Winter Solstice in Portland, Oregon, occurred last night at 8:19.  And so now with what we have buried in the darkness of this time of year, comes what is reborn in the light. At least that is the way it's supposed to work, in the natural world, and the spiritual one as well. Yet here in the mayhem of 2019, much is not normal, order has gone awry.

If there is any substance to the notion of intelligent design of the universe, or its opposite, exquisite chance, what accounts for the stupidity of humans trashing our gift of life from the stars... Arrogance is not a catastrophic enough word to hold all the destruction we are responsible for: billions of birds, the future of our children, and the land itself we stand on, every continent, which might be drowned along with us. 

We're not talking forty days of rain here, but four centuries, or four hundred. It is the end. Of everything. From Shakespeare, to Machu Picchu, the Great Wall, and Timbuktu in Mali. How are we to wake up in the morning to this reality facing us. Or go to sleep at night for that matter. And this is to say nothing of the craziness at loose politically in this country right now, which is some just more of the same, and some unprecedented in its scope and awful consequences. What is it we can count on for sure, beyond the days starting to get longer as of this date on the calendar...

This recently led me into a conversation about faith, a word that almost never comes out of my mouth, because I think of myself of having none, not in anything.
And yet as the conversation proceeded, it became evident to me that I do trust in something: community. Somehow, in the middle of everything disintegrating, what I find myself putting energy into, is human beings working together for the greater good. And I think for me, deeply, it is not even so much that I know it will all work out --  it is that this is the life I want to be living regardless, and the world I want to be creating regardless. There is nothing that matters to me more.

As the single point of reference for everything I've just said, I use the word caring. It's what i look for -- in its presence or its absence -- from everyone, including me. That's what guides my work here in this congregation, and what I'm going to look for in any candidate for national office I'm voting on. That feels right to me this shortest day of the year, in the hard darkness, and the coming light.