Becca Stevens's Blog

Becca holding her first-born.

To be known means you are willing to live with longing your whole life.

We keep waking up to how this pandemic is crawling through 2020 and its effect on every aspect of our life. The distancing is taking its toll as we have to scream to be heard. The truth the psalmist offers to us in Psalm 139 that God searches for us and knows us is good news. The truth that the early church proclaims that we are groping for God and God was never far away is great news.

God is searching us out and knows us—take that in for a minute. The Reverend Charlie Strobel, a Catholic priest who is one of the saints in Nashville, who started Room in the Inn and the Campus for Human Development, is one of my dearest friends. I remember a long time ago when he was reading from Mathew 17 the line if we are not living into this will of God, someday Jesus may say, “I never knew you.” Charlie professed, “Those are the coldest words in scripture.” For someone to say to you, “I never knew you,” is cold because our deepest desire is to be known, to be loved.

What does it mean to be known?

·  To be known means you are willing to be hurt. To be known, you have to share your intimacies and vulnerabilities and that means I am willing to let you hurt me. I am willing for my creator, who knows and loves me, to see my vulnerability and weaknesses. If we hold that stuff in, it is hard to be known. It is amazing to feel like I can be in a safe enough space to trust those parts of me. I think part of the reason the Thistle Farms community has lasted for so long and has grown is that we try to say, “This is a safe space to be known, to expose your vulnerability.” We try to say, “Be willing to trust Love enough to discover that within our vulnerability is great strength.”

·  To be known means you are brave enough to search your own heart. I think just like in scripture that says love God, love neighbor, love self—the oldest and greatest commandment—the same principle applies. We need to know ourselves, others, and God. We have to be willing to continue to search our hearts. To be known means I am going to continue to look inward and say, “This is where I need to grow, this is the muse that is speaking to me, this is where I am being led, this is where I am broken.”

·   To be known means you are willing to live with longing your whole life. Does anyone think communion, where you get a sip of wine and a taste of bread, sates our hunger? It is the longing to be known that propels us back into the world to seek truth and justice. It is that propelling that allows us to be intimate with our community, our partners, our family, our friends. This longing is the poet’s muse. It is when we live on the fringe of the fabric that we can see the beautiful pattern. It’s not a curse. It’s a gift. It’s a gift to feel longing. Unrequited love keeps our desire for love strong. It is in our experience of searching we become assured that God is searching too. We search together.

When I became a mom, I spent hours and hours beholding our first-born son. I could count the hairs on his head. I could describe the soft peach fuzz above his right ear and the way his left ear was a tiny bit different. I knew the way his cheek moved when he started to drift off to sleep, and when the first freckle emerged on his neck. Being known is something like God beholding us like a child, knowing us before we say a word, before we know anything about ourselves, we have been searched out and known and loved.

It is easy to say no one knows me; it is harder to proclaim I am known. I have been searched out and God knows me. He knows my comings and my goings. If I make the heavens my bed, God is there with me and if I sail to the uttermost part of the sea, God is there with me as well. In that deeper, more truthful knowledge of being known, we reach out to another. We remind one other, even in a pandemic, we have searched for you and we know you. A big danger in this pandemic is that people feel forgotten and not searched for. The very small things we do to reach out are big things. This summer as part of a local outreach we brought people a pineapple, and they wept. When in my lifetime have people wept over receiving a piece of fruit? It means the world to be known, to search and know someone. So in gratitude for all the ways we have been known and loved, reach out and remember our neighbor. That is what love looks like today.  

peace and love,
Becca Stevens

 For The Rt.  Rev Glenda Curry’s consecration, June 27th

These are historic times. We are experiencing pandemics and protests calling us to stay apart and come together. Such times leave us feeling like we are traversing uncharted, stormy seas trying to hold onto tradition and justice  as well as anger and hope, as counterbalances. Today, in this historic consecration of you, Glenda Curry as the first woman bishop of Alabama, we remember that while events are historic, they are not unchartered. We know from the history of our faith, the call is not to try and keep everything balanced, but surrender to love. Surrendering to love, especially in historically difficult times is no easy task and comes with a cost.  

