Service led by Laura McBride; sermon by Rev. Victoria Safford.
On the inevitable disruption of our expectations… and the religious call to continually recalibrate:
“We crave order and control and predictable patterns in this life. When we can’t find them (because they mostly do not exist), we get anxious and we make them up, imposing our will or our opinion or our expectations of ourselves, of everybody else, all over the place, and when the universe rears up on its hind legs and says, “Well, actually no. You’re not the boss of the world, and this is not how it’s gonna go,” we are mightily disrupted… How we weather the disruptions; how we welcome them sometimes, or at least acknowledge them, honor them; how we grieve completely when loss or affliction assails us – how we grieve completely, and keep on moving forward anyway, however incompletely; how we let go of one idea, or one assumption, one dream, and re-orient our minds, our spirits, our plans around new revelations of reality – well, that is the religious life…”
“We crave order and control and predictable patterns in this life. When we can’t find them (because they mostly do not exist), we get anxious and we make them up, imposing our will or our opinion or our expectations of ourselves, of everybody else, all over the place, and when the universe rears up on its hind legs and says, “Well, actually no. You’re not the boss of the world, and this is not how it’s gonna go,” we are mightily disrupted… How we weather the disruptions; how we welcome them sometimes, or at least acknowledge them, honor them; how we grieve completely when loss or affliction assails us – how we grieve completely, and keep on moving forward anyway, however incompletely; how we let go of one idea, or one assumption, one dream, and re-orient our minds, our spirits, our plans around new revelations of reality – well, that is the religious life…”
