Dear Ones,

I’ve just returned from the city of San Miguel de Allende in the Mexican state of Guanajuato. There is a thriving UU Fellowship there, figuring out how to create one community from the wealthy ex-pats extending their retirement dollars, the local LGBTQ community with no spiritual home in a conservative Catholic country, and the deported families with both documented and undocumented family speaking English and Spanish. I journeyed to San Miguel with a bilingual, bicultural minister friend who is considering serving this religious community. The first service she preached was called “Dreaming the Possible.”

But the service began with the song “Impossible Dream” from the musical “The Man of La Mancha,” and I was flooded with unexpected memories. In 1979 on a September Friday, my parents dropped me off at my freshman college dorm, only 20 minutes but worlds away from the house I grew up in. But they returned on Sunday afternoon, where we all went together for the very first time to Heinz Hall for the Performing Arts in downtown Pittsburgh to see Richard Kiley sing the title role. Hearing that music in an utterly foreign context awakened me to remembrance of my father’s love of that song and that musical, a story he never read as Don Quixote but one that resonated in his living as he did his best to raise his family out of poverty and to provide not simply comfort but opportunity.

Turns out that Miguel Cervantes himself visited this part of the world, and there is a world-renowned museum dedicated to him and most famous literary creation in Guanajuato, just an hour from San Miguel. The convergences pile up, when we are awake to the possibilities. I was grateful for this trip and for the good memories both.

May you be awake to the convergences of place and possibility, with memory sweet and poignant, as you remember also that you are loved, you are worthy, you are welcome, and you are needed. May you feel it so, and may it be so.