During our second breakfast service, SCC’s writers circle shared pieces of poetry and prose spanning a spectrum of styles, topics, and emotions. It was a rich and tender morning full of vulnerability and love. Then Jacob Rose closed the morning with his song, Hold Your Head Up High. SCC’s writers circle is open to anyone — we meet on the 2nd Tuesday of each month at 7pm.
A huge need in people’s lives is to feel a sense of belonging. Jess, Lorna and Janell all share various stories where they have seen or felt this sense of belonging exist. They acknowledge its meaningfulness and how its goodness can trickle outward beyond an individual’s immediate communities. They further reflected on how communities of belonging create a dwelling place for God’s love and peace.
This Sunday Bradley Jersak shared a beautiful message with us: When we see each other with the “eyes of flesh,” we’re prone to all sorts of mistaken judgments. And when we see the world through “eyes of flesh,” we become overwhelmed and hopeless because we’re blinded to God’s everywhere presence and the beauty and love and light available all the time. But when we learn to “see with our hearts,” it’s as if the world is transfigured and those around us are precious beacons of light and hope. And how’s this for a future: “And every eye will see him, and he will wipe every tear from our eyes. No more suffering, no more death, because the Lamb will be their Shepherd.
In this Easter homily, Jess Williams reflects on the suffering of Christ and his unshakeable solidarity with humankind, and what it might mean that Love is with us at all times. She invites us to consider the cross as both a confrontation and an invitation to “love the world in all the painfully honest ways only you can love it.” (A New Spring, James A. Pearson, )
Rachael explores the idea that maturing faith is movement towards “more love and union – in ever widening circles” (Richard Rohr), asking what wisdom this vision could offer us for these days, how we see it expressed in Jesus, and what sandboxes, planks and annoying people can teach us!
Jess invites us to consider how the invitation to exchange the question “Is this right or is this wrong?” for “Is this the path of Love” might transform the way we see and relate to ourselves and others, and serve as a grounding guide through challenging times. She points out how Jesus embodied this principle in revolutionary ways. Then we turned our attention toward Banksy’s piece “Rage, The Flower Thrower” which led to a beautifully complex conversation about choosing the path of love in the face of violence and oppression.
Wendy VanderWal Martin offers a beautiful contribution to our new teaching theme by exploring the possibility that those who have come before us and those who have ‘loved us in the flesh’ are still present to us beyond death and can be significant portals of Love. She turns to the great cloud of witnesses mentioned in Hebrews 12 to help us imagine this and shares her own experiences of this kind of presence in her life. Wendy invites us all to be open to the idea that we are truly never alone.
As we start to move into our new teaching theme of “The Path of Love: A Way in the Wilderness,” Rachael reviews what inspired it and brings forward Walter’s contributions about the vulnerability of love from before the theme even began! Then she explores the idea that our human experience of the path of love is always a way in the wilderness, and that the conditions that make love hard and vulnerable are exactly what cause its most beautiful expressions to emerge.
This Sunday, Jess Williams introduced our new teaching theme, ‘The Path of Love: A Way in the Wilderness’ and invited us to enter the year holding the question, “is this the path of love?” as a guide through the times ahead. She explains how the leadership collective arrived at this theme, and shares some of the passages, poetry, and community insights that led them here.
On this Fourth Sunday of Advent, with the theme of Love, Walter emphasizes how strange it is that Vulnerable Love is God’s response to all the big problems in the world and the path that God invites us to follow.
