By Cathy Strickler
February 14, 2021

Hi Everybody, it’s really great to be here with you all and have the opportunity to talk. Thank you Merle, I really appreciate you for asking me and I really appreciate you all for listening. I also appreciate and thank everyone who has made these programs possible. They have been a consistent source of connection and comfort.

When Merle asked me to speak I knew right away that I wanted to talk about compassion because I had been thinking about it a lot lately. I have enjoyed the process of writing and getting my thoughts organized.

The main thing I want to talk about is what I’ve found helpful in difficult situations where I react with a strong negative response. Sometimes it’s a harsh judgement, anger, deep irritation, or deep disappointment. Ideally, compassion is a better response. Compassionate thinking is the necessary first step to compassionate action. But sometimes we don’t even get to first base with compassionate thought. It’s easy to run the bases when the object of our compassion is easy to be compassionate to. But it’s hard to even swing the bat to try to get to first base when we’re faced with people who seem hurtful to other people or to us, who seem to reject us or disappoint us, who seem mean or irrational, whose actions are abusive or violent, people who are so damaged that they seem to have no redeeming value, people who we think have done huge damage to our world and who we disagree with so strongly that we want to scream, cuss, get as far away as possible or completely shut out. The trouble with compassion is that sometimes it’s really hard, and even seems impossible.

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By J. Barkley Rosser, Jr.
January 31, 2021

               Three weeks ago Tom Hook spoke about “Imagination,” the topic this month from Soul Matters, with today the last of the month. While he mentioned a dark side to imagination, he mostly focused on its positive aspect, providing visions of better futures that may be achieved with proper hope and effort.  Today we shall be more concerned with the dark side, people imagining things that are simply unreal and are not going to be real, with their belief in such unrealities possibly leading to bad outcomes.

               We have such a situation now with a large portion of the American population seriously believing a Big Lie, that the presidential election of November 3, 2020 was rigged and marked by widespread fraud that resulted in the wrong person being declared winner. Obviously the spread of this inspired the attack on the Capitol on January 6, and this belief looks to persist among many people, even though the new president has been inaugurated.  This is a serious problem, a manifestation of the dark side of imagination.

               Some of the believers in the Big Lie have changed their minds. A particularly dramatic sub-group among the Big Lie believers has been those who have followed the QAnon conspiracy theory.  Increasingly influential with a follower now in Congress, with its people among the leaders of the assault on the Capitol, including the woman killed while trying to break into the House of Representatives, their moment of truth came on Inauguration Day, when supposedly the president was going to order the military to arrest mass numbers of enemies who would be executed or sent to Gitmo, the prophesied “Storm.” The failure of this to happen led some to abandon the theory, with the apparent Q himself, a man named Watkins, declaring that “It is over” and encouraging people to “go back to your normal lives.” Indeed Q had not issued any messages since early December, just before December 8 when by certifying their results states could guarantee that their electoral college votes could not be challenged by Congress.

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By Mary Hahn
January 17, 2021

I woke up one morning and saw the frost on the roof and on the grass and I looked out at the mountains that stood strong like an unbreakable sentry that has stood guard over the valley for millions of years. The mountains are the soul of the region. To understand the mountains is to know ourselves. During our brief lifetime we see little change; they appear much the same. My mind drifted back to the times in which we live. The acrimony and the pain that we face as a nation seems overwhelming.  My mind started racing and then I look back at those mountains that have witnessed things of history and folklore. I thought about the Indians who used to roam these lands and the change that was forced upon them by Europeans. The Indians used the Valley in the shadows of the Blue Ridge for farming. The fertile Valley of the Shenandoah was home to the Monacan Indian nation for 10,000 years where they harvested crops and hunted deer and bear. They eventually were pushed west by the European settlers.

