Providentially, they have entered my life, though my knowledge of them has been limited to the confines of words on a page. Some I know better than others, hearing their voices throughout my day, praying for their help, that with God's grace I may work out my salvation and become the person He created me to be. Each, however, has uniquely affected my being in transformative ways. "I am powerful," a local billboard displaying a dark-skinned woman proclaims. So to are these women; their influence born from their decision to continuously surrender their will to God and to choose love as their guiding principle. In their indefatigable efforts to quench the sorrows of those suffering men, women, and children around them, they risked much - safety, prestige, comfort, reputation, their very lives and the lives of those whom they loved. The crowd blinded by fear, calculated rationales, and misguided faith branded them as fools. And perhaps they were foolish and reckless. But in a world in which people, myself included, continue to claim to resent tyranny and hate injustice yet choose to remain mired in their pedestrian luxuries claiming to be innocent bystanders incapable of doing anything to evoke measurable change, a little foolishness, a little reckless love, might be crucial lest humankind succumb to inhumanity; the image of God replaced with a spiritless machine.
After learning that she was to be sold further south, Harriet Tubman utilized a loosely organized network of safe houses, secret routes, codes, and signs, known as the Underground Railroad, and escaped to Philadelphia. As a free woman, Tubman became a "Conductor" on this railroad, journeying south nineteen times and freeing as many as three hundred slaves. She never lost a passenger and became known as "the Moses of her people."
Founder of the Catholic Worker Movement, Dorothy Day dedicated her life to helping those deemed by the world as "the least of these" and attempting to open the eyes of her brothers and sisters so that they would no longer accept "this filthy, rotten system." Day is remembered for her commitment to peace, nonviolence, racial justice, and the cause of the poor and the outcast.
Corrie ten Boom lived an uneventful life with her father Casper and sister Betsie in their Holland home until German occupation brought Jewish men and women to their door. Besides creating a hiding place in their homes for Jewish people, the ten Booms became actively involved in an underground network designed to help their Jewish brothers and sisters. Ultimately, Casper, Betsie, and Corrie were arrested. Casper died soon after his imprisonment and Betsie and Corrie were sent to the Ravensbruck concentration camp in Germany where Betsie died. After a clerical error which allowed for her release, Corrie spent the remainder of her years helping those victims of the war by establishing homes for healing and by telling the world her story.
A Russian emigre living in Paris, Mother Maria Skobtsova chose a life dedicated to serving God while living in the midst of the world. Serving the poor and homeless in Paris, Mother Maria's work during German occupation in World War II included assisting the Jewish people. During a mass arrest, Mother Maria initiated a plan to smuggle Jewish children out of the stadium where they were being imprisoned by placing them in trash cans. She then helped them escape to Southern France. Mother Maria was also arrested and sent to the Ravensbruck concentration camp where she was killed.
Rosa Parks was tired from her long day at work as a seamstress when she boarded the neutral section of a Montgomery bus on December 1, 1955. When a white patron arrived and the bus driver demanded that Rosa move out of her seat she said no; an action which resulted in the Montgomery Bus Boycott. Nearly one year after Parks' arrest, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that segregation on buses, like segregation at schools, was illegal.
After serving twenty years as a teacher of geography and as a principal at a school in Calcutta, Mother Teresa received a "call within a call" and was granted permission from the Catholic Church to leave her position and live with the poorest of the poor, finding in their faces, Christ in His "distressing disguise."
Following the premature deaths of her husband and eldest daughter, Haregewoin Teferra felt like her life was over and sought to leave the world, appealing to the Ethiopian Orthodox Church to grant her a life of seclusion and allow her to live in a hut by her daughter's grave. But a Catholic organization contacted Teferra begging her to shelter a homeless teenage girl. Teferra said yes, and the organization kept calling. Prior to her death on March 17, 2009, Teferra had cared for nearly 400 children.
It is poetry Wednesday. Forgive me for the lengthy post. My selection today is a section from Kahlil Gibran's "On Love."
When love beckons to you, follow him,
Though his ways are hard and steep.
And when his wings enfold you yield to him,
Though the sword hidden among his
pinions may wound you.
And when he speaks to you believe in him,
Though his voice may shatter your dreams
as the north wind lays waste the garden.
For even as love crowns you so shall he
crucify you. Even as he is for your growth
so is he for your pruning.
Even as he ascends to your height and
caresses your tenderest branches that quiver
in the sun,
So shall he descend to your roots and
shake them in their clinging to the earth.
Like sheaves of corn he gathers you unto himself.
He threshes you to make you naked.
He sifts you to free you from your husks.
He grinds you to whiteness.
He kneads you until you are pliant;
And then he assigns you to his sacred
fire, that you may become sacred bread for
God's sacred feast.
