Friday, October 23, 2026
Spirituality for the Streets • Wisdom for the Journey • A Fuller Life for Everyone
Eternal Progression • A Fuller Life for Everyone • Live and Help Live
🧭 TODAY’S THEME
THE FUTURE IS NOT A WAITING ROOM
When the Young See Visions and the Old Dream Dreams
There is a way of talking about the future that keeps postponing responsibility.
Young people are told:
“Someday you will lead.”
Older people are sometimes told:
“Your contribution is finished.”
People living in poverty are promised that prosperity will eventually reach them.
Marginalized communities are told that justice takes time.
Churches talk endlessly about the coming Kingdom while sometimes tolerating injustice in the present.
But the prophet Joel imagines something different.
Young and old.
Women and men.
Enslaved and free.
All becoming participants in the prophetic imagination.
Perhaps the future is not something we wait for.
Perhaps we practice it.
📖 SCRIPTURE FOR THE DAY
Your Sons and Daughters Shall Prophesy
“And it shall come to pass afterward, that I will pour out my spirit upon all flesh; and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, your old men shall dream dreams, your young men shall see visions.”
— Joel 2:28, KJV
Notice who receives the Spirit.
Not merely priests.
Not merely kings.
Not merely men.
Not merely elders.
Not merely people occupying recognized positions of authority.
Joel imagines the prophetic Spirit overflowing boundaries.
Sons.
Daughters.
Old.
Young.
Even enslaved people.
The prophetic imagination becomes radically distributed.
Everybody gets to dream.
✍️ FROM THE PILGRIM’S DESK
You Are Not Merely Tomorrow’s Somebody
We sometimes say something to young people that sounds encouraging:
“You are the leaders of tomorrow.”
But there is a problem hidden inside that sentence.
Tomorrow.
Why not today?
Young people are already organizing.
Already creating art.
Already challenging injustice.
Already caring for communities.
Already questioning assumptions older generations sometimes stopped questioning.
They are not unfinished adults waiting to become important.
They are people now.
And the reverse problem happens with older people.
Society can treat aging as though a person’s usefulness gradually expires.
Retirement can become cultural disappearance.
Disability can be mistaken for irrelevance.
But Joel’s vision refuses both assumptions.
The young see visions.
The old dream dreams.
Neither possesses everything.
Neither is disposable.
We need memory and imagination.
Experience and experimentation.
Tradition and disruption.
The Franciscan Clarean community I imagine is not a ladder where older people stand above younger people.
Nor is it a culture where youth automatically makes someone wiser.
It is a circle.
People bring different knowledge.
Different experiences.
Different abilities.
Different questions.
Different dreams.
The future becomes something we construct together.
Nobody should have to wait until tomorrow to matter today.
🎙️ TODAY’S SERMON
THE FUTURE IS NOT A WAITING ROOM
Joel 2:28–32
When Prophecy Escapes the Professionals
Imagine the Spirit escaping.
That might be one way to describe Joel’s vision.
The sacred refuses to remain where religious institutions expect it.
It spills.
Over boundaries.
Across generations.
Across gender.
Across social status.
The prophet declares:
Your sons and daughters will prophesy.
Your elders will dream.
Your young people will see visions.
And even enslaved people receive the Spirit.
That last part deserves attention.
Because prophecy in the ancient world could be associated with particular social and religious roles.
Kings consulted prophets.
Priests served temples.
Religious authority often operated through recognized institutions.
Joel imagines something much more unruly.
The Spirit becomes democratized.
Now we need historical context.
The Book of Joel is difficult to date precisely.
Unlike some prophetic books, Joel does not clearly identify a reigning king whose period gives us an easy chronological anchor.
Many contemporary scholars place Joel sometime in the Persian or early Hellenistic period, though scholarly debate continues.
The book opens with ecological catastrophe.
Locusts devastate the land.
Crops fail.
The community experiences crisis.
Joel interprets the catastrophe using the theological language available to him, including the “day of the LORD.”
Modern ecological theology should be cautious here.
We should not automatically interpret natural disasters as divine punishment.
Hurricanes are not God’s judgment.
Earthquakes are not sermons.
Wildfires are not messages condemning whichever group a preacher happens to dislike.
That kind of theology can become cruel very quickly.
But Joel’s response to catastrophe contains something worth recovering.
Crisis requires communal reflection.
Something has happened.
How will we live now?
And then Joel imagines renewal.
Not simply rebuilding the old arrangements.
Something new happens.
The Spirit spreads.
