Letter from our Conference Minister
Dear friends,
While I was reading through devotionals this week, I came upon this from Diana Butler Bass who quotes a response to a question asked during a podcast interview with Jim Wallis. I share this with you as I think this is how many of us are feeling right now.
Diana writes, “While taping a podcast about Freeing Jesus, Jim Wallis asked me how it goes with my soul these days. What a question! Happiness for new words in the world, the joy of Jesus’s Easter uprising. Weariness of long pandemic isolation, brokenhearted over the courtroom testimony about a death that never should have happened. My soul? A Janus-like spirit, leaping toward renewal yet still lugging a yoke that is anything but light.
Resurrection, yes. But haunted by the insurrections of fear and falsity that are ripping the world.
And so, after a long day of many Zoom calls and challenging conversations, I walked. For a couple of miles. Right now, my Virginia neighborhood resembles a florist shop, everything blooming, every color in flower. The dogwoods are among my favorites, the odd timber that is both tree and flower. In floral lore, the dogwood symbolizes spiritual rebirth, the blossoms seen as sacred, as tokens of light, bearers of the Christ consciousness to the earth.
The dogwood at the end of my street seemed to call toward me, beckoning to draw near and gaze. There’s an old southern legend that dogwoods grew in Jerusalem — and that one gave its wood for Jesus’s cross. Because of this, the dogwood was cursed (its short stature a ‘punishment’ for being the wood of death) but it also became a blessing. Blessing? For on each twisted branch burst forth petals of lightness and light.
That’s what I felt when Jim asked after my soul. Like the dogwood. Knowing the knottiness of death in this world, yet witnessing the flowering of new life from gnarled wounds. Resurrection, yes. But under the shaded insurrections of the deep forest. The twisted timber, and the most fragile flower.
How’s your soul today?”[1]
It is a good question. Theological studies of John Wesley, one of the founders of the Methodist Church, indicate that he began almost all conversations with a similar question, “How is it with your soul?” Followed them by the question, “What have you done for the poor lately?” The dogwood blossoms give Diana hope. What gives you hope in these days? Blooming flowers, budding trees and chirping birds give me hope.
Oh, and how is it with your soul?
Blessings,
Bonnie