The St. Philip the Deacon Neighborhood Listening Team will do a short Neighborhood Walking Meditation after church on January 30th. You are invited to participate. The purpose of the Walking Meditation is to use all our senses to experience our parish neighborhood at a deeper level – the land, the trees and plantings, the creatures, and the neighbors who reside close to STPD.
One of the members of the Neighborhood Listening Team will provide guidance before we walk. We will walk individually around a few blocks close to our parish. If it is too cold or wet, we will walk our parish building itself.
We will gather over some hot tea and coffee after the Walking Meditation to share our perceptions, thoughts, and feelings about the experience.
Participating in the Walking Meditation will help us all become better observers and listeners as we reach out to our neighbors.
If you are able, take some time to read Willie James Jennings on Whiteness Rooted in Place.
Most Christians in the West are formed without any of that feeling—the sense of vulnerability, the sense of gratefulness for having been brought inside. They have no sense of what it means to be an outsider. What if we had all been inculcated with this deep sense of humility, of what it means to enter into another people? And what if we had cultivated over the centuries the ability to enter into the lives of other peoples without either trying to take their lives over or losing ourselves?
Where we should begin, individually and collectively, is reintroducing the church to the story of what it means to be a Christian: the constant entering into and becoming a part of other peoples for the sake of love. Too many Christians talk about reconciliation while imagining themselves as centered hosts.
Willie James Jennings, Whiteness Rooted in Place