Pastoral Message

The day the war began, I walked into the church and spent time in my office and doing some flower arranging. I was preparing for a class that night and making the usual round of phone calls. A normal day, sort of, but with that nagging anxiety behind the ordinary appearances.

The day the war began, I heard thunderstorms and lightning and the dark clouds. A tornado sighting south of Springfield but several church members assured me it was normal in an Illinois spring. I listened to the storm and wind and rain and could almost sense the rushing of the clouds over the church. I stood at the front door and listened to the drops of rain hitting the ground and swelling pools of water.

The day the war began, I found dozens of earthworms crawling here and there in the driveway, on the sidewalk and even into the church. I remembered last spring when the same thing had happened and I'd told the children the following Sunday about carrying the live earthworms outside into the grass and water. I thought about how blind they are but with the awareness of cool water, wet ground and welcoming soil. I thought about them and their seemingly simple and uncomplicated lives and their non-awareness of our concerns and anxieties.

The day the war began, I saw the sun come out and the earthworms beginning to perish on the drying sidewalk and road. Did they suffer or feel pain? Perhaps. Their lives had come and gone; in the larger scheme of things their lives didn't matter too much except to them. In the larger scheme of things, the clouds and thunder came and went several times with bursts of sun that killed earthworms.

The day the war began, I knew that in the lives of storms and seasons and earthworms and birds on Lake Springfield, our worries and anxieties meant very little. They would continue to exist now and into the future just as they have for countless millennia.

Does this make our feelings less important? Of course not - regardless how we feel about matters of war or peace. But such perspective may have a lesson for us in this deeply troubled time. Life and the work of being human go on. We take care of families, we work or study or rest. We love as best we are able and try to make some sense out of life. We keep doing our best to be good and kind people and, as the sign on the Social Action bulletin board says, we "listen more and talk less."

So in this difficult time, I hope we'll listen to our hearts, our feelings, and our yearnings and to each other's pain. I hope we'll be considerate of one another and realize that we are family. And families, I have discovered in recent years, are not necessarily the families of blood relations - they're folks bonded by something greater than the sum of the parts - Americans, Iraqis, French, Germans, Unitarian Universalists, Baptists - the list goes on and on.

And we do the best we can. That's what families do on days that wars begin but also the days when wars come to an end and the work of peace starts anew.

Unitarian Universalist Association
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