Lessons from the Grackle
This is a meditation about relationships – to the Earth, to one another, to ourselves. In anticipation of Earth Day on April 22nd, Gretta Vosper opens with concerns for the planet. She offers the example of the grackle bird which takes crud from her eaves and even lint from her dryer and uses this to fashion its nest. We need to impose such a discipline on ourselves! - finding ways to take detritus and make it useful. Give back to the Earth. But the same applies to our relationships. Where relationships have failed, there is a detritus that looks to us much like the crud in our eaves. Yet there are possibilities here as well. Gretta speculates on ways that we can turn the stuff of our setbacks into opportunities for growth and for new life.
Changes
We live in a changing world. Rapid change demands from us a spiritual response which honestly addresses the fact of change. Gretta Vosper believes the church has, for the most part, failed to provide spiritual leadership to the many many people who look to church for guidance in the quest for meaningful living in the midst of change. In response, she has sought to make church a place where the challenges of current scholarship are faced squarely, and where exclusive claims for truth give way to a more free-wheeling environment where people can feel comfortable asking difficult questions. In short, she seeks to meet change with change.
But Gretta is not just a minister of ideas; she is also a minister with pastoral responsibilities. As a spiritual community West Hill UC has been struggling with the changing culture of church. While many embrace it; others have found it unsettling and disorienting. This morning’s meditation is addressed to those within the West Hill family who have found Gretta’s ministry problematic. And as in a family, there are ways of addressing conflict which work, and ways that do not. Gretta grieves those who find they have no choice but to leave, but at the same time invites them, along with those who feel unsure about things, to speak directly to her about their concerns.
We are a community, and as such, there are times when what we believe is less important than how we do our believing, and doing so with a view to the spiritual health of the whole community. We invite those visiting online to recognize that we are a community in transition, struggling to come to terms with our changing sense of identity.
Beyond Belief
The gospel portion of the lectionary readings for this 3rd week of Easter is Luke 24:13-35, the story of the two on the road to Emmaus who meet Jesus incognito. Gretta describes how, even at the time of its writing, the Easter story was consciously crafted to call us to a reinforcement of belief. She speaks of a sermon she once delivered titled “I want to be an evangelical Christian.” That kind of belief would filter a lot of life’s messiness and answer a craving for a coherent account of things. But how much do we miss by ignoring that messiness?
The meditation turns to the morning’s reading from Robert Ingersoll, a 19th century free thinker who challenges more conventional accounts of belief. He asks: What is it that we are afraid of? Are we afraid of dying? Or of living? We have to get beyond belief to what he calls a “true religion” – an approach to the transcendent through an engagement in the wonder and awe and beauty of the world around us. Perhaps at Easter we can choose this manner of engagement as the belief we reinforce for ourselves.