Seeking hope
Regret and grief are very real. But there are ways to address the disconnect between our suffering and the hope and joy of the season.
Regret and grief are very real. But there are ways to address the disconnect between our suffering and the hope and joy of the season.
Wisdom includes meaningful self-knowledge as well as an important outward-facing impact that translates into action.
St. Alban’s Parish was blessed this morning with the presence and witness of Ruby Sales, a civil rights activist whose life was saved 50 years ago by the actions of Jonathan Daniels. Michael Ruane, writing in the Washington Post, explains: By all rights, Ruby Sales should have been killed on Friday, Aug. 20, 1965. She should have been hit by the shotgun blast fired by the enraged white man on the porch of the general store in rural Alabama. Her life should have ended at 17, an African American college student and civil rights worker, gunned down under a Coca-Cola sign in the fight for freedom and justice. But there she was Sunday morning, age 67, in St. Alban’s Episcopal Church in Northwest Washington, given a half-century of life by a white seminarian named Jonathan Myrick Daniels who pushed her aside and died in her place. She sat in an ornate wooden chair in the chancel of the church, the decades having taken a toll on her eyesight and her knees, and called herself “a remnant” …