Pastor's Blog
Anniversaries
It’s been thirty years since our church was “reborn”. In April of 1980, the people of the Reformed Church of Spring Valley and the people of the First Congregational Church of Spring Valley became one new church: the United Church of Spring Valley! The two uniting churches had a long and collaborative relationship in this community. They had leaned on one another from time to time. Finally the time came when it was right to unite, and as they say: the rest is history!
I believe anniversaries are important. At the moment, I can’t think of a holiday that isn’t an anniversary of some kind. Birthdays, weddings, historic events like the Fourth of July, and religious events like Easter or Passover; these are all anniversaries. We observe them in order to remember the events and honor them. Joyous events call for celebrations. Of course there are sad and tragic events with losses. We remember Pearl Harbor and 9/11. We remember the death of a loved one. We also honor these events, and those involved, with our memories and the traditions we maintain around them. All anniversaries are important.
The Anniversaries of our church are important. That would be true every year, but on special multiples, we should throw special parties. Nora and I celebrate our wedding anniversary each year. We were married on June 9, 1973. A typical anniversary celebration would include a dinner out at one of our favorite restaurants, some flowers, and perhaps a small gift. But every five years, we go on a great trip. That started on our 25th wedding anniversary when we took our first cruise. It went from Athens to Istanbul with stops at Santorini, Rhodes, and Kusadasi/Ephesus. It was fabulous! We loved every moment and determined to do it again every five years. On our 30th anniversary, we cruised the Baltic Sea: Copenhagen, Stockholm, Helsinki, St. Petersburg, Tallinn, Gdansk, and Oslo. Wow! We were headed to Alaska on our 35th anniversary, but my hospitalization stopped that one. (Thank goodness for trip cancellation insurance!) We are already dreaming up plans for number 40 in 2013. We believe in anniversaries!
I hope you will join in our celebration of our church’s anniversaries! I use the plural because our church and its two predecessor churches have overlapping anniversaries that are virtually all multiples of 5. United Church of Spring Valley is 30 years old; the Reformed Church of Spring Valley would be 145 years old; and the First Congregational Church of Spring Valley would be 125 years old. We need to remember and celebrate the history of our church and the shoulders upon which we stand. We need to celebrate the ministries and missions undertaken here over these many years. We need to look back with respect and appreciation at the challenges of those decades and all that our predecessors accomplished. Think of all that has happened over those years beginning just as the Civil War was ending. Remember the two world wars and all the others since. Remember the Great Depression and all the ups and downs of the economy since then, right down to today. Remember the riots in our cities, the struggle against racism, and the deep divisions in our country over the war in Vietnam and the war on poverty. Our church was in ministry here in this community through it all. Do you remember?
There are new wars and new struggles in our day. There are new challenges and new opportunities for today. We look back and remember in order to look forward with faith to God’s unfolding call for us. What does God call us to be and do in this next decade of our church’s life? What will our ministry and mission look like in the 2010’s? How well will we carry forward the banner that has been handed to us by the men and women who worshipped and served before us through this church? What do we dare dream for ourselves, and what elbow grease will we bring to the dreams?
We must make opportunities this fall to ask and answer these questions. We must listen to each other. In our speaking, we may hear God speak. Remember what one of our denominations (the UCC) has proclaimed: God Is Still Speaking!
Watch this! http://www.ucc.org/god-is-still-speaking/ads/
Friends
After church on Sunday, July 18th, Nora and I will be flying to southern California for two weeks of vacation with two relatively new friends. Steve and Dorothy Larson live in Santa Ana, but we met them in Greece! Nora and I were on a cruise in the Aegean Sea that started in Athens and ended at Istanbul. In between we made a few stops at beautiful island ports. This was our very first cruise; we booked it as a gift to ourselves for our 25th wedding anniversary. While on the cruise, we met Dorothy and Steve. They were about our same age and they were celebrating their honeymoon. We spent some time together and found that we really enjoyed each other. We became friends. That was back in 1998. Since then we have taken cruises together every five years for our respective anniversaries (though we are 25 years ahead of them!). Steve had a son living in NYC so they came east to visit a couple of times a year and we usually spent some time with them. They came to our son’s wedding last year. We had planned to go out west to see them two years ago, but then (as you remember) I found myself in the hospital for three weeks instead. So finally we are making our way out to see them in their home and we will get to see Yosemite National Park with them and have many wonderful experiences together.
I was thinking about this because I know that as an introvert it is not so easy for me to make new friends. Nora is much better at that, so she is able to help me do so. I would have missed the opportunity to enlarge my circle of friends, but for Nora. I am grateful to her. I am also keenly aware that life tends toward isolation. Our circle of relationships in general, and our friendships in particular, is generally shrinking, especially after we reach midlife (whenever that is!). Jobs change, people move, illness strikes, death comes, our circle shrinks. Life moves us toward isolation, unless we are actively reaching out to establish new relationships, to make new friends, to expand our circle. That isn’t always easy, and it is harder for some of us than it is for others. Yet it is so important!
Life is all about relationships. Friends are precious gifts. To have good friends with whom to share one’s joys and sorrows, to share life, is to be rich indeed. Our desire for such friendships may account for some part of the popularity of TV shows like “Friends” or other ensemble series. We may be living our need for friends vicariously through such shows. We begin to feel like we know the characters in them intimately; they become our “friends”. I have heard many people say such things. How much richer our lives are when we have real friends and not just electronic projections. It may be harder though, more work, to interact and relate to someone in the flesh than someone we can “turn off” when we don’t want to watch anymore.
