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  • BUUC Home
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  • Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
  • Stewardship and Gift Policy
    • Saints We've Known
    • Charitable Giving and the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act
  • Sermons 2022-23
    • The Seventh Principle
    • Make Light of It
    • A Turn of the Screw
    • America: Part II
    • What Do You Expect?
    • Good Mourning
    • Beyone Repair?
    • No Signal
    • Absolutely, Maybe, Definitely Not
    • Do Guardian Angels Exist?
    • Right Here
  • Our Covenant
  • Minister's Welcome
  • Religious Exploration
  • Music & Choir
  • We Rise: Social Justice Resources
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  • Church Calendar
  • Unitarian Universalism
  • Driving Directions
  • Photos of Us
  • Making the BUUC Accessible
  • LOVEUU
  • Community Resources
    • Mental Health Providers, Worcester MA
    • Southern Worcester County Parent Guide
  • Contact Us
    • Sermons 2021-22
  • Sermon Archives
    • Finding Joy in Uncertain Times
    • The Arithmetic of Joy
    • Of Muck and Martyrs
    • Doing Dishes
    • Idle Worship
    • The Fear of the Refugee
    • It's Not Just You
    • If We Choose
    • Lazy Busy
    • A Most Human Season
    • Running on Empty
    • Alone Together
    • Come Home
    • Winter Warmth
    • How Big Is Your Circle?
    • Thanksgiving Life
    • Kurt Vonnegut: Humanist Hero
    • In Costume
    • Again
    • Borderland
    • The Geometry of Life
    • Transformation and Growth
    • Come Build a Land
    • Our Brains, Our Minds and Our Hearts
    • Gifts
    • Repairers of the Breach
    • The Times They Are A-Changin'
    • Mission Possible
    • It Matters
    • Thanksgiving Reflection
    • Shoes That Fit
    • Winter
    • Ignorance, Answers, and Bliss
    • Questions, Questions
    • Living to the Point of Tears
    • Lost in the Shuffle: UU's Less Popular Principle
    • On the Turning Away
    • A Matter of Degree
    • A Collection of Near Death Experiences
    • I Know Her So Well, I Think. I Thought.
    • Faith-based Resilience
    • To Abet Creation
    • Who Cares?
    • A Matter of Life and Depth
    • Pass/Fail
    • Enough
    • O Holy Light
    • With New Eyes
    • Coming Alive
    • Beyond Words
    • Becoming
    • A Miracle Even Thomas Jefferson Could Embrace
    • Fear Not!
    • The Miracle of Change
    • Meeting Grace
    • R-E-S-P-E-C-T
    • Serving with Grace
    • The Pursuit of Happiness
    • When Heresy Met Sally
    • The Souls of All Living Creatures
    • What Are You Looking For?
    • Beloved
    • Let Me Count The Ways
    • Happiness
    • Chosen
    • Faith and Belief
    • Room To Grow
    • Blessed Fools
    • Don't Be a Superhero
    • Getting There from Here
    • Unfinished Business
    • Universalism's Origen
    • Yearn to Learn
    • Beauty Saves
    • Commentary on Freedom
    • Being Human: Religious Community in a Plastic Age
    • Questionable Certainties and Faithful Doubts
    • Commentaries on Murphy's Law
    • Children of a Lesser God
    • Fragile Nets of Meaning
    • Life Incarnate
    • So You Want to Be Happy
    • A Year's End Resolution
    • Where Stars Are Born
    • Thanking Eve
    • Anger, Our Teacher
    • Everlasting Punishment
    • Comprehending Moral Imperatives in a Me-centered World
    • Promises Kept
    • Dancing With The Stars: Science and Religion
    • Two Steps and Missteps: Church Membership for Human Beings
    • Light of the World
    • Dear God
    • Imago Hominis
    • CESA: Reflections on Drug Addiction
    • Falling in Love Again
    • How Does Your Garden Grow
    • Repent! No Guilt Trip Required
    • Go Out into the World
    • Thanks-living
    • Life and Not Life
    • Guilty As Charged
    • Dare To Hope
    • Don't Forget To Chew
    • Break the Silence - Stop the Violence
    • Living Among Strangers
    • What Is Religion Anyway?
    • East of Eden
    • Praying Attention
    • Wholly Human
    • The Healing Power of Forgiveness
    • All I Want for Christmas
    • Let It Be...Let It Go
    • Why Not?
    • People Like You
    • Vulnerable Trust
    • Thin Places
    • Now What?
    • Courageously Humble
    • The Last Butterfly
    • The Good, The Bad, and The Whole
    • Sacred Souvenirs
    • Made Whole
    • This Wild and Precious Life
    • Fragile Nets of Meaning
    • Where Our Future Can Begin
    • Taking Stock: Managing Our Spiritual Inventory
    • To Convert Life into Truth
    • Are We There Yet?
    • Family Matters
    • Ordinary Saints
    • All I Wanted Was Everything
    • Giving Thanks
    • To Be or Not To Be
    • Entering the Christmas Story
    • A Great Light
    • What's Real?
    • Troubling the Water
    • The Amazing Mr. Wedgewood
    • Lend Me Your Ears
    • Work That Is Real
    • Happy Melba Toast Day
    • The Great Pacific Garbage Dump
    • Plastics, Benjamin!
    • Surprise Beginnings
    • A Place at the Table
    • Norbert Capek’s Flower Communion: A Call To Honor Life
    • Voices of God
    • Hold On To What Is Good
    • The Little Stone Church That Rocks
    • What Would Jean-Luc Do?: A Tribute to Humanist Hero Gene Roddenberry
    • From Who am I? to Whose are We?
    • Turning
    • Spirituality
    • R & R
    • Spritual F-Words
    • Does Anyone Really Like Herding Cats?
    • Prepare to Be Amazed
    • The Greatest Gift
    • The Impossible Will Take A Little While
    • Taking Sides: Journey to the Center of the Universe
    • Help Wanted, Apply Within
    • Two Truths & Plastics and Water Don't Mix
    • The Third Conversation
    • Good People >
      • UU You >
        • Twitter and Covid and Wall Street, Oh, my!
        • I Do Believe in Spooks >
          • Holy Homophones >
            • What's in a Name?
            • So Long, Farewell, Auf Wiedersehen, Goodbye!
            • Open-Mindedness, As Assigned
            • Going on a Journey
            • Cheap Love
            • Nonproductive Delight
            • The Persistence of Memory
            • Thoughts about the Historical Jesus
            • Lindens and Tiarella and Bearberry, Oh My!
            • Season's Greetings
            • I Still Have A Dream
            • Peace Corps - A Lesson in Caring
            • Spiritual Engineering
            • Thanks for the Memories
            • Our Stories, Ourselves
            • Anxious Gardeners
            • The Best Sermon Ever!
            • UUnited
            • We Are Courageous
            • A Right Way to Be Wrong
            • Sacred Ideals
            • This Wild and Precious Life Revisited
            • 20/20
            • Home
            • What About Now?
        • Fragile
        • Time Ravel
        • Now Is Not the Time for Hope
        • The G Word (It's Probably Not what You Think)
    • No Thanks, I'll Walk
    • Be the Change
    • I Don't Know
    • What Lies Within
    • Guest Perspective
    • Growing Panes
    • De Colores
    • Roots and Wings
BROOKFIELD UNITARIAN UNIVERSALIST CHURCH
A Most Human Season

