Reverend Jennifer Nordstrom

The leaves are letting go of the trees right now, fluttering down to the earth in spasms of color and smell. Letting go can be beautiful, an inspiration for art and dance. It can also be filled with loss, and leave us with empty branches in the cold wind. 

Invitation is our opening-the-church-year theme this September. Do you hear the community, or the divine, or your tender heart calling you back to church? When we are together, how do we invite the new—people, experiences, practices—in to our community? How do we invite the divine in? How inviting are we to change? Are we inviting in joy? Delight? Transformation?

It is a basic human desire to belong, and to belong to something that matters. It can be the difference between a life that is joyful and abundant and one that feels empty, lonely, and alienated.

A sense of belonging to a community, family, or place gives us stability and support. We can feel more comfortable questioning reality, planning our future, and exploring our sense of self when we have that kind of stability and support. Knowing we belong somewhere can give us the courage to explore ourselves, our ideas, and the world.

“‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers — That perches in the soul…”

— Emily Dickinson

Hope is both delicate and powerful. It can be salvific. But in the face of deep suffering and despair, where can we find this tender thing with feathers?

As Unitarian Universalists we can look to our faith in something larger than ourselves, our belief in some reality that is bigger than the immediate pain of the present moment. For humanists, this might be the innate courage of the human spirit. Martin Luther King expressed his belief that though the arc of the universe is long, it bends towards justice. Buddhists and process theologians express their faith in the oneness of all being. Regardless of the immediate circumstances we face, what do we believe is the ultimate reality that holds the present moment? Against what larger belief are you experiencing the here and now?

Ring the bells that still can ring Forget your perfect offering There is a crack in everything That’s how the light gets in. – Leonard Cohen, Anthem

Brokenness is a reality of life. Different than sin, brokenness is the imperfection, the old wound, and the new hurt that are always part of living on this earth. Our human condition inevitably includes imperfection and pain. Some breaks can heal, some imperfections can transform. Some cannot. Some breaks forever change us, and some faults of character are with us our entire lives. We need to find the balance between continually moving towards wholeness and healing, and being present with what is here and now.

In her book Writing to Wake the Soul, Karen Hering tells the story of French Poet Robert Desnos writing to his lover from a Nazi concentration camp. He told his love that although he did not have the time or energy to write it in the camp, he had an idea “for a love story in an entirely new genre” and he would write it as soon as he was released. He died of typhus two days after his release, leaving us to wonder. What sort of love story can we imagine having ideas for amidst such suffering? And what “entirely new genre” would this love amidst suffering prompt the creation of?