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Feb. 17th, 2009 06:30 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
winterbadgerAn interesting perspective on how to deal with the vicissitudes of life, from the pastor of my local UU church.
Includes the passages:
As the saying goes, joy and woe are woven fine. As Unitarian minister A. Powell Davies wrote: "Life is a chance to grow a soul." These axioms are true because though we are conditioned to ignore the truth that our lives will not work out entirely as we wish - sometimes not even largely as we wished, even in basic, ordinary ways, that is the truth nonetheless. Working towards our hopes is important but as important or even more important is what we do when our dreams are denied or killed or lost. How will we live then? Can we be happy again? How?
The answers to these questions are not about what we each need to do alone to ourselves to make ourselves strong enough, happy enough, accepting enough. because fundamentally the real solutions are not for solitary, independent creatures. It is community and relationship that offer the deep help - and community and relationship that create much of the risk as well.
...
The range of what can happen to us, from wonderful to terrible, will never change, and ultimately we couldn't have it any other way if we wish to live with freedom to make choices. There is no purely beneficent and conservationist system in the universe, there is always, everywhere, life and death, creation and destruction, grace and poison, fulfillment and void, as much in the farthest-flung galaxies as in our brief, brilliant lives. Life's rich melody is a bittersweet symphony.
The universe will not change, and we cannot exit the pattern. When our human ability to create safety and reward for virtue runs dry, then we realize we need to dig deeper, and work to rebalance our own nature. We must not live in denial, nor in fear, nor in false security. We must live knowing life's vagaries and unpredictability, and live finely, with joy and woe. We will not surround ourselves with police details, nor regard the stranger with suspicion. We will fight created injustice, and succor creation's injustice. This is life; everyone is vulnerable, we are all dependent upon the kindness of strangers, and even that will not always be enough. In the end, ... it will not be the thick concrete slabs that save us, it will be the tensile strands of love, of relationship and community, that will catch us and hold us when we are falling. And sometimes it will be our love, the tensile strands we weave, that will hold another in turn. That is life and that is living. Amen.
Includes the passages:
As the saying goes, joy and woe are woven fine. As Unitarian minister A. Powell Davies wrote: "Life is a chance to grow a soul." These axioms are true because though we are conditioned to ignore the truth that our lives will not work out entirely as we wish - sometimes not even largely as we wished, even in basic, ordinary ways, that is the truth nonetheless. Working towards our hopes is important but as important or even more important is what we do when our dreams are denied or killed or lost. How will we live then? Can we be happy again? How?
The answers to these questions are not about what we each need to do alone to ourselves to make ourselves strong enough, happy enough, accepting enough. because fundamentally the real solutions are not for solitary, independent creatures. It is community and relationship that offer the deep help - and community and relationship that create much of the risk as well.
...
The range of what can happen to us, from wonderful to terrible, will never change, and ultimately we couldn't have it any other way if we wish to live with freedom to make choices. There is no purely beneficent and conservationist system in the universe, there is always, everywhere, life and death, creation and destruction, grace and poison, fulfillment and void, as much in the farthest-flung galaxies as in our brief, brilliant lives. Life's rich melody is a bittersweet symphony.
The universe will not change, and we cannot exit the pattern. When our human ability to create safety and reward for virtue runs dry, then we realize we need to dig deeper, and work to rebalance our own nature. We must not live in denial, nor in fear, nor in false security. We must live knowing life's vagaries and unpredictability, and live finely, with joy and woe. We will not surround ourselves with police details, nor regard the stranger with suspicion. We will fight created injustice, and succor creation's injustice. This is life; everyone is vulnerable, we are all dependent upon the kindness of strangers, and even that will not always be enough. In the end, ... it will not be the thick concrete slabs that save us, it will be the tensile strands of love, of relationship and community, that will catch us and hold us when we are falling. And sometimes it will be our love, the tensile strands we weave, that will hold another in turn. That is life and that is living. Amen.