Brookfield Unitarian Universalist Church
March 20, 2022
Rev. Craig M. Nowak

I’m confused. 

Seriously; I am. 

You see since December 21st just about everyone around me, it seems, has been waiting, longing for, even craving the arrival of this day, March 20th. And here we are. Is it everything you hoped for?

And just in case you’re not sure what the significance of the two dates I just mentioned is, one is the first day of winter in this part of the world, and the other, today, is the first day of spring. 

Now, I admit, I’ve always been a bit of an oddball, but I’ve never really understood all the excitement and fanfare around the arrival of spring. Indeed, whenever someone has asked me what my favorite season is, I have consistently ranked spring as my LEAST favorite season. 

Maybe it has to do with growing up spending a lot of time in Vermont where they have by some accounts, a fifth season, known as “mud season” which coincides with spring, and is best known not for warm temperatures and crocuses, but, black flies, which, while small, have a bite that packs a big punch and makes outdoor activities unbearable to many. So just when you want to be outside again, you’re driven back inside by those pesky flies.

Or maybe it’s that spring reminds me of an unreliable car I owned when I was in seminary. Indeed, for a period time I never knew if the darn thing was going to stall when I stopped at a light or stop sign and then not start again. It took a month or two of multiple tows to the repair shop and attempted repairs to finally fix the problem and even after it was fixed I always felt a tinge of anxiety stopping at a light until I totaled the car after spinning out on a snowy road and hitting a stone wall one morning on my way to guest preach at a church in Connecticut. 

Spring doesn’t break down, but it is unreliable, especially at the beginning. One day its cold and you need your coat and gloves, another day hot and you’re sweating in that long-sleeved shirt you put on in the morning.
In a similar vein spring at times feels temperamental. Like a person with whom you’ve planned a wonderful outing with and then, when the day arrives, they decide, for some inexplicable reason, that they’re not going or, perhaps worse, you discover they’ve unilaterally changed the plans you made together.  And its worse if you’re a flower. Flowers, excited to meet the sun, pop up out of the ground only to be killed off prematurely by snow the next day. That’s a fine how-do-you-do!
 
In other circumstances spring can come off as wishy-washy or indecisive, especially on those days where it drizzles off and on all day, like it can’t make up its mind or the day starts out cold causing the central heating to go on and ends warm with the irresistible impulse to fling open all the windows.

Which brings me to another thing about spring that has kept it in last place among with seasons for me…allergies.  Indeed, while perhaps an annual boon to the pharmaceutical and facial tissue industry, spring’s arrival is decidedly less advantageous to the sinuses, eyes, nose, throats and more of allergy sufferers. 

