Lessons From The Mountain

Posted on November 29, 2024 by admin

This week I spend a few nights at The Mountain Retreat and Learning Center outside Highlands, North Carolina. After all that’s happened in recent months, I need some fresh perspective. I need some soul repair.

From the moment I catch my first views of the Blue Ridge Mountains rolling outward like waves, a holy awe washes over me. How amazing to be alive on this planet!
The next morning I set off on a hike. This is my happy place! The trail’s three-mile loop, down one mountain and up another, sounds pretty easy. I kind of forget that I haven’t done any serious hiking in over a year. Still, when my hiking boots hit the trail, I get that familiar rush of joy. My breath flows more easily, and my senses are suddenly wide awake. The air is crisp but not too cold, the sky is bright blue, and I’m surrounded by low trees with thick long leaves that look surprisingly tropical.

Then, whoa! Another surprise! As the trail upward begins, I’m quickly out of breath, my legs burning. Pretty soon, I am stumbling over roots and trembling as I cross a rocky ledge. Better stop! Better listen to my body rather than press on out of habit or pride.
So I stop. I drink some water. I eat a little trail mix. I take pictures of the green- blue vista and shoot a video to share the view with you congregants, which always cheers me up. I give myself permission to return to my lodgings. Yet when I’m back at the original trail, I notice I feel rested and curious and motivated enough to go on … even if it’s just a little further …

From then on, it’s slow going, but I grow stronger. I make better choices when I hit the challenging spots. Now I’m really present to both my inner and outer landscapes. And I start to wonder: Have I stumbled on a metaphor for our journey in the months to come?

Like me on the mountain, we may not be as ready as we need to be for what’s ahead. We start anyway. We’re going to hit some very hard patches, which may take our breath away; they will hurt. We will stumble; we may tremble and fear. At different points we’ll need to stop, to rest, rehydrate, and refuel. It’s OK to cheer ourselves up with something playful or generous or both. We’ll keep adjusting our plans, learning where we’ve got limits and where we’ve got power. Yet when we’re really present both to our personal situations and to the impact of
the wider world, we’ll know when to urge ourselves onward and when we may need to retreat.

It’ll be slow going, but we will grow strong. And I guarantee we will know moments of such beauty and joy, alongside loss. We’ll be fully present to Life.

And best of all, we will be together.


~Rev. Nancy Palmer Jones

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Communities of Coherence

Posted on November 28, 2024 by Bob Patrick

When a complex system is far from equilibrium, 
small islands of coherence in a sea of chaos
have the capacity to shift the entire
system to a higher order.

Illya Prigogine–Nobel Laureate

I’ve been captured by this quotation for a couple of weeks now. I admit that I looked up Illya Prigogine and tried to understand a synopsis of his work in chemistry. I didn’t understand a lot, but I do think I understand this: his work focused on change and how that change is brought about by small instances of internal self-organization. 

Here’s what I find in the quote above. 

–Complex systems can become wildly imbalanced. 

–Within those complex systems there can be small communities that organize and hold together despite the chaos. 

–When there are enough of those self-organized small communities holding together they can cause the larger complex system to move into a higher order of functioning. 

Here’s my hopeful translation of all that.

–Our nation, and much of the world, is a complex system that has become wildly imbalanced.

–But, there are small communities of coherence, self-organizing communities that have a clear vision, know how to work together, and are aiming for good outcomes despite the chaos around them. I like to think that UUCG is one of those small islands of coherence and that it, in fact, has within it other small islands of coherence. You likely know of other small islands of coherence that you are a part of in a sea of chaos.

–The work of repair that has the long view in mind means that we keep doing what we do in our small islands of coherence, for the good of our community, for the good of the communities around us. As a result, we may initiate a shift of the entire system/world to a higher order. 

What we are doing in our community matters. 

~Bob Patrick

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Repair in a Brand New Way

Posted on November 27, 2024 by admin

Once a sweater has a hole, it can never be returned to its previous state. But it could be improved on. Personalized by a custom patch or colorful darn.

