Circle of the Sun

Leela Sinha

Ellsworth, Maine

Dec 21, 2008

What do you believe?

Do you believe?

The sun is returning, the days are lengthening, the hope is coming, do you believe?

Do you believe in light and brilliance and beginning?

Do you believe in plants?

Do you believe in leaves?

Do you believe that the oak and the maple and the beech and the birch will flower and bud and be once again green and growing things?

Do you believe?

This is the season of our belief.  This is the season of knowing it can be and making it so.  This is the season of repairing old machinery and old relationships, of getting ready, of making whole, of starting again.  This is the season of faith rewarded, of hope reborn, of promises kept.  This is the season when maybe becomes yes, when word is made flesh, when the world is saved.  This is the season when the sun still rises, once again rises, finally it rises and for one sweet day all the world’s people are one—all of us are one.

This is what solstice is about, what the sun is about, about belief that is deep, about belief that is strong, about belief that goes beyond logic, beyond reasoning to truth embedded in our very souls, truth that needs no proof, truth that needs no testing, truth that we know like we know that our heart beats, that time unfurls, that the sun rises, that the sun always rises, because we are turning, days after days turning toward the morning.

We know, and we do not know.  We hope, we pray, we anticipate.  And it puts us in our places, this not-knowing, this life that is larger than our life, or any one life.

In these grey and uncertain days of fall and winter we are beyond knowing what the next hour will bring, rain or snow or sleet, sun or cloud, triumph or failure, joy or disappointment.  We are beyond knowing; we are beginning to understand how little we understand; how little we control.

And we are scared.

And we are unsure.

And we are unbalanced.

And we are hurting.

Because we have believed for lo these many years that we must know everything, we must absorb every idea, we must divine every truth; we have believed that we are only strong when we are in control, when the world is in our hands, when the earth is at our mercy, we have believed this as truth, like we know our breath and we know our hearts, but we were wrong.

We have been wrong.

And it is not the lack of control that is hurting, although we think that is what hurts.

And it is not the uncertainty that is unsettling, although we think that is what throws our balance.

It is the expectation that anything should be otherwise.  It is the mistaken understanding of the world as under our control, it is the hubris, the mistaken belief that we can do less than our very best for this fragile planet and these, our people, and do no harm.

Do no harm.  It is, it should be, a primary goal.  But we know that it is not always possible, not really ever possible, that everything we do to stay alive harms something, somehow, eating and drinking, using the planet’s resources for our living requires a full cycle of destruction and regeneration to be sustainable.  It is hard, coming to terms with the price of our lives.  It is hard, learning to look for the welfare of the collective, the institution, the group, the population rather than the good of the individual.  To expect that we are somehow exempt from this cycle, more pure or entirely separate, is to forget who we are, to believe ourselves above living, above relationship, above life itself.

Whatever else we are, we are not immortal.

If we have that of god within us, that light of something that connects us to everything alive, it is not to make us bigger or more controlling; it is not to make us all-powerful, it is not to make us supreme.  It is to make us wiser than we might have been, and gentler; it is to build connections among us and help us stay in community.  It is to help us be graceful; it is to help us be humble by everything that is so big, so impossible [...]

Gathered in Mystery

Dec 14, 2009

Ellsworth, Maine

Leela Sinha

What if there is a god?

What if all the skeptics are off track and all the atheists are wrong, and there is a god, or gods?  What if that god is really a god who listens, a god who responds, a god who hears and is heard?

What kind of god would you have, if you had a god?  What kind would you claim?  Where would you find your god, or gods?   Would you lie with them, sleep with them, eat with them?  Would you argue with them?  Would you have fireside chats?  Where would you find them, or where would they find you?  If there were a god or gods, and if you could choose, what kind would suit you best?

Fiddler On The Roof’s Tevya likes to pace, and shout and shake his fist at the sky; Mary Oliver goes walking; more than one biologist has found god at the end of a microscope; in the movie Contact, Jodi Foster’s character finds something so beautiful it brings her to tears on her way to another universe.  As humans we have been seeking the divine for thousands of years; what we have found has filled volumes, transformed careers, caused the rise and fall of empires.  We all crave contact with the divine.  We all want to be united with that which is precious, special, delightful, holy.  How we understand that divinity varies, and ways to encounter the divine are almost limitless.

