Dear UU Churchers,

This summer, I am wishing you long days full of attention to the beauty of this world. This is not an encouragement to ignore its horrors, but rather to respond to them faithfully. Mary Oliver writes elsewhere that beauty makes us ache to be worthy of it. What better way to spend this one wild and precious life, than to spend it becoming worthy of all this abundant beauty?

“The Summer Day” by Mary Oliver

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean—
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

See you in church, my wild and precious friends,
Rev. Molly