon thousands of peaceful protesters.

There is a shift to a scene of the nation’s autocratic ruler ranting about using any force necessary to quell the violence and looting. “We cannot allow the righteous cries and peaceful protesters to be drowned out by an angry mob,” he rants, and you realize that the violent gassing and dispersal of the crowd in the opening credits was of those very “righteous and peaceful protesters.”

Cut to the dictator (it’s not clear in the movie what to call him, but he seems kind of like a dictator) walking with his minions and ministers (they all seemed to be men in the world of this movie) past barricades and marble buildings to a house of worship on the edge of the park. He stalks up to the front of the church, lifts a Bible in his hand, smirks for the camera, and stalks off again.

I actually haven’t seen the end of the movie. It’s still going on. But it was a brilliant piece of cinematography. The soulless look in the eyes of the leader. The blatant use of religious symbols and spaces to attempt to give validity to the violent quelling of protest. The lies about protecting the very people they were at that moment violently removing from the park so the dictator could use the religious building like a movie set.

I’m not sure how it’s going to play out. The religious people have to see it now, don’t they? The soullessness, the way their beautiful Teacher is being used as an agent of the violence of empire.

Usually in these stories, the people, after their hundreds of years of oppressive rule, throw off the mighty arm of the empire and create a new and better reality in its place. Sometimes everything is destroyed and the new and beautiful thing is built from the ashes of the violent past. I’m going to keep tuning in.

Gratitude List:
1. The marchers in Lancaster yesterday, and Michelle Johnson who filmed it all for five hours, live. There were some powerful moments when the police chief was speaking, and people began to yell their pain and rage, and he just handed the bullhorn over and listened. He said he had to go to a meeting, and somebody yelled out that they were there to march because they couldn’t escape this reality, and he nodded his head, skipped his meeting, and joined the marchers.
2. I got two emails from students yesterday about the current national emergency. I am so grateful that they’re reaching out, that they’re thinking and processing and deciding what their role in this world should be. I’m so proud of them.
3. Snugglecats. Really, every household needs at least one cat. One of mine is snoring.
4. Hummingbird dipping into the petunia basket, a strand of cobweb held in her claws.
5. People are finding their voices in the midst of this. Keep articulating. Keep talking it through. Keep speaking up.

May we walk in Beauty!

“The women said feel how we are not open
fields waiting for their strike. They cannot not bury us
deep, call us things of war and be surprised
when we land mine.” —Kelly Grace Thomas

“The necessary thing is to be solitary, the way one was solitary as a child.” ―Rainer Maria Rilke

“Words are things, I’m convinced. They get in your wallpaper. They get in your rugs, in your upholstery, in your clothes, and finally, into you. We must be careful about the words we use.” ―Maya Angelou

“I’d rather have a mind opened by wonder than one closed by belief.” ―Gerry Spence

“Life is a lot more interesting if you are interested in the people and the places around you. So, illuminate your little patch of ground, the people that you know, the things that you want to commemorate. Light them up with your art, with your music, with your writing, with whatever it is that you do. Do that, and little by little, it might gradually get to be, if not a better world, then a better understood world.” ―Alan Moore

Living in the Empire

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

Tomatoes

Tomato season is upon us.  Those speckled romans in the upper right hand corner appear to have done a little hybridizing with the Amish pastes–so many of them are chunky and round.

I had a conversation with a wise man yesterday (my father).  My book on the desert mothers and fathers caught his eye, and he told me about what he had read about the movement of these communities into the deserts of what is now Syria and Palestine and Egypt–that they appear to have been reacting to the Christianization of empire in the 4th and 5th centuries.  Watching how their spiritual path had been taken and used to unify people under military and nationalistic banners, they chose instead to retreat into the deserts.

We got to talking about how our own direct spiritual ancestors, Mennonite Anabaptists in Switzerland in the 1500s, were also confronting the ways in which faith and spirituality had become a tool of empire and state-building. They refused to baptize their babies into the state church, choosing to untangle their spiritual story from the story of the religious city-states.  Many of them paid with their lives.  Many of them fled that empire for the new world.

Today, I think we also live in a time of empire-building, when the engines of state appropriate and exploit spiritual dogmas in order to consolidate power.  We have no desert to flee to, no new world that holds the promise of a life lived according to principle outside the boundaries of empire.  And perhaps flight is not what is called for in these days.  Perhaps the work of today demands that our desert monastic cells and our new world communities be villages of spirit, grounded inside ourselves.  Perhaps our work is to build and strengthen what St. Teresa of Avila, in the 1500s called the Interior Castle, the spaces inside ourselves that experience the life of the spirit in deep communion with the Great Mystery, a place where political and empirical powers hold no sway.

