This is a First Sundays for Families Service with a 9 am All-Ages Popup Choir practice to perform during Service and special activities for youth. Please let your friends and family know!
Once, a little boy wrote a poem called, “The Monster Who Was Sorry.” He begins by admitting he hates it when his father yells at him. His response in the poem is to throw his sister down the stairs, wreck his room and then rampage through his small town.
The poem concludes, “Then I sit in my messy house and say to myself, ‘I shouldn’t have done all that.’”
Kathleen Norris writes, “If that boy had been a novice in the 14th century monastic desert, his elders might have told him that he was well on the way to outward repentance, not such a monster after all, but only human. If the house is messy, they might have said, why not clean it up?
How can we clean up our own houses, when they are messy?
“We all cause harm. We have all been harmed. We are all bystanders to harm,” writes Rabbi Ruttenberg, in her book entitled, On Repentance and Repair : Making Amends in an Unapologetic World, adding, “American society isn’t very good at doing the work of repentance and repair.”
However, Maimonides, the great thinker, had a lot to say about how we can do the work of repentance and repair – or of cleaning up our own messes – in even the most irredeemable of situations.
As spring arrives, let’s prepare to add some personal and spiritual cleaning up to our list of spring cleaning projects!
I look forward to seeing you at the Grange on Sunday March 1, at 10 am. (or at 9 am for pop-up choir practice)
With love beyond belief, Barbara