That matters.
Because institutions frequently respond to crisis by attempting to restore the exact hierarchy that existed before the crisis.
Get everything back to normal.
But what if normal was part of the problem?
Liberation theology asks precisely that question.
When a society experiences crisis, whose normal are we trying to restore?
If “normal” meant workers living one missed paycheck from disaster, should we restore it?
If normal meant disabled people navigating inaccessible institutions, should we restore it?
If normal meant queer teenagers hiding themselves for safety, should we restore it?
If normal meant a small number of people controlling enormous resources while others lacked basic necessities, perhaps returning to normal is not enough.
Joel imagines transformation.
The Spirit goes everywhere.
And then something remarkable happens centuries later.
The early Jesus movement takes Joel’s words and uses them to interpret its own experience.
In Acts 2, Peter quotes Joel at Pentecost.
The disciples have experienced something they understand as the Spirit.
People are speaking.
Crowds are confused.
And Peter reaches into Israel’s prophetic tradition.
This is what Joel talked about.
Acts slightly reshapes Joel’s language in its Greek context.
The early Christian community rereads an older text through a new experience.
That itself teaches us something about Scripture.
Biblical interpretation has always involved reinterpretation.
The authors of the New Testament read Israel’s Scriptures creatively.
They apply older texts to new circumstances.
They discover meanings that the original authors may not have imagined.
So when someone tells you there is only one possible meaning of a biblical passage, the Bible itself complicates that claim.
Scripture contains interpretation of Scripture.
Tradition develops through reinterpretation.
The question is whether our reinterpretation leads toward life.
Now notice the social implications of Joel’s vision.
Your daughters shall prophesy.
That matters in traditions where women have repeatedly been told to remain silent.
Whatever other biblical passages say—and the biblical library contains genuine tensions about gender and authority—Joel preserves a vision in which women become prophetic speakers.
Then:
Your old men shall dream dreams.
Older people are not discarded.
Age does not eliminate imagination.
And:
Your young men shall see visions.
Young people are not merely apprentices waiting quietly for older people to die before contributing.
They possess visions now.
And then Joel says that even servants receive the Spirit.
The Hebrew terminology reflects ancient systems of servitude and enslavement.
That is deeply significant.
The Spirit refuses to respect the social hierarchy.
A person whose society treats them as property may become the bearer of divine speech.
Think about how destabilizing that is.
What happens when the person at the bottom of the hierarchy can say:
I have something to teach you?
Empire becomes nervous.
Patriarchy becomes nervous.
Religious hierarchy becomes nervous.
Capital becomes nervous.
Because domination depends partly upon convincing people that wisdom flows downward.
The king knows.
The priest knows.
The boss knows.
The master knows.
The professor knows.
The parent knows.
The expert knows.
And everyone else listens.
Joel imagines something more horizontal.
That does not mean expertise disappears.
Experience matters.
Education matters.
Training matters.
A surgeon should know more about surgery than I do.
A structural engineer should know more about bridge design.
But expertise does not grant unlimited authority over other human beings.
Knowledge should serve communities.
It should not become a throne.
This is where my anarcho-communist perspective finds resonance with Joel.
Anarchism, at its best, asks us to examine coercive hierarchy.
Communism, in its libertarian sense, asks how resources and social life might be organized around common flourishing rather than private domination and exploitation.
Mutual aid recognizes that communities already survive through cooperation.
Joel’s Spirit looks surprisingly unruly in such a world.
Nobody owns it.
Nobody privatizes it.
Nobody licenses it.
Nobody can say:
“The Spirit belongs exclusively to my office.”
It is poured out.
Freely.
That is deeply Franciscan.
Francis never set out to build an empire.
He wanted a fraternity.
Brothers.
Companions.
People walking together.
Clare built community among women whose spiritual authority could not simply be reduced to existing institutional categories.
Their movements eventually developed institutions, rules, and hierarchies because every movement faces those pressures.
But the original impulse remains powerful.
Walk together.
Own less.
Share more.
Serve.
Listen.
Live close to people excluded from power.
Queer theology adds another dimension.
Joel’s vision destabilizes boundaries.
The people supposedly excluded from authority become prophetic.
Queer communities know something about unexpected voices.
People once described as sinful, disordered, unnatural, or dangerous have become theologians.
Transgender people interpret Scripture.
Queer pastors preach.
Nonbinary people teach.
LGBTQIA Christians create communities where people rejected elsewhere discover belonging.
The excluded become interpreters.
That is very biblical.
