“Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.”

I know this is a happy day—we are back here gathered for worship, and hopefully the technology is working and folks are also with us on Zoom; it’s so good to be together, and it’s the first day of spring, and there’s going to be coffee after church! We have plenty of reasons to be hopeful and happy.

But I have to tell you, my spiritual companions, that there is also despair in my heart. And I expect there may be despair in your hearts too. Despair for our world, and for the suffering all around. Despair for what we have been though, these last two years, and for all that has been lost. How can there not be?

I have always been a bit of a people watcher. Nothing filled my younger self with more joy than to grab a warm beverage, find a city or park bench and watch the world go by. This practice always fills me a sense of wonder and amazement that world can hold so many different people. That each person that walks by has a whole life (friends, family, experiences) inside. And here they are for a fleeting moment – coming from some unknown place or circumstance and on their way to another.

What our choir just sang is true, isn’t it? It is a wonderful world, with plenty of beauty, so much to wonder about, and enjoy, and be grateful for. This is one of the gifts of sabbath, isn’t it? We slow down, we make time to see and hear one another, to touch what lies deep within us; and this helps brings us to a place of gratitude. And it’s good. The mystic Meister Eckhart said, “If the only prayer you ever say in your entire life is thank you, it will be enough.”

I have a question for you. Do you like being lost? Do you like that feeling of not knowing where you are, or where you’re going? Does anyone?

Well, neither do I. I can get aggravated when something goes wrong and the maps app or GPS leads me astray. I don’t even like to stop and ask for directions! And I wonder if, in recent years, our dependence on technology hasn’t helped—are we losing our innate sense of direction, our natural ability to find our way?

I love that song our choir just sang—it takes me back to my early days in seminary, which for my class began on September 11, 2001. The events of that day, and what followed after, made what was already going to be an intense experience even more so. I was there because of a call that compelled me to go, but it was a call I couldn’t adequately understand or explain, not yet anyway; I was there in a place I had not planned to go.

I took a class early in seminary on Spiritual Autobiography. I loved reflecting on the twists and turns of people’s lives – how they traced their experiences and wove together a tapestry of connectedness and meaning. At our first class, we were asked to define the words: spiritual and autobiography. My personal definition of “spirituality” had always included some feature of individual and collective meaning making. By extension, then, a spiritual autobiography would be a writing down your life in an effort to make meaning out of it. After I shared this with my class, the teaching fellow pressed me a bit and asked, “But…do you make meaning or do you find it?” In his question was a deeper one: does meaning enter once we’ve decided to make it – by some mental or purposeful act, or was the meaning there the whole time waiting to be found and listened to?

When we first decided on February’s worship theme of vocation – I was very much wide eyed and aspirational in my thinking about the topic. However, as I’ve thought back this last week on my life and how and where these ideas have shown up – I realize this is tender topic – it certainly was for me and I expect for many of us - especially in these pandemic days. We all have such different entry points and relationships to notions of vocation, call, life’s work, and purpose – themes that have been profoundly altered, magnified and challenged over the last two years. So…I offer this to us this morning – humbly, and as starting point to a larger conversation over the days and weeks ahead. These are my musings in this moment in time, and I’d love to hear yours…

Do you know how something can just come into your mind—a song, a line from a poem, an image? Who knows where these things come from—but I’m learning to pay attention to them, to see them as gifts. Well, earlier this week, the gift that showed up was the image of a circle. That simple round shape just came to mind. Wondering about this, I remembered that the circle is a symbol of wholeness, and that seemed interesting. Not long after, the words that are our reading today, they presented themselves. First Rainer Maria Rilke’s image of an expanding circle of awareness and being:

“I live my life in growing orbits
which move out over the things of the world…”

I love hearing our choir, in these recordings they’ve done for us! I can picture their faces, and Lisa leading them, and I look forward to when we can be back together in person again. But whether apart or together, we are doing this, aren’t we?

And I don’t take that for granted. In the early months of the pandemic, I worried about us: how do we do church when we can’t gather in person? Around that time, at a pastoral care team meeting, Sarina Ryan said something that really helped, and has stayed with me. Talking about the ways we were finding to connect. the ways you all were reaching out to one another, Sarina said, “I would say that we are stronger now than we ever have been.”

A number of years ago I attended a conference on ecological justice that was co-hosted by the Religion and Conflict Transformation and Faith and Ecological Justice programs at Boston University. While I had spent much of my professional life working in the environmental non-profit field, I have to confess that in all my years working on causes related to environmental education and conservation, I had never thought about them from a justice framework. We need to protect land - yes, we needed to educate our youth to be good stewards of the natural world - yes, but how all this related to social inequity, racism, and injustice did not factor into my thinking.