About a week ago I got my car back from the body shop.  I had two claims on it.  The first was from January.  When I realized that I would probably have to change churches after 22 years it made me a bit distracted.  I survived the Advent/Christmas insanity by focusing on work and, of course, on the actual holiday itself.  However, When the new year began there was nothing to distract me from the massive changes ahead.  Anyway, in a state of general overwhelm I managed to gently back my car into a metal barrier at a local gas station, damaging a rear door while leaving the barrier blissfully unaware.  After the "accident" I didn't have the spoons to get it fixed, so I spent six months driving with a slight dent, a blue streak on the door, and a piece of trim flapping in the breeze.

The second claim was a gift from my son, who was raised in the 'burbs with a mailbox screwed to the house.  He backed the car over the regular old rural delivery mailbox at our new home, surgically removing the car's bumper.  That was much more recent, of course, and the proverbial straw that forced me to do something.  He has been distracted, too.  We all have.  However we are settled in to our new place in Franklin County.  I have a month under my belt at 2nd Church of Greenfield.  We are moving on.  Life is fine.

Allison and I even got to go for a hike last weekend!  That was a fun return to normal.  We live in a valley along the Millers River with trail heads pretty much everywhere.  It was just a walk in the "neighborhood" that I would describe further but...we are supposed to keep hiking traffic down thanks to the presence of a VERY popular rock-climbing site.  Its popularity can create a few bottlenecks for hikers, climbers, and residents alike.  Suffice it to say...if you know, you know.  If you would also like to know...just email me.  Everyone involved is very friendly, just also concerned about the ecosystem.

The hike itself was short and lovely.  There was a classic Massachusetts hiking view.  No great snowy or craggy peaks...only a gentle hill across the river and just a hint of Watatic to our east if you risked your life on the ledge to see it.

​We need to get back in shape after a long hiatus of life interfering.  Al's dissertation still lurks but the "search and call" is behind us.  Getting back out will be a slow process, but a pleasant one.

One thing I have been thinking about lately is how location can change a person.  I feel like I am in the process of becoming at a rate that feels unusual to me.  In Natick I wasn't stagnant by a long shot.  However, now I am moving among different people, with a very different congregation.  I have been pushed spiritually, socially, and physically. Also I am back living in the country.  For the most part I have only visited it for the last two decades. Before that, it was just life.  Now the re-entry is...interesting. Nature is overwhelming here--or feels like it.  There always seems to be a reason to head outside. I am planting a small garden now and planning for the springs of '26 and '27. I am always discovering mysteries in the soil and beds that I am now responsible for.

When I get out of work I come home, put on a different sort of work clothes, and then move brush, or fix the mailbox, or plant the flowers and the vegetables...or perform any number of tasks for the slightly-falling-down house that was built in the late 19th Century.  I am trying to remember the skills I was taught by my grandfather starting 40 years ago and ending a quarter century ago. Then I will read up on whatever needs reading up on.  Then I will do more church work and hang out with the family. 

​I will no doubt write more on this at some point.  For now I am trying to enjoy the ride and the different sort of busyness.  We shall see where we end up in the end.  However, I am happy with the new start.

..I don't know why I did it, but I grossly underestimated the amount of time and energy it would take to go into search, conclude a search, and work through the many complications of moving, buying a house, ending a ministry, and starting another one.  So in my ignorance I signed up for courses and workshops.  Early in the year they worked out well.  I took a course on non-profit administration, for example.  I felt I would need those more "secular" skills if I stayed at Eliot and worked part time somewhere else.  I highly recommend it if you are from Massachusetts and don't mind the occasional drive to Framingham.  However, this was early in my process and part of the process.

I also signed up for some courses and trainings in the area of ecology and religion.  I do this sometimes when I am stressed out.  Learning something that is separate from the chaos is fulfilling and useful for the future.  However...in this case I had to back away.  Before I did, though, I managed to complete an assignment in which I wrote a "Psalm" about the county where I am moving.  It made sense to focus my energy there since we were heading out for house-hunting, candidating, and other meetings.  Anyway, here it is.  I didn't finish the course but I recommend it. I also recommend the platform for people who are interested in the study of religion...

I haven't posted here since October.  It isn't that I didn't have things to say!  It is just that there has been a lot going on.  Also, at sensitive times in an institution like the church, it is important not to over speak.  My last post was about the Eliot Church downsizing their staff and what that meant for me.  A great deal was pretty open-ended back then, but now there has been quite a bit of resolution.

Long story short...I am moving. I went into search while looking at part-time options that would have kept me in Natick.  In the end, I accepted a full-time position as Pastor at the Second Congregational Church of Greenfield Massachusetts.  I am in the process of buying a house in Franklin County.  Allison and I (and to greater or lesser extent the boys) are leaving Natick after over twenty-one years.