What about a relationship with a hole torn in it? You will never be able to go back to the way the relationship used to be. But it can be improved upon, deepened, repaired in a brand new way.

There is a parable about The Ship of Theseus. The ship’s parts all get replaced over the years as the ship is repaired. At what point does it become a different ship? Is it still the same ship even when no original pieces remain? 

Think about a significant relationship in your life. Someone you have known for years and trust implicitly. Is that always what that relationship looked like? What did it look like when you first met? What about when you had your first fight? Human relationships always involve conflict. It might not have been a huge fight where you didn’t speak to each other for a week, but there was some kind of conflict. Some tear that needed repair.

How did you repair it? How did they help? With colorful new threads woven together into a new pattern? With a fun dinosaur patch? With lovingly placed stitches?

Was the relationship improved? Did the act of repair deepen the connection between you and the other person?

~Aline Harris

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Repair in 100 Years

Posted on November 26, 2024 by Bob Patrick

I’ve been listening to Krista Tippet’s interview with adrienne maree brown entitled “On Radical Imagination and Moving Toward Life.” I have to listen in small segments, in part because that’s how my driving and listening while running errands works, and in part because the significance of conversations like this can be so intense that I need time to sink down into what I’m hearing. 

One sentence caught my attention in the middle of the interview. Tippet noted that some research has shown that social change takes about 100 years to take root and become reality. 

100 years for changes that we are working on right now to take place, to become lived experience.

I wonder if we all know that on some level, even on some unconscious level. I wonder–if we understood this on some level–is this why social change takes so long? We know that it’s working for the long term, working for full realities that we won’t likely ever see ourselves. On some level, that may just be too discouraging. Maybe we don’t try to activate those changes as intensely as we might otherwise if we thought they might take root next week, or next year, or even sometime before we die. 

And, yet, that’s the kind of repair work we who are interested in repair are called to do. We are called to work on repair, on social change, on participating in that bend of the arc of the moral universe towards justice. Congresswoman, Shontel Brown of Ohio, in a 2022 article reflecting on this line from a Martin Luther King, Jr.’s speech added this observation about the arc of the moral universe: 

It does not bend towards justice on its own—no, it only does so because people pull it towards justice. It is an active exercise, not a passive one.

King, himself may be one of our most outstanding examples of one who worked on the repair of social change knowing that he would not live long enough to see it. He noted in a speech the night before his assassination that he might not get to the other side of the mountain with us. We can easily argue that the social change he fought for is still not rooted and complete. And still he fought for it even suspecting that he would die for it.

Many in our nation right now think they have supported some political efforts to make our society great (again). The truth is, becoming a better society requires us to work for social changes that we know we will never see, in our lifetimes, take root, but doing so with the vigor and conviction of those who have “been to the mountain top and seen the other side.” 

~Bob Patrick

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Responsibility for the Cycle of Repair

Posted on November 25, 2024 by admin

Fabric is very difficult to make.

You have to harvest fiber plants or shear fiber from animals. You have to clean the fiber based on the type of fabric (boll it for cotton, thrash it for flax, skirt and wash it for wool) and then you still have to spin the fibers into threads, then you have to weave or knit those threads to create a fabric. 

Fabric has, historically, been extremely valuable.

In Victorian England, wealthy households would let their servants take any of their old clothes or household items that they no longer wanted. While household servants would have uniforms for work, they would have access to ‘last year’s fashions’ and relatively new fabrics for their free time wardrobe. Those household servants would wear those clothes for quite a while and they would use overly worn fabrics to patch their other clothing. Those wealthy household’s height of fashion outfits that they would NEVER be caught in twice, were still reused.

Eventually, once the household servants were done with those clothes, they might pass them on to relatives or friends who had less lucrative jobs. 

