“Love will make your house glad, whether it is a cottage or a mansion. Love will smooth the roughest road you may be called to travel. Love will fit your back to whatever burden you may have to bear. Love will make you equal to whatever position you may have to fill.” – William Booth (pictured in the post below)
Alegria
“The above is a commissioned portrait of William and Catherine Booth that hangs at Alegria. It isn’t obvious, but William is sewing, creating the uniform as a symbolic image of his role as founder. Catherine stands next to him with an open bible. The portrait is hanging in our Community Care Ministries area where a Soldier provides pastoral care to residents and (hopefully) will be joined by a CPE Chaplain in the summer. The lack of obvious institutional symbols is an invitation to open conversation, versus a more obvious inclusion of symbols. It emphasizes the humanity of the organization but is true to its unique identity. We also hope that it is a portrayal that takes into consideration women who have experienced abuse.”
“The Salvation Army took a risk and created Alegria, a residential community for homeless families affected by HIV/AIDS, including a residential care facility, children and youth services, and permanent supportive housing. Alegria is a place of healing and formation that breaks down the barriers of stigma and supports the reconciliation of people with HIV/AIDS with their family, friends, and the greater community.”
Paul Hebblethwaite, MNM
Executive Director, The Salvation Army Alegria
Community for homeless families with special needs
This program is located in Los Angeles, CA and is a living, thriving representation of the message contained in “Lean Right, Love Left: Balancing the Body.”
JN
“The above is a commissioned portrait of William and Catherine Booth that hangs at Alegria. It isn’t obvious, but William is sewing, creating the uniform as a symbolic image of his role as founder. Catherine stands next to him with an open bible. The portrait is hanging in our Community Care Ministries area where a Soldier provides pastoral care to residents and (hopefully) will be joined by a CPE Chaplain in the summer. The lack of obvious institutional symbols is an invitation to open conversation, versus a more obvious inclusion of symbols. It emphasizes the humanity of the organization but is true to its unique identity. We also hope that it is a portrayal that takes into consideration women who have experienced abuse.”
“The Salvation Army took a risk and created Alegria, a residential community for homeless families affected by HIV/AIDS, including a residential care facility, children and youth services, and permanent supportive housing. Alegria is a place of healing and formation that breaks down the barriers of stigma and supports the reconciliation of people with HIV/AIDS with their family, friends, and the greater community.”
Paul Hebblethwaite, MNM
Executive Director, The Salvation Army Alegria
Community for homeless families with special needs
This program is located in Los Angeles, CA and is a living, thriving representation of the message contained in “Lean Right, Love Left: Balancing the Body.”
JN
Alegria
“The above is a commissioned portrait of William and Catherine Booth that hangs at Alegria. It isn’t obvious, but William is sewing, creating the uniform as a symbolic image of his role as founder. Catherine stands next to him with an open bible. The portrait is hanging in our Community Care Ministries area where a Soldier provides pastoral care to residents and (hopefully) will be joined by a CPE Chaplain in the summer. The lack of obvious institutional symbols is an invitation to open conversation, versus a more obvious inclusion of symbols. It emphasizes the humanity of the organization but is true to its unique identity. We also hope that it is a portrayal that takes into consideration women who have experienced abuse.”
“The Salvation Army took a risk and created Alegria, a residential community for homeless families affected by HIV/AIDS, including a residential care facility, children and youth services, and permanent supportive housing. Alegria is a place of healing and formation that breaks down the barriers of stigma and supports the reconciliation of people with HIV/AIDS with their family, friends, and the greater community.”
Paul Hebblethwaite, MNM
Executive Director, The Salvation Army Alegria
Community for homeless families with special needs
This program is located in Los Angeles, CA and is a living, thriving representation of the message contained in “Lean Right, Love Left: Balancing the Body.”
JN
The Plumb Line!
I know I’m treading on shaky ground with some who lean to the right when I quote William Sloane Coffin. I must confess that I do not agree with everything he says, but I cannot ignore some of his teachings because they ring so true. Let me give you 3 quotes from his sermon, Homophobia: The Last ‘Respectable’ Prejudice:
“The opposite of love is not hatred but fear. ‘Perfect love casts out fear.’ Nothing scares me like scared people; for while love seeks the truth, fear seeks safety, the safety so frequently found in dogmatic certainty, in pitiless intolerance.”
“I think the love of Jesus is indeed the plumb line by which everything is to be measured. And while laws may be more rigid, love is more demanding, for love insists on motivation and goes between, around, and way beyond all laws.”
“No one can be blamed for feeling revulsion. How can you help it in a homophobic society? What’s essential is to recognize the cultural source of this revulsion and not to act in ways that hurt others.”
What surprises and disappoints me most in all of this is not the homophobia that I witness, but, rather, the hateful, unchristian way it is communicated in the name of Christianity. Satan has found another chink in our armor (the Church). And what surprised me even more was my own vulnerability. It has forced me to confront some of my own carefully masked culturally induced prejudices.
I thought of Jesus as he stood before the tribunal. Scared religious leaders were preparing to cast their vote. What were they thinking? Out of what cultural context did they come? Was their vision clouded by dogmatic certainty? And two thoughts occurred to me…
(1) I will cast my vote many times every day, (2) and in the process, I must never again lose sight of the ‘plumb line.’
