While I am uncertain of how much time I will have to write in the upcoming months with working full time, mothering, and *just a few* church activities (which I will need to cut back on...we shall see...)... I have decided to utilize this blog for a very practical purpose in the next two months. I have committed to two upcoming Sunday church services, and hope to direct my writing toward deepening my thoughts around the issues of each of these. Thankfully, I don't need to write a sermon (got that out of the way for the summer already!)...but I still hope to give my heart toward creating a fully alive and spirited worship experience.
The first service will take place on AUgust 3rd. It will be intergenerational, and include music, stories, and ritual. The theme for this service is honoring the ordinary moments in our lives, and celebrating the season. I have already devoted much of my blog to this topic, probably, but hope to probe deeper into some resources I have acquired.
The second service will take place first weekend in September, and falls right in line with our new UU Congregational Study Action Issue: Food and Environmental Justice. We will be celebrating our 2nd Annual Earth Dinner on that day, and have already invited a guest speaker (a Buddhist-farmer-activist from our region!). I am thrilled that this issue was chosen as our study-action issue. And not just because I shop the farmers' markets and love to garden...it's just hard to think of any other issue that affects every single human being in the entire world and reveals so vividly how connected we truly are. But more on this later....
I've got dinner to prepare (pasta with zucchini and eggplant from the market:)--and kids to wake up from their naps.
Tuesday, July 15, 2008
Pulls and Changes
It is a rare moment these days that I find myself alone in a quiet house. Both girls are napping-- schedules aligning like heavenly bodies in an occurence rarer than a total eclipse of the sun. The older is recovering from lyme disease (early stages, very treatable...though the 104.3 degree temp last week was truly frightening...). And the usually predictable toddler is pleasantly off-schedule, enjoying her second snooze of the day.
Part of me wishes I could just freeze this moment, this moment of preparing dinner while they sleep, of tending to the house--all those things that have defined me as a stay-at-home mom these past four years.
Though there has always been this pull... Even now, I rush to my computer while water boils to sneak in a few moments of writing time. It was like that from the beginning, as I worked to complete graduate research papers, two-week-old baby suckling on my lap. The pull between the pen and the bedtime kiss, between the work of the world and the work of the home has always been a part of my life.
It is reaching a pinnacle at this moment, as I prepare for the next phase in our journey, for returning to the working world. It is exciting news, of course, and hardly the work of corporate America...I will be working as a program assistant at an incredible place-- an interfaith retreat center called The Garrison Institute which focuses on bringing contemplation and awareness to engaged action in the world. I will be working with the directors of two initiatives-- Transforming Trauma, and Contemplation and Education in programming, research, and administration. It's a new field of work for me--and I am grateful for the opportunity to learn and grow in this inspiring environment, and to share my gifts with the world...
but I am also sad. For with each new change, there is a letting go. My girls will spend mornings in daycare, afternoons with dad, and evenings with mom.
This is where I am now. Excited. Anticipating. Full of life. And learning to move into these brand new changes that lie ahead.
Part of me wishes I could just freeze this moment, this moment of preparing dinner while they sleep, of tending to the house--all those things that have defined me as a stay-at-home mom these past four years.
Though there has always been this pull... Even now, I rush to my computer while water boils to sneak in a few moments of writing time. It was like that from the beginning, as I worked to complete graduate research papers, two-week-old baby suckling on my lap. The pull between the pen and the bedtime kiss, between the work of the world and the work of the home has always been a part of my life.
It is reaching a pinnacle at this moment, as I prepare for the next phase in our journey, for returning to the working world. It is exciting news, of course, and hardly the work of corporate America...I will be working as a program assistant at an incredible place-- an interfaith retreat center called The Garrison Institute which focuses on bringing contemplation and awareness to engaged action in the world. I will be working with the directors of two initiatives-- Transforming Trauma, and Contemplation and Education in programming, research, and administration. It's a new field of work for me--and I am grateful for the opportunity to learn and grow in this inspiring environment, and to share my gifts with the world...
but I am also sad. For with each new change, there is a letting go. My girls will spend mornings in daycare, afternoons with dad, and evenings with mom.
This is where I am now. Excited. Anticipating. Full of life. And learning to move into these brand new changes that lie ahead.
Wednesday, July 9, 2008
Declarations of Interdependence, Sunday July 6th
(No time to write something new this morning, so here's my talk/sermon from this past Sunday...)
Declarations of Interdependence:
Presented Sunday July 6th @ Unitarian Universalist Congregation at Rock Tavern
We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.
