Reading Week

My absentee ballot arrived today. It serves as a reminder that I am a transient resident here in Berkeley and my allegiance and civic responsibilities rest in the Upper Delaware. My life in the valley remains my love and my reason for being away.

I spent Reading Week in the canyons outside of San Diego. Friends, who used to live in Equinunk, PA who had moved back to their family ranch some 15 years ago, were attending the international “Bioneers” conference in nearby Marin County. As we were making arrangements to see each other over the October 20-22 weekend, I realized that they would be driving home and as there were no classes the following week, I was able to jump into their mini van and head south. I bought an inexpensive one-way airline ticket back, asked my staff to send my editing work early and packed my books to go.

As we drove through the Central Valley on Monday last week, past miles of citrus, cotton and almond fields, my friends told me they had learned that produce travels on an average of 1,100 miles, that water will be the issue of the future, and that it’s not really global warming anymore, it’s global heating.

In between my readings, I muse how so much of importance seems out of our control and decisions being made on our behalf mock our sense of integrity and ethics. My theology that people are essentially good is shaken by the national and world news.

At the same time, my reading about Dorothy Day and her Catholic Worker houses of hospitality, which have fed and housed the poor since 1930, a thesis about racism and the stories of black Unitarian ministers in my almost exclusive middle-class, white denomination, and the emerging concept of an Islamic Reformation between the Traditionalists (Sunnis) who think that the Qur’an is the word of God and should have no context of history, and the Rationalists (Shi’ites), who believe that the Qur’an is a living document and should reflect a changing culture, seem to point to the human desire to improve and strengthen our sense of justice in the world, even as it is misguided at this particular point in time.

It is said that you can drive from California to New York at night and although you cannot see beyond your headlights, you will get there. Perhaps, for now, that understanding will keep up moving forward on our path to a deeper connection with our fragile earth and ourselves.