 

 Glenda, as you continue your beautiful ministry in Alabama  Prisons, the Decatur Morgan Hospital, here at the Church of the Advent, or on Lookout Mountain, remember your call is not to try to balance everything in your life and throughout Alabama, your call is to continue to surrender your life for the sake of the Gospel.  There is no greater love. Your surrendering offers a path as bishop to love with practicality, specificity, and scalability. In the wisdom of the church, you will begin this path where a miter is placed on your head and a crozier in your hand by being asked to take a knee. It is a powerful way to humble oneself and show reverence. Taking a knee is the opposite of kneeing someone. Using the sharp edge of a knee to hurt another is like wielding a sword. Taking a knee turns the sword into a plowshare. It is the act of becoming small, in order to allow something bigger to take place. It is an act of surrender and bravery.  

 

You are following in the footsteps of great women who have taken a knee for the sake of love. Marianne Bogel, the first woman ordained in 1977 in this diocese. Mary Adelia Rosamond McLeod ordained in 1980 became the Bishop of Vermont in 1993. The list of heroic women breaking old ground, such as Deacons Carolyn Foster and Katherine Jacobs, the first African American women ordained in this diocese, goes on and on. We can trace that mother line all the way back to the woman at the well. She is the embodiment of what is not new. Her life is a reflection of the bonds of old injustices and prejudices. Jesus recognizes her. I have met her and you have met her. I have seen her in the refugee camps where women fleeing war and oppression have become part of the story of violence and vulnerability. You have seen her under bridges, on the backside of anger, inside prison walls, and the shadowed side of feigned civility. The proclamation to her is that shame and injustice have no position in being called to surrender to so that she can proclaim freedom. Those deemed as beggars become the preachers and she, the first evangelist in John’s Gospel, preaches today, “Come and see. You are not going to believe the wondrous work of Love that is coming in this ministry for these historic times.” The woman at the well proclaims to us that the giver and the receiver of healing are the same in God’s eye. 

Last weekend I stood in an A-frame chapel in Nashville where with six people for a woman’s wedding. The woman like many of the women I serve in the community of Thistle Farms, knew sexual assault and drugs before she knew how to locate herself on a map. In the midst of the pandemic, economic hardship and cries from around the country that “I can’t breathe,” she was trying to plan a wedding and she was mad. She was furious and trying to stand her ground about what she felt like was unstated racism within the community, about her family, and money. She said, “I know you want me to be grateful, but I’m not, I am mad as hell.”  She was probably as angry as the woman at the well when kindness is defined as being allowed to draw water. 

There is plenty to be angry about in this world and plenty of reasons to step away from the well. But there is new life for us if we can stay and drink from the water love offers us. I showed up at the chapel before the ceremony a bit nervous as she and her maid of honor were fixing her dress. There was a long, silk lace that had to be threaded down her back and tucked into a bustle. Before long the two of us were on our knees trying to tighten the lace and tuck it all in. We laughed as we were us pulling and tucking and pulling and tucking everything into place. Minutes later she walked up the aisle through an empty church. I snapped a photo as soon as the ceremony ended and She was bathed a bright beam of light. She  was radiant as she surrendered and  made her promise to love, like you Glenda are now, like all of us long to do, like the woman at the well.  We are both the broken and the healer. She asked me to send her the photo and she posted it all over social media, the modern equivalent of running to the city, saying “Come and see. There is light.” We don’t give up just because it’s hard or we are mad.  We keep working for justice.  We keep practicing peace.  We keep surrendering all to love.   

My prayer for you and all healers who know about surrender at the well is to continue to:

• Offer a knee when we need to surrender to love. 

• Honor the places that have been broken open and transformed.

• Embrace humility by taking out the trash, visiting prisons and being anointed by others. 

• Practice courage by facing injustices of our racist past lingering in our present so we can find a way to our mountaintop.

• Raise our consciousness through the allocation of budget and time.

• Challenge our understanding of lavish love by building shelters like cathedrals.

• Proclaim hope to all who have ears, “Come and see.” 

Go in peace with the power offered to you as a Bishop of our beloved church, surrendering to the greatest force for change in the world, love.  Amen.

