Wednesday, April 4, 2012

Thank you

I am more appreciative for all of the communications I have received this Lenten season about forgiveness than I can express.

Members of the Foundry congregation have been taking some amazing steps ... contacting relatives they have been alienated from for years, asking ex-spouses for forgiveness, praying for their own grace to accept God's forgiveness for things they have beaten themselves up about for years.

I do not think I have ever received so much feedback about any sermon series ever before.

I think we happened upon a very important topic. Even as we move on to another series after Easter, I encourage you to continue to think and pray about forgiveness.

You are invited to our Good Friday services at noon and 7 p.m. when we will anoint with oil for forgiveness.

And thanks to everyone who has shared their story with me this Lent!

Tuesday, April 3, 2012

From Alicia ....

This past week’s sermon brought another “aha” moment for me. Dean said (I’m paraphrasing based on my memory) that you know you have forgiven someone when you think of them or remember them – including all of their faults – and feel only love and peace in your heart.

I only knew one of my grandparents, my father’s mother. Her name was Rebeca Gutierrez and pretty much everyone in the family will tell you that she was not a very nice woman. I’ll just leave it at that. Although I grew up just a few miles from my grandmother, I don’t have many happy memories of her. This always made me sad, especially when I heard others talk about their warm relationships with their grandparents.

But, as I’ve gotten older and have encountered challenges and heartbreaks that I never expected, I have come to appreciate and love my grandmother in a new way. I’ve come to appreciate that there were probably reasons she acted the way she did. I can guess what they might have been – she was widowed with three young children, she fled the Mexican revolution at age two – but I don’t really know. However, this helped me view her in a way other than just the grandmother that fell short of my childhood dreams.

As the negative memories of my grandmother started to fade, I was able to see more clearly the incredible ways her strength and courage shaped my life. She was a woman before her time and had vision and foresight that are not always easily appreciated.

In the early 1950s, my grandparents were both school teachers living in East Los Angeles with three young children. Then my grandfather died of cancer, when my aunt was just an infant. My grandfather’s death did not deter my grandmother’s plan to get her children the best education possible. She bought a house in South Pasadena, an almost exclusively white town just a few miles away, against the petitions of residents in the neighborhood. They did not want Mexican Americans in the neighborhood, clearly evidenced by the sign “No Dogs, No Negroes, No Mexicans” at the city pool. The move was not without its hardships, but her plan was successful and all three of her children (and one of her grandchildren, me) graduated from Stanford and also earned graduate degrees.

My grandmother’s drive for access to the American dream for her children and Mexican Americans generally (she and my grandfather were leaders in the Mexican American Movement, a civil rights movement in the 1940s) had many successes and provided a platform for me to reach even higher. However, as many of us know, breaking down barriers and fighting for inclusion are not easy tasks and these activities may have impacted how she treated those closest to her. I have learned to forgive the lack of happy times with her. I may not have memories of baking cookies with her, but I carry on her legacy and for that I’m incredibly proud and thankful.