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We are blessed to be upon this turning earth. Another day comes as a gift, each sunrise a brand-new opportunity, an invitation to a world of everything that can be. Even though time flows continuously, as earthlings, we have the peculiar gifts of these oscillations, these markers, day and night, morning and evening, each with their distinctive light. Each morning we have the chance to accept the invitation of the day and start again, start fresh, attuned to what we would love and create.

And with each sunset, or as we feel the darkness of night blanket us, we have an invitation to reflect upon the day that has just passed and sift through its moments, checking in with ourselves, giving thanks for everything and everyone that nurtured us or challenged us, taking stock of how we used our energies and how we were at our best or how we were not, letting go of what is now over and gone, and then slipping down into dreams, allowing them to do their work.

We are blessed by the changing seasons. Each season with its arc of emergence, of gradually reaching its fullness of expression, giving forth its own particular beauty, its delights and opportunities and challenges, and then fading back, decaying, transforming, giving way to the next season, which emerges from the receding one. The new season comes into its own fullness and then it too dies into what must now be born.

With the turning earth we pass through our own seasons, enjoying them or suffering through them, anticipating or dreading their coming, grieving an end or feeling relief that it's over.

And in these in-between moments, moments like today, hovering on the cusp between summer and autumn, just as with sunrise and sunset, we are prompted to be aware of the transitions in our own lives, and consider what we would embrace and what we would let go of.

Like each sunrise, like the emergence of each new earthly season, the beginning of the church year is an invitation. Even though there is a continuity that connects the end of one year with the beginning of another, and there is a continuous flow that never really stops moving, yet still we can enjoy this as a moment of beginning again, taking hold of it enough to reaffirm what we really want to be about, what we want to create, how we want to be with each other, how we want to share ourselves with the larger world.

Before I can say anything else I want to thank you for the incredibly beautiful and valuable experience of sabbatical. It was what it was supposed to be—it gave me deep rest, new perspective.

Although it's officially over, I feel it continuing to sound in my life, permeating my days, and continuing to give me a quieter and fuller awareness of my own state of being.

When I was just back from sabbatical, I had a revealing conversation with someone. He conjectured that, during the time that I had been released from the daily, practical demands of ministry, I had surely spent many of my sabbatical hours finally able to do what all ministers naturally long to do in their free time: ponder the deepest issues of life and render their penetrating insights in writing. After all, there's nothing like writing a sermon when you really need to unwind! He was eager to hear all of the insights that I had gained and recorded along the way.

I would say that it was in June, while staying on the wild little Island of Erraid in Scotland, that I touched into the depths of my sabbatical retreat. The island is so stunningly quiet, so remarkably untainted by the sounds of machines and human industry. It was there, in the midst of that quiet, that I did my clearest thinking—that is to say, my mind was as empty as an abandoned conch shell, which, if you hold it up to your ear, it simply recalls to you the sound of ocean waves, or is it the sound of your own blood pulsing in your veins?

As I walked in the wilds of the island, with the billowy sky and the turquoise sea and the craggy, windswept landscape all around me, had you been able to see a thought bubble over my head, it would have had in it … a billowy sky, a turquoise sea, and a craggy, windswept landscape. No ponderings, no secondary interpretations. Just experience.

When you have a dream that you want to remember, you have to build a bridge from the fluid, non-rational realm of dream impressions to the linear world of language and narrative. It's not always an easy translation. In a similar way, I'm gradually discovering what I learned during my months of sabbatical. Now that I am called back into the writing life, I have to build that bridge from innerness to outerness. It's through the effort of finding language for my experience that my learnings become clearer to me and also become something I can communicate.

However, I believe that whether I can find the words or not, what feels most important is the change in being and in presence that the sabbatical worked in me, the new energy I feel from it. This I hope very much to be able to communicate and share. And I hope to help all of us find and keep times of sabbath refreshment as our days unfold.

Sabbatical, or even a shorter time of sabbath—even simply a Sabbath day—is like the ancient farming practice of letting a field go fallow. A field that has been tilled and planted and reaped for many seasons in succession begins to lose its fertility. Its yield begins to decline. But if it is allowed to go fallow for a time, regress into its natural state, letting the weeds grow up and die back and compost themselves back into the soil, it will begin to regain its fertility.

