Dear Saints in Santa Fe, and other far-off places: Greetings in the name and spirit of Jesus Christ! When I was four, I was told I couldn’t play in the church anymore. Actually, that’s not quite true but it sure seemed like it.  The pronouncement came by way of a note I was not yet old enough to read.  My friend and I found it on the shelf in a basement closet of the Presbyterian church in Wooster, Ohio, the same shelf that we had been happily making into our secret hiding place.  Oh, we were having such fun!  Crawling up there was half the joy, and decorating it was almost as good, filling it with all kinds of knick-knacks from home.  My dad was pastor, we lived in the manse next door, and the lines between home and church were happily blurred.  Until the note.

Dear Saints in Santa Fe, and other far-off places: Greetings in the name and spirit of Jesus Christ! It’s impossible until it isn’t. This phrase keeps hanging around in my mind and apparently doesn’t want to leave. I heard it a few days ago from Father John Dear at Ghost Ranch as he addressed the seventy-two gun violence prevention activists who gathered there. He kept us captivated by his adventures of nonviolence across the world. My, does John have stories! He talked of all the great movements which started from the ground up, movements such as labor, suffragettes, civil rights, women, LGBTQ, and so on, and each one was thought to be impossible. Until it wasn’t.