As we approach the 100th anniversary of The United Church of Canada in 2025, we realize that the future may be quite different from the past, even when it builds on wisdom and experience gathered over the years. It is a normal human response to experience fear based on uncertainty, and grief over the loss of the familiar. We are called to acknowledge those responses honestly… but also, to create space for love and hope to guide us in new ways.
Here are some words of hope from Jennifer Bailey, as posted in a recent Daily Meditation from the Center for Action and Contemplation, to help us reflect deeply on how we can move forward boldly as communities of faith:
“You are not alone in your quest for understanding your place in the world as it is evolving. At times it may feel like the earth is literally moving under your feet as you attempt to step in one direction or the other. That’s because it is. All around us things are shifting, systems are collapsing, and institutions are failing. This should not surprise us. Around the world, elders across cultures and peoples were predicting this time would come. It is a time of great uncovering in which Mother Earth and Father Sky are pushing us into a divine reckoning about what it means to be in right relationship with one another and all sentient beings in the twenty-first century and beyond. It is clear to me that the actions we take now will have deep and irreversible consequences for the generations to come….
The enormity of the plight we face can be solved only by harnessing the ingenuity and creativity of the communities to which we belong and are accountable. This season will require us to recover ancestral wisdom and practices that we lost or undervalued, repair the deep breaches in our interpersonal and communal relationships that replicate patterns of harm and destruction, and reimagine the possible by stretching ourselves to see beyond the realities of our current circumstances and daring to dream something different into being.”
https://cac.org/daily-meditations/recover-repair-reimagine/
#Nakonhaka #UCCan #DeepBoldDaring