Conference Minister Corner | May 6, 2025

"You shall love Adonai Your God with all your heart, with all your soul and with all your might. Take to heart these instructions with which I charge you this day. Impress them upon your children. Recite them when you stay at home and when you are away, when you lie down and when you get up. Bind them as a sign on your hand and let them serve as a symbol on your forehead; inscribe them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates."  Deuteronomy 6:5-9

Over the past year, I have been participating in a training program called ‘The Soul of Leadership’ through the Shalem Institute in Washington, DC.  This program helps leaders of all kinds integrate spiritual practices with leadership realities to more fully embody their vocational path, and it has been a lifesaver for me.  I have met folks from all over the country, clergy and lay, whose wisdom, care and passionate involvement with the world has grounded me, sustained me and kept me going. 

They have also resourced me, not only with many books about leadership models and practices, but also with poetry, song and prayer.  On the last day of our retreat in April, my friend Jonathan read the following poem by Aurora Levins Morales.  It made me think of countless conversations I’ve had with so many of you over the past few months, I wanted to share it with you.  It is a prayer I think about daily…

V'ahavta by Aurora Levins Morales

Say these words when you lie down and when you rise up,

when you go out and when you return. In times of mourning

and in times of joy. Inscribe them on your doorposts,

embroider them on your garments, tattoo them on your shoulders,

teach them to your children, your neighbors, your enemies,

recite them in your sleep, here in the cruel shadow of empire:

Another world is possible.

Thus spoke the prophet Roque Dalton:

All together they have more death than we,

but all together, we have more life than they.

There is more bloody death in their hands

than we could ever wield, unless

we lay down our souls to become them,

and then we will lose everything. So instead,

imagine winning. This is your sacred task.

This is your power. Imagine

every detail of winning, the exact smell of the summer streets

in which no one has been shot, the muscles you have never

unclenched from worry, gone soft as newborn skin,

the sparkling taste of food when we know

that no one on earth is hungry, that the beggars are fed,

that the old man under the bridge and the woman

wrapping herself in thin sheets in the back seat of a car,

and the children who suck on stones,

nest under a flock of roofs that keep multiplying their shelter.

Lean with all your being towards that day

when the poor of the world shake down a rain of good fortune

out of the heavy clouds, and justice rolls down like waters.

Defend the world in which we win as if it were your child.

It is your child.

Defend it as if it were your lover.

It is your lover.

When you inhale and when you exhale

breathe the possibility of another world

into the 37.2 trillion cells of your body

until it shines with hope.

Then imagine more.

Imagine rape is unimaginable. Imagine war is a scarcely credible rumor

That the crimes of our age, the grotesque inhumanities of greed,

the sheer and astounding shamelessness of it, the vast fortunes

made by stealing lives, the horrible normalcy it came to have,

is unimaginable to our heirs, the generations of the free.

Don’t waver. Don’t let despair sink its sharp teeth

Into the throat with which you sing. Escalate your dreams.

Make them burn so fiercely that you can follow them down

any dark alleyway of history and not lose your way.

Make them burn clear as a starry drinking gourd

Over the grim fog of exhaustion, and keep walking.

Hold hands. Share water. Keep imagining.

So that we, and the children of our children’s children

may live

http://www.auroralevinsmorales.com/blog/vahavta