This has been a whole process, of course.  Which no doubt I will reflect on when the time is right.  However, I wanted to get back into the habit of blogging and--now that there is some certainly around future and current roles--this seemed to be a good time.

One of the trickiest parts of this transition is saying "goodbye" and then saying "hello".  Part of both processes involve boundaries.  In the ministry there are rules about when, where and how we interact with former congregants.  These rules loosen up a bit over time but right now they are in effect.  That is OK.  When we live our lives in the church we try to promote healthy relationships both when we arrive and when we leave.  Here is the newsletter column I posted for the Eliot Church about how the goodbyes will go through the last few weeks of my time at Eliot and for the next year at least...

 I Just got back from a vacation I sort of backed into.  Over the summer we thought it would be fun to go do some hiking and sight-seeing in Ireland for a couple weeks.  We did the preliminary planning and took the time off. We got people to commit to preaching at the church in my stead. Then...we didn't go. Life got complicated.

Still, we had the time so we went up to Maine for a week and visited family.  We saw my sister and brother-in-law's new house.  We checked in with my mom.  We stayed with my brother and sister-in-law.  We stumped around the part of the state where I grew up. We caught a friend's book-launch and poetry reading. Then we also hiked, ticking off visits to the Camden Hills and to Gulf Hagas.  It was a restful trip that I would love to post about some time in the future. However, that is not what I am up to today. Instead I want to touch briefly on developments in my church.

You see, for years we have been talking about the future of churches in the United States.  I have written about it, talked about it, and preached about it numerous times. In that broader context I and others have set the life of our specific congregation. Things have been hard for the modernist institutions we think of when we hear the word "church".  Progressive or conservative, they come with buildings which are often too large for their needs.  They come with a struggling staff in desperate need of retraining and revisioning. They come with programs--like Sunday School--that are much less popular now. They come with the perception of arbitrary judgement which--while not as common as people think--still holds true in many places. The post-modern world has caught up to us.  Congregations--progressive ones anyway--are adapting...but slowly.

 While religion may just be fine, our old institutions may not be. They must change and learn in order to grow.

All of this is to say that The Eliot Church, where I have served for twenty-one years and two months, will be cutting the pastoral position from full-time to half-time starting no later than September 2025. It gives us as a congregation time to plan for what that will look like.  It gives me a year to figure out what I will be doing for the rest of my career. It feels like a long period, but it isn't really.  We are adapting to the new reality--churches must be more flexible, more creative, and more stable ​going forward--but we are still an old and venerable institution. Pastors also need to be these things but I, of course, am older, too.  I am glad we are facing the current reality, even though there will be some hard traveling both for the congregation and for me.

I don't think it is time to dwell on the details.  These will come in time and I will probably post some of what I witness and learn here on Sabbath Walks. However, on our way up to Gulf Hagas we happened to drive past my first church settlement.  I was 1/3 time but they shortly re-connected with another congregation who hired me for 2/3 time. This gave me the same "uneven yoke" that my predecessor had.  Both of those churches are still there, surviving in the face of all the difficulties that this era brings to voluntary associations. Seeing the old parish was a good reminder that life goes on, as does love.  It reminded me that God does not abandon us. We just need to make sense both in and to the society and culture that needs our message.

We have made a big step.  I do not know what it means for me or my family.  I do not really know what it means for the congregation.  What I do know is that we are acknowledging a change that leaves room for celebration as well as grief.

"Remember your baptism" is a popular phrase in my life.  My colleagues and I are urged to do so--and to encourage others to do so--every once in a while throughout the year.  There are good reasons for this, of course.  When we remember this moment in our lives, we recall our relationship with God.  We also recall our relationship with the holy people who gathered together to witness the moment.  At least some of those people are our family, or chosen family. Sometimes it is done in the midst of a congregation as well.  In my congregation on Ingathering Sunday we bring water from places that have been important to us.  Then we use it for baptisms and other things so the congregation is always there in spirit. A baptism doesn't need witnesses.  However, when they are present, they remember their baptisms, too.

Of course, many people don't literally remember.  They were infants at the time.  Also--after the baptism--some people have few opportunities to be reminded of it. Families don't attend worship like they used to. In the absence of anything other than a very occasional visit for Christmas Eve, more and more adults give little thought to their children's spiritual lives or their own. The ritual can be just a thing you do in those early days before other things take precedence.