Much of what rest gives is simply increased capacity for life. The stress and compression of overly busy lives can be numbing to the senses, deadening to the inner life. One can come to feel dried out. It's the opposite of feeling spiritually or creatively fruitful.

Certainly one of the purposes of a faith community is to tap into and nurture our spiritual and creative vitality. And so, speaking from my recent experience, I really do think that rest is a practice to be taken seriously by folks who want to be soulfully connected to themselves and to others, and who want to be generous with their life in relation to the world.

It struck me at some point that perhaps what folks really want from their church is simply more life. And by that, I don't mean doing more. I mean more juice! More connection, more sensation, more capacity, more meaning, more feeling, more creativity, more laughter—even more tears, if they are the sort of tears that water the fields of healing.

What did we say in our chalice lighting?

We've come together in free religious community
to renew our faith in the holiness, goodness, and beauty of life,
to reaffirm the way of the open mind and the full heart,
to rekindle the flame of memory and hope,
and to reclaim the vision of an earth made fair, with all her people one.

In other words, to have, to express, and to share more abundant life! May our gatherings as a church community always be an invitation to more life.

I wanted to share another aspect of my experience staying in the Erraid Community in Scotland. First a little background: The little island of Erraid is located in the Inner Hebrides off the coast of Scotland. The community there is an offshoot of the Findhorn Foundation, which is a very large international community and learning center located on the north coast of Scotland.

The Findhorn Foundation community offers the stimulus of being a busy place of intense contact and learning between many kinds of people, and of being a living laboratory for sustainable practices and community process.

Its tiny satellite, the Erraid community, offers something different. It, too, is a place of intense contact between many kinds of people, and a living laboratory for sustainable practices. But altogether there are usually only about 15 to 20 people on the island at any time, eight to 10 long-term residents and another handful of guests.

Erraid is an intensely quiet and rustic environment for a working retreat. As a guest you participate in the necessary labor of the gardens, the kitchen and scullery and farm, but you're given ample time for rest, meditation, solitude if you choose it, connection if you choose it, and enjoyment of nature all around.

The guests who come to Erraid stay for various lengths of time—a week or two, a month, a summer. Some realize that they feel called to live there for a longer time. Erraid is far from any beaten paths and involves, for most visitors, a multi-stage trip to get there—plane, train, ferry, bus, and finally motorboat to reach its quiet shore. During my two-week stay, my fellow guests had traveled from many part of the world.

There was Don, from Holland, who had been in Nepal, hiking in the Himalayas, before making his way to Erraid. There was an Italian family of four, all with mops of dark ringlets and names that rolled luxuriously off the tongue. They were making a year-long trek by camper van visiting many intentional communities throughout continental Europe and Britain. There was Judith, an artist from Australia, and Lee, a young woman from the American Midwest who was studying veterinary science in Glasgow-and others from Germany, France, South Africa, and various points in Britain.

There is something ironic about the fact that we had all traveled so far only to engage in the simple activities of weeding, cooking, cleaning, and sitting together in meditation. And yet because we had all stepped so entirely outside of our normal lives, chosen a journey of discovery, and were seekers drawn to the connections between spirituality, nature and intentional community, we were immediately available to one another for soulful conversation.

Within a very short time, usually without knowing the most basic things about each other, and sometimes in spite of language barriers, we would find ourselves talking about our deepest concerns and aspirations, what we were seeking for our lives, what we believed about the condition of the earth and the situation of humanity.

Just as the poet Oriah Mountain Dreamer expresses in her poem "The Invitation" when she says (paraphrasing): I'm not so interested in all the usual categories of status—what you do for a living, or how much you make, or how old you are, or what neighborhood you live in—I want to know how it is for you in the heart of your life.

After this brief intersection of our lives, perhaps for only a week or even less, we would part with affectionate hugs and invitations to visit one another, knowing we were unlikely to ever see each other again in this life, and yet also knowing we would be always have a welcoming friend if our paths should cross again.

