Better Days

Better Days (Emma's Revolution: https://youtu.be/grB7TvT_6SM)

We have come in the light to this place in the light with our hearts in the light open wide.
We are here in the light giving voice in the light to the truth in the light we divine.

Let us sing for today let us learn better ways.
Showing love in the light giving hope in the light we create in the light better days.

We are born in the dark we are fed in the dark we connect in the dark through the veil.
We are held in the dark we are healed in the dark mysteries in the dark we reveal.

Let us sing for today let us learn better ways.
Showing love in the dark giving hope in the dark we create in the dark better days.

Time is now we begin where we are we begin we have all we begin that we need.
To renew we begin to release we begin to rebuild we begin to believe.

Let us sing for today let us learn better ways.
Showing love we begin giving hope we begin we create we begin better days.

I sat in the opening worship for the LREDA professional days and I felt the tears well up and wet my face.

I did not want to cry. I did not want my colleagues to see me cry.

But I could not stop the tears.

It has been 12 years since I attended a General Assembly or a LREDA professional day at GA.  And my inner Child wanted to know why.  She wanted to know why I had abandoned her by neglecting these professional and collegial connections for so long.

Once I could hear that Child's wailing question, I could accept it and answer it.

I chose mothering infants and toddlers for a cumulative 12 years with my eyes open.  For much of that time I had very good communal support from family and friends.  I chose to become a doula and childbirth mentor in addition to my religious education calling with my eyes open.  I had amazing support from my partner and connections in that community.  But in the last half of that time, my family was also impacted by financial and social pressures we did not choose but could not avoid.   External changes beyond our control pulled us into the underworld, made us walk a labyrinthine path of change.  I will not speak for my other family members or even about our path as a family except to say that it has been hard and long.

Yes, in a way the time I've spent focused intensely on raising my young children and coping with familial and financial pressures and developing another professional role entirely in another field was an abandonment.  In other ways, it was not.  My inner Love Warrior was able to reassure my inner Child that even when it didn't look like it, all of that time I was in fact working very, very hard to get myself back here.  This reassurance steadied me, dried my tears, and let me move forward.

Put your fears down on the ground

Put your fears down on the ground. 

Walk away. 

Turn around 

and look at them 

from a little way off;

maybe holding the hand of someone you love. 

Maybe you'll feel the (ghost) hand 

of your beloved grandmother, 

The one in whose eyes you could 

do no be no think no say no wrong. 

They aren't you. 

Think about that before

you decide whether to walk over and

pick them back up again. 

Consider whether 

one or two small pieces

might have melted 

into the dirt by now. 

Look up at the sky. 

Breathe. 

Even without those fears

held tight in your hands

your heart is still

beating, you are still

you.

Easter, a Terrible Story about Hope

Once upon a time, there was a man named Jesus.

Who was Jesus?  He was a man. Probably a carpenter. A Jew. And in the world Jesus lived in, there were people with power and authority, and people without.

The Romans had armies and money and power.

The Jews did not. They were seen as different. They believed in a different God, they held strange rituals. The Romans were the ruling class and the Jews were a small, not very powerful minority.

But even in his own community, Jesus wasn't loved by everyone. Oh, he had friends, and he had followers. But he spoke truth to power. He made people uncomfortable. He said things should change, because things weren't okay the way they were.

He was scapegoated.

And he was killed.

This part of story is terrible. When I was a little kid, this story really bothered me. When Jesus is killed, that is a terrible, terrible thing.

Who are you in this story?  

Are you the hero?

Are you one of his friends?

Are you a bystander?

Are you the persecutors?

Are you someone who doesn’t even know this is happening?

So this is a terrible part of the story, and yet, terrible things happen. Every day. Every place. Throughout time. Things fall apart.

The rest of the story is about things that both do and DON’T happen every day, every place, throughout time.

In the story, Jesus is buried and after three days people who love him come to mourn at his grave and his body isn't there.

Then they see him walking around.

And he talks to them.

And they go out to tell everyone they can the GOOD NEWS that Jesus is risen.

They tell the GOOD NEWS that they believe that Jesus is part of God, and God has brought Jesus back from the dead into a new life.

They tell the GOOD NEWS that they believe that if anybody, no matter how sinful a person they are, believes that Jesus is part of God, then after they die, God will bring them back from the dead into a new life in Heaven.

This kind of thing doesn't happen in our ordinary lives. It's more like a superhero story. SUPER JESUS!!!

But it also does happen. Even when things have fallen apart, and people do terrible things to each other, even then there is hope. There are choices.

There are flowers that grow from tiny seeds and crumpled up dead looking bulbs.

There are beliefs that bring us hope and return us to life.  Even when life seems really terrible and hard.

We can choose to believe in hope.  Each of us, here, now, can choose to look for good news and share it. Sometimes, we can choose to help someone who is hurt or treated unfairly or not included. Sometimes in big ways. But we can practice for that in little ways.

