With this Sunday’s theme of “Beyond Welcome,” I had already long intended to share with you this link to Carrie Newcomer’s song, Room at the Table:
Too long we have wandered, burdened and undone
But there is room at the table for everyone
Let us sing the new world in, this is how it all begins
There is room at the table for everyone
Imagining ourselves beyond “welcome” has both close in and out-at-our-edges implications.
Here, close in, as we seek to connect and reconnect as a community, I am aware of the power of bringing who we are to the table – who we are in terms of the gifts we have to offer, and who we are at our most real and honest and imperfect and vulnerable. Again and again I witness it, the willingness to be genuine in an intimate enough circle of others opens and connects people in ways that surprise, move, and strengthen everyone present. It is powerful medicine. And a foundational ingredient of community.
This is why I encourage you, and why it’s one of our goals for this year for everyone, to find at least one small-enough circle of others in the life of the congregation in which you might feel connected, seen, heard, known, and in which who you are and what you bring is appreciated.
Soul Matters Circles, Walking Groups, the Book Group, Men’s or Women’s groups, the Spirituality Sharing Circle, Starting Point, Singing Meditation, the choir (soon, we hope), the various committees and teams and justice task forces, upcoming classes and other circles…or the circle or group you are imagining that is yet to manifest. Look, listen, watch, search, ask on Sunday mornings or via UUCM’s various newsletters and website and communications.
There is room for us all, and no gift is too small…
No matter who you are, no matter where you’re from…
Here and now we can be, the beloved community…
There is room at the table for everyone.
And, important as that is, thinking beyond “welcome” out at our edges is where Carrie’s song actually begins:
Let our hearts not be hardened to those living on the margins…
This is where it all begins, this is how we gather in
There is room at the table for everyone
The appalling disregard for human worth and dignity evidenced in the recent shipping of people seeking asylum at U.S. borders from border states to elsewhere brings such abstract edges closer in. As does The U.S. and the Holocaust documentary airing this week on PBS, linking the past and the present, shedding light on the U.S. unwillingness “to open its doors to more than a fraction of the hundreds of thousands of desperate people seeking refuge . . . as the catastrophe of the Holocaust unfolded in Europe.”
Whether as close as the people in our monthly Soul Matters Circle, or as seemingly distant as the Earth’s many refugees, the ways we practice belonging and extending belonging, and the ways we live into moving beyond a surface “welcome,” grow our capacity to open our hearts across the spectrums of our life connections.
As we seek deep and meaningful belonging – important to so many of us, as last Sunday showed – may we learn at the same time to extend our welcome beyond the easy and the familiar, near and far.
Too long we have wandered, burdened and undone
Let us sing the new world in, this is how it all begins
There is room at the table for everyone
Oh, may it be so. May WE be so.
With care,
Rev. Kevin
Hope to see you at the workshop and party Saturday!