On this last day of September, I’m up drinking a cup of coffee and getting our office manager a newsletter article, late I know. Sorry, Tammy! Throughout these past few weeks as the leaves have started to change colors, I’ve been thinking about our friend Philip Hamilton who died peacefully in his sleep over a month ago. I truly still can’t believe he’s gone. Last night when I opened my email inbox, I found a sweet email from a past colleague of Philip’s, interested in learning more about Nourished. Finding myself wanting to tell him, I reached for my phone, and then I remembered.
Saturday, we held a beautiful memorial service at Groundswell Café. It was a wonderful collaboration between Nourished and Matthew 25. Philip served several years on the Nourished leadership board, helped get the bakery off the ground, helped plan Centering series, and recently led our series on homelessness. And of course, Matthew 25 was what brought Philip to Cedar Rapids, IA, where he touched all our hearts. In so many of my conversations on Saturday, I heard so many beautiful stories of the ways Philip touched so many lives. The housing and construction manager at Matthew 25 said it well, “Philip disturbed the comforted and comforted the disturbed.” The day before Philip died, he spent the day on Skid Row in Los Angeles. From what Philip’s mom told me, Skid Row looks and feels like Gaza. It’s awful there- blocks and blocks of massive homeless encampments. That night, he told his sister, he had joy in his heart.
I’ll close with this poem that we read on Saturday. It’s a poem that is dear to Philip’s family, written on a watercolor painting made by Philip’s sister. It’s called “Fire Flowers” by Emily Pauline Johnson.
And only where the forest fires have sped,
Scorching relentlessly the cool north lands,
A sweet wild flower lifts its purple head,
And, like some gentle spirit sorrow-fed,
It hides the scars with almost human hands.And only to the heart that knows of grief,
Of desolating fire, of human pain,
There comes some purifying sweet belief,
Some fellow-feeling beautiful, if brief.
And life revives, and blossoms once again.