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Jan. 10, 2007 The Parish Minister’s Column The Rev. Barbara J. Pescan Thank you for the many cards and emails you have sent in support of my sister, Melanie, during her recent surgery, and for encouraging my spending three weeks with her in December. It has made a huge difference to both of us to be together all that time. I spent time with my mother at her assisted living home, too, and with friends and family celebrated her 88th birthday together. I saw my nephew for a bit, and, for the second time in the last 25 years, could share the annual Christmas Day dinner with my mom’s extended family.
Mel is recuperating from her successful surgery and, though healing and getting back to normal aren’t coming as quickly as she would like, she is doing what she needs to do, and has good support from church and friends. She sends her thanks to Common Threads for the lovely shawl they sent – of her many comfort covers, she likes it best.
As we leave the Christmas season of giving and enter our Stewardship Season of giving, please consider the myriad ways your life is touched, enriched, challenged, emboldened and sustained by the traditions, ministries and people of this Unitarian Universalist church.
Someone said to me this week that her un-churched friends find baffling her excitement about being part of a church. After a time of discernment, she fully arrived at UCE and is contributing to the health of the congregation. When she listens to people talk about their values she often hears herself suggesting to them that they, too, might be Unitarian Universalists. Although her evangelism is taking her a bit by surprise, she is no longer amazed that our religious community is making such a claim on her life.
I am guessing this being claimed by a religious community could happen other places. But, here, we are in covenant with each other. Though we have no creed nor do we share one belief, we express our covenant by our practice in coming together to worship, by being accountable to each other and to our tradition, by our generosities, and by our sacrifices for each other and for this place. Our Puritan forebear, Richard Mather wrote in 1644 that covenant may be implied by “constant and frequent acts of communion performed by a company of Saints joined together by cohabitation in towns and villages … the falling in of their spirits into communion in things spiritual.” (In Blessing the World, what can save us now, by Rebecca Parker, Skinner, 2006)
Like Parker, I find that phrase lovely: the falling in of their spirits into communion. And, so, for the member I mentioned above; and all of you who give support to me and my sister and to others in their time of trouble; and for all who have come rejecting the idea of a punishing God; and all who “dare to lift up the dignity and strength of human beings”…and the radical principle that we can use our reason and our imagination, and that, with compassion, we can make amends for the past exclusions of our tradition and serve justice now, in our time -- we are experiencing that falling in of our spirits into communion with others who have found the same things nurture the growing of their souls.
This year may you bless the world with gifts manifold and diverse. Barbara Unitarian Church of Evanston
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