Skip to main content

It is Well with My Soul. Part 5 of 5

"Whatever my lot, thou hast taught me to say: It is well, it is well, with my soul."

 Life right now is unimaginably heartbreaking. Children are trained to expect a murderer to walk into their schools (because it happens with increasing regularity), people of color are shot just for living normal life, rights -- reproductive, voting, adopting -- are being stripped away, the earth as we know it is dying, and as it dies, we violently are oppressing those with the least power.

Life right now is utterly amazing. We are questioning all the norms in our society, becoming more inclusive to all types of relationships, changing our words, rejecting "power over," breaking apart assumptions.

Both can be true. Simultaneously.

And in among all of that are the heartbreaks and miracles in individual lives. People are finding love, waiting for the biopsy results, mourning loved ones, getting new jobs, being deported, witnessing a birth - trauma and joy and relationship and disconnection and all of it. Job is always among us, both the Job who is in despair and the Job who has re-found joy.

And we have no assurance of what will happen in the future. What we may be called upon to do.

To keep on going through all of it requires resiliency. And resiliency requires recovery.

A Unitarian Universalist church cannot be a wholly safe space, but it can be a place where we recover, and learn and practice courage. As the saying goes, the safest place for a boat is in a harbor, but that is not what boats are meant for. A Unitarian Universalism for this time in history can be a big tent where we come together to share the wisdom we have found, to learn new ways of being, and to explore meaning itself. An ethic of personal responsibility makes this possible, as we practice making decisions out of our guiding principles rather than our pain.


And it all comes back to love. The kind of love that is freakin' hard, that is a struggle, but that we dedicate and re-dedicate ourselves to, again and again.

What does it mean, for you, when it is well with your soul? 

For me, it doesn't mean that things are great. It doesn't mean an absence of pain. It doesn't mean "comfortable."

For me, it is well with my soul when:

I accept that I am simultaneously enough ... and not enough.

I know I am living out of my guiding principles, imperfectly but intentionally.

I begin with love,
and stay with love,
and come back to love.





The Church Where It's Okay To Ask Questions
Recommitting To An Ethic Of Personal Responsibility Or "Backless Chairs Are Not The Answer"
Part 1 My Love Song To Unitarian Universalism ... And Unitarian Universalists
Part 2 Personal Responsibility Is Non-Transferable
Part 3 That Whole Guiding Principles Thing
Part 4 Pain Is Inevitable
Part 5 It is Well with My Soul


Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Beloved Community: The Now and Not Yet

Rev. Christine Robinson has a great little post up about the phrase "beloved community" and why it's problematic to use that to describe a church. Like her mom, I can get cranky about the whole thing, but my crankiness lies in the misuse of what is, to me, such a breathtaking and profound concept. Martin Luther King, Jr., someone whose words I study in great detail, is the one we often think of as originating the term, but he learned about it through the writings of Josiah Royce. Josiah Royce (right) with close friend William James.  Royce was a philosopher, studying Kant, Hegel. I imagine he would have enjoyed Koestler's theory of the holon , because he saw humanity as being both individuals and part of a greater "organism" that was community. As King's belief about Beloved Community would be rooted in agape , Royce's philosophy stemmed from what he called loyalty, and by that he meant, "the practically devoted love of an individual f...
6 comments
Read more

"I Don't Know Who I Am Now" or The Importance of Not Assuming for a While

The next 5 months are probably going to be kinda weird. Uncertainty and anxiety flying all over the place. Duck! And then after that ... it's also going to be kinda weird, but a different kind of weird, as we move into the After Times, and figure out what exactly they're going to be like, and what exactly WE are going to be like.  It is in times like these, that I like to turn to art to help make sense of it all.  I refer, of course, to the art known as the television series Doctor Who. I mean, if we know things are going to be weird, we probably should look at some art that deals with the weird, right? Now's the time to examine Hieronymous Bosch and Marc Chagall. And Doctor Who, that time-traveling, face-shifting hero.  Part of the Doctor Who story (and why it's been able to keep going so long) is that rather than die, the Doctor regenerates, retaining who they are, but with a different face, body, and to a certain extent, a different personality.  Immediately afte...
Post a Comment
Read more

Me and My Collar

You may run into me on a Friday, in my neighborhood, so it's time I let you know what you might see. When I was doing my required unit of Clinical Pastoral Education (CPE), my supervisor suggested that any of us who came from traditions where a clerical collar was an option, take one "collar week," to see how we were treated, as opposed to wearing regular professional clothes. After a couple of days, I joked to the Catholic priest, "How do you manage the power?" In regular clothes, I would walk into a patient's room, and it would take about 5 or so minutes of introductions and pleasantries before we could really get down to talking about their feelings, their fears, the deep stuff. With most people, as soon as that clerical collar walked in the room, with me attached, they began pouring out all the heavy stuff they were carrying. I was riding the bus back and forth every day, and though not quite so dramatic, the collar effect was alive there, to...
10 comments
Read more