“There is darkness at the end of the tunnel, save for one thing: spring and resurrection! Every spring, a warm sun reappears, and nature and we are given the opportunity to unthaw, to resurrect. Some years back, I received an Easter card which contained only these simple words: “May you leave behind you a string of empty tombs!” That’s the challenge of Easter: To resurrect daily, to leave behind us a string of empty tombs, to let our crucified hopes and dreams be resurrected so that, like Christ, our lives will radiate the truth that, in the end, everything is good, reality can be trusted. Love does triumph over apathy and hatred, togetherness over loneliness, peace over chaos, and forgiveness over bitterness. We need regular resurrections. Spring and the resurrection are the season to let ourselves be unthawed, to re-virginize, to come to second naiveté, to think young again, to give the child in us scope again, to be open again to new possibilities, to surprise, to a new frolic under the sun after a cold bitter time.”
“Crucifixions, bitterness, and winters will come, but spring and resurrection are arsonists, both of them.”
R.Rolheiser
A word from the Reverend Lynn Ungar, Unitarian Universalist poet laureate...
Pandemic
What if you thought of it
as the Jews consider the Sabbath—
the most sacred of times?
Cease from travel.
Cease from buying and selling.
Give up, just for now,
on trying to make the world
different than it is.
Sing. Pray. Touch only those
to whom you commit your life.
Center down.
And when your body has become still,
reach out with your heart.
Know that we are connected
in ways that are terrifying and beautiful.
(You could hardly deny it now.)
Know that our lives
are in one another’s hands.
(Surely, that has come clear.)
Do not reach out your hands.
Reach out your heart.
Reach out your words.
Reach out all the tendrils
of compassion that move, invisibly,
where we cannot touch.
Promise this world your love--
for better or for worse,
in sickness and in health,
so long as we all shall live.
--Lynn Ungar 3/11/20
Seek the stillness inside the movement
“Wind’s in the east,
mist coming in,
like something is brewing,
about to begin.
Can’t put my finger
on what lies in store,
but I feel what’s to happen,
all happened before.”
Mary Poppins
“God sends the wind, but man must raise the sail.” Saint Augustine
Emerging
Emerging
by R.S. Thomas from Frequencies
Not as in the old days I pray,
God. My life is not what it was...
Once I would have asked healing.
I go now to be doctored...
to lend my flesh as manuscript of the great poem
Of the scalpel. I would have knelt
long, wrestling with you, wearing
you down. Hear my prayer Lord, hear my prayer.
As though you were deaf, myriads of mortals
have kept up their shrill
cry, explaining your silence by their unfitness.
It begins to appear
this is not what prayer is about.
It is the annihilation of difference,
the consciousness of myself in you,
of you in me...I begin to recognize
you anew, God of form and number.
There are questions we are the solution
to, others whose echoes we must expand
to contain. Circular as our way
is, it leads not back to the snake-haunted
garden, but onward to the tall city
of glass that is the laboratory of the spirit.
Dear Veronica, my dear children,
Every life is a wonderful story worthy of being told.
Every life is a work of art, and if it does not seem so,
perhaps it is only necessary to illuminate the room
that contains it.
The secret is never to lose faith,
to have confidence in God’s plan for us,
revealed in the signs with which He shows us the way.
If you learn to listen, you will find that each life speaks to us of love. Because love is the key to everything, the engine of the world. Love is the secret energy behind every note I sing.
And never forget that there’s no such thing as happenstance.
That’s an illusion lawless and arrogant men invented so that
they could sacrifice the truth of our world to the laws of reason.
Andrea Bocelli
Silence of Music
Official page for Kairos Center for Change The foundation for everlasting change is spiritual preparation. Why? Two main reasons.
