Tag: history

Are You Ready to Make History? 

The celebration of Christmas is not a sentimental waiting for a baby to be born, but much more an asking for history to be born! —Fr. Richard Rohr, Preparing for Christmas  

What a year! 2025 has been a year of firsts in every living person. And 2025 has been year of first experiences with devastating natural disasters: famine, droughts, etc. 2025 has been a year of many firsts for many nations around the world, including our America’s political/government story. 

But Richard Rohr has just reminded us that ‘history is to be born.’  Wasn’t that the story in Bethlehem over 2000 years ago? Asking for a new world order?  Asking for brave advocates?  Asking for systemic change to make the world safer and more community and caring based? More equity, empowerment versus power over? 

‘Love was born on Christmas eve’ say several popular songs and poems.  

Taking that to heart would mean for me that love is an action verb. So, what needs born in me to meet the model of life set by Jesus as he ‘grew in stature and knowledge of the Lord.’?   

History is to be born. So what do I want my behavior and choices this year to be: who do I choose to be? We do choose! We think we don’t choose much. But that is a myth.   

I make conscious and unconscious choices everyday of how to interact with the clerk in the store; how to respond to the pushy driver on my bumper; how to respond when someone states something hateful or derogatory of others. What temperament will I bring inside my home today?  

I have heard for many years…what is to be my legacy? I think that is far out ahead of what the real task is. Integrity gets thin in me if my behavior in this moment today isn’t consistent with the hope I have for my legacy of how I hope I am remembered.   It is an intentional mindfulness that takes focused pauses in the day to evaluate: “how I am choosing to be, what is my language, my facial expression, my attitude today?” 

No small task. To birth history today. Rohr has hit upon a profound idea…it is not the future we are to spend the majority of our energy on. It is the NOW. The Power of Now was written by Eckhart Tolle in 2004 and has sold over 16 million copies in 30 language translations. What have we learned from that popular book? As I look at what the media choses to capture and show us regarding American behaviors in public, I would assume no one has read that book.  

But, let us remember, the media is never the whole story. What we say, what we witness, where we interact is where our range of influence is and therein lies my call. “To be whom I am called to be.” Following the Rabbi Jesus’ model and many other peace leaders over centuries. We are a humanity still learning how to ‘birth history’. 

My prayer: Creator, help us own the deep awareness that we are living out birthing history with our choices, and it is either working toward hurting others and toward destruction, or making a better world. 

© 2025 Kay F. Klinkenborg, MA, spiritual director, author, poet, adult education facilitator, retired RN; LMFT: Clinical Member AAMFT 

To Tell the Truth

It’s More Than Just a Game Show

by Rev. Dave Klingensmith, Church of the Palms UCC

I have always enjoyed the game show “To Tell the Truth.” I’ve seen it through several different versions, even was at a taping in NYC once. It has always been fun for me to try to decide, along with the panelists, who is really the one contestant sworn to tell the truth.

Most of us learned from a young age that it was important to tell the truth. Those who raised us drilled it into us. “Don’t lie, tell the truth.” We may have learned it in Sunday School. The Ninth Commandment specifically forbids lying in terms of bearing false witness or what is called perjury today. And though we may have been told that a “little white lie” is sometimes OK, almost all cultures and religions discourage lying of any sort.

But while we are often quick to tell someone else to “tell the truth,” we often don’t like to hear the truth, or face the truth, about ourselves or someone else. Some time ago I discovered in doing some genealogy research that my paternal great-grandfather had committed suicide in the early 1900’s when some investments went bad. It was shocking and surprising. Often families don’t want to face the truth when this happens. People often don’t want to face the truth that a family member is LGBT, or that someone has a mental illness. These days using Ancestry.com or other websites, sometimes people may discover that they have siblings they never knew they had, or even that they may not be the race or nationality they thought they were. Doing other historical research might lead us to discover that our families owned slaves or took land from indigenous people.

It can be hard to face up to this. We may want to brush it under the rug, to tell ourselves “That was a long time ago.” But by doing so we deny ourselves a significant, if challenging, part of our history. To acknowledge it may result in significant growth and even healing for us, and for the descendants of those who were wronged.

Likewise, the information we learned in school about our nation’s history may not always have been totally truthful. I learned about the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor but didn’t learn until much later how we put Japanese-American U.S. citizens in internment camps. We learned about the Civil War and slavery, but textbooks downplayed the cruelty inflicted on slaves, and how our entire society capitalized on the backs of people who were bought and sold. We have often glossed over how even Christian missionaries treated Native Americans as “savages.”

Telling the truth about our nation’s history, especially in regard to racial issues, is important. The term “Critical Race Theory” is an explosive one right now. I would argue for a different term – Critical Race History – or even just Telling the Truth About Our History. When we do not acknowledge painful or troubling events or try to say they have no relevance today, we are denying the humanity of someone’s great-great grandparent who was a slave. We may have to tell the truth, that someone we may have admired was really a brutal plantation owner or a ship owner who transported slaves from Africa.

When school districts, or states, maybe even religious groups, try to deny painful parts of our history, we all lose. We lose the opportunity to acknowledge the truth, to admit our complicity in that history, and to see how we can do something today to atone for the past.

We can tell the truth about our history so that injustices don’t happen again. If we don’t tell the truth and acknowledge injustices, we can expect to repeat them.