Change

When I was a kid there was this dinosaur with a really long neck called a Brontosaurus.

There was a planet named Pluto -- the ninth and last of the planets.  And only Saturn had a ring.

The major threat to the United States was the great and powerful USSR.  A wall -- and even more solid idology -- separated East Berlin from West Berlin and the Eastern and Western worlds from each other.

Today, the Brontosaurus no longer raises his head high into the sky -- paleontologists think that it's long neck stayed lower to the ground.  And it's no longer called Brontosaurus -- it's now Apatosaurus, thank you very much.

Pluto is now a "dwarf planet" and part of the Kuiper Belt.  And all of the outer planets have rings now.

The Soviet Union disintegrated into its component parts, and the Berlin Wall came tumbling down.  (I have a few pieces of it in my workroom, chiseled from the wall in those first heady days.)

And now it seems inevitable that I will live to see the full and equal recognition of same-gender relationships, as the Freedom to Marry movement sweeps across the country. 

And America has elected its first African American -- or, more accurately, multiracial -- President, a man whose wife is a descendent of enslaved Africans.

And now we've seen -- and I predict will be seeing for some time -- radical changes in the Middle East.  Egypt, Tunisia, Bahrain, Libya,  . . . this seems to be just the beginning.

Is anyone else feeling that we're living in a rather historic period?

I find myself praying.  A lot.  Praying for peace.  Praying for change.  Praying for hopes to be realized.  I think of the marvelously beautiful prayer/poem from the Christian scriptures, the Magnificat, and find myself echoing its vision.

In Gassho,

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