Pastor Annette's Blog
|
"OF ALL THE THINGS GOD HAS SHOWN ME, I CAN SPEAK BUT A LITTLE WORD . . . NOT MORE THAN A HONEYBEE CAN CARRY AWAY ON ITS FOOT FROM AN OVERFLOWING JAR."
~ MECHTHILD OF MAGDEBURG, 13TH CENTURY MYSTIC |
|
“I store my extra meat in the belly of my brother.” ~ Robin Wall Kimmerer, The Serviceberry Beloved: When I asked the Lenten reading group for their favorite quotes, the line above was their uncontested favorite. The woman who spoke most excitedly is also married to the man who called me a few weeks ago to ask about a family in our congregation with whom he might share a freezer full of meat he’d just bought from a nearby farmer. Hearing I had strep throat, the mama in that family brought me chicken stew she’d made with some of the meat they received from the man who called me. While Kimmerer’s quote comes from a story about a Brazilian hunter-gatherer community, it is no less at work among an ordinary faith community here and now. Kimmerer’s writing is beautiful — poetry, one person called it, a rarity on the subject of economics. She contrasts standard capitalism with what she calls a giving economy, one based on abundance instead of scarcity, on the presumption that commodities belong to everyone, change hands according to who needs them most at any given time. Relationships are the primary commodity in a giving economy, relationships rooted in mutuality, care for one another, and the assumption that we each thrive when we all thrive. By her own admission Kimmerer is not an economist. Neither is she a poet like Wendell Berry, whose writing has a similar vibe. She is an indigenous woman, a scientist, a botanist. Insofar as her writing feels like poetry, I wonder if she is touching a longing in us we tried to name in our discussion, the longing to take leave of an economy and way of life driven by competition and consumption and more fully enter a more creative, contented and cooperative way of being? We talked a long time about workplace expectations and the desire to spend more time and energy on soul-sustaining projects and passions. A giving economy offers some relief from that frustration. Even our conversation was consoling, in the community we found around these issues. We have another discussion this coming Sunday afternoon, March 30th at 4 pm, and it’s not too late to pick up the book. $20 and only 100 little pages. You can read it in a sitting or listen to it on libbyapp.com, using your library card. I’m grateful for you all, for your interest and enthusiasm for such matters, especially these days. I am grateful for your good care of one another, your generosity of time, energy and possessions. You are the people of Jesus in this tiny spot of time and space. As we continue our Lenten practice, I pray you are finding time for reflection and study, in whatever shape that takes for you. ~ peace & prayers, pastor annette
0 Comments
Beloved: The first time I had a pile of mulch dumped on this driveway it took me a week to spread a quarter of it and three hours for my son to spread the rest of it. Now it needs redoing and my son lives in Manhattan, so a man I found on the NextDoor app is coming to measure up my beds and figure out how much to buy. He’s also going to price some extra work for me: pulling two shrub stumps, trimming the others back, and extending my front flower bed. This heavy work isn’t fun for me any more. It takes too long and leaves me sore for days. I’d rather plan and plant, weed and water, stake and prune and harvest. Mostly I just like watching it all grow. I share this tiny, half shady yard with a dozen digging squirrels and a mole or two who, thankfully, are not making dirt volcanoes in my yard like their comrades across the street.
It was good to walk this tiny dot of ground if for no other reason than to remember earth’s twirling traverse around the sun is subject to nothing within the power of men, or women. The sun rises no matter how dark the night, and spring comes no matter how long the winter. The buds and flowers bear witness to the time all healing takes, so much of it unseen and unmeasurable, experienced as absence, grief and pain. An absence to be sat with, for as long as the grieving takes, until one day the light within feels not quite so dark or heavy as it did the last time we poked at it, the hurt not quite so tender. Relieved is an okay way to feel. Glad to be just that much better does not deny the severity of the injury.
Lent bridges winter and springtime for this reason, carrying our prayer and worship from hopelessness to joy. The light and air, the life below and above ground are telling the wonder of God at work within us too, bringing us back to life too. I pray this season allows you time for reflection on the healing you are experiencing these days. ~peace & prayers, pastor annette March 11, 2025
Beloved: Daylight Savings Time has me feeling jet lagged despite having been nowhere. That said, I am loving this springtime weather. I’ve tulips and daffodils pushing through the dirt, and this evening will allow daylight enough to walk the dog and clean off a flower bed. The mere thought of planting something makes me giddy, knowing full well it is ages too early* even to consider so fanciful an idea. So I sit outside on my porch swing, noting to myself for the thousandth time how lucky I am to have a comfortable, safe house to come home to every day. Lucky, fortunate, privileged . . . any word but blessed, for if I choose the word blessed as in I am blessed to have this comfortable, safe house, am I not also saying those without a house are not as blessed as me? I’m not willing to say that - since I’ve done nothing to deserve more blessing than my neighbors. I certainly do not work harder than most of them, especially those toiling and trying to raise kids on $10-$15 an hour employment, people who can’t find anything in this town to rent for less than $1000 a month. I work and go home. They work and go to their second job. If I get sick, I don’t lose pay. If my car breaks down I work from home or call an Uber. But the slightest crisis (car trouble, sick kid, work injury) may equal disaster for a neighbor who is a hair’s breadth from homelessness every minute of every day. So no, I cannot think of my home as a blessing, grateful as I am for it. The writer Nancy Mairs says in one of her books that the way to love a house is to care for it. She might have said clean it but since I hardly ever clean anything but dishes and laundry, I choose to say she said care for it, which I am fairly rigorous about. I have the HVAC guy in twice a year and keep my beds weeded and watered. My garage is organized and so are my closets, mostly. Always, always, always gratefully knowing that simple housing like mine is a luxury beyond the imagination of so many people in our community, even more the world over. None of which is to say I am not blessed, that we are not blessed. But rather, let us reserve the word for the things that cannot be bought with the currencies of this world, money, education, social status or power. Blessings are those things available to everyone for free and originating in the Divine – like hope and love, friendship and connection, gentleness and courage, springtime, sunshine, and birdsong . . . all of them abundant, and within reach for everyone, everywhere. I pray the day is kind to you in every way. ~peace & prayers, pastor annette *No planting outdoors before Mother’s Day, no matter how pretty it looks at the store was my mother’s rule. *A Recipe - Yummy & Quick Stove Top Chicken Breast
“...but in this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes.” ~ Benjamin Franklin, The Private Correspondence of Benjamin Franklin “The difference between death and taxes is death doesn’t get worse every time Congress meets.” ~ Will Rogers March 4, 2025 Beloved: It’s March 4th and I just completed my January? (nope!), February? (nope!) goals of 1.) delivering my documents to the accountant who does my taxes and 2.) sorting, shredding, filing, digitizing, reorganizing all the paper I accumulated in 2024. Is it fun? Not especially. Is it ever so satisfying? Hands down, without a doubt, absolutely yes! I keep less than a tenth of the paper in that file box and empty my shredder bucket at least twice. The accountant will give me back a blue bound set of tax returns I’ll file in a banker box on a closet shelf and I’m done for another year. Home Ec probably isn’t taught in high school anymore but if it was and if I taught it, a unit on managing household paperwork would be included under the heading LifeLong Skills For Stuff Everybody Has To Deal With. Of course, household paperwork is hardly the only unit to fit under that heading, just the one on my mind as I drove over to the accountant’s office this morning. I’m also working on Ash Wednesday, and plans for Lent, the spiritual preparatory season for Holy Week and Easter. Lent is not spiritual business as usual, but rather a time of deeper, more honest reflection, of sorting through our hearts and minds for what belongs and what does not, what is serving the faith we claim and what is not. A time of clarifying our desires and our intentions in light of Christ. A time of confession and repentance, of renewal and recommitment to the morals and values of this faith. I don’t teach Home Economics but I am a pastor, keeper of the spiritual life together of a set of believers in this time and place. A privilege that still startles me when I see it clearly. For Lent this year, I have a few bits and pieces to offer that you might find useful. I’ll keep adding them here as I find them, rather than send multiple emails. For the first, I’ve chosen a tiny book for us to read together - The Serviceberry, by Robin Wall Kimmerer.* Let me hear from you if you plan to read it so we can set up times for discussion. Watch for more Lenten devotional material to be added to the our Home Page. ~peace & prayers, pastor annette After compiling the devotional materials list, I feel inspired to create my own Lenten music playlist - on Spotify where I listen to music - which I will post soon. |
I write a Tuesday morning devotional to members and friends of UBC. It is also posted here.
Enjoy! Pastor Annette Copyright
Everything on this site is licensed under a Creative Commons license, which gives you permission to copy freely, provided that you attribute the work to me, that you use the work for non-commercial purposes, and that you do not produce derivative works. Archives
June 2025
|
RSS Feed