Readings: “Anyone's Ministry”

Ministry is

• a quality of relationship between and among
  human beings
  
  that beckons forth hidden possibilities;
   
• inviting people into deeper, more constant
  more reverent relationship with the world
  and with one another;
   
• carrying forward a long heritage of hope and
  liberation that has dignified and informed
  the human venture over many centuries;
   
• being present with, to, and for others
  in their terrors and torments
  in their grief, misery and pain;
   
• knowing that those feelings
  are our feelings, too;
   
• celebrating the triumphs of the human spirit,
  the miracles of birth and life,
  the wonders of devotion and sacrifice;
   
• witnessing to life-enhancing values;
  speaking truth to power;
   
• speaking for human dignity and equity,
  for compassion and aspiration;
   
• believing in life in the presence of death;
  struggling for human responsibility
  against principalities and structures
  that ignore humaneness and become
  instruments of death.

It is all these and much, much more than all of
them, present in

• the wordless,
• the unspoken,
• the ineffable.

It is speaking and living the highest we know
and living with the knowledge that it is

• never as deep, or as wide
  or a high as we wish.

Whenever there is a meeting
that summons us to our better selves, wherever

• our lostness is found,
• our fragments are united,
• our wounds begin healing,
• our spines stiffen and
• our muscles grow strong for the task,

there is ministry.