I am not saying this as a complaint.  It is just a statement of fact.  In fact, I literally remember my baptism.  I was 18.  The reasons my parents decided to encourage me (along with my siblings) to be baptized were complicated. Neither we nor they attended church regularly.  However, even at the time I found it moving.  I had been hovering around the edges of my friends' churches for a while by then.  I had questions about life and its meaning and the people I met in church--while they didn't have answers--seemed to have a path.  Now I am a pastor and so is my mom.

During worship this past Sunday, I officiated a baptism for an adult who was formerly a member of the youth group. It reminded me of my own experience.  Before the service I told him that there would be times when it meant very little to him and times when it meant a great deal.  That is how these things work.  Baptism is one string that connects us in every direction to Creation.  We don't always notice it, even when we know it is there.  Then...we really do when we need that connection.

Baptism is a sacrament in the tradition I represent.  There is only one other.  That is communion.  The reasoning is that they are the only ones that appear in the Gospels.  John the Baptizer stood down by the river. Jesus sat in the upper room. Other traditions range from having no real sense of sacraments to having seven or nine.  Each tradition chooses different things as well. That is the richness of how we see God.  We are humans, the Divine speaks to us in a language we understand. We all have different "languages" that we speak.

We had communion on Sunday as well.  It was, in fact "World Communion Sunday," which is a celebration of diversity and ecumenism held on the first Sunday in October.  It is another opportunity to consider our spiritual connections.  At Eliot we pass the tray of bread cubes and little glasses through the pews.  We do this so we might serve each other in the process.  Also, it is a recognition of the divine spark within each of us.  Other congregations go to the front to break bread off a communal loaf or take a wafer from a priest.  Frequently there is a communal cup as well.  That we recognize each other in our diverse manifestations of ritual is important.  These are small differences that reflect the wide variety of roads we take toward God.

When I was first getting interested in the United Church of Christ, a UCC colleague asked me how I planned on dealing with participating in a more sacramental tradition.  I had spent some time as a Unitarian Universalist pastor where the word "sacrament" when it is used doesn't have the same weight.  She had also entered the UCC from a less sacramental tradition.  I didn't have an answer then and she didn't expect me to.  It was more of a "head's up" that I might want to start thinking about baptism and communion more seriously and systematically.

I am glad I took her warning. I have learned over the years that ritual can be built over differences in style and belief.  It creates common ground upon which we can sit and converse. We can see our commonality in the quest toward unknowable mysteries.  It also gives us a way to show our love both to God and the world.  Amen to that.

Yup.  Here is the last sermon of the series!  It was quite a trip which contributed to a bit of a work bottleneck and a couple life stressors that still haven't been cleaned up.  The great thing about nature is that in times of stress and chaos we can retreat to it, remembering our relative insignificance.  It is therapeutic and we all could use a little therapy these days...

So I started posting my "Learning From Nature" sermon series and then sort of fizzled out.  There was a big gap in the calendar between sermon #2 and sermon #3.  In there we had our Annual Meeting right after the church's "Winter Getaway" where we close the church and all head to New Hampshire together.  Then we had a guest preacher--Rev. Ciaran Osborne--for the beginning of Lent.  However, we have been back to it for a while.  Here is Sermon #3, "Let Us Not Despair."  The road to despair seems pretty short these days in many aspects of our lives.  It is important, however, to keep our eyes on the prize.  

Anyway...here it is...

So here is the second sermon in my "Learning From Nature" series.  The series will have to take a bit of a hiatus as we have Annual Meeting this Sunday. However, so far, I am enjoying it.  I have decided to move slowly.  Attendance is such that not everyone is in church every week and there are some key concepts here to help us consider how we can change how we relate to the natural world.  I believe that most people--including myself--tend to believe that their (or our) connection to the natural world is closer than it is.  This series is part of an effort to get us to think differently about our place in the ecosystem.

Another part of this process will include a couple forums--essentially one hour workshops after church--on March 3 and March 10 to think about the theology around this relationship.  There will be a Pub Theology as well, riffing off the previous "Pub" when we talked about eco-anxiety.  You are welcome to attend if you are around!  IT is slow process to change our cultural norms and values.  However, we won't ever manage it if we never start.

I started an asynchronous online graduate course in Environmental Policy today.  The reasons were varied.  However, the biggest one had to do with my questions about the role of the church in the environmental movement.  I have been a minister for a long time.  Over the years environmentalism has been a regular topic or lens for me.  I have led workshops and outdoor worship.  We have examined the topic in the context of transcendentalism and other nature theologies. 

During all this time, though, I felt myself coming up against a blind spot.  The fact is, I know a great deal about nature and spirituality.  I have tons of practical experience with human beings and how they move through the world. However, I don't know as much about the science and economics around many of the problems and issues our planet faces. 

