Hello, Goodbye!

Saturday morning my family and I will hauling ourselves out for a 7AM flight to....Eau Claire(www.uucec.org)! I'm very excited to be candidating for ministry this coming week in lovely Eau Claire, WI. There will be sunny skies and no to little humidity. Take that Atlanta!

Departures and arrivals are in my future, and that has joy and sadness all mixed together. Transitions are liminal times creating a need to look out for guideposts and solid surfaces. I have had a series of goodbyes at my internship congregation, from my home congregation,and from fellow seminary students. Somehow though I keep running into people unexpectedly and more people have been telling me what a wonderful place Eau Claire and the Midwest are to live. I feel very much like the Beatle's song, "Hello, Goodbye!" On that note - I'm excited to be doing a "Beatles Theology" for perhaps my last sermon at UUMAN(www.uuman.org) in perhaps a great while. What Would John (Lennon) Do?

Imagine...

Protesting & Perfect Signs (God Loves Glitter) - Standing on the Side of Love in Atlanta

Piedmont park was covered with something besides pollen today. Youths, parents, and activists marched, sang, and supported the gay and Jewish community with signs saying "God loves Glitter" and "Peace, Love, and Tolerance." Of course, we had our Standing on the Side of Love signs! Fellow seminary students carried signs saying "God is love!"

This afternoon a lot of teens from Grady High School in Atlanta and community activists converged into a wonderful counter-witness to the hate-filled messages of Westboro Baptist Church. The church members had horrible signs, "God Hates Jews", "Fags Hate God", and other horrible language. A youth from Grady High School found out that Westboro would be protesting at their school so she helped to organize a counter-protest. Over 800 people responded on Facebook and there were hundreds that came.

We took this moment to bring our Standing on the Side of Love signs and join other faith groups, local teens, and activist in a peaceful witness to love. I really enjoyed meeting some of the parents of the high schoolers that spoke supportively of teen efforts to organize and get their message out. One parent said, "How can I not support my daughter, when she is supporting two friends that came out in high school." This may have been the first protest for many of these teens and they conducted themselves with good spirit and peaceful enthusiasm despite the hateful message they were protesting.

It was a great day to see the power of all ages and types of people coming together in spite of hate. It was a testament to the power of people gathered in the name of love. Even the police doing crowd control couldn't help smiling a little.

Earth Day 2010

Early in life I grasped a sense of the sacred in nature. I sensed something unspoken in the whisper of pines as my eyes strained to see through needles and filtered sunlight. I felt something magical as I broke across the mist in early morning walks in the bend of the Broad river. I didn't need any complicated theology to see the divine and the good in life in those moments. I grew up in Irmo, South Carolina which is a suburb of Columbia. Despite being in a suburb, I was lucky to have miles of woods behind my house. I could hear frogs and crickets in the evenings. I spent sun burnt summer days building forts,and playing flashlight tag among the fireflies and pines. My favorite time was to make my way to the river just as the sun broke the sky and the mist still cast mysterious coverings against the trees. I would sit on river rocks, mindless of mocassins or the rush of the river. I was queen of the river in that moment. I look back on those wild moments of my childhood and taste a freedom I struggle to find again.

There was some elemental understanding of my connection with those woods, that river, and the pulse of life. I would come home baked in mud, my mom would hose us down before she'd let my sister and I back into the house.

Water, earth, air, fire – and spirit. So elemental and basic, yet we lose touch behind our computer screens and the pace of a hurried life. It is easy to think that we can separate ourselves, and remove ourselves from the cycles of nature. Yet the hurricane reminds us. The rainbow reminds us. We must be reminded of our sacred connection, if we can possibly hope to find some balance in our life on this small, blue planet.

David Suzuki writes in The Sacred Balance: Rediscovering Our Place in Nature ,"Human beings depend on Earth and its life-forms for every aspect of their survival and life. It is impossible to draw lines that delineate separate categories of air, water, soil, and life. You and I don't end at our fingertips or skin - we are connected through air, water, and soil; we are animated by the same energy from the same source in the sky above. We are quite literally air, water, soil energy and other living creatures."

On this 40th Anniversary of Earth Day let us reconnect to this relationship. Let us step outside on a starry night and hope to see some fireflies. Let us think about what we eat and why. Let us think about the small things we can do to save energy, to use sustainable products, and live gently on mother earth.