With all due respect to Thomas Jefferson, I don’t quite buy it. To begin with, those truths, those inalienable rights in 1776 were not all that self-evident …. “Men” for instance, left out a few people. It was not a universal term, but a rigidly exclusive one—referring to white male property owners. And over the past couple centuries countless groups—women, blacks, gays and lesbians, and countless others— have had to assert their OWN declarations of independence within the United States….
The truth of the matter is—when it comes to freedom and independence, we have built brick by brick upon that original cornerstone. AND we are still building, still declaring our independence, still singing We shall all be free…
This is not to disparage those original words. I do believe the Declaration of Independence of 1776 was an important step toward the establishment of democracy. And, it was the uprising of voices away from dependence on another nation, and toward self-governance.
From a spiritual viewpoint, this declaration articulates a longing which we all experience as part of our human development, most intensely perhaps as we move from adolescence to adulthood—namely, the longing for self-actualization and for freedom.
But-- Today I stand—here in the free pulpit—and offer all of us a new declaration to consider. Today, I would like to challenge my forefathers, and make the declaration that those inalienable rights of Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness are NOT ours to be attained through independence.
Rather, I stand today and make my Declaration of Interdependence: We hold THESE truths to be self-evident: That all life is connected. And that life, liberty, and happiness are ours to be received as gifts through the transformative power of interdependence.
____
I am not the first to make a “Declaration of Interdependence”. The first recorded reference dates back to 1936. Henry Wallace, Vice President to Harry Truman, made the remark "Declaration of Interdependence" in reference to global political interdependence. Wallace also disputed with Harry Truman over Cold War policy, advocating that US security would be strengthened through cooperation with the Soviets, not aggression, and he suggested an “interdependence” of nations. Wallace was opposed to dropping the nuclear bomb, and subsequently landed in political exile.
Simultaneously—but separately—Walter P. Taylor, president of The Ecological Society of America in 1936 linked Henry Wallace’s idea of interdependence to ecology. There is little rugged individualism in nature," he wrote. An ecosystem is a "closely organized cooperative community of plants and animals."
Also, about this time, in 1944, Will Durant, Pulitzer Prize-winning philosopher, made his "Declaration of Interdependence”, referring to relationships between individuals. He wrote: "… just as no state can now survive by its own unaided power, so no democracy can long endure without recognizing and encouraging the interdependence of the racial and religious groups composing it." Durant’s declaration focused primarily on interpersonal relationships between blacks and whites, between Christians and Jews.
Since then, several grassroots organizations, poets, and institutions have attempted their own declarations. What I find most interesting about these initial declarations is that they each focused on a particular aspect of living—global politics, ecology, human relations. Specifically, they were still rooted in delineating a separation between humans and the natural world. It is only in recent years that these movements have begun to converge, that we have begun to see the connections between our own lives and our planet, between the necessity of securing environmental justice—the right to water, for instance—and our efforts to secure peace and human rights globally.
More recent declarations of interdependence reveal that the separate movements of social and environmental justice are beginning to merge. Paul Hawken, in the book Blessed Unrest, believes that native indigenous wisdom is the spiritual glue which binds these two movements. As Hawken writes, in indigenous thought--“Every single particle, thought, and being, even our dreaming, is the environment, and what we do to one another is reflected in our diseases and our discontents…..It is because we have created an artificial divide between people and nature that the social justice and environmental arms of the movement have arisen separately, each with its own history. Indigenous cultures provide the connection, where we might see the two as one.”
This then is most simply the base and foundation of a comprehensive interdependence as I understand it: That all life on earth is connected; that whatever we do to the web, we do to ourselves. That the web includes all relationships among beings within it---plants, animals, air, water, humans of all races, creeds, and nations in relationship with each other.
_____
It seems pretty basic and simple, doesn’t it? We assert this as our seventh principle, don’t we—that one about respect for the interdependent web of which we are apart? And if ecology has already established this fact of interdependence, then what is there left for us to declare?
But the fact is, we are still as a culture in denial of our interdependence. We are still asserting our supremacy as a nation, and our ability to live in separation from one another and from the earth as fact.
This past week I had the opportunity to experience and affirm my connection with nature while camping with my family in the Berkshires. Waking up at 5AM, watching the sun rise over the trees, listening to the stillness of a babbling brook, I couldn’t help feel that I was a part of nature. That night I read an essay by Native American author, Linda Hogan in which she describes traveling deep into a cave to bathe in hot springs. I would like to read you the excerpt that struck me:
Other women enter this cave and water. This time there are two other Indian and a group of travelers from Japan. I want solitude, close my eyes, lower myself deeper in the water and try to enter my own silence. But then, something wonderful happens. A woman in one of the back chambers begins to sing, a long clear note that fills the whole tunnel. It echoes, an eerie, mysterious sound so that when she moves to another note, it sounds as if there are two voices, like the beautiful songs of humpback whales… Then, from the men’s cave comes the howling of wolves…
One of the Indian women talks about water medicine. She was sick and has come back to the healing waters of the earth.
