Tag Archives: Martin Buber

Christmas Spirit Each Day

Posted on January 14, 2025 by ivonprefontaine

Theologian and civil rights activist, Howard Thurman shared the following poem in a sermon reminding me Christmas is not a one day event. It is part of the daily ceremony and ritual I should undertake. It reminds me some usurp Christmas as a neo-liberal, market agenda that changes a deeply spiritual event into profiteering.

“Where refugees seek deliverance that never comes,
And the heart consumes itself, if it would live,
Where little children age before their time,
And life wears down the edges of mind,
Where the old person sits with mind grown cold,
While bones and sinew, blood and cell, go slowly down to death,
Where fear companions each day’s life,
And Perfect Love seems long delayed.
CHRISTMAS IS WAITING TO BE BORN;
In you, in me, in all humankind.”

Jesus and his family were humble refugees from humble backgrounds. Regardless of material wealth, we each come from and return to humble backgrounds. In between, I can seek deliverance, age with grace, and retain a daily Christmas spirit. Without it, hearts harden, minds ossify, fear is a constant companion, and there is a lack courage (in French, coeur is part of the etymology of courage) to act and speak out against those who treat humans as chattel dealt with as objects. With a daily Christmas spirit, I engage in I-Thou relationships, without judging, qualifying, objectifying the other. Martin Buber proposed “the key to creating society that is nourishing, empowering and healing for everyone lies in how we relate to one another.”

It takes considerable effort to overcome the divisiveness we currently live with and listen, with open hearts, to others who share views of the world different than ours. In On the Brink of Everything, Parker Palmer describes how he felt anger towards others who voted differently than he did. By the time the book was published, he described how it was important to understand that people did so because they felt left behind in various ways.

Here is Healing Time by gospel and blues singer Ruthie Foster, which seems appropriate in today’s day and age. How do we heal and make whole?

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Prayer of St. Francis

Posted on May 22, 2024 by ivonprefontaine

Kathy and I celebrate our anniversary today and this was a reading at our wedding. When I heard the organ, I stood, literally shaking I was so nervous. I turned, looked at Kathy and her Dad, and stopped shaking. What was meant to be was meant to be.

Regardless of one’s relationship with others, intimate or distant, these words guide how we accept the Other, as Emmanuel Levinas said. This way lifts the Other to a human subject in an I-Thou relationship, rather than as an object and it. I hope they continue to guide me as we move forward.

Lord make me an instrument of your peace,
Where there is hatred let me sow love.
Where there is injury, pardon.
Where there is doubt, faith.
Where there is despair, hope.
Where there is darkness, light.
And where there is sadness, joy.

O divine master grant that I may
Not so much seek to be consoled as to console;
To be understood as to understand;
To be loved as to love
For it is in giving that we receive-
And it’s in pardoning that we are pardoned.
And it’s in dying that we are born to eternal life.
Amen.

This is a You Tube video by Sarah McLachlan of the song.

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Welcoming Differences

Posted on August 26, 2020 by ivonprefontaine

I wrote this poem in SeaTac airport in Seattle waiting for my flight I had about 6 hours so there was considerable time to reflect. I make a point of scheduling reflection time into my routine and, when blocks of time emerge reflect, I take advantage of them. Reflecting on what happened and what we aspire to are essential to a well-lived life.

This poem emerged from a conversation about leadership allowing the uncomfortable to reveal itself in conversations. Jacques Derrida may have concluded being uncomfortable is admitting the strange into one’s life and the moment. There is a risk of danger and rejection, steeped in possible hospitality towards of one another and acceptance.

With patience and humility, I can welcome and listen in what Martin Buber referred to as an I-Thou encounter, not an I-it encounter where I diminish and objectify the Other a a thing. As noted in Gentle Rain, when we encounter someone, even briefly, we grow and add a little of each other to our selves. As humans, we are more alike than different. This is lost in the highly politicized rhetoric where purported leaders pit us against one another, dividing and highlighting differences for the sake of conquering.

Patience–

Conversing fully;

Making the world anew,

Healing through listening–

Welcoming uncomfortableness.

Information prevailing–

Supplanting heart’s courage;

Its wisdom,

Sensing the common–

Common sense.

Awakening, pausing, observing–

Emerging from hibernating;

Welcoming that which is different,

Iniviting–

Completing unfinished circles.

Piecing together peace–

Filling voids;

Voicing the silenced,

Heralding life–

Each voice rejoicing.

Making ones’ self whole–

Accompanied by others;

Joining hands and hearts,

Belonging to each other–

Fulfilling humanness.

I took this picture as we travelled through Glacier National Park. At the time, I just took it. Later, as I read about deep ecology, I learned geologists look at the strata in a mountain as chapters in the mountain’s story. For me, this is much like how we each have our unique stories brought together both in what makes us unique and what we hold in common.

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Solitude. A Photographic Journey.

Posted on February 9, 2017 by ivonprefontaine

I think that I cannot preserve my health and spirits, unless I spend four hours a day at least, and it is commonly more than that, sauntering through the woods and over the hills and fields, absolu…

Source: Solitude. A Photographic Journey.

The photographs are wonderful and a quote accompanies each speaking to the essential nature of spending time with our self. It is in reflective moments that we spend in solitude that we rediscover who we are in trying to make our self whole.

The Hasidic scholar, educator, political activist, and philosopher Martin Buber said “solitude is the place of purification.” Through dialogue with our self, others, and the world, we grow to understand who we are and our place in the world in relationship to others.

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Capturing The Moment — Papilio multicaudata Butterfly

Posted on October 8, 2014 by ivonprefontaine

Capturing The Moment — Papilio multicaudata Butterfly.

The image and the short verse in the link are spectacular. Martin Buber wrote complex prose which was poetic. His central point in his seminal work I and Thou was we become who we are in relationship with ourselves, others, and the world. He has a beautiful section about our relationship with trees. In our relationships, we become unique. We are not duplicates of anyone else.

We are who we are because of our relationships, the impact they have on us, and the sense we make of them. Sometimes, more often than not I imagine, the relationships go unnoticed and are taken-for-granted just as our uniqueness is. We become whats in the world rather than a particular who in the world. We might even fall victim to seeing ourselves as whats, as products, rather than that unique person who is only expressed in our particular whoness.

In a world driven by standardization and conformity to standards, it is difficult to find one’s voice and express one’s self through that voice.

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In Those Years by Adrienne Rich

Posted on July 7, 2012 by ivonprefontaine

As I posted the last two or three blogs, I realized sometimes how little we think of we and we individually think of I. I am often guilty of this. Life experienced is a relational enterprise. I think it does start with the I, but moves out to embrace the Thou in the way writers such as Martin Buber meant. We experience life through relational experiences of I and Thou.

Adrienne Rich provided us with poetry as a daily reminder of “no man being an island.”

In those years, people will say, we lost track

of the meaning of we, of you

we found ourselves

reduced to I

and the whole thing became

silly, ironic, terrible:

we were trying to live a personal life

and, yes, that was the only life we could bear witness to

But the dark birds of history screamed and plunged

into our personal weather

They were headed somewhere else but their beaks and pinions drove