Dear Beloved Community at CCSM,
This coming Sunday we will mark Memorial Day. It feels like there are so many losses surrounding us right now - from the over 1 million Americans (and so many more globally) who have died from Covid, to the 10 African-Americans who were killed last week at Tops supermarket in Buffalo due to racist violence, to the pioneering feminist theologian Rosemary Radford Reuther, to the many lives lost in Ukraine and other less-covered conflict situations globally. And then we have our own personal losses and collective losses as a faith community. These losses may not make the news, but they remain on the front page of our hearts.
We live in a culture that so often wants to move past loss, to skim over it, to push it down or aside. As Rev. Penny preached last Sunday, letting go is so hard and so many of us struggle to simply be with what is, especially when that loss is the death of someone we have loved or whose life has touched ours in some way. As she shared so beautifully, we crave permanence but temporality is intrinsic to this life.
And although Memorial Day has been re-packaged by some as simply a launch into the summer season, we will pause this Sunday to remember lives lost to war in its many forms as well as lives lost for other reasons or seemingly no reason at all. We will name the ways we have been touched and shaped by the cloud of witnesses that surround us and how their stories live on in and through us. We will together proclaim and cry out for a world where no life ends before its time.
Please reflect this week on the names you would like to lift up and have live on through your voicing of them. We look forward to seeing you and hearing about the lives that continue to shape yours.
Blessings,
Sheryl