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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