We are welcome here. I love this inner earth, its murmuring heartbeat, the language of what will consume us. Above is the beautiful earth that we have come from. Below is heat, stone, fire. I am within the healing of nature, held in earth’s hand.
I am within the healing of nature, held in earth’s hand. I have held onto those words this past week.
Linda Hogan’s experience articulates for me more than just a moment of connection with all of nature, including our own core human nature. Her story is also helped answer for me a question I’d had about interdependence.
Namely: In declaring our interdependence, What do we stand to lose?
In looking at Hogan’s story, the first thing she lost was her solitude—that which she had hoped for in entering the cave. And she lost the ability to control her circumstances.
There is a certain vulnerability to declaring that we are “held in earth’s hand”, that we are dependent on nature for our healing.
It means that sometimes—try we must—we cannot find the cure to our brother’s cancer, or save our friend from depression. It means that sometimes we are forced to face our own helplessness as a nation—that stay or go, there is no “winning” the war.
Declaring our interdependence means that we accept our vulnerability, our inability to control life.
Lucky for us that’s not the end of the story. See, what I have discovered about interdependence--and—here’s the good news-- INSTEAD, when we accept that we are in this together, we open ourselves to many gifts we did not anticipate—to the joys and the surprises of life, to the shared songs and stories of others, to the healing that lies in living as a part of nature.
As a nation, it means perhaps that we do not know all the answers, but might share in solutions together with other nations, that together we might offer each other gifts, to create a sustainable and just future for all life. As a congregation it might mean that we offer one another our most authentic selves—our shared stories, our shared music and artistic expression, our shared work for justice. And as people, it might mean that we move deeper into compassionate connection with the earth and with each other.
When we declare-and live- our interdependence, we open ourselves to receiving gifts. These gifts are, I believe, all around us, wherever we are, as we let go of expectation and open our ears and our hearts. Today, our service has been filled with many sharing their gifts—thanks to Hollis and Diane for sharing music, and to those who’ve shared their stories as part of our Joys and Sorrows, and to all those who’ve shared their presence here with us today.
_______________
I would like to end our discussion today with a personal confession. I would like to end by offering you the story of my own resistance to interdependence.
Last year, around this time, I came to a service here, but I did not come inside. See I’d had a really rough morning with the kids, and I really did not feel at home in Orange County, and to be honest—I had burned myself out with committee work and other obligations pretty early on. I had taken on work, but had kept my truest self hidden. That day I was on the verge of tears. Basically, I didn’t want to come in because I didn’t want anyone here to see me in distress, to see my vulnerability. I wanted to maintain the illusion of self-control and competence.
I don’t think I’m alone here. I think that a lot of times we fight back our vulnerability because we do not want to impose, or because we believe it is easier to be alone.
It took me a while to learn that helplessness can also be a gift we give to one another. I learned it from each of you, from hearing your stories and receiving your gifts again and again. See, there was another service months later where I received the phone call that my grandmother was entering hospice, and I could not avoid church that day—I was scheduled to be worship leader. So I just showed up—with my tears and my vulnerabilities—and what I received was gift.
We come together not only to share our gifts—but to share our needs. And what I’ve learned is that those needs are also gifts. They are offerings to our community of truest self.
This morning we read together the words of our mission statement. These words, written soon after the fire of 2006, are the cornerstone upon which our congregation is rising. These words are the compilation of several voices, of the members of this congregation. I believe they are our declaration of interdependence, calling us to live our connections with one another, and with the world beyond our walls.
To move toward greater interdependence gives way, I believe, to another way of rising. The offering of ourselves in community—our gifts and our needs, our joys and our sorrows, our hopes and our dreams—opens us to something more powerful than what we can find alone. It opens us to gift or grace or Spirit. In my experience, this Spirit of Life does not come down to us in visions from the clouds, but arises from our connections, from our living and from our loving. This Spirit of Life is what I have come to find in community here with all of you—in moments when we speak our most honest truths, when we share our gifts in worship, when we share in our work for a more sustainable world.
This then is the mystery of interdependence—that in admitting our vulnerability, our inability to do it alone, and moving into deeper connection with life that we become most fully alive—and most empowered. We are less likely to become burnt out or depleted, because we are constantly renewing ourselves at the well of inter-being.
