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Bare Trees in Fog

One Lone Voice

Writer's picture: Marie LaureMarie Laure

One!


On January 21, 2025, one lone voice said what so many others were thinking. Demonstrating that old cliche"Truth to Power" while the world stood as witness, Bishop Budde from high in the pulpit spoke truth to a powerful bully*. She went first - alone - out on that proverbial limb before being followed afterward by a letter written to the membership by the Episcopal Church.** The following day, the National Catholic Reporter headline read "Bishops condemn Trump's immigration orders for stoking fear, anxiety". ***



The one and only who spoke that day did so with one voice as a means of uniting against wrongs and standing with others about to be (and since) torn from their own lives. Just like that!


Bishop Budde has smiling crystal blue eyes, but her tone conveyed and contained all that she knew in her heart that goes against the principles of a free country and a powerful institution that she herself represents. I wonder if she saw herself as a lone woman that day?


Powerful institutions have a moral obligation to speak up for the weaker voices among us. It has been months on end waiting for them to do just that! How come?


While these very powerful church institutions have been bearing witness to injustices forever, most recently those holding positions of power within the institutions have been silently watching as a faction and a fraction of people tote wooden crosses up the stairs of OUR Capitol in the name of Christianity like twenty-first century crusaders on a crusade to avenge themselves. The capital "C" church has always had much to answer for with its bloody history. There have been some inroads into righting past wrongs for which those in power ought to be held accountable, but not nearly enough. Scandals at the highest level weaken the authority of any institution. And, here we have to imagine that keeping silent against blatant co-opting of their own symbol, i.e., the Cross, is in part due to a loss of moral authority. What if your "brand" was being used to align with hatred and malign through violence? Wouldn't you speak up against this with all your might?


One voice in the wilderness can move others to respond. The institutions found their voice because of Bishop Budde's unflinching courage when she showed us what it actually looks like to speak Truth to power. I am reminded of the young man known as "Tank Man" standing in front of a moving tank in Tianenman Square against the Chinese Government in

1989**** Bishop Budde did nothing less.









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© 2023 by Marie Laure

​Six Stages of Pilgrimage:

  • The Call:

  • The opening clarion of any spiritual journey. Often in the form of a feeling or some vague yearning, a fundamental human desire: finding meaning in an overscheduled world somehow requires leaving behind our daily obligations. Sameness is the enemy of spirituality.

  • The Separation:

  • Pilgrimage, by its very nature, undoes certainty. It rejects the safe and familiar. It asserts that one is freer when one frees oneself from daily obligations of family, work, and community, but also the obligations of science, reason, and technology.

  • The Journey:

  • The backbone of a sacred journey is the pain and sacrifice of the journey itself.  This personal sacrifice enhances the experience; it also elevates the sense of community one develops along the way.

  • The Contemplation:

  • Some pilgrimages go the direct route, right to the center of the holy of holies, directly to the heart of the matter. Others take a more indirect route, circling around the outside of the sacred place, transforming the physical journey into a spiritual path of contemplation like walking a labyrinth.

  • The Encounter:

  • After all the toil and trouble, after all the sunburn and swelling and blisters, after all the anticipation and expectation comes the approach, the sighting. The encounter is the climax of the journey, the moment when the traveler attempts to slide through a thin veil where humans live in concert with the Creator.

  • The Completion and Return:

  • At the culmination of the journey, the pilgrim returns home only to discover that meaning they sought lies in the familiar of one's own world. "Seeing the place for the first time . . ."

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