Recently, I was asked to create a eulogy for someone I did not know. In my conversations with the family, I didn’t ask about the beliefs of the person who had died. Near the end of the eulogy, I said, “In recent years, I have put less importance on what someone believed and more importance on how they lived.” The person who died had lived a good life. She was kind to the people around her. She was a good mother to her sons and a good partner and friend.
I begin with this because the Unitarian Universalist Association is now considering changing our principles and sources to values. During General Assembly, Unitarian Universalists will discuss this change and the delegates will have a chance to vote on whether they want this change to be presented and voted on next year. If this change is important to you, whatever your opinion, I hope that you get involved in the discussion.
I also believe that just as the person whose life I eulogized, we, as Unitarian Universalists, will be known not by these words but by how we live out our values in the world. In Prescott and the surrounding Quad City area, few people know of our principles and sources. They know us for how we show up in the community. They know us by how we live. The new people who come to us can see how we are living and what we are doing. This should always be our focus.
From the first Sunday of June, you have been bringing food items for the pantry up to the front of the sanctuary during our Joys and Sorrows. This embodies our commitment to healing food insecurity. In September, the great collaborative congregational effort with PUUF will come to fruition with Empty Bowls. During the past months, our congregation has been encouraged and cajoled to make some new and seemingly small shifts in our lives. Under the direction of Susan Cooper, the Green Team asked us to connect with sustainable energy sources through electric company programs (we are signed up through APS), a solar cooperative, or our own solar panels. We have achieved 31%. This is a great number for most ventures and for a faith community that is known for our stands around climate change, I think that we need to do much better.
When we think of climate justice, it is easy to pontificate or put on our T-shirts with emblazoned slogans and march around the Courthouse Square. The Green Team is asking us to align with our stand on climate change by enrolling in programs through the APS Green Choice program or Arcadia. If this presents a technological problem for you, members who are impassioned with making this happen can help. Some of you do not have connections with electric companies because you are in an independent or assisted living situation. You are excused! I think, though, that we can raise this number to at least 80%. If we do, that would be something to put in a poster. If you need help, please contact our administrator, Tracy Powers, and she will put you in touch with someone who can help you.
Another area we can raise above 80% is the number of households that are composting. Mary Lou and I have a beautiful lidded pot by our sink that holds our kitchen scraps. Outside our door is a larger plasticlidded bucket that holds a week’s worth of scraps. Each Saturday morning, we take these scraps to the Farmer’s Market and come back with a clean bucket. If you don’t come to the Farmer’s Market, then you can bring your scraps to our compost piles in our community garden across the street from our building. Stephen Lovejoy is willing to tell you all about this after any Sunday service.
Both reducing waste and our dependence on fossil fuels are key to mitigating the effects of climate change and they show our love for the Earth. When you take the time to make these changes, the Earth will reciprocate. You will be more susceptible to the beauty that is around us, the sound of wind in the trees, the woodpeckers chasing each other up the side of a ponderosa. The light filtering through the trees or playing on the mountain tops. The trouble we take in our personal lives will return to us in unexpected joy. We will be walking the talk that is written on the wall behind our pulpit of “respecting the interconnected web of life.” Will you join this quiet revolution? Let us be who we say we are.
I look forward to talking with you about this when I return in August from my long walk.
Do you ever look back and think, “Could that have been five years ago? It seems like last year!” Over the past few weeks, the walls of our home have listened to many conversations about the accelerated passage of time. Sometimes, right before summer, I remember my feelings as a child of months stretching before me freed from the constraints of school.
Looking back, though, I wonder if those memories came from books that I read. For me, freedom meant the freedom to read, to have long uninterrupted dives into the world of books. I can hear my mother’s voice calling from somewhere in the house, “Patty, are you reading again?”
My parents believed in the importance of study but they also strongly believed in the value of work. When I was fourteen, through a contact at our church, my father arranged for my first full-time summer job. For forty hours a week, I took care of five children under the age of ten, living in a small home out on a rural road near Eau Claire, Wisconsin.
Their mother was going through a difficult psychological time and their father was abusive. Along with caring for the children, I cleaned their home of pots of food that had been left for weeks in corners of the kitchen and diapers stuffed under beds and in closets.
The part I loved was reading to the children, introducing them to my favorite children’s books, and taking them on exploratory walks in the woods. The part I hated was leaving them, especially the three-year-old, on Friday afternoons when their father returned from where he was studying auto mechanics during the week.
At home, I would squeeze my reading into the evening hours, reading quickly, forgetting to savor those marvelous words. I wonder if that was when I began to think that time was not on my side?
This emphasis in my upbringing of productivity created a core belief that time was scarce. Often during my adult years, I have felt the need to “work” on savoring time and even surrendering to it. During the past weeks, I have returned again to an exploration of my relationship with time, trying not to make it “work.”