And even if spring is your thing and you absolutely love it, you have to admit that it’s not all daffodils and warm breezes. It is a season filled with irritations, too much to keep track of, pay attention to, or catch up with. All of which is unreliable, unpredictable, and, at times illogical. Its temperamental, moody, even, can’t make up its mind, and to top it off an exhausting assault on the senses. 

Spring, it seems to me, is a most human season.

And maybe that’s really what’s long been my issue with spring. In contrast to summer which feels so carefree or autumn whose colors and crisp air consistently reward me with an overwhelming sense of aliveness, and winter whose snowy landscapes are nothing short of magical, spring feels too close to the experience of being human, so wrapped up in and driven by its own neuroses that it feels a lot like….well, daily life.

You know, life where “a parrot of irritation sits on [my] your shoulder.”

Life with, “Too much to do…a mountain of bills to pay and nothing in the house to eat.”

Life that, “ just goes on and on.”

But of course, on that last point, the poet Susan Wood reminds us, “it won’t” go on and on. 
Indeed Wood steers us through a litany of ordinary frustrations that accompany human life straight into one of its most confounding challenges, one so far as we know, unique to being human: 

We hope life, “does go on and on
forever”, she writes, “the little pain, 
the little pleasure, the sun 
a blood orange in the sky, the sky 
parrot blue and the day
unfolding like a bird slowly
spreading its wings…”

We hope…even though we know it won’t.

To our awareness of being alive and having to die, philosophy has sought to offer meaning, religion has sought to offer solace, and science has sought to offer an explanation.

Nature, however, speaks directly to this most vexing aspect of the human condition and perhaps no more directly than through the annual arrival of spring. 

“A Light exists in Spring
Not present on the Year
At any other period --
When March is scarcely here,”

writes Emily Dickinson. 

A light, she says, 

“that Science cannot overtake
But Human Nature feels.”

Some hear this as Dickinson’s elevation of religion over science. But I hear something larger than religion or science in her words. It seems to me her point is not to knock science or any other means of thinking about and understanding the world, but to remind us of that ineffable language, the language of the soul, if you will, through which we recognize and communicate with that to which we are alive within.       

A language inaccessible to those disciplines which require the sense of solidity that comes from observation, analysis, and explanation. A language in which conversation is engaged in not through the exchange of words, but the sanctity of mutual attention.

“It waits upon the Lawn,
It shows the furthest Tree
Upon the furthest Slope you know
It almost speaks to you.”

And what might come of conversation with the light that exists in spring?

For myself perhaps a less curmudgeonly reaction to its spring’s arrival going forward.  Maybe even something akin to Susan Wood’s poem “Daily Life” where the annoyances of ordinary life are acknowledged, even if begrudgingly, but also appreciated, almost tenderly, as part of a larger whole that is, when you think about, pretty amazing, even when it’s not “pretty” per se.

Indeed, maybe now the valiant rise of the first crocuses and their sometime fall under the weight of a late snowfall will reveal spring not as unreliable or temperamental but radically prophetic, continually calling life forth, undeterred by its inherent vulnerability. 

And isn’t that what we’re engaged in when we live with the hope our days will never end yet knowing they will?

Maybe spring is onto something.   
Of course, to some the next logical step is to turn that hope into a reality for human beings. But if we listen…if we’re paying attention, we notice spring does not speak of individual human lives, only Life itself.

As Frederick Turner, author of “Beyond Geography: The Western Spirit Against the Wilderness” writes, “Every added protection against the natural world contributes its bit to the steadily building illusion of independence from nature, so that in time that greatest of illusions is erected: the omnipotence of man.” 

To take from spring the inspiration to advance and prolong only human interests and life is to already believe in and promote the illusion of independence from nature. And spring most definitely does not teach independence from nature.

For what makes spring a most human season is not so much that it appears to simply mimic some of the most woeful if ordinary aspects of human nature, or our continual calling of life forward despite knowledge of our ultimate vulnerability. But rather, that it mirrors our longings and limitations, our trials and our triumphs, our strength and our vulnerability. 
Indeed, to the human willing to engage in a conversation of sacred, mutual attention, spring is nature’s invitation to rest in the interdependent web of existence not to establish a human colony apart from it. In conversation, through the language of the soul our human nature comprehends nature and recognizes itself as part of it. And perhaps this why Dickinson writing of the revelatory light that exists in spring, describes it departure in language that tastes bittersweet, 

“Then as Horizons step
Or Noons report away
Without the Formula of sound
It passes and we stay --

A quality of loss
Affecting our Content
As Trade had suddenly encroached
Upon a Sacrament.”
 
Spring, so revered a harbinger of new life, is quickly overtaken by other concerns.

Let us then welcome and relish not merely its outward expression to the senses, but embrace the conversation it invites inwardly through the sanctity of mutual attention.  Wherein we may yet come to appreciate this most human season anew. 

May it be so.

Amen and Blessed Be

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