Weekly Inspiration (10/25/24)

“ It is easy for us to assume that God favors us because of our creed, our race, our gender, our orientation, our ethnicity, our citizenship, our politics. The reality is that the providence, provision, and protection of God says something, not primarily about us, but of God. It reminds us that God is love, and that love is for all people.”

Br. James Koester
Society of Saint John the Evangelist

Last and First
by Steve Garnass-Holmes

           Many who are first will be last, and the last will be first.
                        —Mark 10.31

Which means, of course, a circle.
First, the Great Upheaval:
“the powerful brought down from their thrones,
and the lowly lifted up;
the hungry filled with good things,
and the rich sent away empty,”
and then the Great Circling:
all of us together, each one first and last,
each a part of one whole,
held in one another's hands,
all of us facing each other,
with all our differences and disagreements,
our strange and varied languages and values and traditions,
all of us in the circle, belonging, cherished, honored.
None are above or beneath, ahead or behind.
We are all here.
And our hereness, our oneness, our encirclement,
the last-being-first-and-the-first-being-last,
is divine.