Category: Blessing

Love’s Endeavor

“The endeavor to genuinely love engages all our emotions.” [1]

Imagine if love’s goodness includes facing the obstacle that challenges us?     Which, of course, seems counterintuitive.  If love is genuine, it should be experienced as uplifting, inspiring, or consoling, right?  Any indication otherwise refutes it as satisfying the auspices of love.

Yet what if authentic love insists on not being limited?    What if love means engaging ALL of our emotions?    Those we gravitate to, such as a sense of belonging, intimacy, trustfulness, and tenderness, and those we do our utmost to avoid: raw, fierce,  deeply honest, and fearful emotions.

Loving this way makes a “…personal, spiritual, ethical, and moral demand on us.” [1]  An insistent love, yes, but a wholly inclusive one.  A love not separated from the truth but bound up in it.  A love that is inconvenient and even hurtful at times.   But a love that also moves us beyond sentiment and into the realm of trustful connections, authentic living, and even joy.

Prayer: On this St. Valentine’s Day, Limitless One, we give thanks that your summons to love authentically is not in opposition to living joyfully.  Instead, in your fierceness and fullness, you seek to complete us, humankind, and all Creation.  May we, as your children, incarnate your love, a love not separated from the truth but bound up in it.  We ask this in all the holy names of God. Amen.

  [1]  Rev. Dr. Jacqui Lewis, an author and activist, Rev. Lewis is the Senior Minister for Public Theology and Transformation at Middle Church in NYC

 

 

The Blessing of the Longest Night

This is the night when you can trust,
that any direction you go,
you will be walking toward the dawn.  [2]

Can we trust that the direction we’re headed will get us there?   How about those times when we were certain that the path was the right one…only to discover that we’ve lost our way?     What of those times when we’re unsure what lies beyond the bend?

But to the ancients, Winter Solistice signified that despite missteps and misfortune, something altogether mysterious was afoot.   From the neolithic structures in England and Ireland, the worship of the gods Apollo and Saturn by the ancient Greeks and Romans, observances by the Native Americans, and the ancient Persian festival of Shab-e Yalda, this union of awareness emerges and takes hold.   Even when Christianity emerged onto the world scene, ancient winter solstice celebrations became incorporated into Christmas.

What, then, is the Blessing of the Longest Night?    Though the world’s peoples are separated by geography and culture; language and religion; ethnicity, national identity, and borders; the longest night ushers in a shared human experience.   A shared experience marked by a sense of wonder and celebration.    Despite all that divides us as the human family,   for the briefest moments, we become one.   A union and blessing that walks us and all creation toward a new dawn and a new beginning.

[1] Image by SASCHA SCHUERMANN | Credit: AFP/Getty Images

[1] An excerpt from Jan L. Richardson’s poem, Blessing for the Longest Night.

 

 

%d bloggers like this: