Minister’s Message

Dear Friends,

Gov. Walz lifted his “Stay at Home” order this week, asking us to remain “Safer at Home” as much as possible. And last week our UUA President the Rev. Susan Frederick-Gray issued guidance for re-opening worship, guidance that cautions against meeting in person until May 2021.  You can see the contradiction. This quotation from the Diary of Samuel Pepys (1665) captures the temptations and the perils we face in this moment. We want all the pleasures of life before COVID-19, and we know the disease is far from controlled. We want to gather and be merry together, and we know that to do so risks our health and that of people we love dearly. We are in hard times, there is no getting around it.

I have seen a number of you posting words of caution and care on your Facebook pages, citing science and rational thinking as reasons to remain physically distanced and at home as much as possible. Still, not all of us work at jobs or in industries where we are shielded from infection and its consequences. We enact justice, as well as acknowledge systematic injustice, when we recognize that all of us do not have the same protections and the same options socially and economically.

Have you realized that when you make those appeals to science and rationality in the name of compassion and justice, you are living within the call of our Unitarian Universalist religion? You are acknowledging the interdependent web of all existence, of which you are a part and never apart from. When you post to Facebook and in other venues, you are living your values as a Unitarian Universalist, you are expressing your faith in the goodness of life regardless of  the pain and sorrow that is inevitably ours as well.

May we all have the confidence and the courage to practice our faith out loud, knowing that when we despair and falter, when we think we cannot go on within such restriction and frustration, that we have a well of shared religious community to recall us to life and to goodness, to community and connection. May you feel held by a cloud of Unitarian Universalist witnesses—living and departed and still to be—who support and uplift you at these challenging times, 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