Dear Friends,
I just returned from a road trip to Chesapeake, Virginia, where I participated in the installation of The Rev. Viola Abbitt as the minister of the Coastal Virginia Unitarian Universalists. The photo is of me enjoying the beauty of the sunrise over the Atlantic Ocean. The ceremony was a beautiful reaffirmation of our faith tradition’s reliance on covenant to bind us together.
Covenant, or the promises we make to each other about how we will be in relationship, is the how to our what. The what is our mission and our vision. Having just adopted our new Values Statements or vision at our annual meeting, my thoughts are on how our agreement to be in a covenantal relationship as reflected in our Sunday morning covenant, our Covenant of Engagement, and our Principles aids us as we live out our stated values within our UCE community and out in the world.
When I think of covenant, I often think of a story from my childhood. The story of Noah and the ark. The version I learned as a child is the version from the Torah and the Biblical Old Testament, which ends with a rainbow to mark God’s covenant with humankind. The story is about a great flood sent by God that destroyed everything on earth but the people and animals in the ark that Noah built. When the waters of the flood subsided, God made a covenant with Noah that God would never again send a flood to destroy the earth. And as a sign of that promise, God said, “I have placed My rainbow in the clouds, and it shall be a sign of the covenant between Me and the earth. When I bring clouds over the earth, the rainbow will be seen among the clouds. I will then recall the covenant that exists between Me, you and every living soul in all flesh.” (The Book of Bereshith (Genesis) 9: 13-15, The Living Torah: The Five Books of Noah).
The part of this story that I have been thinking about this week is that God left a reminder of the covenant. Not a reminder for the humans, but a reminder for God. That when God next becomes mad, angry, disappointed, exasperated, or heartbroken with how humans are behaving, and again sends the storm clouds for a flood to destroy the earth, a rainbow will appear in the clouds as a reminder of how God promised to behave. It is a story that affirms for me what I have experienced about how the promises we make about how we will engage with one another are often hard to keep. That we break our promises with each other and need to be called back into covenantal relationship.
Some reminders are put into place so that we come across them on occasion, like the rainbow. Each Sunday morning, we say our covenant from 1894, written by The Rev. James Vila Blake:
Love is the spirit of this church
and service is its law.
This is our great covenant:
to dwell together in peace,
to seek the truth in love
and to help one another.
It is a reminder of our promise to engage with each other fully and honestly. It is a reminder of our fuller Covenant of Engagement that this congregation proactively developed in 2011 to help us engage with each other as we do the hard work of caring for and growing our community. It is a reminder of our Congregational Relations Team that is available to support us when being in relationship is difficult.
Reminders may also be something unplanned that reminds us of our commitments. My time at the Atlantic coast this past week was a reminder to me of my personal promise to care for the earth. My time with colleagues during Rev. Viola’s installation was a reminder of my personal promise to care for my colleagues. This week, as I vacillate among rage, heartbreak, and numbness after the school shooting in Texas, I am trying hard to be open to those unexpected reminders that bring me back to my commitment to living out our new Values Statements and our 8 Principles in the world.
Before I returned home from the wonderful installation ceremony in Virginia last Saturday, the horrible school shooting in Uvalde, Texas occurred. Already in 2022, before the horrific events in Uvalde, there had been at least 77 incidents of gunfire on school grounds, resulting in 14 deaths and 45 injuries across 31 states. And that does not count what we call mass shootings at locations other than schools.
Deeply disappointed by the lack of gun control policies, the lack of mental health care services, the lack of funding for education and support for educators, the overfunding and lack of accountability of the police, and the way we are failing our children, I must admit that I am struggling to find those reminders that bring me back to the covenants articulated through our Principles. Those promises to address my anger by acting to make our society a safer and more peaceful place (6th & 8th Principles), to address my despair by caring for myself and others (2nd & 3rd Principles), and to address my numbness by finding ways to connect with other people and with nature (7th Principle). So, I hope this note may act as a reminder for you to care for yourself as well as caring for others. To get engaged in caring for and improving our society, in whatever form that takes from conversations with children and youth to letters to protests. To do what you can to stay connected, whether online or in-person, with friends, family, and this faith community that shares in the many ranges of emotions we are feeling in the wake of the ongoing gun violence.
We are often practicing how to hold both hardship and joy. Figuring out how to bask in the glory of our celebrations and successes, whether that is the birth of a grandchild or participating in an installation service, and simultaneously embrace the depths of grief, whether that is due to the death of a loved one or of strangers in a far-away place, is challenging. Our covenants and promises to each other, to our society, and to the earth are there to guide us on this complex journey. To comfort us. To buoy us up. To bind us together.
You are invited to leave yourself a reminder that you will come across on occasion to remind you that you are part of a covenantal community, called into accountable and loving relationship. To remind you that you are loved, you are valued, and that if you need help, to reach out to me, or Rev. Eileen, or someone on the Pastoral Care Team.
Yours in covenantal community,
Rev. Susan