It has been proposed by some researchers that we make summer a season of interdependence. It is also, to me, a season of replenishing and spiritual renewal. I am looking forward this summer not to hiding out in my car, but to drinking from the well in community with all of you—
(Raising metaphorical glass...) To fuller life, To liberty, and To the pursuit of happiness.
Declarations of Interdependence:
Presented Sunday July 6th @ Unitarian Universalist Congregation at Rock Tavern
We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.
With all due respect to Thomas Jefferson, I don’t quite buy it. To begin with, those truths, those inalienable rights in 1776 were not all that self-evident …. “Men” for instance, left out a few people. It was not a universal term, but a rigidly exclusive one—referring to white male property owners. And over the past couple centuries countless groups—women, blacks, gays and lesbians, and countless others— have had to assert their OWN declarations of independence within the United States….
The truth of the matter is—when it comes to freedom and independence, we have built brick by brick upon that original cornerstone. AND we are still building, still declaring our independence, still singing We shall all be free…
This is not to disparage those original words. I do believe the Declaration of Independence of 1776 was an important step toward the establishment of democracy. And, it was the uprising of voices away from dependence on another nation, and toward self-governance.
From a spiritual viewpoint, this declaration articulates a longing which we all experience as part of our human development, most intensely perhaps as we move from adolescence to adulthood—namely, the longing for self-actualization and for freedom.
But-- Today I stand—here in the free pulpit—and offer all of us a new declaration to consider. Today, I would like to challenge my forefathers, and make the declaration that those inalienable rights of Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness are NOT ours to be attained through independence.
Rather, I stand today and make my Declaration of Interdependence: We hold THESE truths to be self-evident: That all life is connected. And that life, liberty, and happiness are ours to be received as gifts through the transformative power of interdependence.
____
I am not the first to make a “Declaration of Interdependence”. The first recorded reference dates back to 1936. Henry Wallace, Vice President to Harry Truman, made the remark "Declaration of Interdependence" in reference to global political interdependence. Wallace also disputed with Harry Truman over Cold War policy, advocating that US security would be strengthened through cooperation with the Soviets, not aggression, and he suggested an “interdependence” of nations. Wallace was opposed to dropping the nuclear bomb, and subsequently landed in political exile.
Simultaneously—but separately—Walter P. Taylor, president of The Ecological Society of America in 1936 linked Henry Wallace’s idea of interdependence to ecology. There is little rugged individualism in nature," he wrote. An ecosystem is a "closely organized cooperative community of plants and animals."
Also, about this time, in 1944, Will Durant, Pulitzer Prize-winning philosopher, made his "Declaration of Interdependence”, referring to relationships between individuals. He wrote: "… just as no state can now survive by its own unaided power, so no democracy can long endure without recognizing and encouraging the interdependence of the racial and religious groups composing it." Durant’s declaration focused primarily on interpersonal relationships between blacks and whites, between Christians and Jews.
Since then, several grassroots organizations, poets, and institutions have attempted their own declarations. What I find most interesting about these initial declarations is that they each focused on a particular aspect of living—global politics, ecology, human relations. Specifically, they were still rooted in delineating a separation between humans and the natural world. It is only in recent years that these movements have begun to converge, that we have begun to see the connections between our own lives and our planet, between the necessity of securing environmental justice—the right to water, for instance—and our efforts to secure peace and human rights globally.
More recent declarations of interdependence reveal that the separate movements of social and environmental justice are beginning to merge. Paul Hawken, in the book Blessed Unrest, believes that native indigenous wisdom is the spiritual glue which binds these two movements. As Hawken writes, in indigenous thought--“Every single particle, thought, and being, even our dreaming, is the environment, and what we do to one another is reflected in our diseases and our discontents…..It is because we have created an artificial divide between people and nature that the social justice and environmental arms of the movement have arisen separately, each with its own history. Indigenous cultures provide the connection, where we might see the two as one.”
This then is most simply the base and foundation of a comprehensive interdependence as I understand it: That all life on earth is connected; that whatever we do to the web, we do to ourselves. That the web includes all relationships among beings within it---plants, animals, air, water, humans of all races, creeds, and nations in relationship with each other.
_____
It seems pretty basic and simple, doesn’t it? We assert this as our seventh principle, don’t we—that one about respect for the interdependent web of which we are apart? And if ecology has already established this fact of interdependence, then what is there left for us to declare?
But the fact is, we are still as a culture in denial of our interdependence. We are still asserting our supremacy as a nation, and our ability to live in separation from one another and from the earth as fact.
