Love - A reading for May 31st

Bishop Steven Charleston's book Hope As Old As Fire contains prayers that he was written over the course of a year.  He published this book in 2012 through Red Moon Publications.

In the Bishop's Office we begin with a short prayer gathering and the reading for the day comes from this book.  After the reading there is silence for a few minutes.  Some may ponder the reading and wonder how he knew it was what they needed to hear.

Here is today's reading.

Love comes to us, abides in us, transforms us, becomes us.

Love finds us in hidden places but dances with us in public.

Love lives in quiet but shouts our name, even if only we can hear it.

Love fills any space we will make, follows any direction we will take.

Love waits for an eternity to share one moment's grace.

Love is who we are, when we are, what we are, as love first imagined.

Flowers from the Sacred Circle

They let us take pieces when we left. 

This workshop brought together individuals that were currently practicing different spiritual practices or types of Christianity together in one room.

In the middle of the room was a large vase of spring flowers.  Dancing around the flowers was the sweetest little boy, brought to this sacred circle by his mother, who practice running at the flowers and stopping, or climbing on unused chairs, then jumping off, all the time looking for approval for those gathered around.

For a few days these takeaways reminded me of spring, growing, evolving, just exactly what all of us were doing for two weeks.

This is how the UN Works

OK, I have been gone from blogging sine the 21st of March.  Way too much going on to find the time to sit and write.  Since I have been back I have been transcribing my notes and doing research.  I will now attempt to reconstruct my days and provide you with  more information.

Today was the first time that I sat in on the general discussions taking place during the 60th Conference on the Status of Women.  It is a smaller version of the General Assembly Room.

Each country represented in the room has a microphone that is turned on when it is their turn to speak.  I quickly try to locate the speaker and watch their expresssions, if I am not seated where I can actually see them, on a large screen at the front of the room. This day I heard representatives from El Salvador, Bolivia, Burkina Faso, Kuwait, Curaco, Palestine, Nicaragua, Germany, and Finland.  I admit that I had to turn to Google or Wikipedia to see where Burkina Faso was located, much less recognize it as a country.  It is located in Western Africa.

At this point I am now aware that various statements have been circulated by blocks of countries, like the EU, that each block hopes will influence the final statement outcome produced at the end of the Conference.  The Episcopal Church Statement is available here (TEC)

The job of the Episcopal delegation is to compare the points made in our statement, see link above,  with the one first circulated by the UN Women for the conference.  This original document was only 4 pages long.  By the time the first draft of revisions and comments was approved on February 26th, it look like this.

To say that my jaw dropped ...  However, it was not until Lynnaia Main, our fearless leader, told us we then had to compare this revision with the TEC statement that I understand this was not just fun and games.  To point, we had to make sure that the four priorities of TEC would not be lost in the final document.

1. Enable women to access power and decision making positions
2. Foster women and girls economic empowerment and independence
3. Eradicate violence against women and girls (children)
4. Provide preferential treatment to marginalized women and girls.

To do this the delegation split into teams and coordinated the analysis of one of the four points.  We worked during our "free" times.  And, for those that could we made visits to delegations for which we had a particular interest and/or an Episcopal presence.   Here  is our letter to the US delegation.

The Statement from Tanzania  was referred to often as was Thailand, and China with G77 Group.

Is your head spinning yet?

One of the conclusions that this 60th deputation came away with is that the next group, maybe I will be so lucky, needs assistance in working through this procedure on top of visiting all the side events and sessions.  We are thinking of forming a small mentoring group that will facilitate this next spring and meeting up again in NYC.

Saint Odd

I came across this bit of prose in a book by Dean Koontz.  Why it speaks to me, not sure.  Here it is.

When I was no longer of the world, I would miss its extravagant beauty.  

I would miss the complex and charming layers of subterfuge by which the truth

of the world's mysteries was withheld from us even as we were

tantalized and enchanted by them.

I would miss the kindness of good people who were compassionate when so may 

were pitiless, who made their way through so much corruption 

without being corrupted themselves,

who eschewed envy in a world of envy,

who eschewed greed in a world of greed,

who valued truth and could not be drowned in a sea of lies,

for they shone and, by the light they cast,

they had warmed me all my life.

Frown Face

So, here is the moment that I sit down to recap this morning and a few other moments and reach for my notebook. 

Gone.

Depression rolling in like a fast moving high tide.

All my notes, connections written on pages.  How to recreate this?

So, I shall begin with was has happened to far this morning.

