Dear Friends,

There is an oak just outside my living room window. A big one. And it’s covered with Virginia Creeper, all the way to the top. Judging by the size, the vine has been growing a long time. And given enough time, that thin and fragile vine, that vine which would only be able to creep along the ground if not attached to the oak, that vine will take down the tree. It might not happen in my lifetime, or in my children’s or even in the lifetime of a new child born this year. But given enough time, that fragile vine will take down that mighty oak. I want to keep that oak, and so I will work to remove the vine. But the vine is an excellent metaphor for resilience.

The oak is rigid and tall, monolithic in its girth and shape; it seems indomitable. Indomitable, like all the hatred and violence and oppression that seems to overshadow our cultural and emotional landscapes in these times. The hardheartedness. The exclusion of whole groups of folks deemed not worth protecting, not worth including in our human family. The abuses of the planet and all its beings, including the human ones. The sins of it! The evil excruciating and constant.

The vine is flexible, with many arms, many tendrils emerging from the main vine and doing the same job as the main vine—growing, encircling, persisting. Cut one down and another grows in its place. These tendrils, these arms are soft, elastic, open. They wrap, they can wrap lovingly, around these violations of the interdependent web, persistently and repeatedly and relentlessly, never ceasing to pull against the hardness that threatens our material and existential existent.

May we be as the vine—soft and lovingly persistent against oppression. May we keep on keeping on, never turning back from confronted with all that harms our values and our principles. May we all soften our gaze and soften our grasp of the evils of this world, pulling with others in loving and resilient attention to love and life, as you remember today and every day, that you are loved, you are worthy, you are welcome, and you are needed. May you feel it so and may it be so.

See you soon, maybe even in church! Rev. Rita