This Week at Trinity, Beamsville
Friday, October 15, 2021
Dear Friends,
This week our family has returned to a more normal diet, out from the extra bounty of Thanksgiving weekend. It feels like such a strange combination of language, to make bounty seem optional or occasional, when in fact, around here, it’s surrounding us all the time. It is clearly a reflection of cultural excess and privilege, to have more food than one can handle, and/or that is good for one’s health – and to not talk about how that is the case for most of this community, most of the time. In the same moment, it is a strange and troubling thought to think that I’m scrolling through social media posts from friends declaring a ‘food coma’, while I’m preparing for World Food Sunday and The International Day for the Eradication of Poverty. Surely somewhere there is a balance, a reckoning; a sharing and fair distributing. Surely it isn’t as far away a reality as I’m making it all sound.
In the midst of this post-holiday return, and in the midst of Sunday’s preparation, I’m also reading ahead for the now annual (3rd annual, I think) fall gathering of Horseshoe Falls Regional Council. The successor to Hamilton Conference, following the national restructuring, this Regional Council is working hard to build healthy community, across a wide geographic space. Looking ahead to this meeting, our gatherings on Thursday and Saturday, virtual as they will be, are expanding our language for Holy Manners. As the Meeting Workbook notes, far more “than a call for polite discourse (although that also seems in short supply these days)”, Holy Manners is about seeking “faith-filled conversations on important topics.” In keeping with the President’s theme, to be bold and brave, meeting attendees are invited to follow the acronym of being BRAVE in our interactions. I’ll say more about that version of BRAVE on Sunday morning, but suffice to say it is meant to call us forward; to bring us closer to the kind of community God has always longed for us to be; to model more clearly the Way that Jesus repeatedly taught us truly can and ought to be.
I know that one set of meetings, one acronym, one Sunday of focus on global food inequities, will not bring instant remedy or relief. Would that it were so, we’d have this world’s many injustices sorted a long, long time ago. Even so, I remain confident (a step beyond cautiously optimistic) that, in time, with perseverance, with attention to language and faith-full choices, God’s justice can be known. In a family, a community, a country, a global culture with so much excess in so many places, God’s justice, God’s equity can be known, lived, and established as the new reality. Surely it doesn’t have to be as far away a reality as we can sometimes make it all sound.
With love, and bountiful thanks, to you all,
Heather
“…and soon there’ll be some apples there,
for everyone in the world to share.” (“Johnny Appleseed”, the debated 2nd verse)