Sanctuaries of Life in Dangerous Days

By Rev. Jeanne Randall-Bodman

On the last weekend of every September clergy and lay delegates from across the Central Pacific Conference of the United Church of Christ gather to tend to the business of the conference — resolutions, bylaws, nomination of new board and committee members — and for the renewal of connections, mutual encouragement, and worship. For the last few years we have deferred the business part of our gathering to a long zoom session on the following weekend and focused our time, energy and imagination on renewing our life together. This year our theme was: Refugia Rising: Sanctuaries of Life in Dangerous Days

We celebrated the ways our congregations offer shelter from the depredations of the current administration, and imagined how we could become not just safety, but fertile ground for new life.

At a moment when our immigrant neighbors are threatened and our transgender siblings have been designated as terrorists, when the federal government is sending troops into Portland, we may well be called to offer physical, emotional and spiritual shelter to those who need to flee.

And at a moment when the church in America is at risk of being swallowed up by White Christian Nationalism, we in the progressive church are absolutely being called to be refugia for the gospel of Jesus Christ.

Christ’s gospel that welcomes the stranger.

Christ’s gospel that is good news for the poor and liberation for the oppressed.

Christ’s gospel that calls us to participate in the creation of a realm that is just, generous, and free.

We are called to be a place of safety. Small, protected, hospitable.

We are also called to be a place of new life. Creative, bold, fresh and new.

Together let us pray, dream, plan, and act.

More about refugia from the book Refugia Faith by Debra Rienstra

When Mount Saint Helens erupted in May of 1980, it lost 1,300 feet of elevation and gained a new mile-and-a-half-wide crater. The debris and ashfall from the volcanic blast devastated the mountain and its surroundings for miles, crushing, burning, killing, and coating everything in hot ash. Everyone assumed life could return to this apocalyptic death zone only very slowly, maybe over several human lifetimes.

Instead, forty years later, the mountainsides are covered with lush grasses, prairie lupines, alders. Critters scamper, streams flow. It will take a few hundred more years for the vegetation to return to something like old-growth forest. But still. Why did life come back with such vigor, and so quickly? As Kathleen Dean Moore explains in her book Great Tide Rising, “What scientists know now, but didn’t understand then, is that when the mountain blasted ash and rock across the landscape, the devastation passed over some small places hidden in the lee of rocks and trees. Here, a bed of moss and deer fern under a rotting log. There, under a boulder, a patch of pearly everlasting and the tunnel to a vole’s musty nest.” These little pockets of safety are called refugia. They are tiny coverts where plants and creatures hide from destruction, hidden shelters where life persists and out of which new life emerges.