Virtual Monastery

Welcome to the "Virtual Monastery" site of the Unitarian Universalist Christian Fellowship. Click here for the Weekly Meditation or scroll down.  You can also visit our Virtual Monastery Archives. This section of the website is designed to help you develop or deepen your spiritual practice and devotion to the God in whom we live and move and have our being.

You may be interested in The 12 Marks of the New Monasticism or The Monastic Schedule that parallel the classic hours of devotional prayer and worship found in a monastery.  Or, you may wish to explore and supplement those readings by going to additional links for Resources and Liturgies for the Christian Year, Prayers, Sermons, Bible Study Resources and to connect with other groups.  Including getting readings and reflections from postings made to the UUCF-Bible online community which is an extenstion of this website.  There we post scripture passages and have discussions about there meanings in our lives.

Whatever your need, we hope that this virtual monastery site can provide you with the tools you need to deepen your relationship as a liberal Christian who chooses to follow Jesus freely.

Each month members of the Unitarian Universalist Christian Fellowship will submit a weekly reflection for your consideration. Our hope is that you will sit with the text, read it, savor it, and be nourished by it. Here's is a simple way of approaching the weekly reflection:

• Read the scripture - at least once, sometimes twice or three times.
• Reflect on the scripture.  Sit with your feelings about it, turn it around in your mind to see what it might mean beneath your first impression.
• Respond to the scripture.  In a group, this would be discussion.  In private, it might be a journal response, a prayer, or in verbal dialogue. Be creative in your response to scripture through drawing, calligraphy, sculpture, music, poetry, essay; whatever medium you enjoy.
• Rest - take time to sit and breathe, let go, relax, and meditate.  If you found new insight in the Scripture, just sit with that insight for a few moments, before giving a prayer of thanks and moving out into your day.

Virtual Monastery Weekly Meditation

February 5, 2012

Revised Common Lectionary

My Messenger:  Rev. Naomi King

• Scriptures:
• Isaiah 40:21-31
• Psalm 147:1-11,20c
• 1 Corinthians 9:16-23
• Mark 1:29-39

Wholeness in Exile:

Isaiah 40:21-31

How do we pass wholeness to the next generation when we ourselves have been torn apart? How do we teach and live into the wisdom that calls us, and live into the covenant that we belong to still when we struggle to remember and disentangle our fears and learning from trauma? When our memories falter, how do we live faithfully?

The prophet Isaiah, sending a message of consolation to the people who have endured captivity for a generation, is speaking to people who struggle with feeling forgotten, abandoned, and, often, condemned. Isaiah speaks to the generation growing up in and born in captivity, the ones without the sense memories of home, that most beloved of places, where we meet the Holy in joy (Psalm 84). Isaiah speaks to the ones whose lives are formed by exile and slavery rather than the responsibilities of freedom. Tired ourselves, we can fear that the Holy is tired of us (Isaiah 40:27).

Exile and alienation remain a common experience, spiritually and psychologically, as so many of us grow up displaced, or with the place we would call home desecrated and difficult to thrive in. How do we grow faithfully and find healing and hope? How do we meet the Beloved right where we are?

Isaiah reminds us in our separation and exile that the Holy is everywhere, bigger than our prisons and our walls, bigger than any border we might throw up and any chasm that separates us from others. Not only that, but we are cared for by the Beloved, one who cannot grow tired, one whose wisdom is bigger than our knowing, one who bears us up even in the middle of our troubles.

We are ever meeting the Beloved right where we are, whether we are at home or in exile. Part of the work of faithing is knowing who we are and whose we are, which we do singing the songs of reassurance and thanksgiving, remembering the good history and the difficult times that came before, in being wholly present with the Holy Presence.

Remembering Whose We Are:

Psalm 147: 1-11, 20c

Re-member-ing what has been torn apart and then restored is our context for Psalm 147, a psalm composed after the Babylonian exile (147:2 The Holy rebuilds Jerusalem; the One gathers in the exiles of Israel).

Often enough, attending the psalms in devotionals and worship, I have found people rushing through, reading the words aloud with no meaning given to them. They are words, or a song, and holy words, so we should say them and be about them. While there are communities that endeavor to read neutrally so as to best allow what the Holy is saying come through the words, I find myself more filled with awe and gratitude and reverence when I pause and attend to the meaning as I read the psalms out loud.

