Our visitors from the Episcopal Diocese of Taiwan and we share anxiety about political factors largely beyond our control. In varying degrees, Taiwan’s people worry about threats from mainland China, including the possibility of invasion. In the United States, immigrant workers, including many who attend our churches in the Episcopal Diocese of Los Angeles, and others at risk are contending with Trump’s cruel workplace roundups and other inhumane policies.
Largely, but not entirely beyond our control. We retain the power of prayer and our unity in Christ. Both are manifest in the new companion relationship between our dioceses. When our four-person delegation visited Taiwan last fall, we were deeply impressed by the diocese’s outreach programs, especially through Episcopal education and care of elderly non-Christian neighbors.
On Monday morning at St. Paul’s Commons, Echo Park, we offered Bishop Lennon Yuan-rung Chang and his delegation a panel discussion on some of the Episcopal Diocese of Los Angeles’s outreach ministries — the Rev. Dr. Francisco Garcia on Episcopal Sacred Resistance, Steve Trepasso on Seeds of Hope and food justice, Hilda Sarkissians on refugee resettlement at IRIS Interfaith Refugee & Immigration Service, Los Angeles, Canon Bob Williams, who organized the panel, on interfaith ministers pooling their efforts in ministries like Laundry Love, and I on building affordable housing on our church campuses. We each described a response to government policies that are beyond our control, but not beyond our influence.
In the afternoon, two wonderful docents offered a bilingual tour of the Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens, beginning with the Chinese gardens and ending with Blue Boy and various colors of ice cream. Briefing our visitors on their destination in San Marino, I said that it was established by Henry Huntington, a collector and early promoter of modern Los Angeles who made his millions on the railroads. I told them that Francisco, a long-time union activist, would probably have organized his workers.