Peace and love, Becca stevens 

  

Taking a knee is a powerful way to stand up. In religious traditions to kneel is to humble oneself and show reverence. Taking a knee is the opposite of kneeing someone. Using the sharp edge of a knee to hurt another is like wielding a sword. Taking a knee turns the sword into a plowshare. It is saying ”Enough, I will not stand for this.”

Growing up, my mom said I was not allowed to go to bed until I knelt down by the bed and prayed. I kneeled before bed even in college after hazy late nights with a quick knee to the ground before falling into the dorm bed. As a priest I have witnessed people surrender to overwhelming pain and grief drop to their knees. It’s a posture of falling at the feet of God’s mercy. As a student of pacifism and justice work, I practiced taking a knee when groups started daily protests in front of the South African Embassy during apartheid. I have not put my hand over my heart at the anthem since I made my vows in the church in 1990. I felt my heart was pledged instead to a calling to love the world beyond borders. This does not mean I do not love my country. I hold it accountable to my calling. I have stood on speaking platforms where I was the only person with my hands to my side, but I have never been brave enough on those platforms to take a knee.

Being on one’s knees is compelling because it is a sign of contrition and humility, both of which require courage. In history people have knelt before kings. People kneel when asking someone’s hand in marriage. It is an act of becoming small, in order to allow something bigger to take place.

The poetic justice is that such an act, by its very nature, is transformed into an act of great defiance. Taking a knee, because of its roots in humility and contrition, is a sign of civil disobedience. Taking a knee has always been a powerful tool in justice work. A drawing from the late 1700’s shows an enslaved black man taking a knee, and it became an emblem of the abolitionist movement. During the march on Selma, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. knelt in front of the courthouse. The power of taking the knee continued in 2016 in the National Football League (NFL) when San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick knelt during the national anthem. The reaction was deafening, but couldn’t drown out the power of his act. Four years later the NFL, which bases its game on the power of physical strength, has finally surrendered to the power of taking a knee. The NFL commissioner, Roger Goodell, said last week, “We, the National Football League, admit we were wrong for not listening to NFL players earlier and encourage all to speak out and peacefully protest.”

The brave and simple act of taking a knee is rooted in two qualities, humility and defiance. Together these qualities — these virtues — stand up to staunch foes. My college-age son went to his first protest in Nashville, and there the organizers called for everyone to kneel as they stood up for justice against racist and violent police systems. He came home and described the feeling of “being in a movie,” because he said taking a knee with 10,000 other young people felt bigger than life. It was epic. It takes so much strength to take a knee. I am taking one now. God forgive me when I didn’t but should have.

— Becca Stevens

Photo of me kneeling 28 years ago today at my ordination.

In the South, as the temperatures hover in the 90s by mid-morning, we get our first snow. It falls in airy puffs, like dandelions, from cottonwood trees. The puffs are as fanciful as monarch wings dancing with dappled halos on a whimsical descent. When one lands on you, you make a wish.

This is a vexing time as opinions rise with the thermometer on how simultaneously to socially distance and protest. It’s a good time to turn to the woods that invite us to remember our ideals and to confess freely. Cottonwood snow lowers stress. It is to the woods that all lovers of justice retreat every now and again to stir their hearts and minds toward love for all creation. The civil rights movement’s grandfather, the Rev. Dr. Howard Thurman, retreated to the woods as a young child in Florida during the era of Jim Crow laws to find a space of freedom. He credits his relationship with an old oak tree for grounding him in his essential beliefs, including radical nonviolence that would influence young preachers such as the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Cottonwoods were here before brothers and sisters were dragged ashore and enslaved. They were here before settlers killed to steal what was not theirs. They witnessed lynching, freedom rides, and secrets. For decades, they silently stood in the alleys of Nashville where we raped, addicted, and arrested our sisters. For the thirty years I have been a pastor, the cottonwood has fallen on the small a-frame chapel where I dreamed of sanctuary for women in Nashville. This year, 2020, as a pandemic sweeps the world and people demand reform of unjust and racist police, prison, and court systems, the cottonwood snow falls again. This yearly shedding is a cleansing, reminding us that we are traveling a long road, and we need strength to keep loving this world and each other.