Worship at the Church Center where I was captured playing the drum and will do so again tomorrow at the closing worship.  Great time but greatest was watching this group of women dancers from MoJazz - Dance Classes for Adults share worship with us.  Worship was lead by AME/AMEZion in Queens.

Question for the day for me:  What is blocking me from hearing God's voice?

Today the UN is basically closed.  All sessions where they decide the final wording of the document to come out of this 60th NCSW are closed.  Side events are the only things in town.

So I went to an event hosted by Union Theological Seminary and The New Seminary for Interfaith Studies.  Diverse body of women in attendance, connecting through Sacred Circles.

My notebook is filled with thoughts on Thomas Merton in New Seeds of Contemplation - A Tree gives glory of God by being a Tree, the Book Revenants by Amy Plum, the Grail Movement, a woman from Pakistan that imparts the wisdom that women need to recognize their divinity and much more.  My tweet about I am....We are.  That women are the keepers of Faith, Custom and Tradition.

This notebook contains all my notes on how to do advocacy back home.  I will have to now try to remember it all as it is specific to the issue that spoke most to me during these two weeks.

Luckily, I have handouts from various events that I have attended, some with notes written on them.  And business cards that I have collected.

But God is hope and she is paying attention.  So I will call the Church Center and see if someone has found it and turned it in.

Keeping Track

On Monday the 14th, one of the first CSW - UN Women events I went to was hosted by Iceland, attended by the Director of the UN Statistical Commission - Stefan Schweinfest (Germany) , representatives from Mexico, Latin America, the Asia Development Bank and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.  Ms. Lakshima Puri from UN Women chaired the event.

The discussion centered on the importance of data collection about different gender gaps and data collection tools.  Ho Hum stuff?  Not really.

Between 2015- 2030 developing nations will need assistance in several capacities - financial, institutional, human and technological.  This assistance will come from varying sources - the UN, other member states and global corporations, to name a few. 

Be it will not just be about setting up National Data Information Systems. It will be about setting up quality network systems  in order that the data is credible. It will be about knowing the framework of the questions that we start with.  And, the knowledge that as time moves forward, the questions asked and the data collected must be fluid. 

Mr. Craig Stevenson from the Asia Development Bank in partnership with the UN Women and the regional office for Asia and the Pacific.  Their focus will be beginning the work of collecting baseline data, data mapping and then producing statistics.  Their hashtag is #Hi5forSDG5.

Ms. Sarah Hendriks from the Bill and Melina Gates Foundation identified now as a watershed moment for this work.  In the past there has been a critical under investment in data collections, technical capacity gaps, political considerations.  Key questions that the Foundation is asking are 1) How can we work together collecting the data and 2) How can we assure that the data poorer countries can be assisted.

But most of all, shifting to collecting intervention data as we move toward 2030.

Will You Pray For Them?

So much of what we are witnessing here at CSW60  are the testimonies of young women and their stories about human trafficking.  One of our Episcopal delegates is deeply committed to this work since her intern work with GEMS the Girl's Educational and Mentoring Services.

GEMS is the only organization in New York State specifically designed to serve girls and young women who have experienced commercial sexual exploitation and domestic trafficking. Girls Educational and Mentoring Services (GEMS) was founded in 1998 by Rachel Lloyd in response to an overwhelming need for services for girls and young women at risk for commercial sexual exploitation and domestic trafficking who were being ignored by traditional social service agencies. GEMS’ programming is gender responsive, trauma informed, developmentally grounded, strengths based, social justice oriented, and culturally competent. GEMS’ founding principles reside in survivor leadership and transformational relationships. GEMS’ services are based on the needs and interests of survivors and the agency’s programming is developed based on survivors’ ideas, input, and expertise.  GEMS provides young women with empathetic, consistent support and viable opportunities for positive change.

One of our small group conversations centered on the website Backpage (Wikipedia) and the role it plays in the exploitation of women and girls.  With this website men can "order" what they "require" by zip code.  A priest spoke about a spiritual exercise where you go onto the site, enter in your own zip code and then pray for the women that you find on the site.

So that is what I did.  Googled the site, clicked on Delaware, Men dating Women where I had to click on that I agreed that I was over 21 and was aware of what the site offered.

Well, I only stayed on the site for a little bit.  This is not for the faint of heart.

And, let us not forget the trafficking at the Truck Stops or the hotels during large sporting events.

Did you know that in some states that if two underage teenagers have sex there is a legal recourse that parents can take that would result in the young man, if convicted, being listed on the Sex Offenders Listing.  But these same states would charge a young girl of 13 sold into trade by an older man with the crime.  

Is your state one of them?

If so, let us now join together to get this changed.