Me and Mt. Rainier

Reflections at 75

By the Rev. Connie Yost

I turned 75 in early August, spending the day at my favorite spiritual site, Mt. Rainier, doing my favorite hike.  The mountain and weather were glorious this year, and though the wildflowers were slightly past peak already, they were glorious, too.

I celebrated with friends and family later in the month and that was glorious as well.  I decided not to wait until I turned 80 for the celebration, “just in case.”  My mother was almost 100 when she died, and the women on my Dad’s side of the family were in their 90’s when they died, so chances are, I’ll be around at 80 and probably 90, maybe even 95!  Still, you never know.

Age changes things and my task is adapting to the changes which includes a constant assessment of what is important for me to do or let go.  I’ve whittled my ministry down to support of farm workers and immigrants, especially through my work as President of Farm Worker Ministry Northwest and Board Secretary of National Farm Worker Ministry.  I also founded a nonprofit, Friends Stay Warm, which pays the utility bills of local low-wage workers when they are in desperate straits. 

It is heart-breaking work but also heartful work, especially when we get a chance to be face to face with farm workers as we did recently in North Carolina.  I wish everyone could have dinner with these hard-working people and then they would know these people are not rapists and criminals and job-stealers, but people who are doing an incredibly difficult and often very dangerous job, subject to being exploited and disrespected and just simply ignored by the people they feed.  They have families, many are women and some are children, and they are just trying to do a good job for poverty wages and survive despite the odds.  And yet, they joke and laugh and share the warmth of their culture with us as well as their food and precious down time.  They make us know why we do the work of advocacy and presence, and why we will keep doing the work no matter how little ever gets done to help them.  

After my birthday celebration, I went to Bend for an Alison Krauss concert and then on to Ashland for plays and Eugene to visit a friend and farm worker advocate, and then home.  While on the road, Dolly Parton died, and then in quick succession Wendell Berry died, and then Gloria Steinem did.  Oh my God.  My idols, my mentors; these are people who are such a part of my history as a woman, as a minister, as a person trying to navigate my place in the world as I age.

What a great life they all led!  What joy and solace they all brought to others through their work and example.  I can remember when the first Ms. Magazine was published and I collected each one and gave 25 years of the magazine to a university in the late 90’s.  I can remember an acquaintance saying he didn’t think Dolly was that talented (back in the 70’s) and I remember thinking, just because she’s country and blonde?  Boy, was he wrong!  And I remember being so inspired and comforted by the words of Wendell Berry when I was founding my first ministry, an organic farm and program for at-risk teens in East Los Angeles.

I began this year focused on my aging and turning 75 and reassessing, once again, what I want to do with my time, which includes celebration, travel, support of farm workers and immigrants, and the nurturing of my health and personal relationships and my garden.  The deaths of my mentors reminds me that a life well-lived goes on far past the time we are here on earth.  That is legacy, and that is what I am thinking most about now.  What would you like your legacy to be?

I close with these words from Wendell Berry:[i]

Find your hope, then, on the ground under your feet.

Your hope of Heaven, let it rest on the ground

underfoot. Be it lighted by the light that falls

freely upon it after the darkness of the nights

and the darkness of our ignorance and madness.

Let it be lighted also by the light that is within you,

which is the light of imagination. By it you see

the likeness of people in other places to yourself

in your place. It lights invariably the need for care

toward other people, other creatures, in other places

as you would ask them for care toward your place and you.

 

No place at last is better than the world. The world

is no better than its places. Its places at last

are no better than their people while their people

continue in them. When the people make

dark the light within them, the world darkens.

---

[i]Excerpt from “2007, VI” [“It is hard to have hope”] by Wendell Berry, from This Day: New & Collected Sabbath Poems (Counterpoint, 2013). 

Copyright 2026 Constance B. Yost. All rights reserved.

 

 PCUN May Day 2025

Reflection by the Rev. Connie Yost

President, Farm Worker Ministry Northwest 

 

In 1962 James Baldwin wrote, "Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced."[i]   Friends, we must stay strong and face the hard truths of this lawless and immoral time in our country. 

 And the truth is that the Trump administration appears to be heading to an authoritarian system, under which, in the words of Jamal Greene, professor at Columbia Law School, “civil society is significantly diminished for fear of targeted retribution... We have much to fear.”[ii]

And there is much fear in our hearts.  Fear of being deported, fear of families being torn apart, fear of economic hardship, fear of programs being diminished or eliminated that provide the basic safety net of food for the hungry, care for the elderly, services for the disabled and health care for all.