Hagar did it.
Mary did it.
The Samaritan woman did it.
The Ethiopian eunuch becomes part of the Christian story.
People repeatedly appear at boundaries and discover that the sacred refuses to remain inside the fence.
Feminist theology reminds us that Joel explicitly names daughters.
That should make churches uncomfortable whenever they insist divine authority belongs primarily to men.
Ecological theology takes us back to Joel’s devastated land.
Human futures cannot be separated from ecological futures.
Dreaming about justice while destroying the ecosystems sustaining life is not liberation.
A fuller life must include soil.
Water.
Animals.
Forests.
Climate.
Neighborhood trees.
Urban gardens.
Clean air.
The more-than-human world is not scenery surrounding human salvation.
It is the community of life within which humans exist.
And religious pluralism asks us to recognize that prophetic imagination is not the private property of Christianity.
Wisdom appears everywhere.
Jewish prophets.
Muslim mystics.
Buddhist teachers.
Hindu sages.
Indigenous elders.
Humanist organizers.
Atheist philosophers.
Scientists.
Artists.
Children.
Activists.
Ordinary neighbors.
If something is true, compassionate, liberating, and life-giving, I do not need it to carry a Christian label before I can learn from it.
Now what about God?
I do not imagine Joel’s Spirit as supernatural fluid poured from somewhere above the clouds.
Following John D. Caputo, I understand God as the event that insists without coercively controlling.
God calls.
God provokes.
God disturbs.
God promises.
God does not force the future into existence.
The future remains vulnerable.
It requires participation.
The Spirit is the insistence:
Imagine something better.
The response is ours.
Feed somebody.
Organize.
Plant something.
Listen.
Challenge domination.
Build accessibility.
Protect a queer kid.
Visit an older neighbor.
Learn from someone younger.
Share tools.
Share food.
Share knowledge.
Build community.
That is where visions become material.
There is a political concept called prefigurative politics.
The basic idea is simple.
Do not merely demand the society you want someday.
Practice its values now.
If you want democracy, organize democratically.
If you want equality, challenge hierarchy inside your own movement.
If you want mutual aid, practice mutual aid.
If you want ecological responsibility, begin living differently.
If you want peace, develop nonviolent ways of handling conflict.
In other words:
Become a small experiment in the future you claim to desire.
That sounds remarkably close to the best meaning of the Kingdom of God.
Not a supernatural empire arriving from the sky.
Not Christians taking control of society.
Not a divine monarchy replacing human monarchy.
But communities practicing another way of being human.
Jesus called it the Kingdom.
Dorothy Day called it building a new society within the shell of the old.
Martin Luther King Jr. spoke of the Beloved Community.
Anarchists have called it prefiguration.
Different languages.
A related question:
Can we begin living differently now?
Joel says the young will see visions.
Good.
Listen to them.
Joel says the old will dream dreams.
Good.
Listen to them too.
Daughters will prophesy.
Listen.
People at the bottom of society will speak.
Listen.
And then do something even harder.
Let what you hear change how the community is organized.
Because giving someone a microphone while refusing them power is not participation.
The future is not a waiting room.
You do not need permission to begin practicing compassion.
You do not need a theological degree to organize mutual aid.
You do not need political office to learn your neighbor’s name.
You do not need wealth to share knowledge.
You do not need perfect health to contribute something.
You do not need youth to imagine.
You do not need age to possess wisdom.
Everyone brings something.
Everyone needs something.
That is community.
And perhaps that is what the Spirit looks like.
Not supernatural domination.
But possibility spreading through ordinary people.
Dreams.
Visions.
Questions.
Courage.
Shared freely.
Until somebody says:
Why are we waiting for tomorrow?
And someone else answers:
We don’t have to.
Amen.
🌍 THE WORLD OUTSIDE OUR DOOR
UNESCO Backs a Youth Call for a New Culture of Peace
Reported Facts
This week, UNESCO highlighted a youth-led initiative connected with the Global Youth Peace Summit, bringing young people into conversations about peace, education, dialogue, inclusion, and the prevention of violence.
The initiative reflects a wider international emphasis on meaningful youth participation in peacebuilding rather than treating young people merely as future beneficiaries of decisions made by older institutions.
UNESCO’s broader work on peace emphasizes education, intercultural dialogue, freedom of expression, scientific cooperation, and the cultivation of what it calls a culture of peace.
Urban Pilgrim Commentary
There is an enormous difference between saying:
“Young people are our future.”
and asking:
“What do young people think we should do now?”
