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Dear saints,
As you may have heard, our merry band of 200-something saints who had planned on being at Kanuga for our parish retreat this weekend will not be making their way up to the hills of western North Carolina due to Hurricane Helene. Kanuga determined on Thursday morning that they needed to close down operations with the potential for loss of power and blocked roads and all the other challenges that could lie ahead. We pray for them, as of course we pray for all who have been in the path of the storm.
If you were part of that Kanuga crowd, the invitation we are extending is to come on Sunday for a s'mores bonfire in the courtyard at 10:20 a.m. and plan on attending the 11:15 a.m. service, following which we will host a Kanuga-esque scavenger hunt on the block and then a simple lunch. You can take All Saints' out of Kanuga but you can't take the Kanuga out of All Saints'—or something like that. It will be a fun way for us to mark Kanuga weekend even as we look to reschedule our parish retreat up there for another time.
Hurricane Helene was on our minds this weekend for other reasons as All Saints' hosted the truly excellent Climate and Democracy summit on Thursday. It's not a bad start to a day-long event to walk into Ellis Hall first thing in the morning, receive an invocation from Bishop Wright, followed by reflections offered by Andy Young, then Jim Wallis, founder and editor of Sojourners magazine, who moderated a panel that featured former Atlanta Mayor, Shirley Franklin, former U.S. Senator from Georgia, Saxby Chambliss, our very own Mary Margaret Oliver and Ed Lindsey, with the retired Bishop of California, Marc Andrus, finishing out the circle. And that was just where we got to by 9:30 a.m.!
It was a privilege to be there as the person whose only input into what was an exceptionally engaging day had been to say "yes," to Amanda Brown Olmstead and Andy Barnett, the core organizers of the conference. All Saints' parishioners and staff were scattered across the room, including the co-chair of our new Environmental Stewardship task force, Maria del Mar Ceballos, whose remit is to help us see options for sustainability from the future of our block to how we go about coffee hour.
The conference for me was book-ended by two great theological questions, related to one another. At the beginning, Jim Wallis asked the central ethical question of Christian theology: who is our neighbor? Toward the end, our own Naomi Tutu shared a Nigerian proverb that says, "In times of crisis, the wise build bridges, but the foolish build walls." A neighbor is someone who chooses to build bridges, someone who learns by listening, particularly to visions of reality different to their own. A neighbor is someone who when asked to choose one side of the political spectrum or another, instead chooses to go deep and build a bridge to the heart of the matters of most pressing concern for our time.
All Saints' is a bridge-building sort of place. I pray that it might be that sort of place for you—one place in your life where you bring your whole truth and your full self. I encourage you to use this election season as a time to truly engage one another, even and especially in your divergent views of the world. When the noise around you asks you to disengage the other, walk the other direction toward those different to yourselves. Build a bridge. Love your neighbor. Believe that God can and will make all things new.
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