I lift my head squinting to see the source of the snow and see the moon in the sweet morning sunlight. In the midst of kneeling down and rising up we see the long sweep of time. People have been working for justice for as long as people have killed for power and intimidated by force. I imagine cottonwood snow tufts falling between the heavens and earth, each one holding the name of women and men who have lived for the sake of love in the work of justice.

Keep speaking your truth in love, keep on the path of justice, and go to the woods to see the summer snow.

— Becca Stevens 

“I didn’t take a class, or search the world. I just saw what was before me on this ordinary day in these extraordinary times. ”

Having vision in the midst of pandemic, feels impossible. 

Thank God we are not responsible for changing the world.  

Thank God we don’t have to gaze into a crystal ball to predict a new thing to get us out of the oldest issues. 

Thank God all we need to do is love the world and be willing to change to love it more.   

To you, I want to say, we can still have vision. We only need to look again and allow our sight to be full of imagination and grace.   

This morning, tucked into the corner of an old drawer, I found a hand sized dusty prayer book inscribed in 1941 to my husband’s mother by her pastor. It said, “private use” on the cover.  It was a much shorter version of the common prayer book and felt intimate as it could fit in the palm of your hand. 

My first feeling was surprise that my now deceased mother-in-law had a small prayer book. I never heard her mention using a prayer book in the 30 years I knew her. But it must have meant something to her to keep it.  She had endured some trauma as a child and maybe this book was like a strong security blanket that guided her through some pretty shadowy valleys. 

Within a few minutes of finding the book and leafing through it, it moved from a sweet memory to something holy. Under the initial inscription I saw that in 1974, my husband’s mom signed it with love to him when he was a young teenager. She must have wanted him to be safe. I can see her passing it to him with little fanfare or notice. Maybe she knew he needed that security during a period when he was going through some of his own heartache.  

I don't know that he even knows he has it. I have no idea how it ended up in this drawer of mine. But what I did know instinctively, like I know when the temperature is perfect for the larkspur to bloom, it was a moment to stop and let what I was seeing with my eyes sink deeper and understand, not only the tenderness of this book, but what I needed to learn from it.   

I had never seen it until this pandemic and somehow because it had been hiding for decades, was small, and well used, it felt sacred. The prayers had had time to germinate and take root. This prayer book had seen war. I wondered if it was time for my husband to sign over the book to our youngest son who has been sent home from college and wondering what to do. But for now, I just needed to see it, hold it and take it in.   

In that tiny prayer book I could feel security and grounding, two things I didn’t even know I was needing to get on with my work and love the world.  

Security, I needed to feel safe.  

Grounding, I needed to know that I can stand on all that I have worked for and it will not collapse under me. 

When I left the room holding the book in my close hand, there was a healing. I didn’t take a class, or search the world. I just saw what was before me on this ordinary day in these extraordinary times. Then I stayed with the sight long enough for it to be a vision and teach me what I need to learn.  

Visions can be old and as simple as considering birds and grass again. Most vision comes from within, the gift is looking at something before us and finally seeing it. Seeing how extraordinary it is, seeing how sacred it feels, and seeing how it fills us with vision.  

There is a cost to vision, a freedom in vision, and culpability in vision.  

It means we can’t unsee and it means we lose the veil of ignorance. But what a sad thing it would be to not allow ourselves the gift of seeing with vision. We would miss the low flying hawks that whisper inspiration into our hearts. We would miss the spiraling of the incense that encourages us to pray. We would miss the dragons in the clouds that dance us into bravery.  I feel like I can feel the transformation of sight into vision because of the presence of salty prisms of gratitude mixed in for good measure. 

We are all graced with vision. Our job is to practice seeing in the ordinary the sacred all around us.  

Peace and love,

Becca Stevens

Photo by Wolfgang Rottmann on Unsplash

“Easter doesn’t begin when the skies are sunny, or the pandemic passes, or justice reigns. It begins while it is still dark and there is only love.”

It doesn’t feel much like Easter with the stormy skies, an empty church, and the world grieving. But it is Easter.  

