The Pastor's Corner, December 2011 Newsletter
Happy New Year!!! God’s grace and peace be with you in this new year!! I pray your New Year celebrations were wonderful and safe and that with the new year comes a new sense of who you are as God’s beloved child. Speaking of beloved child…I was also grateful for the wonderful Christmas celebration we shared together with all the songs and the scriptures and sacred story and candles: beautiful, wonderful, and thank you. Since the Christmas season doesn’t end until this Friday with Epiphany I am still pondering and thinking about the meaning of Christmas and the coming of the Light of the World. I will be preaching on this more this week and next week, but I am struck by how we have such a deep need to make room in our lives for this Light and Life that Christ brings. I am also very aware of all the stuff in our lives that clutters the room in which this Light and Life might dwell. In the new year we all like to start fresh, and many of us claim that fresh start with resolutions and even sometimes some rituals around releasing emotional stuff from the previous year. I was having a conversation recently and was struck by how hard it is for most of us to get a sense of that fresh start. There is so much stuff that ties us powerfully to the past that it can be like trudging through deep mud trying to move forward in our lives. I thought of a computer when it gets bound up in its programming. Often all we have to do is shut it down and reboot it, and it can seem like it is starting all over with a clean slate. Wouldn’t it be great to have that sense of a clean slate for the new year?! And when we look at this comparison, what are the main things that you need a reboot for in your life? Where in your life do you need a fresh start and new beginning? If we make resolutions isn’t this just what we are trying to get to? Part of the power of hearing the Christmas story again is the reminder that we can begin again as well.
You have all the permission you need to release that which is shackling you and holding you back from the new Light and Life that the Christ brings to us. The Divine Spirit is in fact calling you to leave behind much of that which burdens us and move into the freedom of new life. May 2012 be the year in which you discover how to do it. Challenge yourself to do things differently this year and to be different in a way that makes more room for Spirit and more room for inner freedom and more space in which the Christ might dwell clearly and powerfully.
In my own devotional reading I came across this reflection on resolutions from Richard Rohr. He writes…
RESOLVE TO LIVE SIMPLY
Living in the second half of life, I no longer have to prove that I or my group is the best, that my ethnicity is superior, that my religion is the only one that God loves, or that my role and place in society deserve superior treatment. I am not preoccupied with collecting more goods and services; quite simply, my desire and effort—every day—is to pay back, to give back to the world a bit of what I have received. I now realize that I have been gratuitously given to–from the universe, from society, and from God. I try now, as Elizabeth Seton said, “to live simply so that others can simply live.”
May you start the year well and carry it through the entire year. May this be the time for you to grow deeply in the Spirit and to make room for this Christ that Comes. May the Light shine brightly for you, now and always. I remain
In a communion of Spirit,
Erik
Previous Pastor's Corners
December 2011November 2011
October 2011
September 2011