March
2007
Welcome to the World
Today is the beginning of 7-day SOLIDARITY FAST for the people of Darfur. This week is an opportunity for students, faculty, staff, and recent college graduates to come together to reflect on the connection between our own humanity and the humanity of those suffering in the region of Darfur.
How is it possible for a group of American Christian students from more privileged backgrounds to understand the suffering that men, women, and children of Darfur experience each day for the past three years? Consciously abstaining from food for 7 days will only be a tiny fraction of the pain and hunger that Darfurians go through daily. So why are we fasting?
Through the Solidarity Fast Week we hope to start the process of the type of spiritual transformation that connects us our being and sense of survival with that of the world. As Americans, some of us do not experience the level of suffering and injustice the rest of the world faces each waking day (e.g. ethnic cleansing, war, national hunger, the AIDS epidemic, displacement, and extreme poverty). As Arundhati Roy most humbly said when many Americans experienced devastation and national heartache probably for the first time in their lives, “Welcome to the world.”
This is Christ’s invitation to us. Welcome to the world, he says to us when we enter the wilderness with God. Welcome to the world, he says to us when we try to make sense of the destruction in places like New Orleans, Guatemala, Sudan, Uganda, Mexico, Southeast Asia, Lebanon, Gaza, and Iraq. Welcome to the world, he says to us as an invitation to a deep and transformative experience with the Creator of the world.
The season of Lent is a time of reflection, confrontation, and realization of our vocational call to the world. Where will your faith take you this week? Will your faith bring a deeper connection to life around you? Will it bring a recognition of your over-consumption and waste? Will it be a determination to act and affect lasting change? Will it call you out of your passive slumber and stand for an end to genocide forever?
Many of the students participating in the Solidarity Fast (regardless of the amount of days they choose) have expressed their deep commitment to justice, equality, and dignity of all peoples-regardless of ethnicity, race, religion, and citizenship. But our commitment to justice and peace struggles might still be disconnected from the actual experience of pain, injustice, fear of death, hunger, and international neglect and indifference.
As Carter Heyward said, “As we withstand and experience our connectedness with Jesus’ life of love and death of love and our connectedness with those who suffer, so that becomes our primary resource for compassion and healing, the raw material of solidarity and liberation. And there lies the possibility of transformation.”
WE NEED YOUR HELP!! Please help offset the cost for the college students attending. To draw a larger student participation to the BREAK THE FAST event, we are promoting it as a free event, but donations will be accepted. If you can help us with $35, $50, $100 to take care of some of the catering costs, rentals, promo materials, etc. Please click here if you would like to donate online.
Or mail your check (payable to Progressive Christians Uniting; memo: Solidarity Fast 2007) to our office at 1501 Wilshire Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90017 ATTN: Solidarity Fast. Thank you.
Peace.