Currents

January & February: The Illuminators

Check this out! Here's the link to our original inspiration for our deep winter theme of the Illuminators http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Qcj-F_37HU

excerpt from Sunday's sermon:

...what the priests of Zoroastrianism believed was that God was all good, and that was and should have been enough to scare King Herod half to death. The star on the rise was one of theological and social revolution in which a great goodness was the ultimate power and authority. A great goodness, a care for the meek and mild, a sweeping love and acceptance of human nature as essentially full of light and hope was about to bloom in the world. If such a power had been made manifest, says Matthew, a power that id not depend upon military might, or the influence that extreme wealth brings, then the Romans would be hard-pressed to fight it. It's difficult to fight a power that connects human beings one to another, across boundaries and distinctions that used to divide them. It's difficult to fight something so good, so loving, that it need not fight back....

Reading from Sunday (Remember to bring in your own favorite poem about the duality of light and dark for our Poetry Sunday on January 13th!)

Lines Written In The Days Of Growing Darkness by Mary Oliver
Every year we have been
witness to it: how the
world descends

into a rich mash, in order that
it may resume.
And therefore
who would cry out

to the petals on the ground
to stay,
knowing, as we must,
how the vivacity of what was is married

to the vitality of what will be?
I don’t say
it’s easy, but
what else will do

if the love one claims to have for the world
be true?
So let us go on

through the sun be swinging east,
and the ponds be cold and black,
and the sweets of the year be doomed.

by Mary Oliver, from New York Times, Sunday, November 7, 2010