Liturgies

Religion declined not because it was refuted, but because it became irrelevant, dull, oppressive, insipid. When faith is completely replaced by creed, worship by discipline, love by habit; when the crisis of today is ignored because of the splendor of the past; when faith becomes an heirloom rather than a living fountain; when religion speaks only in the name of authority rather than with the voice of compassion – its message becomes meaningless.

— Abraham Joshua Heschel,
God in Search of Man: A Philosophy of Judaism, p. 3

Maybe you will not be called
With the coal held to your lips,
The rush of wings of
Ambitious angels
Covering you. …
But maybe you will be called by
Fallen mustard seeds and
Open-eyed dreams.
Maybe you will be called by
The ordinary and the striking,
The places where your heart catches
More than once. …
Maybe you will know that
Your call is no less real
Because it comes with
Seeds in your hand
And the taste of fruit in your mouth,
With a sound so soft
It could have just been the breeze,
But wasn’t.

– Laura Martin
Associate Pastor
Rock Spring Congregational UCC, Arlington, VA

Christ climbed down
from His bare Tree
this year
and softly stole away into
some anonymous Mary’s womb again
where in the darkest night
of everybody’s anonymous soul
He awaits again
an unimaginable
and impossibly
Immaculate Reconception
the very craziest
of Second Comings

Lawrence Ferlinghetti, from A Coney Island of the Mind

Hope is an orientation of the heart… The more unpropitious the situation in which we demonstrate hope, the deeper that hope is… [Without hope] it is impossible to live in dignity and meaning much less find the will for the ‘hopeless enterprise’ which stands at the beginning of most good things.

Vaclav Havel, Disturbing the Peace, pp. 181-182