Feb. 21, 2024

“You may do this, I tell you, it is permitted.
Begin again the story of your life.”
–Jane Hirschfield, “Da Capo”

Beloveds,

I puzzle over these (not infrequently quoted) lines of poetry every time I see them. Or rather, I puzzle over my reaction to them. As a historian, I know our efforts to ignore the past are futile at best and harmful at worst. And yet, I just saw my first daffodil blooms of the season on my way to church Sunday morning, and I watch every year for redbuds budding, knowing that spring begins again the unfolding of our landscape and the story of life every year. And spring always and only begins from roots and seeds and bulbs grown in earlier seasons. So these lines evoke, for me, both a lovely sense of freedom and permission to begin again and a certain tension between the starting again and what has gone before.

I find myself wondering, in this 30th anniversary year of the founding of our congregation, how we might lean into the permission to begin our story again, knowing that doing so, in the natural order of things, never means severing our connections with all the seasons behind us.

Yours in rootedness and new bloomings,

Rev. Denise
RevDenise@gnuuc.org