Isabel Allende who was forced to flee Chile in a military coup says that “Fear is a very pervasive thing that changes a society, and changes the way people behave with each other, and changes you inside. Something breaks inside you.”[iii]

Friends, it is our moral and human duty to come together in this time of fear.  Some of us are breaking inside right now.  We must stand strong together and not let us forget the inherent worth and dignity of each person, regardless of legal status.  We must stand strong against hateful narratives and policies that break people apart.  We must offer ourselves as a sanctuary for all in need.

We must stand together, as one community.  Pope Francis wrote “Let us dream, then, as a single human family, as fellow travelers sharing the same flesh, as children of the same earth which is our common home, each of us bringing the richness of his or her beliefs and convictions, each of us with his or her own voice, brothers and sisters all.”[iv]

I offer you this closing blessing:

May you offer and find comfort in a community of mutual support and care, such as this one;

May you cultivate and offer others love and hope even in darkest of times;

May we never forget that our lives are interconnected and we have a moral responsibility to care for one other, especially those in the most need and under the most threat;

May we honor the inherent worth and dignity of each person we meet;

May we be motivated by our own moral outrage to speak out, stand up, and stand with, and share our own stories;

May we know that there is an infinite love that surrounds us and supports us, even in our darkest hour.

Amen and blessed be.

 

---

[i] AS MUCH TRUTH AS ONE CAN BEAR by James Baldwin, The New York Times, January 14, 1962

[ii] Opinion | A Road Map of Trump’s Lawless Presidency - The New York Times

[iii] ‘The Interview’: Isabel Allende Understands How Fear Changes a Society - The New York Times

[iv] Fratelli Tutti: On Fraternity and Social Friendship - Top Quotes from Pope Francis' Latest Encyclical - Catholic Apostolate Center

Copyright 2025 Constance B. Yost. All rights reserved.

A New Hope for A New Year

by The Rev. Connie Yost

 I am a bit late coming to this New Year 2024 blog post, but my thoughts about it have been welling up as we enter this election year.  I admit I approach 2024 with fear – fear that the onslaught of election news will wear me down, and a greater fear that a candidate will win the Presidential election who will further degrade not only our democracy but humanity itself.  I long for God in all of this, for those people who can lift up and further the attributes of my God – kindness, strength, hospitality, equality, creativity, beauty, truth, love.

Of all the religious holidays we celebrate, I have come to resonate most deeply with Epiphany. The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines Epiphany as “January 6 observed as a church festival in commemoration of the coming of the Magi as the first manifestation of Christ to the Gentiles or in the Eastern Church in commemoration of the baptism of Christ.”  For Western Christians, this is the day that three wise men or Magi, guided by a star, discovered the baby Jesus, born in a barn to poor people who soon became refugees to protect Jesus from the murderous King Herod.

January 6 – Epiphany – is the day Christians celebrate the light in the darkness.  How very terrible that it is now inextricably bound up with the day a mob descended on the US Capitol with murderous intent to stop the certification of electoral college votes in the 2020 Presidential election.

And yet, because the vile act of January 6, 2021 happened on Epiphany, I find it even more important to remember the message of Epiphany.  The Magi were not Jews, they were Gentiles, and yet they traveled far to find a new revelation of God in the Jewish baby Jesus.  They bridged divides and hardships to join in this revelation, this new light in the world.

The word epiphany comes from the Greek epiphaneia, meaning “manifestation.”  The Merriam-Webster dictionary further defines the manifestation as:

1.  especially of a divine being

2.  a usually sudden manifestation or perception of the essential nature or meaning of something

3.  an illuminating discovery, realization, or disclosure

4.  an intuitive grasp of reality through something (such as an event) usually simple and striking

5.  a revealing scene or moment

Maya Angelou's defines Epiphany as “the occurrence when the mind, the body, the heart, and the soul focus together and see an old thing in a new way."

Epiphany brings me new hope because it affirms that there is always the possibility of something new happening in our thoughts, in our lives, and in the world.  We just need to pay attention.  We need a spiritual contemplative, meditative practice to help us be attentive.  We need our spiritual practice to ground us where our hope truly resides, in the “power of love and renewal that lives within the universe, the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of God.” (Sallie McFague).  Jesus as Prophet shows us that “God offers us quiet, contemplative eyes; God also calls us to prophetic and critical involvement in the pain and sufferings of our world – both at the same time.” (Richard Rohr)

For many Christians, Epiphany is not just one day, but the beginning of a season that lasts until the first day of Lent.  For me, the Epiphany season is one of new beginnings, new hope, bringing light to the word, and a time to focus on the attributes of my God in the world - kindness, strength, hospitality, equality, creativity, beauty, truth, love. 