This isn't a shock.  I am a pastor.  I live and work in a community where my role is to "walk" with people to help them make sense of their lives, the world, their relationships, and their feelings. My biggest resource--among many--is a very ancient collection of texts written by people whose philosophical and theological chops were strong but whose economic and scientific chops were...well...lacking.  This isn't a judgment of them necessarily.  They weren't destroying the planet nearly as quickly as we are, after all...

Anyway, as you know I spend a lot of time outdoors.  My hiking adventures account for most of what is on this page.  I have to say, when I am "out there" on a mountain or a local trail, I wonder how long it will be around.  I wonder about the drastic shifts in weather.  I want to know what is going on with Creation--church people use the term "Creation" frequently even though most of us are not creationists--and what I can do about it. Right now I am feeling the need to dip into a better understanding of the ecosystem and the dynamics that contribute to its health.  

Yesterday I began a sermon series on these subjects.  It is independent of the course I am taking but I am sure there will be overlap. As it currently stands I will preach a number of sermons on Sunday mornings, host a number of workshops, and set up some "Pub Theology" sessions to talk about what the church can do to help the environment.  I feel like we have a role to play that we--houses of worship regardless of faith tradition--are uniquely positioned for.  We deal with hearts and minds.  To truly save humanity, we need to re-take our place in the network of living things.  This has to start with a change in attitude and conversation. 

Anyway, I will probably drop in here to wax lyrical on this subject from time to time.  If you live in the area, check out the church newsletter.  We would love to have you as part of this conversation!

​PS This is Sunday's Sermon...

So the holidays are over...and that is OK with me.  The first snow came over the weekend.  It messed up some church plans but I will get over it.  More pressingly, it is messing up my old bones which is making it hard to peel myself out of the bed, don my winter gear, and walk the dog for her accustomed four miles.  It just didn't happen today.  Even though I have done a great deal of hiking--much of it in the winter--it takes a while for me to recover these days. 

That is the way with time.  It rolls on ahead of us and we need to pace ourselves. We are different people from moment to moment.  Through the years this long line of who we have been changes. With each change we are less like the person we were when we were born. We are less like the person our parents dreamed of us being. We are--even--less like the one we thought we would be.  You know this...but it is worth pointing out sometimes.

That isn't always a bad thing, is it? Lost plans make us who we are. I remember in my undergraduate Anthropology class watching a documentary that followed two groups of children from elementary school well into their adulthood.  In the first video all the kids said what they wanted to be when they grew up.  By the end the rich ones had become just what their young selves said they would be.  The others--working class mostly--went on some unpredictable adventures.  Some stories were tragic.  Mostly, though, they did things they never thought possible.  In fact, they wouldn't even have had the words when they were young to describe the adults they became.

Anyway, the new year is an arbitrary date but--as we talked about during Advent--all holidays are arbitrary.  I have plans for 2024. I bet you do too. It is hard not to look both back and forward at the same time.

Maybe you don't have a resolution.  I don't. That is fine.  However, in surveying 2023 I see good parts and bad parts.  There have been times when I thought that I handled things well.  There were times when it felt like whatever I did made things worse.  This is normal.  It takes a certain level of delusion or a high level of privilege to go through life thinking you are perfect, right?

So what are you thinking about for the future?  For me, the "tiny step" involves trying to figure out what to do with this dog. She came to us the Saturday before Thanksgiving Sunday (which--for the edification of non-church people--is before Thanksgiving).  Right after that was the chaos of the holidays and of our lives which took an entropic turn. It has been a long time since we had a dog. The last one was a husky, who was very different from the one we have now. I hope to figure out our relationship over the next year.  Things will come out of that, I am sure. Not all of them will be good or successful.  However, my wife tells me I am not happy unless I have seven projects going at a time.  So there yah go...

During the Christmas season we went to the Worcester Art Museum and sat for a while in the 12th Century Benedictine priory they have just off the main hall. A jazz band was playing.  The band was great but the acoustics were not.  Anyway, I sat there for a while, recovering from all the mess of the month before.  I thought of the things I hadn't managed to get done.  Then I did my best to let them go.  Most plans don't work out.  What is left, though, is a life.

Whatever your plan is, I hope you commit to it.  I also hope you take it easy. Otherwise you might break something.  Right now I would like to go for a big hike in the snow.  The dog and I look out the window and all I can see is the potential for adventure and stories.  She probably sees squirrels and frozen poop. That ankle though...I need to take my time now if hiking ever gets to be a thing for me again....

Such is the way with the new year.  It is a lot like the old one.  Old injuries and burdens continue.  However, maybe the dreams change along with our ability and our commitment to live into them.