Just a note before we begin:
Hello, Friends! I am delighted to let you know I am back in the hospital, once a week on Wednesday to see patients. On other days, feel free to call me to come in on an as needed basis for patients. Patients who ask for a chaplain, that are entering hospice care, have complicated relationships with family, or who you deem to be in spiritual distress. I am working mostly from home, and live nearby, it’s easy for me to come in most of the time. I also am still available to talk with staff members on the phone who could use a listening ear.
We will have chapel service on Wednesdays at 10:30 a.m. in the cafeteria. Please maintain social distancing and wear a mask. Also, I must preach in a mask, so if you can’t hear me, let me know, I’ll speak up louder. Our first chapel service seemed to go well yesterday. For now we will have no programs to hand out to people as they enter. We will not sing for the time being. I will read to you some song lyrics and continue to post the transcript of service here every week. (Including a video of any song lyrics I have shared with you.)
It was so good to see you all yesterday, thank you for welcoming me back so warmly.
Yesterday, we opened with the lyrics to the song “One Power” by Daniel Nahmond and he performed it at the last Parliament of World Religions:
Here is the message transcript for you:
Nothing New Under the Sun or All Things New?
I enjoy a good long walk in my neighborhood several times a week. It is worth the discipline to get up and out early in the morning, before the heat of the day sets in. In a setting of blue sky, sunshine, flowers bobbing in the wind, it makes a time before COVID 19 and civil unrest highly memorable. Palpable even.
The views and sounds of birds chirping, the slight breeze blowing seems to communicate to me that all of that has come to pass. That conflict and suffering are not ultimately who we are as extensions and expressions of Divine Love.
I say that not to minimize the experience of anyone, or minimize the lives that have been lost in recent times. I say that to affirm that all of this has come and will come to pass, and if we are wise we will learn how to apply timeless spiritual Truth in ways that make the world a better place.
How can I say that, you might think, when even clinicians cannot seem to agree on best practices in the time of COVID 19?
My friends, as the scriptures say,
“What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.”
We were conflicted about AIDS, and SARS the first time around. And other infectious diseases as well. We advised different things over time to prevent the disease until we had studied it enough that we could come to consensus in what to advise patients to do. And we have most importantly, always overcome and found ways to manage, cure, and comfort people as they walk through the experience of disease.
You may not even agree on meeting in this manner, in the cafeteria, with social distancing in place - and you know what? That is totally OK. I am a big enough girl, and wise enough clinician to admit, this may be overly cautious of me. I truly look forward to being proven wrong.
As clinicians this is the approach - that for the most part - we take. We use logic and reason to eventually come to a consensus and then proceed to treat every person, no matter their color or background with the same medications, the same interventions, for the same illness, every time.
If only the world would do the same in human relationships.
At the moment it appears not. Even among theologians there is debate as to what all of this means. You heard me quote scripture earlier that “There is nothing new under the sun.”
I had a healthy debate with a classmate of mine the other day, and his stance, if I sum it up in scripture is, “Behold, I make all things new.” Life is new every moment he says. People do have a habit of saying we are, between a world pandemic and civil unrest over racism living in unprecedented times. I have every confidence civilization will continue; we have risen above such difficulties before.
But will things change, will they be new?
I really, really hope so, and that is the focus of my prayer life right now. I am praying to be patient with people in grocery stores not wearing masks, because my son works in one. I am praying for understanding all sides of the story of protests and to understand my privilege as a white person. I am praying for the safety of the ministers I currently serve, two of them are people of color. I am praying all things will be new, holding a vision of a peaceful and spiritually transformed world.
But transformation takes a lot more than thoughts and prayers. To make things new, right, spiritually guided action – small and large steps alike need to be taken. How does that happen?
I think that an essential element to taking right action is a mindset of curiosity. If we want there to be something new under the sun, a good step in the right direction is to ask one’s self, what am I to learn from these situations, and how do I show up in the world in a way that reflects the spiritual understandings I’ve worked to gain?
It is up to us, my friends, we choose.
We choose if there is nothing new under the sun, or if all things are new.
If we all do our part - in small and large ways, a new world awaits.
I thank you for reading and be blessed this day.
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