In the end it’s much simpler than everything we have built up around us.  Here, we believe in direct access to god or that which is holy—no priest, minister, or saint needs to intercede for us.  We are all we need and have all we need to be in the presence of infinite love and to be infinitely loved.  But none of us are expected to be infinitely loving.  We are human, just human, deeply and intensely loving but with limits of time and place and body and spirit. 

When Tevya paces, wants to know why he’s not rich, why his daughters have chosen unsuitable men, who decided he should have five daughters and no sons, he is arguing into a long line of traditional argument, shouting at the sky like his father and his father before him.  But that’s okay.  His god can take it.  His god is capable of infinite love and infinite patience, of the kind that no human can give.

How, then can all of us receive such love if none of us can provide it?  The too-easy answer is that god gives us that love.  But that answer depends on the existence of a god and that god’s willingness and ability to be that which we are not.  For many of us that’s too much to believe, too much imagining and not enough proof,  too much faith for a faith built on rational thought and transcendent connections of earth and sky.  None of this universe shows intense and regular compassion; none of the world is nice or sweet or giving, not the way humans understand it—none except humans ourselves, and we have our limits.  if we are to believe in love that overcomes and transforms everything, we need to see it somewhere, to know that it exists already, somewhere outside of fairy tales, holy books, and our own fertile imaginations.  We need to see it somewhere here, in this world, in this time.

When the Genesis creation story begins the god of that time and place says let there be light, and there was light, and he separated the light from the darkness, and then there is an earth, and plants and animals and every living thing and finally humans, who are instructed to go forth and multiply.

Go forth and multiply.  Have sex and have children and let them have children until the world is richly populated, which since before the five billionth human arrived we have been questioning as a survival strategy since we seem to be using resources faster than we can make them.

But there’s something about the infinity of life; there’s something about the boundless capacity of beings to make something from not much of anything: where there is one or two there can be more, and where each one is, there can be everything they are.  So where we have two humans[...]

Association Sunday

October 12, 2008

Who would we be without each other?

Would we be lonely? Would we be sad? Would we be finally, totally at peace?

UU Singer/songwriter Peter Mayer, who wrote “Blue Boat Home”, also has a song about introverts. “People upset me when they interrupt me with calls and unannounced visits, and on top of that when they chat about nothing at all and I ask what is it? I do have a lot to do. Can you return at two? I will not be here by then. Just leave what you need me for on a note on the door so I can ignore it, my friend.”

“I’d like to hire my own secretary who’s mean, someone who says things like, “Mr. Mayer can’t be reached; he is not in, you see. He’s in a meeting ’till ten. I suppose I could take your name. Who are you anyway? Please never call here again.”” (“The Introvert Song”, from the album “Elements”)

Some of us are clearly more externally-oriented than others. But humans are made to be social. We are made to live among each other, to laugh and cry together, to love and fight and heal in unending circles of days and months and years. No matter how introverted we are, there is a basic human need for each other; without touch, without companions, infants die and adults go insane. We are made for contact: challenging contact, intimate contact, creative contact, religious contact.

Each of us has different priorities:

Some of us come for the intellectual stimulation; some for the emotional support; some come for conversation, or comfort, or spiritual enrichment. The one thing that everyone among us seems to agree on is community. Connection. People. We engage in ritual, in struggle, and in caring together. We know we are not isolated, not rejected, not unworthy, despite a nagging sense that every day we are given is an unexpected grace. We are witnessed and we witness others; and in seeing and being seen we are made somehow more truly who we are. We need this. We crave it. We wonder:

If a person’s life is transformed and no one sees it, is the transformation real? Yesterday was National Coming Out Day, a day set aside to honor and encourage people who are gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, or asexual to come out–to name their own identity and let it be visible, because there is something different about being known really, being known entirely. This visibility in community is crucial. This visibility transforms not just individuals but whole communities over and over again. Each coming out–each claiming of identity– reinforces and reestablishes the sanctity of self-definition and the obligation we each have to continue to discover and examine ourselves and to share what we have learned. If we are so ashamed of what we have learned, or so afraid of others’ shame that we are unwilling to bring it to light, then either the shame or the quality must change. Only our hearts can tell us which is wrong. Over time, shame that festers in a community, coupled with lack of safety and lack of visibility can be fatal. Ten years ago today Matthew Shepherd died from exposure and untreated injuries after having been robbed, beaten, tortured, tied to a fence and left for dead because he was gay. It was eighteen hours before someone found him, and five days from the attack to his death. At the time, there was no state or federal law under which Matthew Shepherd’s death could be prosecuted as a hate crime.

Invisibility kills. Isolation kills. Silence kills.

It also snowballs. If no one talks about something, then the lesson is that it is either shameful or nonexistent or both. And it’s not just about sexual orientation. Among liberals, there are those who wince if they hear the word church. They may have had a bad experience; they may believe that theologically and socially conservative churches are the only churches out here. And since none of their friends talk about church, except perha[...]

Openings

At last it is October.  The colors are here, the fall is here, Samhain and Halloween are coming with Thanksgiving to follow, and with these come pumpkins.

Pumpkins are squash, with tasty seeds and tasty flesh and an efficient enough shape to render carving worthwhile.  Efficiency, in this case, is measured in proportion of volume to exterior dimensions, with more being better.  While it is possible to grow a zucchini with roughly the same mass as a medium-sized pie pumpkin, it is much harder to make a jack o’ lantern out of it.  Acorn squash fares somewhat better, but pumpkins hold pride of place for a reason: they are good.  Their plumpness suggests plenty; their flesh is succulent roasted or stewed, they keep well, and one’s hands fit nicely inside the top, if one begins with a suitable lid.

I did not always know this.

I grew up in suburbia, and as far as I knew, pumpkins were for carving.  It was years before I knew you could eat one.  You could eat the seeds if you didn’t burn them, but I had no idea that jack o’ lanterns were made of food.  Eventually I did connect pumpkin pie with the glowing orange heads on every doorstep, but I was in college before I took a round, orange squash, cut a lid and hollowed it out, and then replaced the lid and put it in the oven.  Living in small town Minnesota was like living in a perpetual magic show, or a living history museum–things I had only read in books, things I thought were gone forever, were still part of life.  The shopkeepers knew me.  The bank teller knew me.  I walked to get groceries, to the fellowship on Sundays, to the general store where Mr. Jacobsen had run Jacobsen’s since time began, and where his son was running the store with him.  We were an hour from the Mall of America, but we might as well have been on a different planet.

It was a transformative planet.  It got into your very bones and soul.  It changed the way you looked at things and how fast the world spun by.  When I went there I said I wanted to experience a different one of our country’s many cultures.  And so I did.  That change has impacted the whole rest of my life.  Before that I knew nothing but the fast-paced world of New York’s suburbs.  Everything had to happen yesterday or sooner; everyone had to fend for themselves; life was entirely anonymous; work was a necessary evil; automation was good; all recreation was expensive.

Life in Northfield couldn’t have been more different.  My college certainly allowed us to stay high-strung if that was what we wanted, but I was on a cultural immersion experience and I was determined to be immersed.  Some small towns with colleges isolate the school, reject the students, regard the whole thing as a kind of parasitic growth.  All the determination in the world would have been useless if the town itself hadn’t embraced us, but we were lucky–Northfield was never like that.  My fellow students showed me how to be at college, but it was the townspeople themselves that showed me how to be part of the town.  The lady who ran one of the antique shops always said, “Thank you,” and “goodbye” when I left, and so I learned to say goodbye when I left a store.  The bank manager taught me to write checks and so I learned that I could ask strangers for help.  The UU fellowship jumped at the possibility of a young person in their midst, and thus I learned to set boundaries.  And the beloved man who ran the math tutoring center on campus also owned one of the grocery stores in town, and it was therefore clear how interconnected a small town really is.  In four years there I learned as much about community and grace as I did about English literature or educational theory in classrooms and on campus.

