“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
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
