Mid-week Email
Message from our Assistant Minister
July 14, 2020
How are things with you, Beloveds?
Last week, I joined Dinner in the Twilight Zone on Wednesday evening, hosted by our Director of Lifespan Religious Education, Marguerite Mills. (It was fun; you might want to try it!) During the discussion after the episode of Twilight Zone we viewed together, Marguerite asked if each of us were a book, which would we be?
My answer: Always Coming Home, by Ursula Le Guin, which I’ve loved for decades, almost as much for its title as for its contents. Perhaps because I grew up in the military, home has always been a big theme for me; but right now, the idea of home is alive on startling new levels. Of course, I am spending (as many, but not all of us, are) much more time at home than usual. But I’m also aware of being cut off from some of the places, people, and groups that in “normal” time have been an important part of my sense of feeling at home in the world, of being connected and loved and needed. I miss the friends with whom I had regular walking dates, the parents of my child’s friends with whom I used to visit as we dropped our kids off at each other’s houses or attended school-related meetings, the staff at our favorite neighborhood restaurant, and (of course!) all the FUUN people. Even though I still spend most of my work life connected to church and church people and church projects, it’s not the same when we can’t meet in person for worship and committee meetings and classes and all the work it takes to keep our church community feeling like a home for each of us.
Being cut off from my usual external experiences of connection, I find I am doing some deep work connecting with myself: considering the ways in which I am and am not at home by myself and with myself and observing the ways in which being at home or coming home matter to how I show up for all that is my life.
There is a poem in Always Coming Home that I think of as a blessing. In the novel, it is offered to young people as they depart from home to go exploring. Today, I’m reading it as an invitation to mine our internal experiences, to taste and feel, to know with our bodies, that each of us—body, heart, mind, and spirit—is connected to everything else that is, to know that coming home is often a goal, but also how we are always:
In all our gatherings, we bring to each other what we experience and discover: the new, the strange, the old, the shining, and the savory. Together we learn to make a home for ourselves and for each other. This is good work and a precious gift.
Wherever your journey takes you these days, walk carefully, walk mindfully, and be always coming home.
In faith and love,
Denise
asssistantminister@