My Dear First Parishers,
I am so grateful for your caring, supportive responses to my announcement this past week that I will retire as your minister on June 30, 2027, the end of this church year. I shared at length in my email and in Sunday’s sermon the reasons for my decision and how much I will miss being your minister, so I won’t repeat it all here. Just know how much I care about this congregation, how hard this decision was, and what an honor it is to serve as your minister. As the UUA Transitions Office told me and Tom Coffey, our Standing Committee Chair, the search for an interim minister will not begin in earnest until spring. So, for now, we can focus on our regular church stuff as I am still your minister through the end of June!
This month’s Soul Matters worship theme is “Healing,” which struck me. November’s themes usually run along the lines of gratitude and hospitality. As I write this, we do not yet know the results of the midterm elections. For many of us, the outcomes carry heavy burdens of hope and fear about the future of our country, as if one day could determine everything. And for the past decade, we have been caught in a cycle of fraught elections every two years, in which our deep divisions surface, conspiracy theories abound, and the threat of violence simmers just beneath the surface. We have barely recovered from one election before the next begins.
Perhaps this is why the Soul Matters editors chose healing: we are in such need of it. Last year, I preached about moral dissonance and moral injury. Moral dissonance is the deep spiritual distress we feel when our own actions, or what we see happening to us or around us, conflict with our most deeply held values. Moral injury is the harm done to our souls when that dissonance reaches the level of trauma. Both affect not only perpetrators and victims but also witnesses. The violation of the human rights of immigrants, the cultural reinforcement and justification of violence against women, unashamed political corruption and abuse of power, and purposeful degradation of the environment—none of us is untouched by these things.
I am deeply moved by this. For healing to happen, we need more than community. We need communion: community gathered and joined at the level of soul. Communion is not simply shared belief (religious, political, or otherwise), nor friendship, nor comfort. It is the willingness to share, to be vulnerable, to open our hearts and embrace one another’s full humanity as we offer our own. We cannot simply leap into this. It requires deep trust, and building that trust is slow and quiet work. It happens in conversations over a meal, in working side by side to serve with and for our neighbors, or in coming together to sing. The election results will be what they will be. Whatever the outcome, we can focus on healing where it is needed: from our own bodies and spirits to the natural world that surrounds us.
So, let us vote, pray/meditate, heal!
In faith,
Rev. Ellen