[Oe List ...] witness in October, 2010

[Janet Sanders]

Dear Nancy, 
Thank youu for your continued creativity and exploration.  Your early work with teaching  imaginal education was one of the reasons I joined the order.  I have appreciated your on-going willingness to be open to the new that was emerging.  Many blessings, Jan----- Original Message ----- 
  From: nancy 
  To: Order Ecumenical Community 
  Cc: Dialogue at wedgeblade.net 
  Sent: Monday, October 25, 2010 8:34 PM
  Subject: [Oe List ...] witness in October, 2010


  Colleagues, old and new, near and far, greetings!

      This has been a wake up year for me.  Here I thought that at 82 I could relax a bit, til I had a dream of my seminary professor informing our class there was no retirement for clergy.  They had a job for the rest of their life!
      This was a shock for me, not because I'd forgotten it, but because the radical new age we are in raised so many questions of what could be done and what needed to be done.  Four little shockers:
      1 "Reading again our old sign, "What appears to be the breaking up of civilisation may be just the shattering of old forces by life itself!"   This struck me most about the church.  We are a smaller and smaller group, and whiter and whiter as time goes by.  Working for ICA around the world was never that, and I kept feeling something should be done, yet we didn't manage anything!
      2. I have read Spong from time to time, and this fall actually finished "Eternal Life: A New Vision." We still have folks in our senior class who talk about God and point up to heaven.  Bill and I have taken them on one at a time, and most will acknowledge now that they are not talking about some old man living  in the clouds, or even above the heavens. Their are other religions that share this image in some form, and while we still find Jesus to be out model and teacher, we are much more selective in what we understand literally ffrom the New Testament --and the Old!
       3. A film on National Television a few months ago really woke me up.  They were documenting the most recent discoveries in space. They started with our old notions that Earth was the center of the universe and sun moon and stars circled it. From there they went on to show the other planets in our galaxy, and earth became a baseball in comparison.  Then they moved further out to new discoveries and the earth was a dot in the massive heavens, and finally actually disappeared in terms of size and significance.
      4. I actually finished Spong and found he claimed, "I began to seeGod in a radically different way: as part of the universal consciousness in which I stand." "Suddenly it made sense to me that the ancient name of God found in the Hebrew scriptures was part of the verb "to be".  God the great  I Am  blends with the I Am affirmations that each of us must make on our journey into self-understanding."   "Individuation wwithin the oneness of God enables us to transcend all the human boudaries of tribe, race, gender. sexual orientation and even religion."

      It all forced me to the understanding that my life is not yet over and there is work to be done.  Because of this we work on creating the new community of fellowship instead of the narrow bands of family. We have no "Order" as we had in Fifth City, but we are finding a significant number of women and men who care and are ready to work for a new society or neighborhood or body of people to bbegin with, who are ready to work at the new earth.  What a birthdy present!!
  Now that hope really would be something to leave our grandchildren!

          Nan(cy) Grow, still wearing the Order ring after 42 years.


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