In contrast to the connections between the guests, one got a very different feeling from the long-term residents: They seemed heavy-laden with unrelenting responsibilities—they were very busy with all that had to be done to maintain the farm, the animals, the old buildings, the community's daily needs, and their own family's needs. They often seemed distracted, and spoke mostly among themselves, often sitting with each other and apart from the guests at meals, communicating with the guests more functionally than socially. In spite of having a gorgeous sanctuary, they rarely attended meditations unless one of them was actually charged with facilitating.

I truly felt for the residents, given all they were trying to manage. But I also observed that the capacity to be present and available has to do not only with one's setting or conditions, but more importantly with one's state of mind. It became clear that an attitude of real hospitality has less to do with showing someone where the linens are, and much more to do with how you show up in conversation with that person. The guests on Erraid, I found, practiced a deeper quality of presence and hospitality than did the hosts—something for us to keep in mind as a community, since we are always hosts to visitors and seekers here at Theodore Parker Church.

As I have come back into my everyday life, the central question for me is: how to retain the capacity to be fully present to life? How to continue to be available for that depth of connection, with both myself and others? How to remain alive to sensation?

I have a great hope that we can experience our community, our gatherings, as an invitation always to more life and more juiciness. Oriah Mountain Dreamer's poem, "The Invitation," is essentially, an invitation to risk aliveness and contact

… to risk being in touch with our longings
… to risk believing in inspired possibilities
… to risk investing ourselves in order to bring those possibilities more fully into life
… to risk tenderness and connection
… perhaps to risk not always having to do something, but learning also to just be more fully.

These kinds of risks can make the difference for us between being a community that is truly vibrant and learning and one that nestles more deeply into its habits and its comfort zone. Somehow, we must learn to balance rest and risk. The right kind of rest enables us to take the right kind of risks.

You're invited, we're all invited, to be a community that rests, and that risks.

May it be so.

OPENING WORDS
An excerpt from "Things to Remember Upon Waking" by David Whyte

You are not
a troubled guest
on this earth,
you are not
an accident
amidst other accidents
you were invited
from another and greater
night
than the one
from which
you have just emerged.
Now, looking through
the slanting light
of the morning
window toward
the mountain
presence
of everything
that can be,
what urgency
calls you to your
one love? What shape
waits in the seed
of you to grow
and spread
its branches
against a future sky?

MEDITATION
"Anima Mundi" by Rev. Lilli Nye

READING
"The Invitation" by Oriah Mountain Dreamer (adapted)

It doesn't interest me what you do for a living.
I want to know what you ache for,
and if you dare to dream of meeting your heart's longing.
It doesn't interest me how old you are.
I want to know if you'll risk looking like a fool for love, for your dreams,
for the adventure of being alive.
It doesn't interest me what planets are squaring your moon.
I want to know if you have touched the center of your sorrow,
if you have been opened by life's betrayals
or have become shriveled and closed from fear of further pain.
I want to know if you can sit with pain, mine or your own,
if you can dance with wildness and let the ecstasy fill you
to the tips of your fingers and toes without cautioning you to be careful,
to be realistic, or to remember the limitations of being human.
It doesn't interest me if the story you are telling me is true.
I want to know if you can disappoint another to be true to yourself;
if you can bear the accusation of betrayal and not betray your own soul.
I want to know if you can be faithful and therefore trustworthy.
I want to know if you can see beauty, even when it is not pretty,
and if you can source your life from it's presence.
I want to know if you can live with failure, yours and mine,
and still stand on the edge of the lake and shout to the silver of the full moon, "YES!"
It doesn't interest me to know where you live or how much money you have.
I want to know if you can get up after the night of grief and despair,
weary and bruised to the bone,
and do what needs to be done for the children…
I want to know if you will stand in the center of the fire with me
and not shrink back…
I want to know what sustains you from the inside, when all else falls away.
I want to know if you can be alone with yourself,
and if you truly like the company you keep
in the empty moments.

CLOSING WORDS
Excerpt from "The Inner History of a Day" by John O'Donohue