We Are All Reverends

"Anyone's Ministry"

Ministry is
a quality of relationship between and among human beings
that beckons forth hidden possibilities

inviting people into deeper, more constant,
more reverent relationship with the world
and with one another....

standing for human dignity and equity,
for compassion and aspiration.

believing in life in the presence of death,
struggling for human responsibility
against principalities and structures
that ignore humaneness and become
instruments of death.

It is all these and much, much more than all of them,
present in
the wordless,
the unspoken,
the ineffable.

It is speaking and living the highest we know
and living with the knowledge that it is
never as deep, or as wide
or as high as we wish.

Whenever there is a meeting
that summons us to our better selves, wherever
our lostness is found,
our fragments are united,
or our wounds begin healing,
our spines stiffen and
our muscles grow strong for the task

there is ministry.

Excerpted from "Anyone's Ministry" in Out of the Ordinary by Gordon McKeeman