Psalm 147:1 begins us with an affirmation of praise. Hallelujah! It is good to chant hymns to the Holy One; it is pleasant to sing glorious praise. Sitting in the sanctuary, meeting these words, with whatever is going on in my life, I want to meet those words with meaning. When I’m in trouble, I’m given a chance to find a Hallelujah moment, to remember I am not alone wherever I go, however I find myself. When I’m full of wonder, I have a chance to lift up my heart with thanksgiving. However I am, the affirmation of praise is an invitation to remember my whole self and be refreshed and renewed.

Many of us will meet exile and plenty of troubles in our lives, before we arrive in the hour of prayer, and after. Psalm 147 and psalms like it give us the marvelous opportunity to remember who we are and whose we are.

Love’s Generosity:

1 Corinthians 9:16-23

Paul’s speech in 1 Corinthians 9:16-23 is part of a larger set of instructions on the duties of freedom, with Paul as a living instruction manual. Like the Corinthians, we can wonder along with Paul about how well we’re living into the freedom of our faithing, how well we are answering the duty to love.

Evidently, there’s a lot of concern about what we will get when we follow the way Paul is teaching. Imagine being gathered in community and folks asking questions like, “Hey, Paul, if I follow the way, will I have I enough to eat every day?” or “Teacher, if I follow the way, will I have a bigger house?” or “Are the really good people part of this way who are given every good and wonderful thing!”

Paul says no. No, we share the way of love, we live more generously into it every day, with no expectations of material things or special respect or power over one another. Instead, we serve this world with love, in order to be part of Love’s transforming power, not because we’ll be richer or more powerful or personally taken care of. We reach out and we deal with discomfort and we serve because that is what love does: attend to the sick and lonely, restore the ruined lands and bind up the wounded heart, rejoice in the day that the One has made, and tend every stranger, neighbor, and enemy as a loved one, as the Holy, as ourselves.

The way has to be free for love to really work and transform us and this world. That’s how grace and generosity work. Love isn’t about what we get, but about how and what we give.

Love Serves:

Mark 1:29-39

The generosity of transforming love is made real in how we serve humbly in the way of the Holy (Micah 6:8) by loving the One, our neighbors (strangers, enemies) and ourselves (family, friends, self). Mark 1:29-39 gives us four examples of how Jesus bears the generosity of transforming love.

Jesus heals Simon’s mother-in-law.

Jesus heals the many sick.

Jesus retreats to pray.

Jesus answers the new call to bear glad tidings.

Notably, Jesus doesn’t get to Simon’s house and gripe, “Hey, Simon, some hospitality! Show me your so-called-sick mother-in-law and I’ll heal her right into making us comfortable and welcome!” No, Jesus goes to her bedside directly and lifts her up. That she is able to get up and make him welcome is an unneeded and unexpected gift – more love in action. Mark is showing us: Jesus is living humbly.

Similarly, Jesus doesn’t have the disciples at the door charging for each healing or cure or moment of hope. We’re not told of messengers bearing advertisements through the streets shouting out, “Get yourself cured for only ten shekels! A moment of hope for three talents! Only have a mite? Get a ray of heaven smile!” Instead, word passes as word always passes when hope slips into a city, borne on a current of joy and expectant gratitude. Mark is showing us: Jesus is loving his neighbors as himself.

Jesus doesn’t groan, “Leave me alone. Let me have my time off. I’m tired.” He understands that people are yearning to be with him, yearning for love’s transforming blessing. Instead, Jesus slips away, knowing his disciples will find him, and devotes himself to the Source of All. Mark is showing us: Jesus is loving the One with his whole heart and his whole mind.

Then, when the disciples find him, Jesus says, “Great! Let’s go on and do what I am here to do!” Jesus is answering the whole call set down by Micah: to live humbly, to love the Holy, to love neighbor (stranger, enemies) and family, friends, and self.

Prayer:

Transforming Love open our hearts to service without expectation of reward, of fame, of fortune, or even of joy. Instead, help us serve in the true life of love, generously, into our discomfort zones. When we find ourselves meeting our expectations proudly on the road, grant us laughter and self-recognition and humble joy that we may proceed another way. When we pride ourselves on serving others and forget to turn back to You, Beloved, do come gather us up and set us down in the garden of wonder, for a quiet time in full appreciation and awe in Your Creation, the diversity and abundance of gifts beyond our own, and the astounding miracles that occur in making space for them. Transform us in Love, Holy One, and keep on that transformation as we turn with you in serving goodness and peace in this world. Amen.