The story of the Resurrection begins with the words, “While it was still dark…” The cross was casting its longest shadow as the sun was rising on Jerusalem that Sabbath as Mary heads out with grief guiding her to the body. There was turmoil in the occupied nation and the disciples were in hiding from persecution as dawn was breaking their hearts again.  

Mary heads out with oils, ready to meet the body and face the guards. Her walk to the garden, in midst of violence, injustice, fear and grief, preaches this Easter. She is compelled to walk to the source of love. Easter doesn’t begin when the skies are sunny, or the pandemic passes, or justice reigns.  It begins while it is still dark and there is only love.  

Love, in its rawness and power carries the day.  It leads Magdalene through despair, brushes aside fear, and carries her with courage and humility to the grave where what she experienced changed our world. It is the story of how love is more powerful than death, and rises like the sun cutting through clouds of violence and shadowed valleys. It sustains Mary through meeting angels and feeling the earth shake. It catches her when she falters at Jesus’ feet. Love then leads her to be the first preacher, and to offer generations the Easter message that  love is the most powerful force for change in the world.  

During this crazy coronavirus season, even while it is still dark, we glimpse love’s rising. “I have no words right now,” one of the graduates said during our weekly zoom circles at Thistle Farms, "but I show up and keep the faith.”  “I am not sure what to do”, a midwife and board member at the Chapel where I serve said during a call, “except keep going in love.” Those sentiments, like countless others, are reminders that even while it is still dark, we walk towards  love. Wherever and however it is calling us. It takes humility and courage to love the whole world in the midst of a pandemic by taking small steps with what we have been given. When we walk in faith before the dawn’s early light,  we are gifted with a clearer memory, more gratitude, courage in small acts, and freedom to weep. In the midst of life that can be unfair, hard, and frightening, love can carve our path. 

This year, beyond all others, Easter invites us into the truth of love, the strength of love, and the freedom of love. Today is the day to proclaim love as a statement of faith. We don’t have to wait for the mountaintop, we proclaim it in the valley. We don’t have to wait for a pandemic to subside, we proclaim it in quarantine. We don’t have to wait until the paths are straight, we proclaim it meandering in the desert.  

Love is all that will survive death, and it is our for the taking. In the face of trauma, broken hearts, and  a virus that can take us out, is enough. When John Prine died this week, along with more than 20,000 other souls, I kept thinking about how his angel from Montgomery was right, “its a hard way to go.” I imagine that angel’s name may have been something like Magdalene, hovering close with her arms full of herbs and oils. And as he becomes love, she weeps in joy again. Easter etches love into hearts of flesh. The old preachers used to say, “its Friday now, but Sunday is comin’.” The stone has rolled, the shroud has fallen and we are free. We can celebrate with all those who have died and live on in love in the memory of God. 

Love reminds us the distance between the wilderness and the garden is short. All we grieve is still a part of us and our hope is not in vain. It’s not hard to imagine Magdalene, you, or me,—searching for love with such longing that we look for life in a tomb.  With just a glimpse we can live into the love fashioned on the first morning of creation. We can live in the truth that love lives and make our song on our own Easter morning, “Alleluia, Alleluia, Alleluia.”

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

“When I say offering a roll of toilet paper to someone is a spiritual discipline, I mean it. It is holy and good. Practically divine.”

As the reality of the coronavirus is beginning to sink more deeply into our minds, we held a staff meeting for the chapel I serve in Nashville, Tennessee.  

The pastoral team suggested we call to check on all the folks who are health compromised, elderly or financially strapped. Something in that response didn’t feel complete. First, I knew most of the people would go instinctually into “southern polite”: “I’m fine, but aren’t you sweet for checking in.” 

Meanwhile, I am imagining them awake at 2:30 in the morning with anxiety over simple supplies and hand sanitizer. One of the gifts of this time is the woods are not closed for business, and I could walk daily figuring out how to spend my “corona” sabbatical.

All of us are doing the same thing. We think globally; then plan on a personal level. We collectively start the internal list of our plan for gathering supplies and distributing them to ourselves, our family, and maybe a friend. We decide how we are going to spend our gift of time and not be the one to gain the “corona 20.”  