This past week I had the opportunity to experience and affirm my connection with nature while camping with my family in the Berkshires. Waking up at 5AM, watching the sun rise over the trees, listening to the stillness of a babbling brook, I couldn’t help feel that I was a part of nature. That night I read an essay by Native American author, Linda Hogan in which she describes traveling deep into a cave to bathe in hot springs. I would like to read you the excerpt that struck me:
Other women enter this cave and water. This time there are two other Indian and a group of travelers from Japan. I want solitude, close my eyes, lower myself deeper in the water and try to enter my own silence. But then, something wonderful happens. A woman in one of the back chambers begins to sing, a long clear note that fills the whole tunnel. It echoes, an eerie, mysterious sound so that when she moves to another note, it sounds as if there are two voices, like the beautiful songs of humpback whales… Then, from the men’s cave comes the howling of wolves…
One of the Indian women talks about water medicine. She was sick and has come back to the healing waters of the earth.
We are welcome here. I love this inner earth, its murmuring heartbeat, the language of what will consume us. Above is the beautiful earth that we have come from. Below is heat, stone, fire. I am within the healing of nature, held in earth’s hand.
I am within the healing of nature, held in earth’s hand. I have held onto those words this past week.
Linda Hogan’s experience articulates for me more than just a moment of connection with all of nature, including our own core human nature. Her story is also helped answer for me a question I’d had about interdependence.
Namely: In declaring our interdependence, What do we stand to lose?
In looking at Hogan’s story, the first thing she lost was her solitude—that which she had hoped for in entering the cave. And she lost the ability to control her circumstances.
There is a certain vulnerability to declaring that we are “held in earth’s hand”, that we are dependent on nature for our healing.
It means that sometimes—try we must—we cannot find the cure to our brother’s cancer, or save our friend from depression. It means that sometimes we are forced to face our own helplessness as a nation—that stay or go, there is no “winning” the war.
Declaring our interdependence means that we accept our vulnerability, our inability to control life.
Lucky for us that’s not the end of the story. See, what I have discovered about interdependence--and—here’s the good news-- INSTEAD, when we accept that we are in this together, we open ourselves to many gifts we did not anticipate—to the joys and the surprises of life, to the shared songs and stories of others, to the healing that lies in living as a part of nature.
As a nation, it means perhaps that we do not know all the answers, but might share in solutions together with other nations, that together we might offer each other gifts, to create a sustainable and just future for all life. As a congregation it might mean that we offer one another our most authentic selves—our shared stories, our shared music and artistic expression, our shared work for justice. And as people, it might mean that we move deeper into compassionate connection with the earth and with each other.
When we declare-and live- our interdependence, we open ourselves to receiving gifts. These gifts are, I believe, all around us, wherever we are, as we let go of expectation and open our ears and our hearts. Today, our service has been filled with many sharing their gifts—thanks to Hollis and Diane for sharing music, and to those who’ve shared their stories as part of our Joys and Sorrows, and to all those who’ve shared their presence here with us today.
_______________
I would like to end our discussion today with a personal confession. I would like to end by offering you the story of my own resistance to interdependence.
Last year, around this time, I came to a service here, but I did not come inside. See I’d had a really rough morning with the kids, and I really did not feel at home in Orange County, and to be honest—I had burned myself out with committee work and other obligations pretty early on. I had taken on work, but had kept my truest self hidden. That day I was on the verge of tears. Basically, I didn’t want to come in because I didn’t want anyone here to see me in distress, to see my vulnerability. I wanted to maintain the illusion of self-control and competence.
I don’t think I’m alone here. I think that a lot of times we fight back our vulnerability because we do not want to impose, or because we believe it is easier to be alone.
It took me a while to learn that helplessness can also be a gift we give to one another. I learned it from each of you, from hearing your stories and receiving your gifts again and again. See, there was another service months later where I received the phone call that my grandmother was entering hospice, and I could not avoid church that day—I was scheduled to be worship leader. So I just showed up—with my tears and my vulnerabilities—and what I received was gift.
We come together not only to share our gifts—but to share our needs. And what I’ve learned is that those needs are also gifts. They are offerings to our community of truest self.
This morning we read together the words of our mission statement. These words, written soon after the fire of 2006, are the cornerstone upon which our congregation is rising. These words are the compilation of several voices, of the members of this congregation. I believe they are our declaration of interdependence, calling us to live our connections with one another, and with the world beyond our walls.
