For this week’s blog, we invite you to take in a story or two from CER’s Lenore Bajare-Dukes, which was originally shared as part of the Exploring New Models for Faith Development & Religious Education Wave Cohort (part of the UUA’s wider Meet the Moment process).

You can take this story in a lot of directions. Feel free to use it as a tool for your own spiritual reflection. Or as a leader, to think about what adaptations this moment in time is inviting from you.

First, I share the story of the Water-Bearer’s Garden, originally recorded for the pre-packaged worship service congregations can access through the Wave Cohort (contact us if you want the whole thing). You may have heard a story of the Water-Bearer’s Garden before. This one starts a little differently. When the bucket was still whole and unbroken. Let’s watch:

How was that to watch?

I wonder how it made you feel?

I wonder how it’s inviting you to see the gifts that you have to offer, or the changes that may be happening in your own community?

And here’s one more story for you. In some ways, it’s the same story.

In these times we are in now of incredible uncertainty, deep moral challenge, and UU communities determined to show up and often wondering exactly how to do so — I find myself reaching back to the adaptation that I and so many others practiced during the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. (A pandemic that is still with us.)

In 2020, the pandemic hit our congregations suddenly. A whole lot of folks had to figure out: How do we do church when things all around us are changing? When times are harder than we knew? When we commit to protecting one another – so much so, that we let go of gathering in person in order to answer the call of love?

In 2020, UUs had to exit the buildings in which we were gathering, and in congregation after congregation, we flowed out of all those empty rooms and we gathered, instead, on the sidewalk. We gathered in the garden and on the playground. We gathered on the streets with protest signs. We gathered in people’s homes, and on Zoom, and on phone calls, and by bedsides. We figured out new ways of doing this thing called liberal religion, that’s at the heart of what we’re about. We didn’t do it perfectly. And we lost some people who that just didn’t work for. But we found places to flourish. To have Unitarian Universalism flourish. Some of those places found a new vibrancy, a new mission, a renewed purpose.

How do we stay true to ourselves, when everything around us changes?

We listen to the call of love, we hold fast to the values that are at our core, and we adapt.

We ask ourselves how to continue carrying forward the mission of what we do here, even when the forms of how we gather have to change.

And these are the same questions so many of us are asking now, in these times. In the Meet the Moment process, in Board meetings, in RE programs, in our justice-making, in our capacity-building.

I am so grateful for those lessons of sidewalk chalking, dance parties outside, children’s worship at home, and more, for teaching me that it is possible to simultaneously hold on very tightly to who we are and our deepest values – even as we loosely hold the forms of what, exactly, that has to look like. The practice of slowing down, veering away, dancing, grieving, moving in response to things shifting around us.

It turns out that this muscle of looking within us to what is at the core of what we offer, and then moving in response to the moment we are in — that muscle so many of our communities have worked on – it’s needed in this time, too. This time, of fascisms rising both nationally and globally. This time of accelerated danger to so many vulnerable people. This time of so much courage, resistance, resilience, and strategy ready for us to join. This time when, if we were to only continue to live our lives as though all of this were not true, we would risk losing something essential about the values we hold.

So. What’s at the heart of what you are about?

Like the bucket in the story, where might you be holding on fast to something that could be a little more permeable, a little less perfect, a lot more abundant?

And what gifts, what love, what wild abundance are waiting to come forth from you?