The Act of Waiting
Did any of you walk into church today and see the Advent candles surrounded by greenery where only last week we displayed our harvest of blessings, and mutter “Oh, no! Not Christmas already!”
A Small Gratitude Takes Root
Feeling depressed? Make a gratitude list. Resentful? Get to a gratitude meeting. All you need is an attitude of gratitude.
It can border on the trite, the saccharine, the listing small blessings for which one might be grateful: the rain didn’t become torrential until after I got home, that driver let me merge into the exit lane, I caught a whiff of azalea, my favorite pair of jeans are clean, my brand of peanut butter is on sale, I heard the grumpy crossing guard laughing with a passing child this afternoon.
Compassion Says
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.”
Animal Souls, Human Souls
"In days of old, animals believed
humans to likewise have a soul"
I love bits of prose, poetry, movie dialogue or song lyrics that turn our expectations upside down or inside out–such as those lines from today's call to worship by Annette C. Boehm, who translated them from the German herself. If we’ve thought about it all, we might debate whether or not there is some irreducible, inextinguishable bit of human existence that might be called a soul? Or have wondered, do animals have souls? Such ponderings are familiar to me.
Aren't We Already Our Best, True Selves?
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".
Course Locked In
I ended last Sunday’s sermon with these words:
"these times call us to heed the lessons of the cycle of earth’s seasons… each in its time. Let us be eager and unwavering in our pursuit of the remedies nature’s ways might teach us, fearless and joyful in turning our learning into action for the transformation and salvation of the world.”
First Harvest
My maternal grandfather, of whom I have no memory, a hardware store owner, car salesman, and sometime family farmer, notoriously lacked the patience typically required of farmers or backyard gardeners for arrival of harvest time.
Might As Well Flower
'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.'
Meditation for Music Sunday
‘Tis said “music has charms to soothe the savage breast”. And haven’t we felt that to be so over and over again? Not just lullabies or the most lyrical of etudes, either. Soulful blues, hard-driving rock, EDM, sailing, wailing folk, rollicking Zydeco–these, too, and more, soothe the savage breast. Because sometimes frayed or enraged nerves easily fall into alignment with gentle melodies and smooth rhythms.
What If
Antoine de Saint-Exupe´, the French aviator and writer best known for the The Little Prince, wrote, “The theoretician believes in logic[,] and believes that he despises dream, intuition, and poetry. He does not recognize that these three fairies have only disguised themselves in order to dazzle him….He does not know that he owes his greatest discoveries to them.”
Anything Could Happen
One of my more scold-y Unitarian Universalist colleagues–fabulous by scold-y–issued a warning a few weeks ago: “if you’re going to call it an Easter service, you better preach about Jesus and the resurrection; if you talk about baby chicks and blooming flowers and new life, don’t you call it Easter.”
A Bright, Insistent Spasm of Defiance
Last week I spoke about how in more or less normal times, when our months and weeks are filled with days that sometimes move from joy to joy to joy and that sometimes move from no good events to terrible, horrible events, to very bad events, in more or less normal times we can train ourselves to fine tune our attention to the joys.
From Joy to Joy to Joy
If I have a day of petty and not so petty problems, set-backs, and annoyances, and a chance to tell them all to my friend Emily (who preached here at our installation service in October), Emily listens with great empathy. And then she says, “I’m sorry some days are like that. Even in Australia.”
Will the Net Appear?
Leap, and the net will appear. Or will it?
In just a moment I’m going to ask you to raise your hands indicating your agreement with one of three statements.
If I Can’t Trust You…
I grew up in a generation–one of several generations–that was taught to seek out a policeman (and they were almost exclusively men) if we were ever lost or separated from my parents. Oddly, I don’t remember my parents ever giving me that advice.
The Sea Will Hold You
“You know more than you think you do.”
If I had a re-do that would be this morning’s sermon title. We will get to the sea will hold you a bit later.
Dancing Til the Cows Come Home
“If I can’t dance, I don't want to be part of your revolution.”
The Emma Goldman’s piece I read earlier this morning, is often paraphrased this way on t-shirts and social media memes. “If I can’t dance, I don't want to be part of your revolution.”
Our Community of Communities
A few years ago, in the height of the COVID pandemic, in the midst of the Black Lives Matter Uprising, in the wake of the murder of George Floyd, I asked my mentor in ministry if we were living in the end times.
On Beyond Tolerance
A friend recently posted a short video on social media, showing herself interacting with a cat that had recently joined her household. In it Bridget can be heard to exclaim, “that’s unauthorized behavior!”
Do We Have a Place in the Story?
Tomorrow, it hardly needs to be said, our nation celebrates the birthday of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., a man who would be 96 today, if he hadn’t been assassinated at the age of 39–in the prime of his life and at the height of his public ministry.