“What kind of day are you going to have?” I would ask my kids when dropping them off at school in the morning. 

After an eye roll, they would say in a monotone, “A great day.” 

“What are you going to use?” They grew tired of the question in kindergarten and loathed it more with each passing year.  

“Imagination!” Either they would answer under duress, or I would say it for them. 

Imagination moves us emotionally and spiritually; it matures us and creates our bonds. 

We belong to the moral imagination of Jesus, who proclaimed a kingdom of God, a way of Love, a governance of love and justice, a prodigal-loving, latecomer-paying, and nonviolent change agent of salt, light, and leaven.  

The Northern Illinois Conference, according to its vision statement, is “making and supporting vital Christians and vital congregations that engage with their communities and the world for peace, justice, and mercy.” This helps us imagine that relationships of mutual benefit are at the heart of the way of Jesus. The restorative principle of ubuntu also affirms that we exist for interdependent good. Ubuntu is an animating principle that affirms that my well-being is your well-being and I need your healing for my well-being—and my harm undermines the well-being of all.  

The concept of intersectionality points to the ways that categories such as race, class, and gender, as they apply to an individual or group, can create overlapping and interdependent systems of discrimination or disadvantage. The timeless message of scripture is that we belong to a cosmic body of Christ. 

While I was starting to serve as an assistant to Bishop Hee-Soo Jung, I heard the stories of how church boarding schools abused native peoples in Canada. That led me to wonder about the harm done by boarding schools in Wisconsin, now part of the Northern Illinois–Wisconsin Area.  

When I was the superintendent in Milwaukee, I met someone with firsthand experience of that abuse. The district had a Native American ministry at 11th and Maple. In an effort to help appoint a clergy leader there, I entered the building early for a meeting. There I got acquainted with someone who became my rabbi.  

He taught me the dynamics and realities of those city-dwelling persons—most of whom were from Oneida and came to the city to make a living in the 1950s—and of their kids and grandkids. He described his boarding-school years, including being whipped for using his language, separation from his family, and the long-standing grief for all he lost. He made clear that these experiences impacted him each day.  

When I see his face in my mind’s eye I am reminded how the healing of harm is tied up with our mutual well-being and how honest reckoning and even economic questions are unresolved with our reckoning of racism in this country. All of it is tied up with our flourishing, and release from harm for a newness of life that demonstrates our baptism. 

I leave you with a sijo from my collection lightly, published by Red Moon Press, and ask you to pray and consider your own ubuntu steps:

Honestly 

How other trees gossip 
about the rain comes to nothing. 
Trees made honest by the breeze 
have less malice to confess. 
Be here lightly, even kindly. 
There is mud, too, in your nest.

Be here, kindly. Thank you, all of you, for your ministry.