To move toward greater interdependence gives way, I believe, to another way of rising. The offering of ourselves in community—our gifts and our needs, our joys and our sorrows, our hopes and our dreams—opens us to something more powerful than what we can find alone. It opens us to gift or grace or Spirit. In my experience, this Spirit of Life does not come down to us in visions from the clouds, but arises from our connections, from our living and from our loving. This Spirit of Life is what I have come to find in community here with all of you—in moments when we speak our most honest truths, when we share our gifts in worship, when we share in our work for a more sustainable world.
This then is the mystery of interdependence—that in admitting our vulnerability, our inability to do it alone, and moving into deeper connection with life that we become most fully alive—and most empowered. We are less likely to become burnt out or depleted, because we are constantly renewing ourselves at the well of inter-being.
It has been proposed by some researchers that we make summer a season of interdependence. It is also, to me, a season of replenishing and spiritual renewal. I am looking forward this summer not to hiding out in my car, but to drinking from the well in community with all of you—
(Raising metaphorical glass...) To fuller life, To liberty, and To the pursuit of happiness.
Tuesday, July 8, 2008
Life, Change, Fear
Life is still a whirlwind of changes. Finding the center in the whirlwind is such a challenge! Last week we painted our condo, went on vacation (a wonderful camping trip in the Berkshires!), and--in the midst of these family events--I went on my first job interview in three and a half years (when I took a job working part time as an ESOL teacher). I've been home full-time with the kids since we moved here--two years now--and it's had it's ups and downs. The first year with my youngest was, I believe, essential for our growth together. But now it's time for a little separation...And especially for my oldest, who really needs more than I can give her. Am I burning out from full-time motherhood? Just saying this to appease some guilt for wanting to return to work? Perhaps a bit...but I can't see how hours with stimulating learning activity and socialization in a good day care setting can be worse than spending so much time with a mom who's frazzled, distracted, and run out of good ideas to . Not to mention isolated. Sure, we make the efforts to get together with other families--nature hikes and Friday playgroups, but my kids still seem bored during the week. And I guess so do I. I mean if we lived in an intentional community where we created a cooperative childcare/homeschooling system, it would probably be different... but I don't. I live in a exurban commuter condo complex next to a Mall.
Anyway, I'm rambling with questions...it's second interviews this week, and off to summer camp for my oldest, back to work for my husband, and mom and sister visiting on Saturday, and that firstborn child turning 4 years old on Sunday!
Oh-- and then, I'm still feeling the glow of Sunday's service, which for a holiday weekend in the summer was wonderfully attended. Somehow, in the midst of last week, I managed to write a sermon... (Ok-- while my husband took the kids to a pool party on Saturday, I managed to put some words together...). I'll post what I wrote soon, though- as a novice sermon writer with no speech training, I find that the actual sermon I give also adlibs quite a bit. I am still trying to figure that whole sermon thing out-- I sometimes hear the voices of my favorite preachers making their way into my own... it's kind of funny. Kind of strange evolution of prophetic voice.
How do you measure the success of a sermon? I don't think it can be measured by the words themselves. There is such a dynamic interplay between the words and the congregation--probably this is true especially in a small church when you can see the nods, the tears, and the laughs up close. Also, we add the voices of our congregants to our speaker's sermons afterwards--it is not just one voice giving the morning message, it is many voices telling their stories and sharing their truths. I've heard this does not work in many congregations, but it really seems to work in ours, and is for many, the favorite part of service. We were also gifted this past Sunday with great music--a folksinger congregant just surprised me with this gift, waiting for me in my e-mail inbox when I returned from camping...
Anyway, I got this feeling for a split second while preaching on Sunday--what are these people doing listening to me speak with rapt attention? What do I know? It is a strange position to find yourself in...and a bit overwhelming. I guess that's why public speaking is humans' number one fear...(which really I still don't understand! Public speaking? What about sky-diving? Or death of a loved one???)
Well, what I felt after Sunday's service was connected and bonded, more completely than before with my congregation. More love. More spirit. That is how I judge the success of a sermon.
Such rambling thoughts today...now back to my family and the balancing act of life...
When it comes to fears I will take public-speaking any day over that deep fear that I will somehow screw up or let down the two people I love most in this world: my kids.
Anyway, I'm rambling with questions...it's second interviews this week, and off to summer camp for my oldest, back to work for my husband, and mom and sister visiting on Saturday, and that firstborn child turning 4 years old on Sunday!
Oh-- and then, I'm still feeling the glow of Sunday's service, which for a holiday weekend in the summer was wonderfully attended. Somehow, in the midst of last week, I managed to write a sermon... (Ok-- while my husband took the kids to a pool party on Saturday, I managed to put some words together...). I'll post what I wrote soon, though- as a novice sermon writer with no speech training, I find that the actual sermon I give also adlibs quite a bit. I am still trying to figure that whole sermon thing out-- I sometimes hear the voices of my favorite preachers making their way into my own... it's kind of funny. Kind of strange evolution of prophetic voice.