I don't know if everything happens for a reason. I don't know if it makes sense to believe Jesus died to fix our mistakes. Sins are just mistakes. But I do believe we can learn something  from everything that happens. And the lesson I choose to take from what happened to Jesus is that when things fall apart, there is always the possibility that growth and new life will come after. And that I can be part of that possibility, if I choose to.

You Are Welcome Here

You Are Welcome Here

Black, Brown, Tan, White

No matter where you were born

Female, Intersex, Male, Trans

Bi, Gay, Lesbian, Queer, Straight

Able-bodied or Disabled

Adult, Baby, Child, Elder, Teen

Agnostic, Atheist, Buddhist, Christian, Hindu, Jew, Muslim, Other, Quaker, UU,

Conservative, Liberal, Progressive, Radical

All People Are Welcome Here

But Not All Behavior

No Hatred, Yes Love

No Name-Calling, Yes Respect

No Harassment, Yes Consent

No Unfairness, Yes Justice

No Intimidation, Yes Inclusion

No Grandstanding, Yes Listening

It’s okay to feel your feelings

You have choices

Use them KINDLY

Rules for Listening to People You Love But Don't Agree With

Rules for listening to people you love but don't agree with.

1. Choose to believe what they are telling you - that there is a truth at the root of what they are saying, even if it is not what they think they are saying.

2. Ask for clarification and more information instead of arguing. 'Can you tell me some specific examples of what you're talking about?' 'Can you tell me why a is more important to you than b?'

3. Move the conversation towards consensus by finding out what want or need is underneath their position. They want to feel safe - you also want them to feel safe. If you're both working on ideas of what would help them really be safe instead of attacking their first thoughts about what would make them feel safe, you'll get a lot more of what you want, too.

4. Say it's okay for the two of you to disagree. It really is. Disagreement is not the problem and can be done respectfully. Disrespect is what is not okay.

Breath

All I have to do
is let the love flow through me
like breath when I sing.

Doctor Who, Stonehenge, and Paganism

Needed: 

Green underlay

Stonehenge stones (gray felt)

Yellow felt Sun

Blue Felt Tardis

Science Symbol

Pagan Symbol

Spread out the green underlay in front of you

Hm, I wonder what this could be?

Start to set out the gray stones.

Someplace green … maybe it’s grass.

But what are these gray things?

[Kids may guess, or not.]

This is Stonehenge.  Stonehenge is a great circle of really big standing stones in a wide open field.  The stones line up so that at the Winter and Summer Solstices, you can see the sunset and the sunrise perfectly framed by the stones.

Put the sun at one end of the circle, then the other.

Stonehenge is in England.  England and other countries in Northern Europe is where a lot of my ancestors came from, a long time ago.

But Stonehenge was built much longer ago than that, probably starting about 5000 years ago.

I wonder what life was like then?

I wonder why people built this?

I wonder HOW people built this?

I wonder how we could find out the answers to the questions we have about this great mystery?

Bring out the Tardis.

One way we could find out is by time travelling.  There’s a very famous TV show called Doctor Who.  In it, The Doctor is a Time Lord.  [let kids tell you about The Doctor if they want to]  He can travel to wherever and whenever he wants.  And when he gets where he is going, he likes to find out answers to questions like, why did people build Stonehenge?  How did they do it?  Why was it important and what did they do there?

WOULDN’T THAT BE AWESOME?!?!

If we could do that?!?!?

But we can’t.  We don’t have a Tardis or any other kind of time machine.

Scientists try to answer these kinds of questions, too.

Bring out the science symbol

They dig up the ground and they radio-carbon date things and they examine the stones and they figure stuff out, like where the rocks in Stonehenge came from.  Some of them probably came from over 150 miles away.  Which means that people moved these HUGE stones on foot about as far as from here to Washington DC.  Which is AMAZING.

But they can’t really tell us why.  Science can’t tell us what the people who did these amazing things were thinking or feeling.  We can only guess.

So we guess.  And we guess that Stonehenge was used for religious ceremonies of some sort.  Pagan religious ceremonies.

Bring out the pagan symbol

A lot of religions have holy books or scriptures that tell the people who belong to that religion how the religion started, what to believe and how to worship.  Paganism doesn’t have that.

What Paganism has is a lot of stories and myths and rituals.  Some Pagans now go to Stonehenge and hold rituals and tell stories that are their best guesses about what the people who built it would have done there.  They take everything that the scientists know or guess, and they take fragments of stories that have been passed down through the generations, and they make something that means something to them out of it.

Are they right about what Stonehenge was for?  We don’t know.  They have no way to know, for sure, either.  But what matters to them is that the rituals they perform and the stories they tell make them feel more connected to each other and the natural world and the spirit world, more whole, happier. 

Please feel free to use this story anywhere you'd like with attribution to Dawn Star Sarahs-Borchelt 2016.