Institutions frequently celebrate youth symbolically while reserving actual decision-making for older and more powerful people.
Joel’s prophetic imagination challenges that arrangement.
The young see visions.
That does not mean youth automatically produces wisdom.
It means age should not automatically determine whose imagination counts.
From my anarcho-communist perspective, meaningful participation should distribute decision-making rather than simply invite marginalized people into rooms where the important decisions have already been made.
From a Franciscan Clarean perspective, community means learning across generations.
Peace cannot simply be handed to young people as an inheritance.
They must participate in creating it.
📚 SCHOLAR’S CORNER
How Joel Became Pentecost
Joel 2:28–32 reappears prominently in Acts 2.
After the Pentecost experience, Peter interprets what is happening by quoting Joel.
But Acts does not simply photocopy the Hebrew text.
The author is working with the Greek scriptural tradition commonly called the Septuagint and applies Joel’s prophecy to the emerging Jesus movement.
Acts introduces the quotation with language about the “last days.”
This illustrates something fundamental about biblical interpretation.
Biblical writers themselves reinterpreted earlier Scripture.
They took inherited texts and asked:
What does this mean in our situation?
Historical-critical scholarship helps us distinguish Joel’s original literary and historical setting from the later Christian interpretation in Acts.
We do not have to choose between them.
We can study both.
Scripture contains a history of people rereading Scripture.
❓ QUESTION EVERYTHING
What If Experience Becomes an Excuse to Exclude?
Experience matters.
But sometimes we weaponize it.
“You haven’t been here long enough.”
“You’re too young.”
“You wouldn’t understand.”
“We’ve always done it this way.”
Experience can become wisdom.
But experience can also become a gate.
Today’s question:
When does respecting experience become protecting hierarchy?
And the reverse matters too.
Newness does not automatically mean improvement.
Young people can be wrong.
Older people can be visionary.
The goal is not reversing the hierarchy.
The goal is creating community where knowledge can travel in every direction.
🌿 CREATION IS OUR MONASTERY
The Future Hidden Inside a Seed
Hold a seed if you have one available.
Something tiny contains possibility.
Not certainty.
Possibility.
A seed requires conditions.
Water.
Soil.
Temperature.
Light.
Time.
Some seeds never germinate.
Others become plants producing thousands more.
Hope works similarly.
Hope is not certainty that everything will turn out well.
Hope is participation in conditions where something better might grow.
Today, notice one seed, tree, bud, or fallen leaf.
Remember:
The future is not magic. It grows from conditions created in the present.
🏳️🌈 QUEER WISDOM
You Can Become More Than Your Earlier Self Imagined
You are allowed to surprise your younger self.
Perhaps you understand your gender differently.
Perhaps your sexuality changed or became clearer.
Perhaps your theology transformed.
Perhaps a label once useful no longer fits.
Perhaps you discovered a community you never imagined.
Perhaps you became someone younger-you could not have named.
That does not necessarily mean your earlier self was fake.
It means you continued becoming.
Queer wisdom understands identity as something richer than a rigid box.
You do not betray your past by growing beyond its vocabulary.
💡 ONE BIG IDEA
Prefigurative Politics — Living the Future Now
Prefigurative politics means attempting to embody within present practices the values we want a future society to possess.
Want democratic participation?
Practice it inside organizations.
Want mutual aid?
Share resources now.
Want ecological responsibility?
Build it into everyday life.
Want accessibility?
Design it from the beginning.
Want equality?
Examine the hierarchies inside our own communities.
The concept has been important within anarchist and other radical political traditions.
Its challenge is powerful:
Do our methods resemble the world we claim to want?
The Urban Pilgrim translation:
Practice tomorrow today.
✊ SAINT, HERETIC & TROUBLEMAKER OF THE DAY
Ella Baker — Leadership Without a Throne
Ella Baker was one of the great organizers of the American civil-rights movement.
She worked with organizations including the NAACP, Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.
But Baker was skeptical of leadership models centered upon charismatic individuals.
She emphasized grassroots organizing and the capacities of ordinary people.
Her philosophy is often summarized through the idea:
Strong people don’t need strong leaders.
The exact wording appears in discussions of Baker’s organizing philosophy, but the deeper point matters more than the slogan.
Movements should develop people’s capacity to participate rather than making communities permanently dependent upon a heroic leader.
That is a lesson churches need too.
If a community collapses when the charismatic leader leaves, perhaps community was never fully developed.
