From Our Ministers

In the big picture of the world, we’re all travelers, all guests, all hosts, all a little lost, all looking for home, all coming home, all making home.

The joyful energy this community generates in the Sanctuary, Atrium, Social Hall and classrooms nurtures the spirit and helps heal the world. What you do matters!

Hospitality opens us to the new—both to look and listen for new understandings of long familiar people, and to make discoveries with new folks.

Hospitality is striving to take no one for granted. Everyone wants to be greeted warmly, to be seen for who we are. And all of us are more than we appear to be.

Hospitality is taking a risk, stretching your heart, even when it’s been broken. It calls us to move through our fears to reach out to one another. Hospitality is a way to know and be known.

Ever had the experience of getting tight and tense while getting the appearance of your home and yourself ready for company? We have.

What we really want is to be at home in ourselves. We want the way we are with one another and the way we each are with our own self to be respectful and to trust that to make others feel at home.

Hospitality favors mutual respect over demands and to do lists. We’re learning this from Don Wollwage, our facilities manager, and Alisa Gould Sugden, our office administrator. We’re grateful for the presence they bring to the congregation. Even when we’re busy with details and interrupting their work to ask for help, they are centered and composed. We too can greet them and appreciate them and not just confront them with our needs. We can extend this mutual reverence to each other, to all the staff, to everyone.

Hospitality is the practice of seeing the holy mysteries in one another and in ourselves. Each of us has depths and cracks. You learn so much about yourself as you are pleased or annoyed by others. What great spiritual work!

Community is where we live out our relationships with self and life. We meet and greet and treat one another as if we affirm the worth and dignity of each person.

And we do!

Barbara and Bill

Revs. Barbara and Bill Hamilton-Holway, Co-Ministers