Friends,
August is here. My normal beginnings of newsletters including naming the times of the season and as I do, I want to acknowledge the grief and the sadness.
August is here, and kids return to school, and our community divisions show themselves: the role of science in our lives; racism and the work of an ‐racism; gay rights and bigotry; women’s rights, reproductive rights; immigrant justice, environmental justice, the rights of refugees… and the list of ‘the least of these’ continue.
This morning I was drinking my coffee and Peter, Paul and Mary’s ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’ played in the background. All I could do is cry.
I checked my email to see the Order of Service from our sibling UU congregation in San Miguel, Mexico, and this was their reading. It spoke to me:
#662 Strange and Foolish Walls
The years of all of us are short, our lives precarious.
Our days and nights go hurrying
on and there is scarcely me to
do the little that we might.
Yet we find me for bitterness, for
petty treason and evasion.
What can we do to stretch our
hearts enough to lose their littleness?
Here we are ‐ all of us ‐ all upon
this planet, bound together in a common destiny,
Living our lives between the briefness of the daylight and the dark.
Kindred in this, each lighted by the same precarious, flickering flame of life,
how does it happen that we are not indeed in all things else?
How strange and foolish are these walls of separation that divide us!
Indeed, how strange and foolish are these walls that divide us. It is on each of us to reach out, to stand up, to speak up, to draw one another closer. This brief life, this even shorter bout of ableness, we have to declare to our neighbors what is right and what is true:
You belong and you’re enough. You are beautiful. There are systems and institutions designed to spread the lies counter to this gospel. And, if we work together we can dismantle those institutions piece by piece. And, together we can love each other, cherishing our uniqueness, loving both our similarities and our differences.
I pray each of you know that you belong with us, even though we are separated physically we are united in Love. Wear your masks, fight for justice and be a friend…
Peace, — Rev. Will