Each day, I look for moments like those out on our deck when time passes from second to second before sunset, accompanied by the sound of birds. I’ve been trying to create that prolonged sense of time when I sit with you when you are going through something difficult or simply to listen to how you are in this moment. I have been paying attention to the quality of time, sometimes just seconds of encounters with neighbors when we walk, allowing for a conversation about the loss of a pet or a bear spotted only three miles away. I have been allowing my silent walks to be interrupted because it seems wrong to say to a neighbor, “I’m sorry but I need to be quiet now.” If I said that, my insistence on silence would ruin the moment. We can’t rush mindfulness!
Will you join me in the work of stretching time? This summer, let’s relax into those moments alone and with others when we can take a deep breath. This is the quality of time we need for the dreaming and envisioning that we are moving into as a congregation. When you look at the work that will be spread out on the sanctuary walls by the sanctuary transformation team, take a deep breath and be present. Don’t march through it. Take time. Take time to click on and watch the videos you will be sent in the Weekly Peak and in this Newsletter.
Listen to each other with the reciprocity we have been bringing to walks in the forest. Take time after service to ask someone you don’t know or an old friend, “What are your dreams?” Let time spread around you, unhurried. We have all the time in the world. The work for this summer is to listen and take time.
If you wrote to me today, you would have received my “Sabbath” message. Today is Monday, a day that I usually rest from ministry but after I received my first text of the day, I knew what I needed to talk with you about this month.
Every other Monday begins with a text from the “Food for your Neighbors” program at the Farmer’s Market asking me how many boxes of fresh vegetables and fruit I need to be delivered on Saturday morning for people experiencing food insecurity. Marie Higgins, the volunteer who heads up the program, and I have been in contact for two or three years. At first, I helped connect her with drivers at Granite Peak who could deliver fifteen or so boxes to a place in Prescott Valley where they would be picked up by families in need. With the dissolution of Keep Prescott Together, the destinations for boxes also became difficult and we had to start over. Today, I asked for 7 boxes. That was two more than the previous delivery. This work makes me very proud to be your minister!
Sometimes, if I receive names too late to submit for a box, I go to the Farmer’s Market and receive $25 in coupons and I fill the box for them with what I imagine they might need. This has been an amazing experience. All of it. Probably the most important learning experience has been doing the shopping.
When I ask for the coupons, the Farmer’s Market volunteers assume that I need assistance. That made me aware of my jewelry and embroidered jacket and favorite purse. Did they think that I was faking it? I deliberately tried not to tell them that I was a minister picking up food for someone else. It was hard to be that person who received assistance. This model of giving is hard for those who receive it. I feel good about the number of boxes rising and I dream a bigger dream called “Mutual Aid.”
Mutual aid is not charity, but the building and continuing of new social relations where people give what they can and get what they need. Mutual aid is an idea and practice that is based on the principles of direct action, cooperation, mutual understanding, and solidarity.
Mutual aid recognizes that we are all in need and that we all have something to give and demonstrates the reciprocity of the interconnected web of life. We experienced mutual aid when we lived in a farming village in Japan. When our roof replacement cost a small fortune, we opened ourselves to receiving. Our neighbors left bags of vegetables on our doorstep. The grocers in the village at the foot of the mountain asked us if we could use imperfect apples to make sauce or juice. We only bought cheese that had been marked down because it was on the edge of spoiling. I disliked sweet potatoes, one of the main crops of our village, and that first winter we received two gunny sacks full of them. I learned to make sweet potato soups and pies. To reciprocate, we invited our neighbors to sit by our sturdy Wisconsin-made wood -burning stove in our living room and fixed them persimmon pudding made from the persimmons that grew on the edge of our land. In the summer, we made plum wine to share.
What would that look like here? When people join our congregation, we talk of giving time, talent, and treasure. I wonder if it would be good to talk about the “r” of receiving. For all that you have given, could you receive a ride to our services, boxes of vegetables to hold you through when you had unexpected taxes to pay, or a job that fizzled unexpectedly? I hope that we begin this transformation by entering into the reciprocity of mutual aid. Let us remember our times of need. Let us recognize our current needs along with what we can give. I believe that reciprocity is an essential element of a beloved community.
In the meantime, the food pantry needs your support. Please donate to the Minister’s Benevolence Fund, from which we buy food for the pantry, and fill our entryway basket on Sunday or during the week with the targeted food donations announced in the Weekly Peak. If you go to Costco, consider getting an extra bag of toilet paper!
If you get huge bags of rice and beans, consider giving us a part of that bounty. I also want you to let me know if you’d like to receive from our food pantry. I can arrange that. Let us dream of a place where people in fancy cowboy boots are unashamed to pick up needed goods knowing that the gifts they give of time to our community are received in return.
This transformation is one of my wildest dreams for Granite Peak. What is yours? At the end of August, Rev. Sarah Gibb-Milspaugh will be coming to facilitate a conversation about our dreams. Let’s prepare!