How the Front Porch Pantry was formed

As I walked in the woods and thought about a strategy for going to the store, my mind went back to the conversation I had on the phone with the pastoral team. That’s it. I want to help people buy supplies for other people who are facing challenges.  

Within 24 hours we  launched “Front Porch Pantry,” a simple temporary program for people to drop off food on my porch. My sons then take the supplies and deliver them on the front porches of people who need them. Each bag contains, hand sanitizer, toilet paper, and maybe small communion wafers to use during our virtual services in a communal meal. My oldest son Levi hosted  an Instagram live concert announcing the project hoping his fans would donate a few bucks since most of them aren’t in Nashville. 

The staff at the chapel loved the idea and bought items online in bulk. Thistle Farms, a community of women survivors put it online to serve all the graduates and residents of their programs.

Within 48 hours we started delivering our first boxes of toiletries and goodies. The emails from the first recipients were -- "I love this community," "You have no idea what this means to me to be remembered," "How did you know I was running low?" and, of course, "You shouldn’t have, but I am so so thankful."

People started dropping off amazing things, offerings of love in trying times. Never once was anyone within six feet of another person. But love travels farther than 6 feet and you can feel it. It was a gift to our family as well.  

Packing a box with a roll of toilet paper, when you are down to your last eight rolls, is a spiritual exercise, a tithe. If you want world peace, maybe start with sharing a roll of toilet paper.

'How could I live on 5 sheets of toilet paper a day?'

Two weeks ago, as the coronavirus was unfolding, I was sitting in an asylum-seeker camp on the border in Matamoras, Mexico.  About 3,000 people are in a tent city on a dirt strip between the Rio Grande and the Brownsville border. 

People stand in line to eat, to charge phones, and to go to the bathroom in a line of porta potties that stretch the length of a basketball court. There is a stand in what would be center court with a woman as referee. 

To each person she passes out five squares of toilet paper, pre-torn and folded. I thought about the huge scale of problems between governments and borders, and the reality of people who just need toilet paper. Of all the degradations I saw that week that one stuck with me. How could I live on 5 sheets of toilet paper a day? 

One afternoon I was beading with kids in the camp, listening to them laugh and tell stories with a resiliency we all should hope to embody in our lives. There was a strong smell of feces that rose as the wind shifted. I swear to you I thought it but the incense of this camp. That smell that rises like a prayer of petition. 

When some poor soul can’t wait in line to receive their 5 sheets, they must go down by the river to squat and wipe with thin long grasses. The smell was humility and longing: two things close to God’s heart. Unlike every other time in my life, I didn’t cover my nose or make a face. I just made myself breathe, like all the kids.   

I don’t want to turn away from the smell of humanity or the reality of the struggle of families trying to find a home with their own damn bathroom.

'I am with you' is the best answer to 'How long will this last?'

That evening we received a message that none of the six of us from Thistle Farms could come back to the camp. We had all flown and the risk of our infecting the camp was too great.

For a minute I forgot that I can be infectious and smelly and needy. I am sorry for thinking I was being gallant in my response to the stench in the camp. Some of that smell comes from me.  My prayer as I flew home was to keep low enough to the ground, not to forget the smells that rise from all of us

When I got home, I had missed the big runs on toilet paper. I thought people sure could have used a referee like the saint who handed out sheets. If everyone had bought just one roll at a time, we still would have still been toilet paper rich by camp standards.  

So when I say offering a roll of toilet paper to someone as a spiritual discipline, I mean it. It is holy and good. Practically divine. 

How long will this last?  How long do we need to share toilet paper?  The answer throughout time by love is simply “I am with you.” 

While that doesn’t seem like enough of an answer, it is more sufficient than we can imagine.  I am with you in your big and small sufferings. I am with you in your secret daily fears and in your dreams.  I will keep being with you, for however long it takes.  

Peace and love.

