Wednesday, July 15, 2015

Apricots and Accidents

What if the mightiest word is love, love beyond marital, filial, national. Love that casts a widening pool of light. Love with no need to preempt grievance.
Elizabeth Alexander

We’ve had a lot of activity come our way this week. The Christian Peacemaker Teams sent a delegation of a dozen to Detroit to meet with numerous leaders and communities in the city. Our good friend Sarah Thompson (below) is the executive director of CPT, based in Chicago. She grew up in Elkhart, Indiana, attended Spelman and then Associated Mennonite Biblical Seminary, lived abroad (including Palestine) and seems to be constantly on the move. Her team was made up of leaders from all over North America, hungry to learn about what is going on here and what it might mean to struggle against injustice here. CPT is hosting a larger event called the Peacemaker Congress at St. Peter’s this weekend.


We had our final planning meeting for another conference that we’ll be participating in this week in Detroit: the Spirit & Roots gathering of leaders in three different traditions: Christian, hip-hop and indigenous spiritualities. There will be a lot of deep dialoguing, to learn from each other what it means to access Spirit and to strategize for creative ways to work with each other for a more just and humane world.

Lutheran teenagers have invaded the city! On Sunday morning, we missed church to speak to about 100 of them from Northern Minnesota at the African-American museum: to tell our story and to narrate the interplay of race, injustice and the water shut-offs in Detroit. They were part of a contingent of thousands this week for their annual national gathering.

Our good friend Erinn invited us up on to the roof for the annual apricot harvest:




The old Park Avenue Hotel was imploded on Saturday morning to make room for the new hockey arena in downtown:


And there was an accident right across the street: two cars collided, one of them careening right into the house:


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