Epiphany asks me these questions:  How am I doing as the manifestation of these attributes in my life?  How can I bring more of these things into my life?  How is my spiritual practice supporting me?  How attentive am I to Spirit’s message of love in the midst of my own pain and the sufferings of the world?  How can I bring the light of Epiphany into the world?

Copyright 2024 Constance B. Yost. All rights reserved.

Happy New Year 2021

Happy New Year 2021

I am not sure how happy this new year is for most of us.  For me, it started like so many of the days before it - gray, rainy and straining my ability to think up new things to do to keep myself from sinking into boredom and lethargy.

But I do feel hope in the new year.  There is a new federal administration coming  in a few weeks that won’t solve all our problems or do everything I want, but will definitely do better than what we have had.  With any luck the daily news won’t be full of a barrage of lies and attacks on our democracy by the very leaders who are supposed to be upholding and advancing our democratic principles.  Maybe some decency will even enter into the public discourse and we will offer meaningful, tangible support to all those who have been hurt by the pandemic and all those who were already hurting due to their immigration status and/or poverty wages.

That’s a lot to ask, it seems.  How can we be the richest country in the world yet have so many people living in intolerable circumstances?  Can it be that we collectively worship wealth more than equality?  Can it be that we care about justice only if it doesn’t cost us anything, or inconvenience us in any way, or limit our own ability to accumulate wealth?

The pandemic ended life as we knew it, and now that I have been lamenting this for over nine months, I am beginning to understand that there is a gift in this, waiting for us to claim it.

The Indian writer Arundhati Roy writes[i]:

What is this thing that has happened to us? It’s a virus, yes. In and of itself it holds no moral brief.  But it is definitely more than a virus. Some believe it’s God’s way of bringing us to our senses. Others that it’s a Chinese conspiracy to take over the world.

Whatever it is, coronavirus has made the mighty kneel and brought the world to a halt like nothing else could.  Our minds are still racing back and forth, longing for a return to “normality,” trying to stitch our future to our past and refusing to acknowledge the rupture. But the rupture exists. And in the midst of this terrible despair, it offers us a chance to rethink the doomsday machine we have built for ourselves. Nothing could be worse than a return to normality.

Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew.  This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next.

We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it.

Dreams in the Time of Fear

In 1998, Zapatista women in Amador Hernadez demanded daily that the Mexican military leave the village communal landholdings. (Photo by Tim Russo)

Dreams in the Time of Fear

The sterility of the bourgeois world will end in suicide or a new form of creative participation.  This is the “theme of our times,” in Ortega y Gasset’s phrase; it is the substance of our dreams and the meaning of our acts.

Modern man likes to pretend that his thinking is wide-awake.  But his wide-awake thinking has led us into the mazes of a nightmare in which the torture chambers are endlessly repeated in the mirrors of reason.  When we emerge, perhaps we will realize that we have been dreaming with our eyes open, and that the dreams of reason are intolerable.  And then, perhaps, we will begin to dream once more with our eyes closed.               --  Octavio Paz, The Labyrinth of Solitude, 1961

I am probably way out of my depth here, but I am going to plunge ahead, anyway.  After all, I am in Mexico, I am a Zapatista and a kind of Catholic, and despite everything, I am a believer.

Believer in what, I expect you to ask.  Well, not in only reason, certainly.  It has its place, I am sure, in the scientific laboratory.  But as Octavio Paz said almost 60 years ago, this path of reason we have been on since the Enlightenment has not brought us to a better place in terms of our social structure, or happiness, or well-being, or ability to simply live without destroying ourselves and the planet.  That’s a pretty monumental failure in my opinion.

I don’t really care who is to blame, and thank god I am not an academic or a philosopher so I don’t have to say all of this is a certain way which will be convincing to someone who will write articles and books and then maybe we will all come to understand this.

No, that is not my job, thankfully.  I am a simple person, highly educated in a certain way, but I know that I know nothing, really, except what I feel in my heart.  And that’s OK with me.  

One of the joys and afflictions of aging is memory loss.  I can’t always readily call up to mind the word or fact I want.  I’m not really interested in debate though I like to hear others well-thought out arguments.  I detest being lectured to, but enjoy giving my opinion to those who are truly open to listening.  I try to understand what my heart is telling me, and work with my shadow self, all while trying to stay present in the Now.

