Back in the Saddle

Well, after a summer hiatus, I am glad to be settling back into the routine of church life and contemplation. We had a jubilant celebration of common waters to begin our church year and followed that with a Sunday devoted to atonement.

Here's an article that I wrote for the September 9 edition of the Foxboro Reporter on the topic of atonement. The one published in the paper was quite altered from what I wrote for them, but here's my copy:

Broken Beauty

By Katie Lawson, Minister of Foxborough Universalist Church

Once I was told that being in relationship is much like sitting in an old log cabin in the midst of a tremendous winter storm. We light a fire in the fireplace and sit down on the couch in front of it with our beloved and try to keep warm. Pretty soon, because we are human, we feel a draft and get up to find where the cold wind is blowing in under the door and roll up a towel and jam it in there. In having got up, we got cold and so we hustle back to the couch to a warm embrace and the glow of the fire. Soon enough we feel another draft—another assault on our perfect warmth—and set out to find the gap between the logs through which the wind has found its way in. Now we are cold again, maybe even colder not having fully warmed up after the last time. This goes on, us getting up to find and fill the cracks meanwhile getting colder and colder when really all along we could have been throwing more logs on the fire and being warmed by the heat of our beloved.

This wisdom applies just as readily to the rest of life—that we have a tendency to hustle around trying to repair the places where the wind blows in or at least hang pictures over them, especially if people are coming over. We are afraid the cold wind of loneliness, of life without love and joy, and, so we try to stop up the places where it might seep in, when all the time we could be sitting on the couch with our beloved and stoking the fire. This is not to say we should live in denial that there are cracks or that we don’t get up to close the front door when in blows open, only that we understand that charming old log cabins like us are going to leak just a bit and that’s okay. It doesn’t mean we have to freeze.

Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “There is a crack in everything God has made.” He wasn’t filing this as a complaint—critiquing God’s handy work. He was trying to say that everything that is REAL in this world is imperfect. Everything whose origin is love is imperfect. We are all imperfect, and those imperfections don’t keep us separate from love and joy; often, in fact, it is our compulsion to fix them or hide them that will. We are entering the Jewish Days of Awe, which began with the Jewish New Year and will culminate with Yom Kippur, a Day of Atonement. Let’s begin again. Let’s find a nice big log to throw on the fire and for as long as we can stand it let our cracks be and feel the warmth of forgiveness next to our Beloved. May you each be forgiven, may you forgive.