By Lisa Steele-Maley, Director of Programs at ChIME
Last week I attended both the BTS Center’s Convocation: Engaged Hope and the One Planet Peace Forum. Both events were opportunities to learn from and enter into practice with faith leaders, visionaries, and justice workers. Needless to say, it was thought provoking and inspiring.
Importantly, the internal and external conversations that continue to resonate from these two conferences have been rich and meaningful ~ I can feel new learning and ideas finding space inside my body and collaboration with both prior experience and aspiration.
At one point in the weekend, someone referenced Wendell Berry’s poem “What We Need is Here”.
And we pray, not
for new earth or heaven, but to be
quiet in heart, and in eye,
clear. What we need is here.
I re-read the entire poem to myself several times over the weekend. My body relaxed into the sacred truth that what we need is always here. And then, on Sunday, I saw a video of the Pihcintu chorus, a chorus of immigrant and refugee girls based in Portland, singing “Somewhere”.
Somewhere there’s a place for me. Somewhere…
Watching the girls sing, I could see their innocence, feel their longing, and hear their strength. My own body recognized the yearning for community and belonging to the wider web of creation and struggled with anger, frustration, and sadness of the injustice of our world systems. My perfect rootedness here and my continual longing for connection are both real true. This paradox of here and somewhere is both delightful and vexing, painful and beautiful, heart-wrenching and heart-opening. As I hold this paradox and turn it over and over in my mind, I recognize that it is expanding both my heart and my spirit and that expansion will benefit all I am and all I do.
ChIME holds this paradox so well. For students, the 2-year ChIME journey is complex; it includes here and somewhere, personal and community, inner and outer, reflection and service, and more. The wider ChIME community includes board members, staff, adjunct teachers, and over 170 alumni who continue to hold loving space for one another to grow and learn into these complexities. I am grateful to be a part of this community and, while I continue to feel that yearning for somewhere, what I need is here.
Just swallow the sun, wish on the stars and
Let love define the people that we are.