The working class would happily wear fashion from five years back, assuming it would keep them nice and warm. At that point, they were more concerned with functionality than fashionability.

They would wear those clothes for years, mending and repairing them as needed. Until, finally, the clothes were not even functional for this group of people.

And then, the rag and bone man would come by.

The rag and bone man would buy both very old clothing (that was almost reduced to rags), and also meat bones that had been boiled again and again to make weaker and weaker stock. Those items that were very clearly approaching the end of their functional life would then be sold to the least wealthy levels of society.

At what point does repair (or reuse) become exploitative?

What if we were to develop systems that reuse materials for that ‘upper crust’ of society and not just passing it down through thrift store systems to excuse the most affluent in buying new things again?

Have you (as a western, relatively well off in terms of global economies) ever donated a perfectly good clothing item? Maybe just because it wasn’t fashionable anymore? Or it didn’t fit your current aesthetic?

But you felt alright about it because you were ‘benefiting the less fortunate’?

It was totally alright to exploit those of a ‘lower class’ if it made us feel better right?

What if we took it upon ourselves to repair what we had instead of passing it down the societal chain?

What if we took responsibility for the cycle of repair maintaining the materials in our own lives?

~Aline Harris

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Cleaning the Chaos

Posted on November 22, 2024 by admin

I think I’ve been angry this last week; no, I know I’ve been angry. I’m so angry about the way society is going, a deep rift, a chasm, a crack is growing across the hearts of many people. I know I am angry because I have been obsessively cleaning my house for several days. Trying to pull together a bit of understanding, reasoning, control, in my frantic, anxious mind. 

This is how I practice repair for myself, repairing my heart from the pain of despair and misunderstanding, calming my brain to be able to maintain control of my situation. 

This anger feels like a recognition of fractures not only in society but within myself—each crack I notice in my surroundings a mirror of those within my heart. In these moments, repair becomes an act of survival, of grounding. Through cleaning, I’m able to transform my rage into something manageable, restoring a sense of order, however small, in a world where control feels elusive.

As I clean, each task becomes an opportunity to live in love: to cleanse not only the dust from surfaces but also the confusion, disappointment, and frustration clouding my spirit. I create space, quite literally, for a quieter heart, one that can move through the pain with love instead of anger. Repair, in this sense, isn’t just about fixing or putting things back in place—it’s an ongoing commitment to rebuild love in my own life, regardless of what the world outside might look like.

In this way, cleaning becomes a practice of love: love for myself, for my environment, and for my capacity to live in a way that values healing. Each action reminds me that even in the smallest of tasks, I have the power to reconcile, to bridge a gap, and to continue living fully in love.

~Candice Carver

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No Small Thing

Posted on November 20, 2024 by admin

Before we can repair our broken selves, first we have to believe it’s even possible. That is no small thing. During the worst time of my life, I struggled just to imagine, much less believe in, the possibility of healing. If we don’t believe healing is possible, then we won’t even try. We’ll slip into bitterness, despair or cynicism, and we will believe instead that we will never be able to let go of what has harmed us.

When my daughter, Amy, died, I lost everything: my faith, my sense of security, my reason to simply be. I could not imagine living day to day in a world without my child. I had a family that needed me, and so, I put one foot in front of the other, but my heart, so broken, wasn’t in it. I simply didn’t know how to repair this level of brokenness in myself, in my family. I went to a counselor. I read books. I would listen for hours to ambient music while embroidering intricate designs. I sat, alone, beside my daughter’s grave in all sorts of weather. I felt bereft, hopeless.

I didn’t get better all by myself. I got better by joining a community. I found other bereaved parents and their stories helped me to believe that although my broken heart might never be the same, it could learn to beat its new, fragile, rhythm. They gave me the gift of believing my life could be better, that some form of healing was possible. I still carry the scars that healing left behind. Sometimes the scar tissue will suddenly pull tightly against my beating heart, reminding me of who I was once and who I am now. 

~Lisa Kiel

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