But I could not have learned it without that remarkable openness of a town that welcomed strangers into its midst, strangers who came at the remarkable rate of six or seven hundred a[...]

sermon

September 28, 2008

Ellsworth, Maine

Rev. Leela Sinha

Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, the high holy days of the Jewish calendar, are late this year, or we were early. But they are finally approaching, these days of atonement when names are inscribed in the book of life for the coming year, and when all wrongs must be righted, and all amends made. Sin is a concept more closely associated with Christianity than with Judaism in popular culture, but the idea is there, violations of law for which one must repent and be forgiven. As we come down from that long and venerable religious line, we could have inherited it, we might have inherited it, but we certainly don’t talk about it.

I think we’re afraid of sin.

I think we’re afraid of sin even if we don’t believe in it. In fact, it’s especially scary, then. It’s scary because if we don’t believe in it then we don’t know what it looks like, can’t fight it, can’t name it. We know there’s something big and bad out there but we don’t know what it is; we might accidentally meet it, or talk with it in the street, invite it home for dinner. We don’t know what happens if we forget and let it in, because really, it’s not there.

We Unitarian Universalists never really talked about getting rid of sin, not as a planned proposition. We talked about getting rid of hell, and agreed that probably made sense, given that whole bit in the New Testament about a loving god; we talked about authority and where it comes from and we even talked about getting rid of god–although we never did come to agreement on that, the discussion is robust, with a respectable history. But we’ve never brought sin front and center.

Sometimes it seems like we did, back when we were talking about hell. But believing that god, if there is a god, is too good to damn us, no matter what, is different from believing that we’re too good to be damned.

If there is such a thing as hell, and if the world worked on a strict eye-for-an-eye system of checks and balances, a lot of us could be in a lot of trouble. We all make mistakes, errors in judgment, little ones and sometimes big ones. Even if we set aside those people who, for reasons too complicated for us to understand, become violent and consistently mean, we are still left, not with some kind of perfect elite a la the Puritans, but with a flawed and messy bunch of people– of us. Sometimes we don’t know what to do; sometimes we know but we can’t bring ourselves to do it. Sometimes we act fast and don’t think until later. And some of the mistakes we make are really just mistakes–minor upheavals in the fabric of our lives. Others, however, are bad. They’re really bad. We don’t like to think about it; we certainly don’t like to talk about it. But we do have language for it. Old language. It’s called sin.

The word “sin” has a fascinating etymology, coming to us from the Germanic line. The words retain their sense of “trespass” or “offense” back through the years until they suddenly shift to meaning “true”. It seems likely that the origin is “to be truly the one who is guilty”. So sin comes from truth. (From the Online Etymology Dictionary)

Now we have this scary thing that we might not believe in that is derived from that which is at the very core of our sense of reason, which in turn is at the core of how we practice our faith. That should make us feel nice and secure.

**

Imagine one of those classic Christmas mornings, just before the sun rises, children in their beds but raw with excitement and not having slept a wink. Nearly every family that celebrates Christmas has a gatekeeper event, something to keep the festivities from starting in the middle of the night. So imagine that the cock crows or the sun rises or grandma gets up to make her tea, and suddenly the[...]

Openings

At last it is October.  The colors are here, the fall is here, Samhain and Halloween are coming with Thanksgiving to follow, and with these come pumpkins.

Pumpkins are squash, with tasty seeds and tasty flesh and an efficient enough shape to render carving worthwhile.  Efficiency, in this case, is measured in proportion of volume to exterior dimensions, with more being better.  While it is possible to grow a zucchini with roughly the same mass as a medium-sized pie pumpkin, it is much harder to make a jack o’ lantern out of it.  Acorn squash fares somewhat better, but pumpkins hold pride of place for a reason: they are good.  Their plumpness suggests plenty; their flesh is succulent roasted or stewed, they keep well, and one’s hands fit nicely inside the top, if one begins with a suitable lid.

