Rev Liz Walker

On Friday the Lowell City Program to end Homelessness in 10 Years held another Conference on homelessness issues.  About 135 people, from all over the Commonwealth, attended.  The key note speaker was the Reverend Liz Walker, formerly a reporter on Boston Channel 4.

Below is a summary of her keynote presentation:

She started off saying "Good Morning", which elicited a pretty tepid "Good Morning" from the conference participants.  She responded that her religious tradition was one of "Call and Response".  The second "Good Morning" draw a much more enthusiastic response.

When going to New York City to see my son, I often go by train and there is a large church off to the side as one arrives at Penn Station. It has a quotation from Lamentations:  "Is it nothing to you, all you who pass by?". In NYC it is, since it is all about no eye contact, my son tells me.

We, as a nation, are in that kind of mood right now.  We feel threatened.  We are struggling to hold back the darkness.  So, I say thank you for what you do.  I know it is not about money.  It is because you feel it.

I have been working in Sudan, mainly with women and children.  We have a group, My Sister's Keeper.  We visit villages and listen.  The Sudan is run by a very elite government whose ideology clashes with the people they serve.  In the south of the country there are limit resources and the people are traumatized and afraid.

We are all traumatized nation after 9/11.  We used to live a risky life.  But it is still with us.  In Sudan it.  There is the risk of stepping outside your comfort zone.  There is always a security risk.  In 1994, I went to Sudan.  The north is Arab, Muslim, elite, powerful, no oil, but educated.  I went to do a story on the clash of North and South.  Then I found I was drawn into their drama.  My life changed around these issues.  My employer, one of our local TV stations, thought this was an international story and took a long time to agree to run it.  Finally they agreed to run it on Sept 11, to include a bit on Osama bin Laden.  It didn't run, of course, due to the event of the day.  The lesson is that we are all interconnected, all taking risks, all engaged.

Now is the time to turn on to serve.  We are all called to serve.  Not all called to be a minister.  You know you have found your mission "When your joy meets the world's needs", in the words of Frederick Buechner.  Things are changing in the world, but we all need to change.

Returning to the south of Sudan, only 1% of the women are educated. The New York Times columnist Nicholas D. Kristof says most of the world's problems are because women are uneducated.  How do you get people to accept that?  And to fix it.

I grew up in Little Rock, Arkansas. The Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr, came to our city in 1957.  He came and called for people to change.  People didn't want to change, even Blacks, due to lynching and other actions of segregation.  Reverend King admitted he wanted to stay in the pulpit, but in 1953 he went into the streets.  When there is change coming, you are either in the train or on the tracks.  Because of Reverend King people were motivated to work for change.

My last point is that you have to have imagination.  [Admiral] Jim Stockdale said he confronted the brutal facts of his reality during this time as a prisoner of war during the Viet-nam War, but never lost faith in the eventual outcome.  He imagined the future as part of his resistance.  He said that the ones who didn't make it were the Pollyannas, the ones without the ability to confront reality and still have the imagination to visualize a better future.

Down in DC they don't seem to talk to each other.  But, this is a chairos moment, which is Greek for the "right moment".  Today we are caught between peril and potential.  Maybe you need to take a risk and open up your minds for new thinking.  We opened up a school for 500 girls and it has changed things.  It was a chairos moment, it was the right time in God's plan.

We need to understand that both Sarah Palin and Barack Obama may have good ideas, but to grasp that we all need to talk and listen.  We all feel threatened today, but we have the way out by seizing the moment.

Then there was a very short Q&A, with one question, which was about how to proceed.  The response from the Rev Walker was:

We need to reach out to like minded people to build community, which can refresh and strengthen us and thus we have churches, synagogues and mosques.  Thus al Qaeda.

From that last little quip I take the point that we need to pull ourselves together towards the goals that WE find important.

A good talk and a standing ovation.

Regards  —  Cliff