When I Was Back There

When I was back there in seminary school
There was a person there
Who put forth the proposition
That you can

As memory makers, we know there are certainties we should never forget. One of them is being community. Not a community, but community.

We are community as we defend ourselves. Community that we have built together as refuge, shelter, safe space … Community where we place our trust when fear rages. Community that - particularly now - we appreciate more and more, because being community makes us stronger.

Can you give me sanctuary
I must find a place to hide
A place for me to hide

We are also community in the ways we move together through shared means of communication, common public references and similar faces of tragedy. Our community takes root in equality, dealing with multiple crises that always make distinctions between “subordinate” and “powerful”.

"This crisis — like earlier ones — could well be the catalyst to shower aid on the wealthiest interests in society, including those most responsible for our current vulnerabilities, while offering next to nothing to the most essential workers, wiping out small family savings and shuttering small businesses." No place seems immune but some are more vulnerable to its devastating spread, and to its most insidious impacts.

All our lives we sweat and save
Building for a shallow grave

And as community, we foresee that we will soon return to normal. To the normality of a commercialized culture, of poverty wages, of inequalities in access to health, of an ecologically unsustainable model of production …

Normality that need not continue to be in the future.

Must be something else we say
Somehow to defend this place

Make memory so that we don't return to normal.

We need someone or something new
Something else to get us through