I did not always know this.

I grew up in suburbia, and as far as I knew, pumpkins were for carving.  It was years before I knew you could eat one.  You could eat the seeds if you didn’t burn them, but I had no idea that jack o’ lanterns were made of food.  Eventually I did connect pumpkin pie with the glowing orange heads on every doorstep, but I was in college before I took a round, orange squash, cut a lid and hollowed it out, and then replaced the lid and put it in the oven.  Living in small town Minnesota was like living in a perpetual magic show, or a living history museum–things I had only read in books, things I thought were gone forever, were still part of life.  The shopkeepers knew me.  The bank teller knew me.  I walked to get groceries, to the fellowship on Sundays, to the general store where Mr. Jacobsen had run Jacobsen’s since time began, and where his son was running the store with him.  We were an hour from the Mall of America, but we might as well have been on a different planet.

It was a transformative planet.  It got into your very bones and soul.  It changed the way you looked at things and how fast the world spun by.  When I went there I said I wanted to experience a different one of our country’s many cultures.  And so I did.  That change has impacted the whole rest of my life.  Before that I knew nothing but the fast-paced world of New York’s suburbs.  Everything had to happen yesterday or sooner; everyone had to fend for themselves; life was entirely anonymous; work was a necessary evil; automation was good; all recreation was expensive.

Life in Northfield couldn’t have been more different.  My college certainly allowed us to stay high-strung if that was what we wanted, but I was on a cultural immersion experience and I was determined to be immersed.  Some small towns with colleges isolate the school, reject the students, regard the whole thing as a kind of parasitic growth.  All the determination in the world would have been useless if the town itself hadn’t embraced us, but we were lucky–Northfield was never like that.  My fellow students showed me how to be at college, but it was the townspeople themselves that showed me how to be part of the town.  The lady who ran one of the antique shops always said, “Thank you,” and “goodbye” when I left, and so I learned to say goodbye when I left a store.  The bank manager taught me to write checks and so I learned that I could ask strangers for help.  The UU fellowship jumped at the possibility of a young person in their midst, and thus I learned to set boundaries.  And the beloved man who ran the math tutoring center on campus also owned one of the grocery stores in town, and it was therefore clear how interconnected a small town really is.  In four years there I learned as much about community and grace as I did about English literature or educational theory in classrooms and on campus.

But I could not have learned it without that remarkable openness of a town that welcomed strangers into its midst, strangers who came at the remarkable rate of six or seven hundred a[...]

sermon

the coming darkness

Sept 21, 2008

Ellsworth, ME

Rev. Leela Sinha

The coming of the dark is the coming of limits, the coming of boundaries, the coming of edges.  Our summers here are vast, open spaces of mile-long days; as the equinox comes we feel the shift, close windows, don sleeves and sweaters, light lamps to hold the edges of the evening back for a few more days.  It is in our cultural nature to fight limits, turn on the lights, turn up the heat, hold tight to that perfect-weather day.  It is our habit to resist the darkness.

But it comes anyway.

It lets itself in at the kitchen door, puts the water on for tea, and boots up the computer.  One day we arrive home and it’s got its feet up in the living room with our favorite novel.

It comes uninvited, stays as long as it wants, and doesn’t do its own dishes or use coasters on the good furniture.  When it leaves our home looks like it’s been hit by a tornado.  It could be anything: death, depression, divorce, children going to college, a change of jobs, a change of fortune, or a change of seasons.  It comes.  And it stays.

resistance really is futile.

Discipline is not.

In her book, Eat, Pray, Love, Elizabeth Gilbert writes about several struggles she has while studying and practicing at an ashram in India.  One of them is the voice in her head while she tries to meditate.  Another is her resistance to the Gurugita.  The Gurugita is a 182 verse Sanskrit chant that she describes as “The murderous thing we do here.”  She doesn’t like the tune.  She doesn’t like the words.  It makes her smoke and steam and sweat.  It makes her so mad that she skips out in order to meditate or call home, even though she traveled halfway around the world to stay at this place.  And the hardest part is that the ashram won’t give her anything to really rebel against.  One of the people she consults says, “You’re not here as a tourist or a journalist; you’re here as a seeker.  So explore it.”

