Spiritual Themes>Challenge and Transformation|Quest Article

How deep our sleep last night in the mountain’s heart, beneath the trees and stars, hushed by solemn-sounding waterfalls and many small soothing voices in sweet accord whispering peace!

A friend of mine from Maine says that down east there are five seasons: summer, fall, winter, spring, and mud. Mud is the season between winter and spring, the season of melting snow when winter’s icy grip loosens its hold…but doesn’t quite let go.

Can this really come to pass? Will justice ever roll down like waters? Will we find our way to right relationship in our personal lives, in our neighborhoods, and in our world? Many days, it seems the odds are against us, stacked much higher than forty to one.

If Unitarian Universalism stands for love, it is wed to freedom. Freedom invites vision. Vision leads to change. Change causes anxiety. Anxiety awakens resistance.

Let us be dissatisfied until from every city hall, justice will roll down like waters, and righteousness like a mighty stream. Let us be dissatisfied until that day when the lion and the lamb shall lie down together, and every[one] will sit under [their] own vine and fig tree, and none shall be afraid.

But children rarely listen, and
storybook characters, never.
When they see that confectionary
cottage
their entrance is inevitable,
like the mosquito bite you swear
you will not scratch and always do,
and always make it worse.

Before you know what kindness
really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.

We need to start doing things that don’t accomplish anything in particular immediately. This is urgent. This will not wait until you are retired. (Just last week a retired volunteer said to me, “I really have to take a sabbatical. One of these days I am just going to disappear for a month.”) It takes practice, and if we don’t start young, it will be hard to learn later in life.