From the Associate Pastor
Reflecting on family Sundays when she was a child, UCC minister, Donna Schaper, writes, “When I was growing up, my family kept Sabbath in the traditional Protestant Lutheran way: Sunday was more social than spiritual. (I think that is where I first learned that God loves people, that the spiritual comes through the social!) In the fifties, we had very little to do on Sunday except for visits back and forth between families. Nobody talked about much except each other. There was always a large dinner somewhere, usually at a grandparent’s house. There were drinks. People told secrets. The women talked about the men in the kitchen. The children ran around in circles doing cousin-type things. We fought. We told secrets. We played endless hide-and-seek for afternoons that seemed like decades in the front yard. The men occupied chairs and talked sports or bosses or cars or the best routes to the mountains. People were not rushing – they were being. There was no where to go but where they were.”
She concludes, “My parents lived in a more congealed time and a more congealed culture. I live in a less congealed time and a less congealed culture.” I wonder, how “congealed” is your life?
Actually, I’m not sure I like the word, “congealed”, but I do know that it is often a challenge for me to be present and happy in the moment. I might like the page I’m on well enough, but I find myself constantly looking ahead to the next page to see what I might be doing next. My “now” is constantly being invaded by “later”, the next obligation intrudes on the current obligation. Too often, a very uncongealed life.
Summer beckons. June was crazy busy, but perhaps now the pace slows, at least for a while. I think I need some congealed time, some time when, in the words of Schaper, I am “no longer insatiably bent on The Next Thing.” I look forward to some time when I am able to see a lot in a little, when I can celebrate “little victories of being over doing.” And so may these summer days be for each of you.
Gene
