March2020

Food for Thought
Living in a Christ-soaked world
Pamela Strachan, OLM
Many of you know I have been following Fr. Richard Rohr’s Daily Meditations for a
number of years and have found these meditations and other publications from the
Centre for Action and Contemplation a rich source of challenging and thoughtprovoking
Christian spiritual insight.
The meditations are a free daily resource, pinging into your inbox first thing in the
morning - or you can choose to receive them weekly or monthly. As it’s not
possible for me to join you for the daily worship each weekday morning (as I would
wish if I lived in Peebles), I’ve found these meditations an excellent alternative
discipline of daily reflection and contemplation. This is the link if you’re interested
in receiving them: cac.org and click on Daily Meditations.
Here is a recent one to share with you. It’s from last November but is particularly
relevant as we suffer from recent extreme weather and are having to think
seriously about how we’ve all contributed to climate change. It will also be our
topic for our April Breakfast Church - see p.5 when Neil Cummings will talk about
Eco Congregations and the Climate Crisis.
I write this from a very soggy glen where we’ve been rescuing marooned sheep
trapped in the swollen Holms Water and with the Cardon Burn racing past my
window…. all ultimately flowing into the rising River Tweed. I trust you are all safe
and dry and not flooded out as so many unfortunate households have already
been.
Richard Rohr's Daily Meditation
From the Center for Action and Contemplation
Economy: Old and New
Making Do with More
Monday, November 25, 2019
Charles Eisenstein is a fascinating public speaker, author, and advocate for gift
economies. At a rather young age, he walked away from a thriving business career,
recognizing that our cultural models of success simply weren’t working for him.
Drawing on his background in business, mathematics, philosophy, and spirituality,
he turned his attention to the some of the largest problems facing the world today,
including climate change. Here he writes of a future in which material limitation
actually delivers a greater sense of wealth:
A world without weapons, without McMansions in sprawling suburbs, without
mountains of unnecessary packaging, without giant mechanized monofarms,
without energy-hogging big-box stores, without electronic billboards, without
endless piles of throw-away junk, without the overconsumption of consumer goods
no one really needs is not an impoverished world. I disagree with those
environmentalists who say we are going to have to make do with less. In fact, we
are going to make do with more: more beauty, more community, more fulfillment,