And I will recommend to you what fmh recommended to me: it is best read aloud.
Listen: The world is here
by Desmond Tutu
by Desmond Tutu
Don’t you hear it, praying and sighing and groaning for wholeness?
Sighing and whispering: wholeness, wholeness, wholeness?
An arduous, tiresome, difficult journey towards wholeness.
God, who gives us strength of body, makes us whole.
We yearn to experience wholeness in our innermost being:
In health and prosperity, we continue to feel
un-well, un-fulfilled, or half-filled.
There is a hollowness in our pretended well-being:
Our spirits cry out for the well-being of the whole human family.
The beggars and the mad people in our streets:
Where are their relatives? Who is their father? Where is their mother?
We cry for the wholeness of humanity.
But the litany of brokenness is without end.
Black and white; rich and poor; Hausa and Yoruba;
Presbyterian and Roman Catholic; We are all parts of each other.
We yearn to be folded into the fullness of life together.
Life, together with the outcast,
The prisoner, the mad woman, the abandoned child.
Our wholeness is intertwined with their hurt.
Wholeness means healing the hurt,
Working with Christ to heal the hurt,
Seeing and feeling the suffering of others, standing alongside them.
The person next to you: with a different language and culture,
with a different skin or hair color–
There is no wall, there is only God at work in the whole:
Heal the sores on the feet; salvage the disintegrated personality;
Bind the person back into the whole.
For without that one, we do not have a whole.
God who gives us strength of body
Makes us whole.
Amen.
Sighing and whispering: wholeness, wholeness, wholeness?
An arduous, tiresome, difficult journey towards wholeness.
God, who gives us strength of body, makes us whole.
We yearn to experience wholeness in our innermost being:
In health and prosperity, we continue to feel
un-well, un-fulfilled, or half-filled.
There is a hollowness in our pretended well-being:
Our spirits cry out for the well-being of the whole human family.
The beggars and the mad people in our streets:
Where are their relatives? Who is their father? Where is their mother?
We cry for the wholeness of humanity.
But the litany of brokenness is without end.
Black and white; rich and poor; Hausa and Yoruba;
Presbyterian and Roman Catholic; We are all parts of each other.
We yearn to be folded into the fullness of life together.
Life, together with the outcast,
The prisoner, the mad woman, the abandoned child.
Our wholeness is intertwined with their hurt.
Wholeness means healing the hurt,
Working with Christ to heal the hurt,
Seeing and feeling the suffering of others, standing alongside them.
The person next to you: with a different language and culture,
with a different skin or hair color–
There is no wall, there is only God at work in the whole:
Heal the sores on the feet; salvage the disintegrated personality;
Bind the person back into the whole.
For without that one, we do not have a whole.
God who gives us strength of body
Makes us whole.
Amen.
One of my favorite parts: "for without that one, we do not have a whole."