Leadership should help people discover their own power, not convince them they are powerless without the leader.
🕊️ WORDS FOR THE ROAD
Do not wait for the future to give you permission to become the kind of person the future will need.
📓 PILGRIM JOURNAL PROMPT
What Future Am I Already Practicing?
Imagine the kind of community you would like to inhabit.
How do people treat one another?
How are resources shared?
How are conflicts handled?
Who gets included?
How are disabled people supported?
How are children treated?
How are older people treated?
How are animals and ecosystems treated?
How are decisions made?
Now ask:
What one feature of that future can I practice today?
😇 HOLY FOOLERY
Joel Meets the Strategic Planning Committee
Joel:
“Your sons and daughters shall prophesy!”
Committee Chair:
“Have they completed leadership training?”
Joel:
“Your old people shall dream dreams!”
Chair:
“We’ll need those dreams submitted in writing.”
Joel:
“Your young people shall see visions!”
Chair:
“Excellent. We can form a youth advisory subcommittee.”
Joel:
“Even the servants receive the Spirit!”
Chair:
“Let’s not get carried away.”
Joel:
“The Spirit is being poured out upon everyone.”
Chair:
“Who authorized this?”
Joel:
“Exactly.”
🙏 PRAYER FOR PEACE ACROSS ALL FAITHS
A Prayer for Generations Learning Together
Sacred Mystery beyond every name,
teach generations to listen to one another.
May children be safe enough to imagine.
May young people possess meaningful voices.
May adults have courage to change.
May elders continue dreaming.
May Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, Sikhs, Pagans, Indigenous traditions, humanists, atheists, and people of every path work together where peace and justice require cooperation.
May communities learn from memory without becoming prisoners of the past.
May we welcome new ideas without worshiping novelty.
May power become shared responsibility.
May knowledge become common wealth.
May peace become something we practice rather than merely request.
Amen.
🕯️ FRANCISCAN CLAREAN REFLECTION
A Community That Makes Room for Tomorrow
Francis did not begin with an elaborate institution.
He began walking.
Others joined him.
Clare did not wait for someone to invent the perfect role for women seeking radical spiritual community.
She began living the life.
That matters.
Sometimes institutions ask:
“Do we have permission?”
The Franciscan question can be different:
“What does love require?”
Then begin.
Feed somebody.
Pray.
Share.
Walk.
Care for creation.
Challenge exclusion.
Build community.
And remain humble enough to change the experiment when it stops serving life.
Franciscan Clarean spirituality should never become a museum dedicated to Francis and Clare.
The best way to honor radical ancestors is not to preserve their world unchanged. It is to practice their courage in ours.
🌱 THE HERBAL MINUTE
Dandelion — A Plant That Refuses to Stay in Its Place
Dandelion, Taraxacum officinale, is one of the most familiar plants in urban landscapes.
It appears in lawns.
Sidewalk cracks.
Vacant lots.
Gardens.
Places where someone was quite certain it was not invited.
Various parts of dandelion have long histories of culinary and traditional herbal use.
Young leaves are sometimes eaten as greens.
Roots have been roasted for beverages.
Flowers have been used in foods and traditional preparations.
But dandelion’s reputation as an herbal “detox” remedy often exceeds what clinical evidence can establish.
Your liver and kidneys already perform sophisticated metabolic and elimination functions.
Safety note: Dandelion can cause allergic reactions, particularly among people sensitive to related plants in the Asteraceae family. It may interact with some medications, and people with certain gallbladder, kidney, or medical conditions should seek professional guidance before medicinal use. Never eat urban-foraged plants unless identification is certain and the location is free from pesticide, pet-waste, roadside, and other contamination concerns.
Today’s herbal wisdom:
Resilience sometimes looks like a yellow flower growing through a crack in concrete.
🎒 URBAN PREPAREDNESS
A Household Power-Outage Plan That Shares Responsibility
Instead of asking:
“What gear should I buy?”
today ask:
“What will we actually do?”
Imagine the electricity disappears this evening.
Who checks flashlights?
Who makes sure phones and power banks are conserved?
Who knows where medications and medical information are?
Who checks on household animals?
Who contacts neighbors who may need assistance?
Who keeps track of refrigerator and freezer safety?
Who knows where backup water is stored?
If one household member normally manages everything, the plan has a vulnerability.
Share knowledge.
Everyone does not need identical responsibilities.
But important information should not exist inside only one person’s head.
Accessibility matters.
Emergency lighting should be where people can find it.
Instructions should be simple.
