Throughout our lives, we are changing, learning, growing – we may feel we are pretty much the same person we were yesterday, and we may expect that we will wake up tomorrow as pretty much the same person we are now, yet in truth we are always in a process of becoming. This is true for each of us as individuals, and it is true for the communities and institutions to which we belong.
The embrace of the evolving, emerging future is a characteristic of liberal religion. The people who we see as our religious ancestors in Unitarian Universalism were often (though not always) those visionaries who questioned, who challenged the status quo, and who believed in the possibility and desirability of change.
We have come through a year of so much change – much of it unsought, unwelcome, and stressful, as a pandemic drastically changed our daily patterns of interaction almost overnight. The development of a vaccine offers us hope for another round of big changes, but as we live into the opening up of social interactions, who do we want to become? Do we want to go back to things the way they were? Could we, even if we wanted to?
What have we learned that is worth continuing as we become a post-Covid world? Nation? State? Congregation? What did we stop doing that we DON’T want to resume as before? I’m looking forward to exploring this topic with all of you in worship, covenant groups, and Second Hour conversations this month.