“When we no longer know what to do, we have come to our real work and when we no longer know which way to go, we have begun our real journey.”
Wendell Berry
“Take delight in the Lord, and he will give you the desires of your heart. Commit your way to the Lord; trust in him, and he will act.”
Psalm 37:4-5
My trip to the grocery store last week felt different. No staff member was at the entrance handing out sanitizing wipes and spraying down carts. Many were shopping without masks. The energy felt lighter, less tense. I noticed I was breathing fully. After this long period of caution, isolation, and uncertainty, we are moving into re-connection. Once again we are in the process of change. How do we go forward? Have you ever seen a cat patting a surface before putting her full weight onto it? Moving back into the world feels like that – checking things out, taking it one bit at a time before fully trusting ourselves to the new now. And by the way, what is the new now? It is the one we choose to create.
The mythologist Michael Meade suggests that rather than trying to go back to “normal,” we engage in a creative process of restoration, renewal, and return. Restoration invites us to grieve what was lost for ourselves and others over these 18 months. This week we discovered in the usher’s cabinet in the foyer of our Sanctuary the stack of unused bulletins from March 15, 2020. Given the national announcement on that Friday, our Board made the difficult and wise decision to close our buildings. We put out the word as best we could and livestreamed our service on Face Book with a cell phone. We held our Spiritual Communion as planned. God was there, we were all there, and love was there. We were and are still community, the Living Body of Christ. Yet when I read through that bulletin and our notice about safe covid prevention practices, I cried. So much has happened, so much has changed.
Renewal is the inspiration that comes into the space cleared by honest grieving. As our beloved Unity co-founder Myrtle Fillmore wrote, “During your periods of communion with the Father pray for wisdom and guidance. Be open and receptive to the leading of the Spirit. It will be revealed to you what steps to take to do your part to establish divine order.” From that divine energy we can return–not to how it was, but to what we are creating now, creating anew. We are living in an exciting time. Much constricted thinking and doing has been revealed and released. New understanding of human dignity and worth and the essential relationship we have with our earth home is expressing. We are truly in a new day. We may not know what to do or which way to go in it. That is good news. We have to trust Spirit. For as Wendell Berry writes, “we have now come to our real work, … begun our real journey.” We are being guided from within. This is the way we go authentically forward to create a world of love and peace–the new now.
In the Love and Light of the Christ,
Rev. Anna
