The Wheel Keeps Turning
Greetings Friends,
When deciding what to write to you in a given week I have a few places I turn to, to try and find a helpful and timely message. I think about the season in the Christian year, the scripture for the week, what has been going on in our world and in our church, even my personal life, and any resources or voices in my sphere that feel especially wise and grounding. Somewhere in that swirl of things something usually rises to the surface.
This week our scripture is Psalm 62: 5-12. Reading it a few times, the words that resonated for me today were “Trust in God at all times, O people; pour out your heart before the Holy; God is a refuge for us. Selah.” Somehow these words felt simultaneously like loving advice, a balm, but also prickled somehow. How and why should we trust in God at all times when we see and experience so much struggle around us? Is “trusting in God” a way to stay calm in the storm? Or, more insidiously, is it a way to get us to distance ourselves from pain and possible action— trusting that God will ultimately solve it all so we have no need to worry, no need to make ourselves uncomfortable by restructuring harmful patterns around us?
My prayer obviously is for it to be the former, for faith in God to be a grounding engine, or better metaphor might be, to imagine faith as an underground mycelium network, bringing us the nutrients we need to survive in changing conditions, even to influence those conditions for the better. Sometimes I feel it in my heart that that’s so. Other times I don’t. But in those moments God often catches me in other ways, a call from the right friend, a silly moment with my kid, or even my own stubborn personality preventing me from giving up. The theme for the Center for Action and Contemplation this year is Radical Resilience. I really felt grounded and refocused by these words from Brian McLaren in choosing this theme, I hope you are too.
“If we’re going to help people take wise action and imagine a better future amid coming troubles, then we will have to help people find that better future within themselves, so they can live that better future out into the world. And that’s what we hope to do together in 2024. We know that we are in hard and dangerous times. We, as a global civilization, are living destructively with our planet. We are living dangerously and divisively with one another. And we’re living often delusionally within ourselves. This year, we are going to seek to explore together radical resilience so we can become thermostats rather than thermometers in our world, setting the temperature, setting an example of contemplative depth and wisdom and love and peace—rather than just sinking into the fury and fear and denial and despair of so many of our times.”
Please Pilgrims, can we try and help each other find our better futures? Can we “pour out our hearts” to each other and offer each other Holy Spirit inspired words of hope, humor, and empathy? Can we invite others into knowing us, and can we notice and respond to those invitations? Can we be forces of loving and grounded action in the restructuring of our hurting world? We can, we can, we can.
Much love Pilgrims,
Felix (she/her)
P.S. Pastor Lindy will be visiting family this week and this coming weekend I will be taking the youth on a retreat! Though I’m sorry to miss worship I know y’all will be cared for by our new member Cathy O’Connell’s preaching, Richard Whitaker during the children’s moment, and our deacons.