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Friends,
The work of poet Andrea Gibson has been a balm and a charge – for me and for many. Since their death from cancer last week, I’ve been returning to their work and in particular their poem, “MAGA Hat in the Chemo Room” (which I highly recommend watching in full.) In it, Gibson describes being in a place meant to keep them alive, surrounded by people whose politics often seek to erase people like them.
I want to feel what I rarely feel outside of here – that everyone is rooting for me to survive. Even MAGA hat guy. I want him to want me to live so long, I could walk over right now, tell him I had to have my ovaries removed, and he’d be so kind, he’d say, Andrea, you can absolutely have one of mine just here, have it. There is a land that free somewhere. We just think believing in it is a child’s prayer, something you only let yourself want when you don’t yet know this world. But if that land can’t exist in this room where everyone’s being told they could die soon how will it ever happen out there?
Gibson’s poetry doesn’t turn from suffering and injustice – it names it. Not to despair, but to imagine something better. What if prayer is like that too? A practice of radical imagination? This Sunday, we’ll look at the “Lord’s Prayer” as Jesus teaches it in Luke as more than familiar words but as a blueprint for a different world, a summons to imagine and embody the kin-dom of God. We’ll ask, like the disciples once did, “Lord, teach us to pray”—not just to endure the world as it is, but to transform it.
Looking forward to imagining with you,
Sally