Our Past Creating a Story for the Future
Each month, our community shapes itself around a different aspect of our world. So far this Fall, we’ve embraced possibility and cultivated relationship. This month, we will be Holding History in our worship and spiritual lives.
I recently visited family, and got to “hold history” in our relationship during a visit with an elderly relative. She was born just before the stock market crash hit New York and the Great Depression began. We talked a about the times of her childhood, then more about her teenage years, and summers working at a Jewish camp in upstate New York. She reminisced about getting to see plays and musical numbers still in production that became camp entertainment. How she’d seen musical numbers long before their professional runs on Broadway or in films.
Then, my dear relative mentioned the town of Koidanov that my great-grandfather and the whole family had emigrated from. Then, thanks to the internet, we were able to look it up and see pictures of some historic sites together. For our family, sharing this experience of her retelling our history was a way of building relationships. We were honoring our elders and ancestors, becoming more connected. We felt ourselves joined to a long stream of history of the world. The feeling in our bones was one of becoming a part of something greater than ourselves.
In our congregation, too, part of community is telling the stories of our community’s ancestors and of our own lives. This is what weaves the fabric of our history. It gives roots to us, like a great tree reaching toward the sky with beautiful leaves that drop each Fall… cycles that continue in growth. Our stained glass window, pictures on the wall, quilts, and wall hangings are all part of our shared stories.
I recall these lines of poetry:
In the daily weave of our lives, those who have died are still strong, guiding threads.
Immortality by Leslie Takahashi
Theirs is the golden glimmer or perhaps the brilliant red or the melancholy blue—
still they are part of the whole cloth of our lives.
They are the ancestors: the “goers before.”
Through this, we know immortality.
… They are more than remembered, they are memory itself.
For what we love lives on in the way
our beloved dead accompany us through our life—
their words and wisdom our guide, their humor our relief,
their restless concern for the world our charge.
Through this, we know immortality.
I think somewhat often about the need for history… not the glorious battles and far-off heroes so much as the connections to people and stories that are personal. History lets us know that we are not alone, not the first to try something hard. None of us is the only person who has ever screwed up or been at a loss to fix it. We are not the best nor the worst. Yet we are always, always part of an ongoing epic series in which we write just a few chapters. A sense of history reminds us that we are not so important that we cannot have space to be imperfect. At the same time, we are also those whose choices change the world, reshaping the pattern of everything that is.
Shaping and Sharing Our Story Together
It’s a beautiful paradox to be both infinitely small and infinitely important… to know that everyone else is both those things as well. So this month, I invite you to consider your story in the context of this community. This month, think about how your life intersects with Unitarian Universalism and our shared story, and what this congregation has made possible in your life.
Then, I invite you to share your story… Perhaps come to Soul Matters or Community Office Hours and tell me about it, ask how to write something for the newsletter or a worship service, call a friend because this pondering made you think of that old friendship that was cultivated through this community, or just let it be a warm glow in your heart. However you choose to be a part of our history and present, know that there is love here, and that you are a part of making this community of its growth.
