New Beginnings
Reverend Janet Parsons
Gloucester UU Church
July 11, 2021
I chose this reading this morning (from John O’Donohue’s To Bless the Space Between Us) because I think a great deal about how this time is a new beginning for us. It’s not a time we asked for, that we anticipated. It’s been forced on us all by the pandemic and by all the changes that have happened in the past year and a half. So we are poised right now on a threshold. Think about the image in our reading, of the paintbrush being picked up and about to touch the canvas. That is the space that we as a congregation are in right now. We’re not quite back indoors and back to normal, but we’re not where we have been since the last time we were together, either.
Let’s think of this time together as an opening for surprises. Many times we find ourselves wanting to go back to life exactly as it was before. But life changes, minute by minute, and we are carried forward. Our life’s work, really, is to keep moving forward, to stay open to what will happen next. We humans aren’t meant to stay still, or to look backward. Think about the surprise we received in March last year. We didn’t know we could hold services on Zoom. We didn’t know we could stay connected by online courses and conversation groups. But we did, starting small and growing and learning new things every week.
There’s so much we can’t see yet about our church life. We hope to be back indoors together in September, if it’s safe. We look forward to hearing our organ, our pianos, and our choir, but we don’t know yet when that can happen. We are poised here, on the edge of surprise. My hope is that we can all stay open, and curious, and creative as we set forward.
Martin Luther King said that we don’t have to see the whole staircase rising above us in order to take the first step. We just set out – take that first step in faith, and see where it leads us. That’s what this new church year feels like for me – a climb step by step up this new staircase. I hope you’ll all climb together!
