As we approach our second pandemic Christmas and New Year’s, it feels like we can’t catch our breath. Not a week after children ages 5 to 11 were eligible for the vaccine – a cause for great celebration and relief in many families – we started to learn about a new COVID-19 variant. Now we are preparing for yet-another wave of infections, restrictions, uncertainties and losses. Plans we’ve made, gatherings we’ve longed for, routines we’ve tried to start again are once more in doubt. Though there is still much joy to be found in this time of year, it all feels so very precarious, and leaves us, once again, reacting to all those things that are out of our control.
What is true in our personal lives and our work and schooling is also true for our congregational life at UUCF. We have had to react and adjust over and over, doing the best we can to provide for one another what we so deeply need during this time – a community that loves and supports us, that reminds us of what is most important in this time, that calls on us to act in the world with love. It is increasingly apparent that the need to be flexible and inventive, to try new things and let go of them if they don’t serve our mission, to respond to a world that feels dangerous and volatile will continue for the foreseeable future.
It is a tremendous challenge during times like these to move from reactivity to proactivity, but it is essential that we do so. We are learning, over and over, that the world is unpredictable, especially now. We cannot control what happens with the pandemic; we have only limited influence over the political challenges our country faces and the threat coming from climate change. But even though it all feels like an emergency – indeed it is an emergency – we also have to work together to find time to catch our breath – to do more than react to what is happening around us.
The Soul Matters theme for January is Living With Intention. Rev. David Miller and I have been talking about ways to bring greater intention to addressing the challenges of this time, understanding that we are no longer in a short-term crisis, but rather a time of constant and chronic challenge that calls for a different kind of response. Given my role as Lay Minister for Worship & Arts, we have been talking especially about the role worship has to play in building community, binding us to one another and giving us the strength and spiritual resources we need to continue the work the world needs from us. We hope to bring more intention to this part of our life together, even as we shift and adjust to meet the needs of the moment. The staff, the leadership, the newly formed Family Ministry Working Group and the entire congregation will be vital to this effort, as we continue to reshape how we are with one another and strive to fulfill our mission.
During this Christmas week, I wish for all of us some time to breathe, some opportunities to laugh, some moments of joy and many experiences of loving and being loved. May the gifts of this season give us the strength, the courage and the patience to move into the new year with intention, that we together might do more to build the beloved community of which we dream.
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