Real friendships require commitment. They take time and energy. We need to nurture them. And lest our circle of friends shrink into solitude, we need to be open to new encounters. We need to extend ourselves and go looking for them. I made two new friends today. Two weeks ago, I took the initiative to call the Spring Valley Methodist Church and speak to the pastor there, the Rev. LaGretta Bjorn. I invited myself to visit her, and she graciously welcomed me. I went to her church today and spent two hours with her and with the Rev. Claire Lofgren, the vicar of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church. I really enjoyed being with them, and I think it was mutual. I am hopeful that we will become good friends and not just colleagues.
Friendship is a spiritual gift. It is a quality of relationship grounded in a deeper sense of our common humanity and our interdependence. It carries the possibility of reflecting our relationship with God. One of the most astonishing affirmations in our scriptures is God’s desire that we become God’s friends. Abraham was heralded as the “Friend of God”. In his last hours with the disciples, Jesus called them to be no longer his students, but his friends. May it be so for us. May we experience ourselves as friends of Jesus, through whom we have been befriended by God. And may that Spirit of friendship be at work in us and through us to expand the circle of friends with whom we share and celebrate life.
Wholehearted
I am trying to pay better attention! You know, it isn’t very easy! There is so much going on all the time inside our heads and all around us. It isn’t easy to pay attention and remain focused on any one thing for very long.
As you may remember, I wrote last month about a week I had that was full of things lost and found. Unfortunately, it is too often only when such repetitions happen to me that I finally notice. God has to be pretty persistent with me in order to get me to pay attention. I am doing a little better though. This week I encountered the word “wholehearted” twice within two days from different sources. One was a paragraph in a blog by my friend, Doug Wysockey-Johnson, who is the executive director of Lumunos (formerly known as Faith at Work). The other was a radio broadcast of a recording of Maria Von Trapp, made back in the 1950’s, for Edward R. Murrow’s “This I Believe” series.
Maria von Trapp (made famous in the movie “Sound of Music”) spoke of the daily habit she and her husband shared for reading the Bible together and attempting to put it into practice. She remembered the day they read the passage about “becoming as little children”. Of course they knew it did not mean to shrink in size, but they wondered what quality of childlikeness Jesus was uplifting. They came to the conclusion it was “wholeheartedness.”
“What struck us most was the discovery that a child has no past, and no future. It only lives in the present moment but, this, wholeheartedly. Just by watching our babies, we found if they ate, they ate; if they slept, they slept; if they played, they played. And whatever they did, they did with their whole heart, with their whole little being.
Not so, a grownup. While he’s doing one thing, he’s worrying about the past: Why didn’t I do this? Why didn’t I say that? Or about the future: And how will it go next month, next year? What am I going to do if this and this should happen? Slowly it dawned on us that only a childlike soul can fulfill the first and foremost commandment: “Thou shalt love the Lord, thy God, with a whole heart and with a whole soul and with a whole mind.” Because the grownup has forgotten how to be wholehearted about anything; while he does one thing, he cares already about another.”
Just in case I didn’t absorb that message (which was certainly intended for me!), God sent it a second time in Doug’s blog. He was writing about fatigue and exhaustion, which characterize so many of us. I expected him to preach a little sermon about self-care, about taking breaks, vacations, and keeping the Sabbath. But I was wrong, he was writing about “wholeheartedness”! Doug quotes the poet David Whyte:
“The antidote to exhaustion is not necessarily rest, so says the poet David Whyte. No, sometimes the antidote to exhaustion is wholeheartedness. In his highly recommended book Crossing the Unknown Sea: Work as a Pilgrimage of Identity, Whyte recounts these words spoken to him by a trusted friend at a time of real work exhaustion: ‘You are so tired through and through because a good half of what you do here in this organization has nothing to do with your true powers, or the place you have reached in your life. You are only half there, and half here will kill you after a while.’ (Crossing the Unknown Sea, p. 132).”
I understand him to be saying that half-heartedness is exhausting and deadly (to the soul if not to the body). This is a spiritual challenge, at least for me! I think God was inviting me to see that my attention and my heart are both often fragmented. We might call it multi-tasking and congratulate ourselves on our productivity. But it is unhealthy in so many ways. The Buddhist practice of “mindfulness” addresses this same destructive proclivity. It is a call to be present, to be fully present, to the moment, to the task at hand, to the person right in front of us. It means paying full attention. Perhaps if I bring my whole mind and my whole heart to bear on just one thing at a time, as much as I can, perhaps God may be able to heal the fractures in my life and make me more whole. May it be so.
Comments
Rest vs Wholeheart
Submitted by Anonymous on Thu, 07/08/2010 - 1:06pm.
I am not sure if I followed this, but I just pinned a prayer slip to that old rugged wooden cross inside of Iona Abbey for you. On it I wrote, or scribbled, For Rob Williimas - Rest. The congregation prays for all these prayer requests once a week on a certain day which I think is Wed. I'm hoping to go to the service tonight. It took landing on Iona to finally get me to remember friends and check emails, Facebook etc. I will have to think about rest and whole heartedness.
Mary Oliver's Poem on Paying Attention!
Submitted by Anonymous on Tue, 06/01/2010 - 12:05pm.
Look and See
This morning, at waterside, a sparrow flew
to a water rock and landed, by error, on the back
of an eider duck; lightly it fluttered off, amused.
The duck, too, was not provoked, but, you might say, was
laughing.
This afternoon a gull sailing over
our house was casually scratching
its stomach of white feathers with one
pink foot as it flew.
Oh Lord, how shining and festive is your gift to us, if we
only look, and see.
~ Mary Oliver ~
(Why I Wake Early)
Comments
Friendship
I give thanks to God to have had the Williams family in my circle of friends for many years- and to have experienced God's love in their spriit of friendship. A true gift in my life. I wish we lived closer and could attend your church more often. I hope you are having a wonderful and well-deserved vacation in California.
Friendship
Thank you for these kind words... Who is this from???
RSVP
Rob