Readings

Rev. Gail Collins-Ranadive, Interim Minister,
High Plains Church,  Colorado Springs, Colorado
March 20, 2003

This morning as I watched the dawn come up from the Plains, the same dawn
that saw 'our bombs bursting in air' over Baghdad, my heart filled with a
terrible sadness--a sadness I shall 'hold in the light' as a spiritual
discipline through this new spring and this new war.  Then I watched the sun
light up Pike's Peak, and recalled the poem that Katharine Lee Bates wrote
after her inspired summer here in Colorado Springs.  It was her poem/prayer
that God's grace would crown us all, and, later in her life, she urged that
when we sing her America the Beautiful, "we think of 'From sea to shining
sea' as applying from the Pacific to the Atlantic, around the other way...so
that [it] will include all the nations and all the people."  May it be so. 

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