December 9

A few months ago, a neighbor of mine who uses drugs reached out to emergency services to help negotiate an unexpected reaction to something he had taken.  When two police cars and a fire truck arrived at our building before an ambulance, I made my way downstairs to make sure he was ok.  He told me he was alright and sent me back inside, so I respected his space, but continued to keep watch from my apartment window.  I saw emergency personnel poke and prod his body without asking, talking and laughing with each other as they stood over him and restrained him to the gurney. They didn’t say more than a few words to him; it was like he wasn’t even there.  He just stared up at the dim early morning light turning the sky pink overhead as they worked on him.

I wonder how this scene might have played out differently if the emergency personnel my neighbor was engaging with knew that his name was “Righteous Peace, Godly Glory.” I wonder how it would have felt in his body if they took off his restraints, his “garments of sorrow and affliction,” and “put on forever the beauty of the glory from God,” like the prophet promised the exiled, forgotten, oppressed ones to whom he was writing in the book of Baruch.  This is the kind of Advent vision that the harm reduction movement imagines as it affirms that people who use drugs are the primary agents of reducing the harms of their drug use.  What a different world we could live in if everywhere we looked we saw the gathered children of God – the ones lost to overdose and other preventable health struggles, the ones exiled by systems and structures not meant for their survival – and witnessed their rejoicing, because not only God remembered them, but we did too.  Maybe our journey toward Love-made-Flesh this year is about re-membering the glory of God’s beloved ones, dreaming and making real a world where all people are re-membered – restored to membership – in our communities and treated as agents of their own flourishing.

Prayer

Inhale: I will remember who I am.
Exhale: My name is glory.

Freedom Song

Music: “The Truth” by Macrina Wiederkehr & Velma Frye
Offered by: Lynice Pinkard