Love sparks

Theologian Howard Thurman has famously said, “Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.”

Where’s your spark, friends? What is it that makes you come alive beyond the daily struggle to simply survive?

In Meditations of the Heart, Thurman reminds us:

“Whatever may be the tensions and the stresses of a particular day, there is always lurking close at hand the trailing beauty of forgotten joy or unremembered peace.”

Part of the joy and pain of my faith tradition, Unitarian Universalism, is a theological demand to be present to revelation as it unfolds. This requires a wakefulness in each of us as individuals and as congregational collectives, a mindfulness about the why and the how of our lives.

Social justice facilitator and healer adrienne maree brown writes “We don’t practice to feel good, we practice to feel more.”

So much of our social structure is designed to shut us up and shut us down. Advertising amplifies fears and insecurities we may not have even known we had. Our political process encourages apathy and overwhelm, insignificance and disillusion. We numb out at an extraordinary rate: “Approximately 80 percent of the global opioid supply is consumed in the United States.”

And if we shut out the pain, we shut out the joy.

So it matters, my friends, that we attend to our spark — to that which makes us come alive. It matters that we make time and courage-filled space to nurture that which makes us most glad to wake up in the morning.

In this faith, we honor your spark and insist that you find a practice that calls you into beloved community with a sense of worth — your own and everyone else’s. Universalism is not for the faint of heart.

This universal love is what makes it possible for us to proclaim that Black Lives Matter, that women’s rights and trans* rights are human rights, that no human being is illegal. We honor the spark of life that calls us toward compassion and connection.

Community doesn’t always feel good — but community always supports us in feeling — being awake and aware.

Tgether we are encouraged to dig into our silencing — in the ways that we have been silenced and have silenced others.

Together we are encouraged to dig into how we have been shut down and have shut others down.

Together we are held in our learning and our growing. We can offer each other grace for the learning and the growing pains.

Together we can release our expectations of perfection and offer each other the hope of excellence — which is possible when we trust ourselves and each other to honor the life giving spark in each of us.

Dearest ones, your precious lives matter so much. Treat yourself and each other as the beloved sparks of miraculous life that you are. For then we can truly come alive in this world.