Important information may need to exist in print as well as electronically.
People who depend upon powered medical or accessibility equipment may need specific contingency planning.
And pets belong in the plan.
The Urban Pilgrim approach to preparedness is not:
Every person for themselves.
It is:
What do we know, what do we have, what do we need, and who can we help?
Preparedness becomes mutual aid before the emergency ever happens.
🥾 OUTDOOR PILGRIM SKILL
Planning a Walk With Rest and Exit Points
Outdoor planning is often framed around distance.
“How many miles can I do?”
Try another approach.
Before a walk, identify:
Your starting point.
Your destination or turnaround point.
Places where you can rest.
Places where you can safely shorten the route.
Accessible bathrooms when relevant.
Water availability.
Public transportation or pickup points if available.
Weather exposure.
Sunset time.
The goal is not proving toughness.
The goal is creating options.
A route with several safe exit points may be better than a route that traps you into completing a predetermined distance.
This is especially useful when walking with children, older adults, disabled people, people rebuilding fitness, or anyone whose energy varies from day to day.
Franciscan fieldcraft is not about conquering the landscape.
It is about moving through it attentively.
A successful walk is one you can adapt.
🚶 PILGRIM PRACTICE FOR TODAY
Invite One Person Into a Decision
Choose one small decision you would normally make alone but that affects someone else.
Ask them what they think.
Not ceremonially.
Not after you have already decided.
Actually listen.
Maybe it concerns dinner.
A household task.
A ministry project.
A meeting.
A shared purchase.
An outing.
A community activity.
Then notice what changes when decision-making becomes shared.
You do not need to surrender every personal decision.
The practice is simply learning to recognize when something we call an individual decision actually affects a community.
Participation begins when consultation can still change the outcome.
✨ CLOSING BLESSING
May We Begin the Future Together
May Joel remind us that prophecy cannot be monopolized.
May young people see visions.
May older people dream dreams.
May daughters prophesy.
May people dismissed by society discover that their voices matter.
May historical-critical scholarship teach us that Scripture itself contains reinterpretation, development, debate, and change.
May liberation theology teach us to listen from below.
May feminist theology challenge every institution that mistakes patriarchy for divine order.
May queer theology remind us that becoming can be holy.
May ecological theology teach us that no human future exists apart from the community of life.
May religious pluralism make us curious rather than threatened by wisdom beyond our own tradition.
May Francis teach us to possess less.
May Clare teach us to build community.
May Ella Baker remind us that leadership does not require a throne.
May our preparedness distribute knowledge rather than hoard it.
May our outdoor skills give us options rather than demand unnecessary endurance.
May dandelions remind us that life has an astonishing talent for appearing where respectable landscaping says it should not.
And may the God who does not dictate history from a supernatural control room,
but insists through the fragile call of justice, compassion, possibility, hospitality, and love,
keep whispering:
Another world is possible.
Not guaranteed.
Possible.
And possibility asks something from us.
Dream.
Imagine.
Organize.
Share.
Question.
Listen.
Experiment.
Repair.
Plant.
Protect.
Welcome.
Begin.
Do not tell children they must wait until adulthood before their ideas matter.
Do not tell young people they need decades of obedience before they can challenge injustice.
Do not tell adults they are too busy to dream.
Do not tell older people their usefulness has expired.
Do not tell disabled people participation requires pretending they are nondisabled.
Do not tell queer people their future requires returning to somebody else’s past.
Do not tell poor people justice must wait until the economy finds it convenient.
Do not tell workers that democracy belongs everywhere except the workplace.
Do not tell communities they need a hero before they can organize themselves.
And do not tell yourself:
“Someday I will begin.”
Someday is an extraordinarily effective hiding place.
The future does not arrive fully constructed.
We make pieces of it.
At kitchen tables.
In gardens.
On sidewalks.
Inside churches.
At protests.
In classrooms.
At food pantries.
On trails.
During conversations.
Through mutual aid.
Through friendships.
Through refusing domination.
Through ordinary people discovering they can cooperate.
Maybe Joel’s Spirit is still being poured out.
Not as supernatural spectacle.
But wherever imagination escapes the boundaries imposed upon it.
Whenever someone who was told to remain silent speaks.
Whenever someone accustomed to speaking learns to listen.
Whenever knowledge is shared.
Whenever resources become common care.
Whenever another person is invited into the circle.
The future is not a waiting room.
Open the door.
There are dreams outside.
Eternal Progression • A Fuller Life for Everyone • Live and Help Live.
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