Reflection

Each month we will post a reflection on this page. 

March 2010

Yielding to Gratitude

By Gail M. Koehler

As I write, Lexington’s 2010 One World Film festival has just begun—a series of screenings that invite viewers into the lives of peoples geographically removed from Central Kentucky.  The first film of this year’s series was "Departures," a Japanese movie about a struggling cellist.  When his orchestra job dissolves, he returns to his boyhood home left to him by his departed mother. There he stumbles into a job preparing bodies for “coffining,” involving a ceremonial washing and preparation of corpses in the presence of their families.  I’ve since read that the film is loosely based on the book Coffinman: The Journal of a Buddhist Mortician by Shinmon Aoki.  

What struck me, as a mother with a teen and a wannabe teen in our house, was the deft manner that the director Yojiro Takita captured the struggles and knotted conflicts that can so consume families when locked in rage or disappointment with one another.  The film then illuminates what a gift the preparatory ceremony is to those fractious souls when an adept, tendering presence allows them to yield to their gratitude for the person they knew and finally release the beginnings of their grief.

The depiction of dignity and compassion I’d seen flickering on the screen provided me a gift as I exited the theater into the chill February evening: a reinvigorated desire to be open to small daily moments of reconciliation; to a yielding to gratitude that can provide a quiet—if only I will heed it—soundtrack to daily life.

Gail Koehler has found her spiritual community with Quakers since 1998.  Among a variety of writing projects, she is also the editor of Peaceways, the Newsletter of the Central Kentucky Council for Peace and Justice.

Reflection Archives

Monthly Reflection Guidelines  

Our goal is to provide thoughtful reflections that encourage readers to more fully embrace the values written in Franciscan Peace Center ’s Mission Statement: i.e., dignity, compassion, reconciliation, equality, simplicity, kinship with all creation, and a nonviolent way of life that will bring about a peaceful global community.

 

Suggested guidelines for submitted reflections:

1)      Interfaith/universal – like viewing a world without borders

2)      Reflective of the season or month for which you are writing

3)      Passionately inclusive, beginning with our universal concerns for other living things, leaving out nothing or no one

4)      Firmly rooted in peace and justice for all

5)      Containing no more than 200 words (the shorter the better)

6)      Submitted by the third week of the month prior to publication

 

“The act of praying or meditating is so universal that one wonders

 if the need to reach out beyond ourselves in thought and word

 is simply part f the human condition.”

~L. Annie Foerster in Praying Out Loud: Interfaith Prayers for Public Occasions

(Skinner House Books, Boston , ©2003)

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