I am a minister by training and experience and calling.  It is what I do and who I am anymore.  I can’t imagine anything else.  And what I do as a minister is listen; I travel and people tell me things; I work as a chaplain and people tell me things; I do what I can for social justice and people tell me things.  And what they say is that we want a better world for ourselves and our children.  That is universal. 

We want adequate food, water, clothing, housing, education, healthcare and the ability to make a living.  We want to have hope for the future.  We want to worship in our own way, and live free from fear of oppression and bodily harm.  We want our children to live and thrive.  We want to fall in love and have a fiesta or two.  We want to laugh from time to time.  

Is that so much to ask?

It seems that it is, for the many people who struggle in poverty conditions in the United States and elsewhere.

The Story of Bethel New Life

Mary Nelson, President Emeritus of Bethel New Life in Chicago

Where There’s a Will, There’s a Way 

Or Never Give Up Just Because We’re Older and Just a Small Group

By the Rev. Connie Yost

April 5, 2017

It began in Denver, in July of 2016, when Southwest Airline computers crashed and my flight home to Portland was cancelled.  An hour and a half wait in line had me rebooked on a flight out the next evening, and an apologetic $200 voucher was issued, good only on a future, Southwest Airline flight.

Never one to turn down a good coupon, discount or voucher, that $200 weighed heavily on me.  Where to go?  Finally, I decided to tour parts of the Midwest I had skipped over (or flown over) in previous trips.  My trip began in Detroit, wound through Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, ending in Chicago.

Between booking the trip and taking the trip, I had gotten more involved with the Interfaith Alliance on Poverty in Portland, specifically researching programs that have effectively moved people and communities out of poverty.  I remembered studying the Chicago-based work of Bethel New Life when I was in seminary some years back.  I was in luck – Mary Nelson, one of Bethel’s founders and executive director for many years was still living in the community, and she would be happy to talk with me and show me around.

Mary’s email said that I should take the “L”, Chicago’s elevated subway, green line west to Cicero, where I would transfer to the #54 bus going north 7 stops to Thomas.  Then, it would be a short walk to Bethel at 4950 W. Thomas.  It’s complicated, she said.  No worries, I replied.

I was on the green line headed west when I began to worry.  A man sat down across from me and started trying to put a dollar bill in the pocket of the young man next to him.  The young man looked straight ahead and never said a word while all of this was going on.   When the Pulaski stop came up, the older man told the younger man, “This is your stop.”  Again, the young man looked straight ahead and said nothing.  The next stop was Cicero, and as I got up to get off, both of the men also got up.  Uh oh, I thought, what if they follow me?

Mass Movement for Salvation

Jingle dancers at Standing Rock gathering 2016

The Power of the People: A Mass Movement to Address Runaway Inequality and Save Ourselves and the Planet

 by the Rev. Connie Yost

December 27, 2019

I recently went to the Native art market in Washington, DC, where I bought a first edition of Eugene Tapahe, Navajo photographer/writer’s book, Never Forget, Standing for Unity.  It is a beautiful testament to the gathering of water protectors at Standing Rock during the Dakota Access Pipeline fiasco.  Even years after the camps broke up, the people who were there speak of the spiritual power of the gathered community that has stayed with them and literally changed lives.  It speaks to me of the long loneliness people endure in this world and the power of love when people come together united in doing the right thing.  They say that they were not protesting, they were protecting, a distinction I find spiritually empowering.  Who wants to go around angry in protest, when we can come together in peace and prayer to honor and protect the earth, the animals, our ancestors, each other, and all the generations yet to come.  

I wasn’t there at Standing Rock at the time, but I was there last June, and I find that in all my travels to Indian reservations, natural landscapes, small towns and the places no one goes to, there is a beauty and a hunger and, I think, a spiritual clarity and strength deep down in the people, just waiting to be unleashed for the common good.  But too many people are being crushed under systems of violence, injustice and inequality, barely managing to survive, if at all.  That simply f-s people up.  We need the gathered community for sustenance, and we desperately need to address the root causes. 

That is why I find the message of Runaway Inequality by Les Leopold so compelling.  He makes the case in easy to understand language that we need to come together in a mass movement to demand the kind of policy changes that will stop the financial strip-mining of America, which began 40 years ago and is now of crisis proportions, leaving everyone falling further and further behind except the financial elites.  

Read the book, please.  I cannot do it justice here, only to say that runaway inequality is the over-arching defining issue of our day.  We have to be willing to take it on, on a massive scale, or no other issue can be solved.  Leopold writes, “…no matter what our individual identity…, we also need to take on the identity of movement builder.  We all must come together or we all lose.”