February 2, 2012

Lection for Candlemas
Presentation of the Lord Year B at the Revised Common Lectionary

My Messenger:  Rev. Naomi King

Malachi 3:1-4:

We begin reading today, “See, I am sending my messenger to prepare the way before me.” (Malachi 3:1) Centuries of Christian interpretation make this messenger out to be John the Baptist. But when Malachi was it could also be Malachi himself, for Malachi means “My Messenger”. If we look to the context of the rest of what the Messenger is bearing, we find a prophet who largely supports the Torah, the five cities of refuge that are the five Books of Moses. When My Messenger was set down, it was towards the end of the Persian occupation and just after the Torah was canonized. A way has been made before us, with My Messenger, turning us toward the way of living we’re given in the Torah. For Christians today to merrily avoid this context is to avoid a way that has been prepared already for us, one that John the Baptist preaches in and calls for repentance within. My Messenger calls us to attend. Here we are, on Candlemas, attending, asking: “how may we best serve, Holy One? How shall we travel in the way of covenant?”

Psalm 84:

Along the way we are traveling, we meet Psalm 84, a psalm of thankfulness for the pilgrimage to refuge. 84:4 is a verse of homecoming.

Even the sparrow has found a home,
And the swallow a nest for herself,
In which to set her young,
Near Your altar, Ruler of All,
My king and my Holy One.

As we sing this verse, we may be reminded of Jesus’ words where welcome has been hollowed out and denied him. “Even foxes have their dens and birds their nests, but the son of Man has no place to lay his head.” (Matthew 8:20) How humanly we crave a home, that beloved place where we meet the Holy and shout for joy! Following My Messenger, we return to that beloved place. This is one piece of the answer to our questions. We return to that beloved place and dwell in the wonderful presence of joy.

Hebrews 2:14-18:

Like the first hearers of My Messenger, the first readers of the Letter to the Hebrews, are going through a time of trouble and persecution. They’re looking for some good news to help them stay focused on the path of promise, some assurances that they are indeed on their way to the beloved place where the Holy dwells. We do not have to be enthralled by death - to be motivated by fear -and we do not have to be like angels, to be perfected. The mercy we have as we try to live according to My Messenger and follow the teachings of Jesus is that we can trust the Holy understands our suffering. We are not alone or forsaken, even if we are worried about where we shall lay our heads. We have not been forgotten. The beloved place lies ahead.

Luke 2:22-80:

Some call this day Candlemas and some call it the Presentation of the Lord. Luke 2:22-40 gives us the second name. There are, of course, all sorts of Biblical reasons to present our children to the Holy. One reason is to induct them formally into covenant with the Holy. Another is to remind ourselves of the blessing children are, blessings to tend, blessings who will grow us and challenge us in untold ways, and blessings who have their own unique gifts to give the world. But there is also laying down the path for this child that they may follow it all their days, turning to the most beloved place and finding joy and rest with the Holy One. When we begin important relationships, we usually begin with introductions. Taking our children to the sanctuary to dedicate them is an introduction – introducing them to how we honor and seek the Holy, introducing ourselves to the Holy again as a family, introducing ourselves to the next stage along the journey. Following My Messenger, who points back to the ways of living in the Torah, Luke tells us Mary and Joseph take Jesus to present him to the covenant of the Holy One.

Luke’s telling is yet another introduction to us who read and attend. Here is a child of amazing blessing. Here the family is following the ways set down in the Torah, the way pointed to by My Messenger. Here are additional introductions, to Simeon and to Anna, who otherwise show up in no other account by name. Anna is a prophet and she declares the prophecies fulfilled. Simeon announces that the prophecies are being fulfilled for everybody, no exceptions. Simeon is, in some ways, the earliest Universalist, finding Universalism the way of the Holy One. Everyone will come to the most beloved place spoken of in Psalm 84; all belong to Perfect and Abiding Love already.

Prayer:

Beloved we seek you in the morning and in the evening. Let no hour pass without us seeking you out, for wherever you are, there is the home, the most beloved place, the most blessed of moments. Guide us all our days to tend to your path, set down by the law and the prophets and taught to us by your son Jesus. Remembering that you abide with all, let us turn and call all family, neighbor, friend. On this day of dedication, let us rededicate our own hearts to you, so that our words, our thoughts, our dreams, and our deeds are ever following your way of peace and steadfast love. Amen.