— Becca Stevens

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“Don’t get fooled by all the other glittery objects around you.  You will always find love as long as there is a sky above you. ”

I have professed for decades, “Love is the most powerful force for change in the world”. But over the years, as founder of a community for survivors, and as a priest, I forget I believe in this.  Instead I get tripped up by all the noise in the world and by my own fears and ego.  It's hard by virtue of what we do, to love. Love in its unadulterated form must be like the sun on a clear day.  It’s so bright and powerful we can't look directly at it. Yet such a vision of pure brightness is our deepest longing.  It is this ideal that creates prophets and poets. This pure love was described by Gandhi as “Ahimsa," the soul force. So powerful it can unleash the chains of oppression and set captives free. Martin Luther King believed such love is realized together in a beloved community.  Loving together could change the course of history. Dorothy Day called this radical love, and we had to count it highest among our ideals. Only then could love topple nations and change individual hearts.  

I long to believe all of this. I vow to spend my life seeking this love. But what I have witnessed in religious circles and justice work is we don’t allow ourselves to exercise love’s power.  Instead we settle for building tiny boxes that eclipse the magnificence of love.  We look through our self-created boxes and love becomes, convoluted, cauterized, constrained, compartmentalized, and compromised.  Even though we are seeing love dimly, we tell ourselves that is just what love looks like. So, we stock pile more than we need, and thereby justify the harm we have caused one another and ourselves.  Think for a moment how we have suppressed love. We have thwarted it like huge grey clouds masking the sun. I understand why. The cost of bearing such a light is next to impossible to live with.

“The full force of love buckles our knees. It makes us run for shade and sort love into boxes like agape or philia, creating boundaries where we can live in safety. When we live like that for decades, the truth of love begins to fade in a distant sky and we forget to look up. ”

Becca with refugees, Ritsona, Greece. See products handmade at the camp, LoveWelcomes.org.

I have glimpsed it.  You have too. We see it when everything else fades and our hearts turn to flesh.  I sat with 20 women from all parts of the world in a refugee camp in Greece.  The skies were hot and clear and none of us knew the next steps.  The refugees had suffered so much and our goal was to create aneconomic community for women.  There was no clear path forward.  All we had was love.  There were tears to be sure, there were some disagreements, and too many meetings. But love lead us that day. I felt it burning my face and stinging the salt water tears.  I kept thinking, “if we can just love each other, everything else will move out of our way.”  In midst of the heat, trauma, uncertainty, and huge demands, I felt divine pure joy. 

I don’t want to leave this earth forgetting to look up and catch the glimpses of pure love. I want to experience ahimsa unadulterated where the force for change dwells.  I want to travel with a beloved community that tends to radical love daily.  When we glimpse at love in its purest form and feel its true power, we experience an eternal pull that has changed the world. When we are brave enough to walk toward such light, we can feel love’s contagious nature, and we can feel how intimate and messy the whole affair unfolds. When we walk toward that kind of love, we cross borders and join a host of other yearning pilgrims. We set aside shame, resentment, excuse, procrastination, and hoarding.

This is how I want to us to live, walking as flock under a bright sky. You are in the rays of such love.  Don’t forget to look up.  Don’t forget to run to community that believes in radical love.  Don’t get fooled by all the other glittery objects around you.  You will always find love as long as there is a sky above you.  We can search together through our own daily practices and through a shared commitment to love.  We have an inherited right to keep reaching out in this world and sit under the hot sun and believe, “love is the most powerful force for change in the world.” 

I recently traveled with a group of Thistle Farmers to the border towns of Mc Allen, Brownsville and Harlingen TX. We visited nonprofits and foundations, talked with judges and local families and led an all-day workshop for community leaders. What I learned there has prompted me to think about how the Thistle Farms Global community might work to effect change for more just solutions to the current crisis on our southern border.

Economic Stability and Safety are driving concerns for non-profits, cities, citizens, and immigrants. Families leave their homes due to lack of employment and poverty.

Parents fear for their own safety and for the safety of their children. If people make the decision to leave their homes, and communities to embark on a long and dangerous trek, one must ask the question, “What other options are available to them?”

We met a family living in a border town where one spouse works at a nonprofit while the other works for border security. This couple works hard to provide for their children. Good people on all sides are trying to figure out how to be on the side of compassion and justice while keeping communities safe and sustainable for all.

