From Your Minister

Dear Ones,

As we move towards November and the days are slowly getting cooler and steadily getting shorter, I’ve been thinking a lot about our November theme of the Practice of Repair.

“What do we mean by repair?” is, of course, one of the first questions we need to delve into this month. But it turns out there’s not a simple answer. (Is there ever?) In different contexts, we mean a lot of different things by repair. Rarely do we mean making something exactly like it was before, because we know that’s not really possible.

Here are a few meanings that have been helping me reflect on the practice of repair:

• Replacing or fixing broken or nonfunctioning parts, like when I repaired my dishwasher or we worked with our solar company to fix a problem that was keeping UUS’s solar panels from generating electricity.
  
• The art of kintsugi, where Japanese ceramicists mend a broken piece of pottery with gold paint, making something new and perhaps more beautiful. You can read about this practice here. Peter Mayer also sang about it at our concert a month ago and you can listen to a recording of that song, “Japanese Bowl” here.
  
• Trying to understand someone coming from a vastly different perspective by listening deeply to each other.
  
• The practice or restorative or transformative justice, which you can read adrienne maree brown talk about here. Restorative justice focuses on rehabilitation rather than punishment to rebuild relationships. Transformative justice goes beyond an event and seeks to transform the culture. Both can be practiced with two people or at a societal level.
  
• The practice of tikkun olam, where we work to repair the cosmos in response to the initial fracturing of the vessel containing the light of the universe. The light that spilled became part of all events and people but is hidden and so must be made visible to restore our innate wholeness. You can listen to or read Rabbi Lawrence Kushner and his granddaughter talk about this on the On Being podcast here.
  
• The deep repair work that Prentis Hemphill talks about in What It Takes to Heal when they write, “… it’s time for a real reckoning, for repair, for restructuring of the systems that caused the incident in the first place, which is what real healing, tending to the injury, would truly mean. In order for healing to happen on that scale, on a societal level, we need tangible and significant changes to our institutions and to the underlying culture we live in. To get there, we all have to dirty our hands and become involved in making the world in far deeper ways than we’ve been taught are possible.”

Whichever of these definitions we choose for our context, we then – or perhaps concurrently – get to turn our attention to what practices can help us with repair. During our November worship services, we’ll be exploring some of the practices of repair that our world is hungering for right now. In this, we’ll build on our October reflections on the Practice of Deep Listening and our September reflections on Invitation.

I hope you’ll join us to reflect on and practice the work, the ministry, of repair this month. For this is how and why we work to live Love ever more fully and fiercely into this world.

Love and Blessings,
Rev. Diana