How do you measure the success of a sermon? I don't think it can be measured by the words themselves. There is such a dynamic interplay between the words and the congregation--probably this is true especially in a small church when you can see the nods, the tears, and the laughs up close. Also, we add the voices of our congregants to our speaker's sermons afterwards--it is not just one voice giving the morning message, it is many voices telling their stories and sharing their truths. I've heard this does not work in many congregations, but it really seems to work in ours, and is for many, the favorite part of service. We were also gifted this past Sunday with great music--a folksinger congregant just surprised me with this gift, waiting for me in my e-mail inbox when I returned from camping...
Anyway, I got this feeling for a split second while preaching on Sunday--what are these people doing listening to me speak with rapt attention? What do I know? It is a strange position to find yourself in...and a bit overwhelming. I guess that's why public speaking is humans' number one fear...(which really I still don't understand! Public speaking? What about sky-diving? Or death of a loved one???)
Well, what I felt after Sunday's service was connected and bonded, more completely than before with my congregation. More love. More spirit. That is how I judge the success of a sermon.
Such rambling thoughts today...now back to my family and the balancing act of life...
When it comes to fears I will take public-speaking any day over that deep fear that I will somehow screw up or let down the two people I love most in this world: my kids.
Sunday, June 29, 2008
Blogging Hiatus
OK- painting our condo, camping in the Berkshires, planning a July 6th service, AND job interview all in one week. Not to mention my Mom's visit for my daughter's birthday the following weekend....
Deep breaths. Some of this was unexpected.
Right now, I will be on blogging hiatus until further notice. Deep breaths and silence in the mornings is spiritual practice enough.
Hope to resume on July 7th....
Deep breaths. Some of this was unexpected.
Right now, I will be on blogging hiatus until further notice. Deep breaths and silence in the mornings is spiritual practice enough.
Hope to resume on July 7th....
Friday, June 27, 2008
The Hardest Job on Earth
I sometimes think that it is easier to give a sermon on peacemaking to a full church than it is to be a peacemaker at home with my family. In raising two little ones who abound with more energy than I know what to do with, I hope only that we all make it through this period of our lives unscathed and whole!
Time for All Ages is a joke at church. My youngest thinks this is a great time to play "catch me if you can" around the flaming chalice. My oldest has used her time up front to flash an entire church! I do remember a time when I was a child that my parents received an award for their "saintly patience" with two rambunctious kids...maybe it was after my sister dumped a cup of hot coffee on our priest's lap! My own exuberance was usually a little more welcomed, as I was a bit older when we started attending church; it consisted of a weekly gallop down the aisle at the sign of peace--right into the open arms of that same coffee-stained priest.
So maybe it is karma. I'm sure that's what my father-in-law thinks when he looks at our oldest-- spitting image of her father in both looks and willpower. I have heard it said that the characteristics we try to suppress and manage in children turn out to be the ones we favor in adults. Perhaps. If we could just swallow some basic cultural tenets, I'm sure my husband and I could be very successful. But alas, we are still breaking the rules--evoking pedagogies of liberation, rewriting religious language and ideas, working to break free from the constraints of capitalism gone wild.
Maybe my children get their rebelliousness from us. Or maybe they are just acting their age (though I was recently recommended a book about raising "explosive children"-- I already read the one about "the spirited child" --I liked that-- but explosive????)
All in all, when it comes to parenting young children I have only a few wishes. First and foremost, I wish for their health, happiness, and well-being. Secondly, I wish that the seeds of kindness, curiosity, and wonder are nurtured and grow throughout their lives.
Or perhaps I should write these wishes in reverse? For if I were to pass on anything to my children that I have learned, it is this:
That it is by extending to the world our open hearts, that we are filled.
That it is by living and loving fully that we are made whole.
To keep on living and loving and becoming-- despite pain, despite loss, despite oppression. That is the most rebellious thing of all.
Time for All Ages is a joke at church. My youngest thinks this is a great time to play "catch me if you can" around the flaming chalice. My oldest has used her time up front to flash an entire church! I do remember a time when I was a child that my parents received an award for their "saintly patience" with two rambunctious kids...maybe it was after my sister dumped a cup of hot coffee on our priest's lap! My own exuberance was usually a little more welcomed, as I was a bit older when we started attending church; it consisted of a weekly gallop down the aisle at the sign of peace--right into the open arms of that same coffee-stained priest.