And then, how does the tending of our own inner gardens inform our daily living in the empire?  How will I explore my anxieties and concerns about things like elections and drone warfare and poverty and refugees in light of my inner journey?  How will I act in the outer world, if I am informed by my own inner amma in her quiet desert cell?  What will our communities of spirit look like here, within the belly of the empire, if we do not set ourselves apart in desert communities or sail away to a new land?  How do we keep our circles wide and inviting, our conversations holy and uplifting, our actions principled and full of resolve?

The movement of spirit that I see today is not defined by a singular religious group or sect.  It crosses religious boundaries.  The Muslim seeker and the Christian seeker, the Sikh, the witch, the Buddhist, the agnostic, and the universalist–it is one spirit community, working together to live with intention and purpose, with compassion and wisdom, calling forth that longing to experience the life of the spirit within each other and with everyone they meet.

Gratitude List:
1. I found the hummingbird nest yesterday.  It’s been a couple years since I found one.  I just happened to be looking at the right place at the right moment when she flew in and settled on her nest.  What a miracle of existence is the hummingbird.
2. This seems petty, but it’s a biggish deal to me: the warning lights in the Prius went off.  I decided to drive her for small errands yesterday because we couldn’t get a car appointment until this morning.  After two or three stops, she stopped giving me panicky lights.  My mechanic says to just keep watching for the lights and hope she was just resetting something.  I was afraid of a huge repair bill.
3. The inner work.  Knowing you’re out there, and so many others are with us, tending our inner gardens, building and connecting communities of spirit.
4. How sleep refreshes.  I felt really run down yesterday.  Jon said maybe I didn’t eat enough.  I thought maybe it was the humidity.  My bones ached.  I thought I might never feel rested again.  A good sleep has done the trick this time.
5. Inter-species friendship.  Here’s Fred, talking to me about breakfast.  I had to give him my attention and respond to his questions and snuggle and feed him.  Now he has settled quietly into the chair right beside me, companionably.  What a great guy.

May we walk in Beauty!

Wake-Up Words

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

DSCN8972

My Anabaptist ancestors spoke about being in the world, but not of it.  My love of the writings of the mystics and of Sufi thought has caused me to tend to tend to reject that notion.  I am in this world, this body, to experience the world, to know matter intimartely.  The idea has so often been interpreted as a call to a matter-denying asceticism.  Yet, while at least some of those early Anabaptists seem to have been interested in living ascetically, they were also living in a time when the city-states and political structures of their day demanded their spiritual as well as their political allegiance.  Their choice to focus on not being of this world was a rejection of the force of empire.

Today, we are also living within structures that, while they claim to offer freedom of spirit and idea, have a tendency to demand allegiance, an empire of consumerism and militarism.  We may not always see the victims of this empire, but they’re there.  This empire in which I live is responsible for so much that goes against Good News: forced labor and child labor making cheap things for us to buy; rampant exploitation of the planet’s resources; demand for precious metals and minerals that cause conflict and wars in other parts of the world; sales of arms to and support of militaries that harm their own people; bombing of innocent civilians in an attempt to kill our “enemies”; bowing to the god of Might and Force.

How can we live in this empire and not experience some of the numbing effects of its daily fare?  And how can we live in this empire, and yet not be of it?

Gratitude List:
1. Jim’s wake-up words: You are what you eat.  If you eat the food of the empire, you take on the characteristics of the empire.  I am not grateful for this truth, living within the belly of the empire as I do, but I am grateful for the reminder to live with that awareness.
2. The cycle of life.  The young ones keep rising to take their place.
3. Water.  I take it for granted all too often.  I flick the dial on the dishwasher, turn on the tap, adjust the knobs on the shower, fill my coffee pot.  Not everyone has access to clean water.  For some, the filling of the water-need is arduous and treacherous.  May the waters run free and clear for all.
4. All the things that DO get done.  I get to feeling a little ragged about all the things that don’t get done, but in the meantime so many things do get accomplished.
5. Snow geese.  They haven’t stopped in the Wrightsville/Columbia fields this year (at least not that I have seen).  It was a joy to see them in the fields near Campbelltown yesterday afternoon.

May we walk in Beauty!