Report from Bloomington-Normal
Marshall Massey
in A Long Listen, Appointed Meetings
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5 Comments
After our meeting concluded, one Friend commented that the local Friends meeting had never really labored for discernment before. Another Friend said that the evening’s practice in discernment may have been one of the bigger benefits of the occasion.
My *Second* Break for Healing
I healed to the point where I could bring my backpack to a meeting of my oversight committee at my monthly meeting. (They were very loving to me!) And I was able to go to meeting for worship, too, the day before yesterday, and it was wonderful….
Individuals and Larger Systems
It took me twenty more years to realize that I’d seen the destruction of an entire biosystem underway — the biosystem of woods, fields, and marshes that had occupied the coastline of southeastern Michigan since the glaciers retreated and the local climate turned temperate. But the scale of the destruction had an impact on me even as an uncomprehending kid. It was just too colossal to ignore. In ten years of childhood, I saw the wild destroyed to a distance of ten miles.
“Going Naked for a Sign”
Marshall Massey
in A Long Listen, Travel in the Ministry
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8 Comments
It’s a matter of making oneself publicly visible, struggling to get by while stripped (‘naked’) of the customary protections, conveniences and tools of prosperity and power.
To the Spoon River
…They told me of the Flood of ‘93, when first the Mississippi, and then the Illinois, and finally the Spoon River rose up out of its banks and poured across the farmlands, and they and their nine guests couldn’t get out of the house for four days because of the waters covering the only road. They watched their hay bales float away, big waterlogged quarter-ton bales still lighter than the waters sweeping them off; and they played a lot of Scrabble, and learned to make pancakes with almost no eggs; and at the end, they built a raft to go for food and poled it across the floodwaters —
Called Meeting in Monmouth
Marshall Massey
in Appointed Meetings, The Big Walk
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3 Comments
Updated on Friday, June 9, 2006 at 08:23PM by
Marshall Massey
It troubles me that one side gets its views very prominently heard and promoted at liberal meetings and through the pages of QEW, while the other side sits on the sidelines feeling ignored, forgotten, and alienated. It troubles me even though I am closer to agreement with the side whose views are getting all the publicity.
Entering Illinois
Now I was in Illinois, and Illinois topography is palpably different from Iowa’s. The road led straight east for two miles across the river’s lower flood plain: a narrow two-line highway carrying very heavy truck traffic, elevated a few feet above the plain, with almost no shoulder to walk on. A breathtaking situation….
The Middle of My Second Week
…Come 5:00, when I started looking for a place to spend the night, I found myself on the edge of the giant Iowa Army Ammunition Plant (that bluish-grey semi-rectangular shape at the lower left corner of the map above), which looks very much like a vast, grim prison facility. The landscape was semi-industrial. No good places to camp.