So maybe it is karma. I'm sure that's what my father-in-law thinks when he looks at our oldest-- spitting image of her father in both looks and willpower. I have heard it said that the characteristics we try to suppress and manage in children turn out to be the ones we favor in adults. Perhaps. If we could just swallow some basic cultural tenets, I'm sure my husband and I could be very successful. But alas, we are still breaking the rules--evoking pedagogies of liberation, rewriting religious language and ideas, working to break free from the constraints of capitalism gone wild.
Maybe my children get their rebelliousness from us. Or maybe they are just acting their age (though I was recently recommended a book about raising "explosive children"-- I already read the one about "the spirited child" --I liked that-- but explosive????)
All in all, when it comes to parenting young children I have only a few wishes. First and foremost, I wish for their health, happiness, and well-being. Secondly, I wish that the seeds of kindness, curiosity, and wonder are nurtured and grow throughout their lives.
Or perhaps I should write these wishes in reverse? For if I were to pass on anything to my children that I have learned, it is this:
That it is by extending to the world our open hearts, that we are filled.
That it is by living and loving fully that we are made whole.
To keep on living and loving and becoming-- despite pain, despite loss, despite oppression. That is the most rebellious thing of all.
Thursday, June 26, 2008
New Seeds in Old Pots
Last night I planted new seeds in a little painted pot. I received this pot as a party favor a couple years ago; it was a symbol of new possibilities, then, the hand-work of a woman I had just met. She had planted seeds, she said-- basil or oregano. We would discover which as soon as they grew.
Well, perhaps I was negligent or the soil unfertile, but my seeds never grew. Though I watered and waited for the sun to nourish, the soil remained barren. Eventually, I emptied the dirt, and held onto the beautiful pot. Recently, I placed it on my bedroom altar/bookcase, along with other gifts I have received throughout my lifetime.
Last night, in contemplation, I saw the pot, and realized I needed to plant new seeds. I had black dirt in a pot on my patio that I had recently collected from my inlaws backyard to transplant mint. Crops grow like wildfire in black dirt; I use it for transplanting herbs...so there was the right soil waiting.
And I had an array of extra seeds--no basil or oregano, so I decided to plant cilantro, since I use it so much throughout the summer. AND I know from past experience--it grows quickly. And I am a bit impatient.
SO, is there a metaphor in all this? Of course. While the first seeds--(read:dream of a community in Rochester)--never blossomed for us, recent events have moved me to plant new seeds.
And yet-- all I have to offer is the seeds. All else is gift.
For, there is soil I have recently discovered--fertile and rich--that is the gift of new friends I have met. And there is the clay pot, beautifully colored-turquoise blue with a sparkling sun, of those who came before-- ideas and dreams we held, visions we shared. These are not lost, though our paths have drifted in different directions. The new will grow from within the structures of old pots. Isn't this always the way in which we rise?
But even these gifts are not enough alone. Seeds are nourished by nature, by sun and rain, fire and water. There is an element of grace, and a certain serendipity to it all. So right now I wait to see what will grow.
Well, perhaps I was negligent or the soil unfertile, but my seeds never grew. Though I watered and waited for the sun to nourish, the soil remained barren. Eventually, I emptied the dirt, and held onto the beautiful pot. Recently, I placed it on my bedroom altar/bookcase, along with other gifts I have received throughout my lifetime.
Last night, in contemplation, I saw the pot, and realized I needed to plant new seeds. I had black dirt in a pot on my patio that I had recently collected from my inlaws backyard to transplant mint. Crops grow like wildfire in black dirt; I use it for transplanting herbs...so there was the right soil waiting.
And I had an array of extra seeds--no basil or oregano, so I decided to plant cilantro, since I use it so much throughout the summer. AND I know from past experience--it grows quickly. And I am a bit impatient.
SO, is there a metaphor in all this? Of course. While the first seeds--(read:dream of a community in Rochester)--never blossomed for us, recent events have moved me to plant new seeds.
And yet-- all I have to offer is the seeds. All else is gift.
For, there is soil I have recently discovered--fertile and rich--that is the gift of new friends I have met. And there is the clay pot, beautifully colored-turquoise blue with a sparkling sun, of those who came before-- ideas and dreams we held, visions we shared. These are not lost, though our paths have drifted in different directions. The new will grow from within the structures of old pots. Isn't this always the way in which we rise?
But even these gifts are not enough alone. Seeds are nourished by nature, by sun and rain, fire and water. There is an element of grace, and a certain serendipity to it all. So right now I wait to see what will grow.
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