The mountains witnessed Black people working in servitude and a war between the states that should’ve torn us apart. By 1820 there were over 2423 Slaves in the Shenandoah Valley. One in seven was enslaved. The Shenandoah Valley strongly supported the confederacy to preserve the slavery. Whites reacted slowly to new laws where people were considered people Instead of property. The south past laws for segregation called the Jim Crowe laws. All this while the mountains remained vigilant.

They saw us preparing for a world war and a pandemic at the turn of the last century. During the 1918 pandemic in Virginia, schools, churches and a variety of public places closed their doors during the pandemic peak. (Sound familiar?) Newspaper obituaries were filled with names of young men and women whose lives had been cut short by the influenza.

They were around during the economic fall of 1929 but most of these people that lived in their shadows were too poor to tell. Unemployment began to rise rapidly in 1931, farm prices plummeted and the state government cut spending to maintain a balanced budget and relief rolls rose sharply. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt initiated the civilian conservation Corps which built the Skyline Drive.

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By Tom Hook
January 10, 2021

IMAGINE THAT! Can I? Can we?

When I chose this video for this morning, it was before the devastating attack on our Democracy this past Wednesday.

This video, titled “The Great Reversal” is based upon Isaiah 60. Isaiah wrote this for the Jewish exiles who are returning to Jerusalem after their captivity in Babylonia.

Cyrus of Persia, who had defeated the Babylonians, allowed the Jewish exiles to return to Jerusalem and even provides funds to finance the rebuilding of the temple.

There must have been excitement and a glimmer (just a glimmer) of hope for the Jewish people. That they might imagine a brighter future given this new opportunity.

“Look up, Love, take your eyes off the ground, show your face!

Have the courage to see, not only the problems, but the one who remains with you holding the Light!

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By Les Grady
December 27, 2020

As part of the service, Linda Dove read RUBAIYAT FOR PLANET EARTH.

So, what’s an apocaloptimist?  The urban dictionary definition is “someone who knows it’s all going to hell, but believes it’ll turn out OK,” with “it” being the country, the environment, humanity, or something else.  For me, it’s the climate.

I’m an engineer, and most engineers are, by nature, optimists.  We solve problems, which requires optimism.  If a problem is so large and complicated that it’s hard to be optimistic about its solution, we break it down into its component parts, for which solutions can be found, thereby retaining our optimism.

When I first became an advocate for solving the climate crisis, around 14 years ago, I was terribly naïve, because like Dr. Spock on Star Trek, I thought that logic and facts would rule the day.  That if I could explain the science in clear and logical terms, people would accept the fact that the developed world’s fossil-fuel driven economic system was causing the carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere to increase, thereby causing Earth to warm.  Furthermore, that they would see the obvious solution – stop putting fossil CO₂ into the atmosphere and deploy systems to take some of it back out.  Boy, was I deluded.

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By Tom Hook, November 8, 2020

Quote – bell hooks (author & social activist)

What Does It Mean to be a People of Healing? pdf format

Rarely, if ever, are any of us healed in isolation. Healing is an act of communion.

Healing is an act of communion? Let’s ponder that a bit…. Here we are in the midst of a worldwide pandemic of Covid-19, racial and civil unrest, economic uncertainty, and just five days from one to the most vicious, divisive elections in history and we hear from bell hooks that healing is an act of communion?

I believe that for any of us to heal, or to aid in the healing of others, we must take a broad, holistic approach combining all the resources available to us.

Let’s face it….we are in time of great disruption, and without the inner work of contemplation (or mindfulness) and the outer work of action (in community) we stand the chance of seeing society, as we have known it, devolve into further chaos. We must heal in order to survive as a species and as a planet.

From the late Fr. Thomas Keating we hear these parting words: “The only path forward for the survival of our species and perhaps even our planet is a path of nonviolence, of contemplation and action prioritizing justice and solidarity, an affirmation of Oneness and the interconnectedness of all things, which science confirms, and spirituality has always known on its deepest level.”

So where might we begin to examine healing and being healed?

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