There was a time in our faith tradition’s history when All Souls was the second most common name for our congregations, behind First Parish/First Church of Whatever City. It was a reflection of the Universalist strand of our merged faith–our belief that all souls are held in God’s unceasing love.

Last week I spoke at length about surviving in today’s world without being swamped with compassion fatigue, about the two steps I believe will buoy us up even as our days and hours are filled with situations demanding our compassion, that will protect our hearts while allowing us to participate in the healing of the unending sorrow that surrounds us.

About thirty years ago Charles Figley, the Paul Henry Kurzweg Chair in Disaster Mental Health at Tulane University, coined the phrase compassion fatigue to refer to

“absorbing information and often the suffering of others through empathy. It happens when a helping professional experiences exhaustion due to caring for someone, and can lead to profound emotional and physical erosion that takes place when helpers are unable to refuel and regenerate themselves.”

I worked in a large suburban branch of a county library all through high school, and in a university library all through college, and a very small town library for a couple years just before moving to Savannah. In all three places I heard the same comment over and over again: "it must be great to work somewhere so quiet and calm".

If I had a do-over on this morning’s sermon title, I’d choose Not All Belonging is Salve. That profound truth comes from NYTimes bestselling author of Black Liturgies, Cole Arthur Riley who wrote:

"I'm beginning to think alienation and rejection are the two great persuaders of our own unloveliness.

If Symborska is right, and all the water that is and ever was in the world is contained, somehow, in this single drop on my finger and in the drops in the water you brought with you this morning and in the sources from which you gathered your water–and there is scientific basis for that claim–and if we turn this morning to water as a metaphor for truth or enlightenment, than isn’t it a bit foolish that we come again and again to this specific place and time in search of what might be found anywhere there is water, at home or our neighborhood or our home towns or wherever we went for vacation this summer or pretty much anywhere? Perhaps. But it matters that we are here.

Pinkie promise.

Cross my heart and hope to die, stick a needle in my eye.

That’s a piecrust promise.

Do you solemnly swear…?

Do you…? I do.

We make promises throughout our lives, to friends, family members, therapists, judges, spouses, neighbors, just about everyone with whom we enter relationships. Some of those promises are explicit and some are tacit but no less real.

If you are about my age or older you remember back before backspace and delete. Before word processing. Before that magic tape in a Brother electric typewriter that would somehow lift a typed character from a page–but only one or two characters back and only if the typebars were perfectly aligned. Back before White-Out. Back when there were typewriter erasers. Typically disc shaped pink erasers attached to stiff plastic brushes, though some later ones were pencil shaped with a stiff plastic brush at the opposite end of the cylinder.

'Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these.'

Our worship theme for the month of June is, as Kurt said, the Practice of Freedom. So, I’m going to need you all to return here at 4:00 this afternoon, and then at 11:00 and 4:00 again tomorrow, and for each of the 28 days after that, so we can begin to scratch the surface.