Join us October 3 at 5pm for an outdoor Blessing of the Animals. Animals on leashes or in carriers are warmly welcome, as are stuffed animals and photos.
“It feels like this is something of our last Sunday of the school year, before we shift into summer mode next week with one 9am service. It’s also like we are at this societal moment of pivoting out of COVID-19 restrictions and more or less going back to normal – if there ever was such a thing. What’s been a bit disorienting for me was the radical abruptness of reopening. It was like the CDC and our civic leaders just got tired of the gray zone of semi-regulated communal life, and rather than slowly undimming the lights, they just decided to flick the switch on, and many of us, accustomed to the dark and coziness of quarantine, are squinting a little bit, trying to acclimate to the bright lights of normal.”
“Imagine a Portrait Gallery approached you and wanted to capture your image for posterity. How would you like to be portrayed? What picture of yourself would you like others to see? And do you think that picture ties up at all with the pictures others have of you? How would you be in this portrait? Where would you be? What emotion, position, look would just capture you?”
“Human beings take around 650,000,000 breaths in their lifetime;
About 25,000 a day. How many of those are we aware?
My Apple watch rings once an hour with a reminder to Breathe.
It’s kind of annoying:
What does it think I’ve been doing for the last hour?
It doesn’t give me a reminder to tell my heart to pump blood
Or to my intestines to digest food.
Why does it suppose I’ve neglected my breath?”
“In 2004-2005, I moved to Kuwait with my young family. It was a year of many transitions for me. There were obvious changes: leaving New England for a desert climate of almost constant sunshine and heat; a calendar of feasts and fasts that rotated around Islam and the phases of the moon; weekends that began on a Friday, the Muslim holy day, and ended with work and school on Sunday mornings.”
“One of my last acts of defiance before sheltering in place two weeks ago was to go to a driving range. So the idea of managing our grip comes to mind as I spend time confiding with friends and colleagues around our current battle against COVID-19 and mitigating its spread. Control over the trajectory of our lives beyond our swing, and whether we have any levers for it, seems to be the consistent theme with which everyone is grappling.”
“As a senior applying to college, this fall and early winter were a flurry of essay writing, emailing schools, and eventually submitting applications. The supplemental essays I wrote presented a new challenge. I had to convey a sense of who I was in 500 words or fewer? Or only 150? There was a lot of frustration, sighs, and complaining on my part.”
“Every time you come to this website and join in this virtual worship, a new sinew connects you to the rest of us. Every time you phone a church friend to see how they’re doing, a new tendon stretches out between the two of you. Every time you log on to Zoom for Bible Study or Teen Formation or Crafternoon, you’re adding flesh and skin to the Body of Christ.”
“What does it mean to ‘breathe underwater?’ I’ll be the first to say, I have no idea. There was no class on any of this in seminary. And yet, before we grow any supernatural gills, we need to recognize that we are underwater. The indefiniteness of this moment; the uncertainty of it strikes us all differently, and yet the feeling of being underwater is a good one–some of us might feel like life is a massive undertow, and for others of us it is the dread of looking down and not being able to see the bottom.”
“One of the most difficult transitions I ever faced was living through, and recovering from, a depression. It was the summer of 1977, just short of my 30th birthday. I had to quit my job. I had to give up my apartment. My brothers moved me home to live with my parents. Every day I got up wishing for the day to be over.”
