Rev. Lori on Living at the Pace of Gratitude
A version of this reflection was originally published in the previous week’s Friday Flyer.
Hello Wonderful People!
There is something quietly sacred about the first week of summer.
The light lingers just a little longer. Gardens begin to stretch toward fullness. Birds seem less hurried, as if they know there is enough daylight for everyone. Nature reminds us that growth is not something to force, it is something to receive. Summer arrives not with a command to accomplish more, but with an invitation to notice more. To notice the warmth of the sun on our skin. The laughter of children. The scent of pine and freshly cut grass. The miracle of an ordinary day.
In our busy lives, we often measure ourselves by what we produce. But creation itself offers another rhythm. Trees are not anxious about growing. Rivers do not rush toward the sea. They simply become more fully what they were created to be. If you remember the concept of “church time”. In theory our regular year and our regular Sundays should remind us that spiritual work is on its own clock. But the church of summer does that even better because that is summer's spiritual lesson.
Not that we stop caring or stop working, but that we remember to live while we are doing the work. To sit on a porch with a friend or take a walk on the beach or the park or the cemetery.. To read a good book beneath a tree. To walk without headphones. To watch a sunrise without trying to capture it on a screen. In the Unitarian Universalist tradition, we speak of the interdependent web of existence. Summer gives us a chance to feel that web rather than simply think about it,to recognize that we are not separate from the earth but participants in its unfolding story.
The first week of summer asks only one gentle question and I ask it to you today:
What would it feel like to live at the pace of gratitude instead of the pace of urgency?
May this season be one in which your spirit, like the gardens around us, finds enough light to grow, enough rain to soften what has become hard, and enough rest to become fully alive (again).
Peace and Blessings,
Rev Lori Whittemore
(she, her, hers)
Unitarian Universalist Church of Saco Biddeford