Member-only story
In the Presence of God
it happened in a suburban parking lot while holiday shopping
While I was out holiday shopping for my grandchildren today, I had a Divine encounter. It wasn’t unexpected since I ALWAYS expect miracles. It’s how I operate and delight in talking about them when they occur. I was wearing one of my favorite articles of clothing on an unusually warm December Pennsylvania day. I was bundled up in a winter coat and cozy fleece gloves yesterday. I say often that if you don’t like the weather in these parts, wait a few minutes. Several of my wardrobe choices have the same message, a few t-shirts, another sweatshirt, zippered hoodie and a puffy rainbow hued winter vest. They come from a company called Sunshine Sisters.
This sweatshirt that encourages people to BE KIND attracts lots of attention. As I was getting out of my car and a man was loading his, he commented on it. He said that we need more kindness in the world especially now. We were both floored by the outcome of the election and that hate seemed to have won. We agreed that we all needed to do our part to change that. He told me that he had been in Soweto during apartheid and how cruelly people were treated. He had the blessing of meeting and shaking hands with Desmond Tutu and he had never felt closer to the experience of the presence of God as when he was with the Archbishop. I shared that I felt the same way when I met the Dalai Lama. He had heard of my friend Sharon Katz and the Peace Train.
This is a bit of Sharon’s story. “As a teenager, I traveled illegally to Black townships near my hometown of Port Elizabeth (now called Nelson Mandela Bay!) to visit my actor friends who were working with Athol Fugard. I first left South Africa in 1978 to go and live in Lesotho where I lived and worked in remote village for a year and I gathered so many wonderful songs, singing with children daily. I later traveled to the United States in 1981 to study music therapy in Philadelphia returning to South Africa after Nelson Mandela’s release from prison in 1990. It was then that I started The Peace Train musical production and mounted a 500 voice…
