Dear all —
I don’t know about you, but with the swift uptick into more and more daylight, I find myself waking up earlier and earlier. I kid myself that with my inevitable earlier rising, I somehow need less sleep (which is certainly not the case). Soon we approach the longest day of the year, the solstice on June 20th. In Sweden during Swedenborg’s time of the 18th century and continuing today, solstice brings one of the most important cultural festivities, the Midsommar. Rooted in pre-Christian cultural practices, the event celebrates the fertility of summer and the bounty of all things which have grown with the return of the light. Perhaps it is no surprise that in Swedenborg’s descriptions of the heavenly realms, he writes of heaven as a place where the spiritual sun never completely sets—a kind of climate akin to Scandinavia in June, peak mid-summer.
The light and its natural exuberance might contrast for some of us with the darkness of these times. It remains a moment of great volatility, perhaps the greatest crisis our nation has faced since the turmoil and division of the Civil War — a time of intense polarization, of families torn apart on the streets, of illegal detentions and hasty deportations, of famine and bombs, a Constitution violated and ignored. It’s quite dark. I often find myself thinking of a line from a William Butler Yeats poem (a poet who read deeply in Swedenborg), about the Apocalypse: “everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned.” As a community, we are nevertheless called upon to “be a light in the darkness,” and to broadcast a (gospel) message of hope, love, and redemption. I hope the beauty of the late spring that we are so privileged to get in the Bay—the flowers and the light, the play of ocean fog ebbing and flowing above the cityscape—can give you courage and conviction to meet this moment, wherever (and whoever) you are. Remember, the flowers that “neither toil nor spin” are reminders that we are not to worry. A bigger, cosmic story is at play, a drama much larger than this particular moment (intense as it certainly is); truth and justice are woven into the very fabric of creation, that “moral arc of the universe” which is long, “but bends towards justice,” as the Rev. Martin Luther King famously put it. So keep looking out for the arcs, and the rainbows: it is Pride month, after all.
I will not be with you this Sunday, as I am taking that day off. The special worship-in-meditation service will be led by our friend from across the Bay, Tassy Farwell, who is an active, licensed pastorate at Hillside, our sister congregation in El Cerrito. I will be thinking of you and look forward to being “back in the pulpit” on June 15.
With best wishes,
Rev. Dr. Devin Zuber
Interim Pastor