SESSION 7 – APRIL, 2009

A MINISTER LEAVING

ADAPTED FROM SESSION BY HELEN ZIDOWECKI

Chalice:  “I wanted a perfect ending.  Now I’ve learned, the hard way, that some poems don’t rhyme, and some stories don’t have a clear beginning, middle and end.  Life is about not knowing, having to change, taking the moment and making the best of it, without knowing what’s going to happen next. Delicious ambiguity.”

Gilda Radner

Check – in:

Reading:  We receive fragments of holiness, glimpses of eternity, brief moments of insight.  Let us gather them up for the precious gifts that they are and renewed by their grace, move boldly into the unknown.

Sara Moore Campbell

Quotes from the Common Bowl:

Life Questions:

1.  What have you valued in our ministry with Norm?

2.  What do you think are the next steps as a congregation to process this event of our minister leaving?

3.  How can you personally contribute to the process of regrouping as a Fellowship?

4.  How does this affect your spirituality and sense of community?

Closing ritual:

May the light around us guide our footsteps, and hold us fast to the best and most righteous that we seek.  May the darkness around us nurture our dreams, and give us rest so that we may give ourselves to the work of our world.  Let us seek to remember the wholeness of our lives, the weaving of light and shadow in this great and astonishing dance in which we move.

Kathleen McTigue

QUOTES FOR LESSON 7 – APRIL, 2009

The thing about democracy, beloveds, is that it is not neat, orderly, or quiet. It requires a certain relish for confusion.

~ Molly Ivins

Have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart. Try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books written in a foreign language. Do not now look for the answers. They cannot now be given to you because you could not live them. It is a question of experiencing everything. At present you need to live the question. Perhaps you will gradually, without even noticing it, find yourself experiencing the answer, some distant day.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

Everything in the universe goes by indirection.  There are no straight lines.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

The truth is that our finest moments are most likely to occur when we are feeling deeply uncomfortable, unhappy, or unfulfilled. For it is only in such moments, propelled by our discomfort, that we are likely to step out of our ruts and start searching for different ways or truer answers.

~ M. Scott Peck

One who asks a question is a fool for five minutes; one who does not ask a question remains a fool forever.

~ Chinese Proverb

There are two ways to slide easily through life: to believe everything or to doubt everything; both ways save us from thinking.

~ Alfred Korzybski

Creativity requires the courage to let go of certainties.

~ Erich Fromm

You may be deceived if you trust too much, but you will live in torment if you don't trust enough.

~ Frank Crane

What the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the master calls  a butterfly.

~ Richard Bach

The relationship between commitment and doubt is by no means an antagonistic one. Commitment is healthiest when it is not without doubt but in spite of doubt.

~ Rollo May

The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty; not knowing what comes next.

~ Ursula K. Leguin