A Message from the Regional Helpers
Dear Sisters and Brothers in Subud California & Nevada,
We write to thank you for allowing us to serve as your Regional Helpers these past four years. Since the 2014 World Congress in Puebla where we started our term, we have been blessed with your patience as we learned our role, with your forgiveness for the times we messed up, and with your warm hospitality when we visited your groups and homes.
Perhaps most of all, we have been blessed with your trust to perform these roles to the best of our ability. This trust has been an extraordinary gift to us, six individuals. The grace with which we were blessed was felt deeply, and our experiences have created a bond for which we will forever be grateful.
Saying goodbye to all of this is bittersweet, but mostly it’s very sweet because we’ve enjoyed a wonderful four years and now we get to pass the baton to a brilliant, new team of Regional Helpers: Marcella Cooke (Los Angeles), Helena Mertens (Badger), Renata Reid (San Diego), Hani’a Abrams (Oakland), Harlan Gleeson (Los Angeles), Leo Horthy (Santa Cruz), and Owen Riparetti (Santa Barbara).
We are very excited for our new Regional Helpers and grateful to them and to all our sisters and brothers who were willing to consider the role.
We would like to close with two remarks:
- One of the factors that made our efforts so effortless was the extraordinary work done by those who came before us and by those with whom we have had the pleasure of serving alongside, including the 138 group helpers in our region, the National and International Helpers, and the previous and current regional council. It has been inspiring to witness these teams and individuals working together and demonstrating how well our Subud association can function. Thank you.
- It is our opinion that the region is doing well. We will continue to improve, always, but the quality of respect and care that members demonstrate for each other and within their communities is inspiring. This respect and care helps to create more safe and open spaces within our Region for those seeking the latihan. Couple this with how we’re learning to put our latihan into practice with courage, and we begin to see the content that brings peace. We keep going! Again, thank you to all members of our Region for these four years and please, for those times when we were not our best or did not do right by you, we invite you to be in touch and humbly ask for your forgiveness.
It has been a joy. And, we know you join us in welcoming Helena, Marcella, Renata, Hani’a, Harlan, Leo, and Owen!
Love,
Elna, Maria, Lucia, Bustami, Luke, Meldan