“So you’re not letting me off the hook?”

“You can let yourself off the hook anytime you want, Liz.  That’s the divine contract of a little something we call free will.” (Gilbert, Elizabeth.  Eat, Pray, Love.  p.164)

And yet she goes, fuming and full of rage she goes, full of irritation and resistance she goes.  And then one morning she oversleeps.  As she is grouchily preparing to leave the room she discovers that her roommate has accidentally locked her in, and that’s with a padlock.

Something–coincidence, conditions, God–has handed her a perfect excuse.  What does she do?

She jumps out the window, drops about 14 feet to the cement, and runs, barefoot, to the temple.  Because she has to be there.

It occurs to her about three or four verses in that she actually doesn’t want to be there.  And then she hears her Swamiji’s voice laughing: “That’s funny–you sure act like somebody who wants to be here.” (as above, p.168)

In that moment something shifts for her and she makes a conscious choice to have a different relationship with this practice that clearly calls her.  It’s a chant of love, so she finds someone she loves deeply, unconditionally, intensely–a dear nephew named Nicky–and she chants it as a lullabye for him, on the other side of the planet.  She chooses the shift, and it happens.  She cries through the hour and a half, which feels like ten minutes, and then drops into deep meditation.  She writes, “Needless to say, I never missed the Gurugita again, and it became the most holy of my practices at the Ashram…and of course I called my sister the next week and she said that –for reasons nobody could understand–Nick suddenly wasn’t having trouble sleeping anymore.”

**

I’ve met a lot of people who come to church daring the minister to do something useful, do something relevant, do [...]

sermon: Water for the Desert

ingathering and water communion, September 7, 2008

homily 1:

Every time my mother and I talk poetry it eventually boils down to meaning.  “What does it mean?” she’ll ask, “I don’t understand.”  Try as I might I cannot explain how the words wash over me, give me shapes and pictures and feelings for meanings I cannot articulate in plain English.  If I could say it in ordinary language, I tell her, I probably would.  Poetry is for things that are too big and complicated for grammar and logic, that have too many layers and too many feelings for which we don’t have names.

Ritual is the same way.  It is poetry made physical; it is psalms made flesh.  We pour our waters together here because no matter what I do, I cannot convey what it means to see our water mixed by molecule with other waters.  Knowing that we can be both the same and different, intimately mingled and unique; knowing that we each bring something to a richly laden table but that once we have mixed we can never be separated cleanly, that this time and this place leave an indelible mark on us–the symbols are rich and varied and I will try to explain a little, but when we watch our water go into the common bowl our hearts speak the wisdom we need if we let them.

We are the water.

This is us.

You are invited, after the service, to take a little piece of us home with you, to fill your vial with the mingled waters of your community and keep it, or boil it or freeze it or water your garden with it; you are invited to offer it as holy water on Samhain or Beltane; to bless your visitors, to cleanse your home.  Make with it symbol and ritual that means something to you, with deep roots in your heart and your theology.

And when you take the water, what does it mean?  Early communion was potluck, celebration of abundance, about combining the resources of community to find richness among us.  Later in Christian history the focus shifted from the loaves and fishes miracle to the Last Supper, where Jesus said, this is my body, and this is my blood; remember me when you eat and drink.  (from Saving Grace, Rebecca Parker and Rita Nakashima Brock)

(What does it mean to take that of others and make it our own? )

We call this communion.

Remember me.  Absorb me.  Integrate me.  Transform me.

