Dear Members and Friends,
It was so good to gather with many of you on Sunday for our Homecoming service. Prior in the Memorial Garden, it was deeply meaningful to read through the names of those who have gone before us, and afterward it was a lot of fun to mingle with many of you. Thank you to Jenna McPartland and Julyen Norman for providing such an expansive picnic following the service. Their efforts to provide vegan coffee hours and now a full meal contribute to our cultivation of community.
The day brought to mind the late Peter Raible’s translation of a passage in Deuteronomy of the Hebrew Scriptures:
May we remember
We build on foundations we did not lay.
We warm ourselves at fires we did not light.
We sit in the shade of trees we did not plant.
We drink from wells we did not dig.
We profit from persons we did not know.
We are ever bound in community.
As I mentioned on Sunday, when it comes to a vibrant faith community, it’s easy to ask, “What am I doing here?” While it’s all the more significant to ask, “What are we doing here?” I trust this year will bring forth all the more clarity and consensus among the congregation for your shared mission and vision. I am honored to serve as your Transitional Minister in this second year!
A year ago, the Sunday after Homecoming, I preached a sermon entitled, “How Do You Want to Be Together?” Following the service I facilitated a conversation around that question. Over fifty of you stayed. The chairs were in a circle and participants spoke to both challenges and hopes. If we were to respond to that same question today, I bet many more hopes and far few challenges would be articulated.
This Sunday, I will address the question: “What do you want to promise one another?” This flows from questions like “How do you want it to feel when members, visitors, and children participate in our community?” And “How do we live our UU values, starting with one another?” Living into the answers of questions of covenant—and covenantal relationships— are the silk that interconnects and holds a faith community together.
Following the service, I hope many of you will stay to share and hear from others regarding these questions. I am grateful to members of the Right Relations Team (previously called the Conflict Transformation Team) for facilitating this special community time.
I will keep our service to an hour for a short Congregational meeting to follow. That meeting, as you likely know, is to authorize the Endowment Committee to cover the expenses for heaters that need to be fixed. That’s it. Soup will be available for those of you who stay beyond the short Congregational meeting. So, I encourage you to participate in this community conversation slated for 11:30-12:30.
It’s a beautiful day here in Chicago, and I understand it’s beautiful there. I’ve been holding you all in my heart the last couple days, knowing it’s an uncertain time and yesterday was the anniversary of the September 11th attacks. I appreciated a shared photo of the gathering at the memorial at Sherwood Island beach.
May this community provide all the more spaciousness for honest engagement with our most deeply held values so that each of us can navigate the journey of living out who we truly are and what we are called to do in our world. It is a blessing to participate in this congregation.
Grace, Peace, and Love,
Alan
A few readings to reflect on:
A Ritual to Read to Each Other by William Stafford
If you don’t know the kind of person I am
and I don’t know the kind of person you are
a pattern that others made may prevail in the world
and following the wrong god home we may miss our star.
For there is many a small betrayal in the mind,
a shrug that lets the fragile sequence break
sending with shouts the horrible errors of childhood
storming out to play through the broken dike.
And as elephants parade holding each elephant’s tail,
but if one wanders the circus won’t find the park,
I call it cruel and maybe the root of all cruelty
to know what occurs but not recognize the fact.
And so I appeal to a voice, to something shadowy,
a remote important region in all who talk:
though we could fool each other, we should consider—
lest the parade of our mutual life get lost in the dark.
For it is important that awake people be awake,
or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep;
the signals we give — yes or no, or maybe —
should be clear: the darkness around us is deep.
from Rev. Gretchen Haley of Foothills UU Church in Fort Collins, Colorado
In a world that feeds on moral outrage, we are here to cultivate moral courage
In a time that prizes picking sides, we gather to draw a wider circle
And in a culture that teaches us to get for what we give
And to ask “what’s in it for me?”
We come to practice generosity and to remember,
We are all in this together.
In the midst of life’s bitterness, we choose to sing, to give thanks,
to laugh together, and to be keepers of beauty
to offer a place of belonging for all who come,
in gladness and in pain,
to resist the push to the next moment, and the next
to slow down, to breathe more deeply, to feel a part of something greater
let us be the change we wish to see.
Prayer for an Invitation by David Whyte
I pray for you, world to come and find me,
to see me and recognize me and beckon me out,
to call me even when I lose the ability to call on
you who have searched so long for me.
I pray to understand the stranger inside me
who will emerge in the end to take your gift.
I pray for the world to find me in its own wise way.
I pray to be wanted and needed by those I have learned to love
and those I must learn to love.
I pray to be wanted and needed by those I cannot
recognize in my self-imposed aloneness.
And I pray to be wanted and needed
by those I wish to be wanted by.
But I acknowledge the power of your beautiful
disguise, and I ask for the patient heart
of all things to understand the abiding fear I feel
in following your unknown ways,
in my fear of receiving,
in my fear of taking your hand,
in my fear of following your hidden,
difficult and forever beckoning way.