Imbedded in conversations about how to best serve asylum seekers is the acknowledgement that communities are struggling to meet the needs of their neighbors - challenges like homelessness, hunger and the lack of health care. Recognizing the overwhelming needs of asylum seekers who have, in many cases, spent months walking, has put a tremendous strain on resources for shelter, food, transportation and medical care. In this exchange, we must recognize that there is a strain on both the givers and the receivers.

Trauma informed care for asylum seekers is the goal at the Reception Centers receiving women, men, and children from Detention Centers. They want to bring compassion to the services offered. For instance, they are sensitive to people who have walked for weeks and then suffered detention who may need just soup at first so as to not overwhelm a body suffering trauma and exhaustion. They keep mothers and children together as long as they can knowing that the violence and vulnerability of the journey is sometimes unspeakable.

There is beautiful work going on at smaller long-term shelters, as well as at the overnight reception centers where people stay for a day or so before they travel by bus to their host families across America. Kind and compassionate volunteers, pastors, medical staff and social workers address people’s mental, spiritual, physical well-being and safety. Knowing how to respond is hard for both those providing direct services and for those who want to be supportive.

Pictured below, scenes from the Ozanam Center in Brownsville, TX, with director Victor Maldonado. They offer beds, showers, food, and other essentials, but it is in dire need of an upgrade and better services for women.

Here are seven calls to action that matter:

First: A call to activism that demands more just federal laws and sustainable policy.

Second: A call to support asylum seekers as they pass through or relocate to your community. through meeting buses, providing substance and gift cards, and volunteering with local groups. 

Third: A call to provide financial support to organizations who provide legal representation and advocacy on the ground.

Fourth: A call to donate dollars, volunteer hours, or in-kind gifts to those doing the day to day boots-on-the-ground work at the border. including the catholic charities groups and the smaller not-for profits.

Fifth: A call for social media advocacy /influencers to raise awareness by sharing stories of the heroic journeys of the families and the people responding to them.

Sixth: A call to those of all faiths to remember the wanderers of this world and God’s special care for them.

Seventh: A Call to use our purchasing power to support entrepreneurial women artisans who did not or could not flee their communities.

Love beyond Borders: the Thistle Farms Global Team Response

The response of the Thistle Farms Global team is to rally support and investment for women survivors so they can invest in their own communities, eliminate physical and sexual violence in their families and move from shadowed fear to agency in their own lives.

This year we will pour time and resources on 10 existing Thistle Farms partnerships in Central andSouth America with an emphasis on creating new jobs and supporting safer communities. We will help build the first long-term free housing for survivors in Belize.

We will begin conversations with a group entrepreneurial needle-pointers who live near the border and expand our projects in Jalisco, Mexico and in San Eduardo, Ecuador.

We will support non-profits along the Texas border and encourage their leaders to bring their whole, idealistic hearts and souls to the work.

We will offer our experience, talents, and platforms to promote love beyond the border and work to ensure dignity for all.

All research points to the undeniable truth that, while it takes a village to raise a child, it takes a woman to heal that same village.

Creative Justice will challenge the old ideas in the non-profit sector that bigger and faster is better, that economics and lavishness in services are polar opposites, that in the midst of great need we will burn out, and that we are powerless to change the world with love.

— Becca Stevens

As I begin, my exit I realized while I pack that I’m shaking the dust off everything.  There is rich red dirt that is the foundation of Rwanda.  By the end of a week it has made its way into your clothing, your pores, and has seeped into your heart. 

The red dusty dirt invites pilgrims like me to experience at a cellular level the truth that we are simply dust.  I am dust, rich as this land.  I am dust, buoyant as the particulars soaring through the air on an African breeze.  Thank God for the witness of fellow dirt lovers in Rwanda that have taught me this week that being dust is a gift.

Dust is what makes the rich earth that grows hope.  This dust is what sustains more than 80% of all Rwandans. This dust keeps me close to the earth, keeps me close to my creator, and makes me feel like singing at the end of this journey, “Alleluia.” Now for the 30 hour flight home!!

Thank you for being a part of this week and for sharing the story of Thistle Farms Global with a friend.