Letter from Peter Anderson
Colorado Central – March 2004 – Colorado Central Magazine
Dear Ed and Martha:
A belated note to thank you for a very fine issue in January — one that posed some provocative questions. As to the question about progressive Christian voices why we never hear them, I would just say they’re out there and they are speaking out. There are some good publications — The Other Side, Sojourners, Radical Grace, Friends Journal, Catholic Worker — that support these voices. We welcome these voices in Pilgrimage, as we do a variety of voices from all the world’s great wisdom traditions.
But the “LOUDS” who dominate the AM airwaves and the American pulpit (at least on TV) seemed to have shaped popular notions of who Christians are and what they believe.
I often experience the need to qualify my own identification with the term Christian (for folks on the left and the right) when explaining how my own beliefs as a Quaker have led me into the Christian story and community (albeit on the left edge of the village).
It has been tempting at times to distance myself from the Christian community altogether, which I might well do if it weren’t for the conflicting and somewhat weightier belief that true Christian values, at least as I understand them and as Jim Stiles evoked them in the January issue, help to ground me in that which is good, and true, and needs to be given voice.
An old seminary friend of mine once suggested that there are really only a few thousand authentic Christians living in the U.S. The Christians he had in mind walk humbly in a centered faith, celebrate the awe and wonder in living and dying, reach out to help and empower those on the margins, believe in the power of non-violence and work for peace. They live their lives as motions of love.
Steady On,
Peter Anderson
Crestone
