Minister’s Message
Dear friends,
I work today glued to the TV, watching the departure of the 45th and the Inauguration of the 46th President of the United States. I feel strangely calm in my body. It’s a sensation of letting my shoulders drop, of tension in my abdomen releasing, of my jittery feet stilled. I experience these sensations with some surprise, as I recognize how my body has carried the anxieties of my mind in a time of grave illness and massive death, of unprecedented political unrest, of physical and social restriction beyond any need for privacy or “alone time,” of personal sorrow. I have been tense. I imagine you have been, too.
And now I am truly grateful to allow myself what feels like a luxury and maybe a foolish one—to imagine an alternative to being ripped apart by an unrestrained pandemic, a lack of compassion for the suffering of our citizens caused by unequal distribution of the economic value created by all of our labor, a hopeless sense that life will not improve. I am moved to imagine our nation can begin to heal from all of this age-old and recent trauma and tragedy. I begin to imagine accountability that helps all of us acknowledge the painful truths of our national history, to uplift all of the ways people have overcome oppression and despair. I begin to imagine that construction of common cause, the policies and work that lifts the tide of all people, creating a more equitable and more peaceful national culture. I begin to imagine a heavy cloud, a cloud obscuring our humanity from one another, lifting away, enabling light and love to flood our lives in ways familiar and new. May my imaginings lead me to the work of co-creating the world of which I dream.
May we all use our imaginations in the service of crafting goodness for ourselves, each other, and our world, as you remember, today and every day, that you are loved, you are worthy, you are welcome, and you are needed. May you feel it so, and may it be so.
Blessings, Rev. Rita (she/hers)