To immerse ourselves in the change that other people will bring into our lives we have to trust them, or we have to trust ourselves, or we have to trust the process.  By knowing each other we offer ourselves up–we will never be the same again.  By loving another we take a tremendous risk–we become vulnerable to loss and gain, joy and pain beyond measure.  By joining ourselves to this community–however brief the union–we open the possibility of connection with all these people.  All of them.  Flawed and funny and smart and serious and hopeful and grieving and just like us and nothing like us, all of them.  And our communion together today says yes, we are here, yes, we are present, yes, we make of ourselves what we can, yes we offer ourselves as we can, yes we will take the chance, yes, we will be open, yes, we will transform, yes we will be transformed.

If we only give, we come up empty.  It is when we complete the cycle that we are once again filled.

homily 2:

The world is a desert right now.  In the way that the tribes in the desert needed water and manna from heaven, we are starving, thirsty, wandering souls.  Our hearts and our spirits cry out for some relief as our minds despair, and what can we do?

These, friends, are the days of religion.  These are the days of faith.  If religion in this country is declining, then we people of religion are failing not just ourselves, but the whole world.  I don’t mean that we should have an unthinking faith or a false hope.  We do not have that to offer.  But we are the water in the desert.  We are not empty-handed supplicants, and we are not a mir[...]

101 Gifts (Flower Communion)

May 18, 2008

Ellsworth, Maine

Leela Sinha

There’s been a lot of depression going around lately. I, myself have been depressed for the last four days. This is a triumph—in years past it might have been four months before the fog was lifted–and yet today already I can feel that grey veil peeling back to reveal a world in full color. I mentioned my depression to a friend who said that it was happening to everyone she knows— not usual for early May—and she suggested that the earthquake and the cyclone and the continuing war are creating a collective weight that is pressing down on all of us, too much death and destruction for our mere humanness to bear.

She could be right. Spring may have arrived, but there are so many people struggling for the threads of their lives that we can’t help but be affected; we can’t help but be pushed. We are not living in isolation, and while we never have, technology brings the crises closer than ever. From here there is so little we can do—and it calls up memories of other similar times: Columbine and the tsunami and riots and cults and we are stuck in our comfortable lives wondering when the weight of the guilt will paralyze us for good. It’s not a hard leap from there to feeling helpless and from there we slide easily to hopeless and from there it’s just a hop, skip, and a jump—or a slump—to depression. When we add our own personal losses to the mix this puzzle of depression’s surge is no longer a puzzle. The puzzle then is, what are we going to do about it? See the trick to depression is that it’s not a thing to be fought, because it feeds on negative energy. It’s not a thing to be pushed back against. It’s a condition to be managed, to be worked around, to be slyly evaded. Brute force rarely works; what works is a clever and persistent underground resistance.

Some of that resistance is medical—rearranging the chemistry that causes the slump either by medication or by conversation. Some of that resistance is routine—making easiest the things that are best for us. Some of that resistance is educational—when we shine a light on depression it shrinks a bit. And some of that resistance is social—using the power of community to keep us in good health.

Community has power. It has tremendous power. People who don’t have any idea why else they come to church come to church to be in community, because there’s something about it that we can’t get by ourselves. Even when we don’t understand it we want it—in fact, we crave it. Humans are built to be social animals and we respond to the presence of others. When we come to church we come bringing ourselves, bringing the gift of whoever we are, however we are. Whether we think we need it or not, someone needs it—someone needs us— perhaps to hug, perhaps to reject, perhaps to reflect, perhaps to educate, perhaps to soothe. When we come here we come here as 101 people bearing 101 gifts, and we give those gifts to each other.

And nothing helps us feel unpinched like giving it away.

If we believe in abundance; if we believe in strength and hope and joy; if we are having a hard day and believe in nothing; if we are fearful; if we are inspired—what we bring to the community makes the community. We are the community. And when we feel the depression grasping our hearts we still have something to bring. Even weeds flower. Even the weeds in our own yards flower. We always have something. And the community, the transforming power of community, means that we will find a way to use it—but for that transformation to occur, we must be willing to let go.

One of the hardest things for institutions is being given large financial gifts with long lists of restrictions. Organizations have been disbanded while holding major gifts that were entirely unusable, like a huge organ endowment for a church that is desperate to fix its foundation. What good is an organ if the roof leaks and the pews are sinking through the f[...]