Sacred Ground: At the Edge of a New Year
A Green Mountain Justice reflection on 2025
The candles are lit. The nights are long. Across our Green Mountain home, neighbors gather at tables to break bread and share warmth. This is the sacred season. A time for stillness. For gratitude. For taking stock of where we’ve been and where we’re being called.
At Green Mountain Justice, we’ve spent this year walking into uncomfortable places. Under bridges. Into motel rooms where families live packed together. To kitchen tables where single parents wonder how to stretch a grocery budget one more week. We’ve entered what complexity theory calls “the edge of chaos.” That narrow space between order and disorder where suffering and emergence happen together. Where transformation becomes possible.
It’s holy ground. And we are honored to walk it.
The World Before Us
Let’s be honest. The world unfolding before us is not easy to witness.
Homelessness in Vermont has increased over 320% in five years. BIPOC neighbors are five times more likely to experience it. Hundreds of neighbors face another Vermont winter without stable shelter. Political polarization is deepening. Systems designed to help are buckling under the weight of too many needs and not enough resources. The fabric of “freedom and unity” is fraying.
And yet.
And yet, something else is happening too. Something quieter. Something sacred.
In the chaos, hearts are opening. Hands are outreaching. The Spirit is moving.
What Love Made Possible This Year
This year, we watched love do what transactional systems cannot.
Three families who spent years in motel rooms now have homes. Real homes. With kitchens where they can cook meals and tables where children can do homework. Carol and Dave helped Mariah and her three kids move into their new place in Brandon. We delivered furniture to Matt and Liz in Rutland. Jerome finally got that critical surgery he’d been putting off, and helped him move into his apartment. Records were sealed. Jobs were landed. Evictions were overturned.
These aren’t outcomes we achieved. They’re transformations that emerged from relationships.
Our Neighbor Care Neighbors showed up. Week after week. Not with clipboards and intake forms. With presence. With grocery cards handed over alongside a conversation about how life is really going. With rides to appointments and texts that say, “I’m thinking about you.”
Our Neighbors’ Table gatherings created “third space” where neighbors of all walks of life could come together. Not as helpers and helped. As people. As beloveds. As community.
Our Voices from the Edge podcast amplified stories too often unheard. When Vermont Public featured our series on Vermont Edition, Jerome’s voice and Jessica’s voice and Matt and Liz’s voices reached beyond the margins. Truth was spoken. People listened.
Our Living Together op-ed series won first place in the New England Better Newspaper Competition. Not because we’re skilled writers. Because our neighbors who live at the edge are skilled truth-tellers. Their wisdom is what changes hearts.
And when the first snows came, our Warmth with Dignity campaign put EMPWR coats in the hands of neighbors who would otherwise face the cold without protection. These aren’t ordinary coats. They convert into sleeping bags. They’re made by formerly unhoused parents in Detroit. When we hand one to a neighbor, we’re handing them dignity. We’re saying: your survival matters. Your comfort matters. You matter.
Prophets, Sages, and Co-Conspirators
One of my mentors taught me that the best theology comes from where the pain is. Our proximity to our impoverished neighbors opened our ears and eyes. Sometimes the people you least expect are actual prophets.
The woman working two jobs while raising three kids in a single motel room who still found energy to encourage others in recovery. The man who chose to sleep outside rather than subject himself to racism in a shelter. The young person with cognitive impairments from years of abuse whose entire disability check barely covers rent.
They see what the privileged cannot. They know what scarcity really means. They understand that the bootstraps we tell people to pull themselves up by are often frayed or missing entirely.
Our neighbors are not objects of charity. They are sages. Teachers. Co-conspirators in the work of building beloved community. We don’t work for them. We work with them. There’s a world of difference in that small word.
This year I learned again what Bryan Stevenson teaches: we are all more than the worst thing we’ve ever done. And I’d add: we are also more than the worst thing that’s ever happened to us. Our marginalized neighbors are not defined by their circumstances. They are equally and inherently worthy. Full stop.
The Privilege of Proximity
There’s a choice we make every day. Step toward. Or step away.
Stepping toward is harder. It requires leaving comfort zones. It means sitting with uncertainty and letting go of the need to fix. It asks us to be changed by what we encounter.
But here’s what I’ve learned: proximity is not a burden. It’s a gift.
When you walk with someone through their darkest valley, you discover resources within yourself you didn’t know you had. When you witness resilience in the face of systems designed to break people, you learn what strength really looks like. When you share a meal with someone the world has discarded, you find yourself on sacred ground.
We don’t help our neighbors because they need us. We need them. They teach us what it means to be human. They remind us that our wellbeing is bound up in each other’s wellbeing. They embody the interdependence that our values proclaim but our culture denies.
Looking Ahead
As 2025 closes, we’re not slowing down.
Vermont’s Extreme Cold Weather Shelter Program is running with over 200 beds across six regions. Hundreds of neighbors still need them. Our Neighbor Care ecosystem is growing. New partnerships with Middlebury College and Vermont State University are forming. We’re developing training programs to help privileged neighbors move toward proximity with wisdom and humility.
We won’t pretend this is easy. We’re trying to grow something in soil conditioned by over 400 years of white supremacist culture. Tribalism that borders on caste. A self-centeredness so deep we mistake it for common sense. Even our liberalism is becoming more performative demonstration of tribe than a basis for the care we extend to our neighbors.
These aren’t just historical problems. They’re the water we swim in. The shape of what we fail to see. Relational ministry means working against that current every day. It’s slow. It’s humbling. Some days it feels like planting seeds in concrete.
We still have more work to do than resources to do it. Our fundraising systems are still finding their footing. But the work is not going unnoticed. And the relationships we’ve built are bearing fruit that no balance sheet can measure.
Gratitude
So here, in the quiet of this sacred season, I offer gratitude.
For our neighbors who trust us with their stories and their struggles. You are our teachers.
For our Neighbor Care Neighbors who show up week after week. You make beloved community real.
For our board members and partners who believe in this ministry. Brock, Gordon, Jason, Corey, Kerri, Margaret, and so many others. You make this possible.
For our donors who understand that relational care cannot be measured in widgets and outcomes. Your generosity fuels relationships.
For Vermont. This place of freedom and unity where we get to live out these values in the most challenging and beautiful ways.
And for Love. The liberating power at the center of everything we do. The force that calls us into deeper connection with each other and with that which transcends.
A Blessing for the New Year
May you find the courage to step toward when everything tells you to step away.
May you discover that the edges are sacred. That uncertainty is creative. That chaos holds possibility.
May you meet a prophet in an unexpected place. And may you have the wisdom to listen.
May you know in your bones what our mission proclaims: we are working towards a beloved community of communities through the liberating power of Love.
The candles are lit. The table is set. Love is here. There is room for you and all our neighbors.
Come. Let’s build this together.
Tom Morgan is the Founder and Director of Green Mountain Justice, a Vermont community justice ministry working towards beloved community through the liberating power of Love. Learn more at greenmountainjustice.org.
Let’s connect. Support this ministry with your donations here. To join our Neighbor Care Network, contact us.
