Our Mighty Companion

Our Mighty Companion

A recent lectionary reading for September 10 http://www.io.com/~kellywp/YearB_RCL/Pentecost/BProp18_RCL.html was Psalm 146 which relates directly to Peaceful Living’s principle of companionship. It reads:

Alleluia

Praise Yahweh, my soul

I mean to praise Yahweh all my life,

I mean to sing to Yahweh as long as I live

Do not put your trust in men in power,

Or in any mortal man-he cannot save,

He yields his breath and goes back to the earth he came from,

And on that day all his schemes perish.

Happy the man who has the God of Jacob to help him,

whose hope is fixed on Yahweh his God,

maker of heaven and earth,

and the sea, and all these hold!

Yahweh, forever faithful,

gives justice to those denied it,

gives food to the hungry,

gives liberty to prisoners.

Yahweh restores sight to the blind

Yahweh straightens the bent.

Yahweh protects the stranger

he keeps the orphan and the widow.

Yahweh loves the virtuous

and frustrates the wicked.

Yahweh reigns forever,

your God, Zion, from age to age.

For us at Peaceful Living we are committed to being companions to the individuals we are here to serve. The root of companionship is “to break bread with”. We are here to break bread with the people for which Yahweh holds dear. But we cannot do this alone…and so as we are “tiny companions” so is Yahweh our “mighty companion”.

The Dominos fell the wrong way

September 7, 2006

Dominos fell the wrong way

Seeing, reading, and hearing about all the war hysteria an old saying popped into my head…”that’s all I can stanz and I can’t stanz no more”. While I agree with Popeye’s (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Popeye) food preferences, as a Mennonite committed to non-violence, I take a different approach than he would to Bluto or Brutus

I remember walking out on the playground at Lower Salford Elementary School one day, I don’t know if Ida Keyser, Miss Heckler, or Mrs. Smith was my teacher that year, but I remember seeing the whole play ground filled with bomb shelters. I also remember in our Weekly Reader in the world news section we read about Vietnam. During most of junior high school and Souderton and later while at Christopher Dock Mennonite High School….we were constantly told in the news about the threat of communism and why we needed to stop this threat to American democracy and Southeast Asia is where we were going to do this. One of the US solders who fought in Vietnam and was involved in the My Lai Massacre (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mai_Lai_Massacre) went back 25 years after the incident in 1993 to revisit the site. When he arrived the children now living in the village approached him announcing their names….”me Flower…me Blossom.” His response was…”My God we should have bombed these people with Love”

Instead of going to Vietnam, I volunteered to go into alterative service, working as an orderly caring for persons with disabilities in West Berlin, Germany…living behind the Iron Curtain for two years…in an island of western democracy.

Suddenly in 1989 the Iron Curtain fell under its own weight. The people in Berlin said the Wall fell for the same reason it went up…to keep people from leaving. When it fell, hardly a shot was fired, but it fell backwards and knocked a lot of other communist dominos with it. And so, at the end of one of the most violent centuries in history, we saw a non-violent revolution, using Gandhi and Martin Luther Kings non-violent approach, that democratized over a billion people’s lives...in East Germany, Russian, Romania, Czechoslovakia, China, South Africa, Chile and other countries as well.

This is why I’m a member at Salford Mennonite Church, Harleysville and involved in our “Be not Afraid Weekend” to find ways to live in peace in a fear-filled age. I invite anyone who is interested in this kind of dialogue to our sessions on Saturday and Sunday September 9 and 10 (http://www.salfordmc.org/ ).

Joe G. Landis

Lederach

Time and Eternity

I’m a Christian, I’m a Mennonite, and I’m concerned about doing things that will last for eternity. My primary concern is how we as a Christian church include or don’t include persons with disabilities into our fellowship. I believe as a Christian, and the broader faith community as well…Judiasm, Islam, Buddhism, should be a light for the rest of the world to see how we as the faith community do this. My quest to understand this emerges out of my life and thought after working 30 years in the field of disabilities. I have come to believe that the individuals who we call the most severely disabled, are the ones who are the most spiritually profound. They could care less about our different faith traditions, but simply ask the questions…”are you kind?” and “will you spend time with me?”...and dear people, is this not what the heart of our faith traditions are?

Joe Landis