A Minister's Message – Wherever We Are, We Can Begin Again – September 23, 2020

My first writing of a Minister’s Message coincided with Rosh Hashanah, and though I am not Jewish, through proximity of friends and neighborhoods, I have found messages of the High Holy Days to be meaningful. The Birthday of the World reminds me of how enduring this planet is, how forgiving it can be, and that wherever we are, we can begin again. And then I heard news of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and felt the impact of one more challenge.

At what a pivotal moment I arrive here with you, when the world is in the midst of a paradigm shift – a challenging concept to explain to middle school students when I worked with them, but that we are viscerally experiencing now. What I thought I knew about how life was, how I projected my coming days to be, unraveled entirely.

It had similarly struck me during an election night some Novembers ago that life as I knew it was somehow over. On that night, I felt a sudden detachment to those material things that I held close, and that I thought helped to identify me as who I was. I knew that the world had changed completely, and I was no longer moving in a direction that made sense, that aligned with what needed to be done. The world I had been preparing students to live in was no longer. I asked myself, what should I be doing with my life, that I am not yet doing? That I am here with you is an answer to that question.

In Chicago I had begun working with a collective, Showing Up for Racial Justice, or SURJ, and I was at first uncomfortable with trusting in community to show up when needed. But when we hadn’t enough people to present a workshop, someone returned from out of town or someone’s meeting got canceled. And then one person brought markers, another had prepared a PowerPoint, a third brought a mic to hook up to a phone. Suddenly, seemingly out of nothing, but all moving in the same direction, we had a workshop. Over time I noticed that when one person was at capacity and could not give, there were enough hands to get the job done. I developed faith in community.

I am reminded of the title of a book that shouted at me once from a library bookshelf, at a time when parenting a toddler frequently had me at capacity, John Hays’ A Beginner’s Faith in Things Unseen. In the collective, I developed trust. I learned to have faith that we would take turns while someone caught their breath, and we all need, at some time, to catch our breaths.

We are in the midst of High Holy Days when, in the Jewish tradition, we make amends, hold ourselves accountable, and are present for each other as we try. Though we may carry grief, for ourselves or our loved ones, for Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and for our extended community enduring yet more obstacles, we are not alone. This is a time when we are not restored to our old selves, but are new again in a way that we have not been before. May we move towards our most authentic selves, into a new year, and in community.

We can be certain that there is change.
We can lean into a certainty of adapting
Of adapting together.

Blessings,
Kim