Last year, we got some great local coverage as the paper supported our effort to bring jazz education to children. So in about 45 minutes I'm off to yet another practice to make sure we've got our groove for the schools in a happening way. Next Sunday, the Conference Minister for the Massachusetts Conference of the United Church of Christ will be our guest preacher. Jim Antal will bring a message the grows out of his eco-justice spirituality. Our band will share a tune - "This Is Your Land" - about radical hospitality, too. (NOT the Woody Guthrie classic but the one from Point of Grace.)
Given these happenings, it is starting to feel like the new program year is going to settle in. This past month since Montreal has been frenetic - nothing like the gentle pastoral ministry I'd been doing for the past four years in the Berkshires - but now things are moving back into focus. We'll hire a new Christian Education person this week who will join us on Sunday, the jazz band will go to a few schools, the church band will join with others next Saturday for the CROP Walk Rally Against Hunger, I will have a chance to visit with a seminarian in her third year at Yale and... life will start to truly embrace the shift into autumn in our neck of the woods.
Mary Oliver's poem, The Trees, feels like what I am experiencing today:
Do you think of them as decoration?
Think again.
Here are maples, flashing.
And here are the oaks, holding on all winter
to their dry leaves.
And here are the pines, that will never fail,
until death, the instructions to be green.
And here are the willows, the first
to pronounce a new year.
May I invite you to revise your thoughts about them?
Oh, Lord, how we are all for invention and
advancement!
But I think
it would do us good if we would think about
these brothers and sisters, quietly and deeply.
The trees, the trees, just holding on
to the old, holy ways.
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