Daily Reading: 2 May
(from www.christianaid.org.uk)
Those who sow with tears will reap with songs of joy.
Something to read
Restore our life Lord, like streams of living water Those who sow with tears will reap with songs of joy. Those who leave crying, carrying seeds to sow will come back with songs of joy, carrying abundance with them.
- Psalm 126:4-6.
Something to think about
Is another world possible? Many have tired of trying, others wait without action, others act without faith. We pray and learn from Psalm 126 and peasant resistance.
Hope has two sisters: memory and resistance. To make memory is to retake the living sense of history, to recognise liberating processes - exoduses - and to celebrate that the Spirit of God animates us in another possible world. This conviction expresses itself in joy and disarms all fatalism and passivity.
Memory restores resistance to us: we plant with tears, we will reap with joy. Resistance is the daily practice of believing, working, organising, and being able to change relationships with the earth, work and sharing, and power relations.
Something to do
Around the world, peasants plant seeds in situations of oppression, but the animated and organised announce with conviction the joy of harvesting the free land, and the sources of water released.
Read: Keeping the Struggles of Peasant Women Alive: Get to Know the Via Campesina campaign
And see if the movement is happening near you
Something to pray
God of life, we celebrate our history in favour of life and the rights of the People
We want to thank you
for so many brothers and sisters
who have resisted in the struggle for land and earth,
making Earth a place of work, joy and recreation.
God of life and Lord of history,
The dream of his people
is that the land be honoured and shared
and shared among all.
We are renewing today
our intention to continue fighting
for a ‘land without evils’
and for a just and fraternal world.
Amen.
Today’s contributor is Nancy Cardosa, Christian Aid’s former theology advisor.