“If you don’t like the road you’re walking, start paving another one.”

~Dolly Parton~

I remember hearing a story by someone who worked intimately with people who were dying. She was a hospital chaplain, who routinely saw clergy coming to visit patients on their death bed, offering comfort and condolence to the families. One day she met a patient who was Buddhist, and the priest who visited with her didn’t offer comfort or any kind of promise. He just held the woman’s hand, and said: Have courage.

I’m very grateful to have so many great linguists and students of language in our congregation who reminded me that the root of courage is the Latin cor, which means heart. The original meaning of the word courage was to come to terms with our own heart, our own true feelings, our own mind and be unafraid to express it. Having courage is to fully express our true life.

This really is the highest intention of UUYO, in my opinion. The transformation we speak about or touch on, is to me fundamentally a transformation of our heart, a way of opening to more of what is actually true for us. When this happens, we learn how to love our life. When this becomes possible, it becomes more possible to love other people, which is where our covenant and our stories all point us.

I was sitting outside on my deck overlooking Mill Creek Park under a black walnut tree, which is committed to pelting our roof with black walnuts every other year in the Fall. This Fall is our year to get pelted, and being a fool I sat on the deck and tempted fate that a black walnut wouldn’t land on my head and knock me out. Fortunately fate smiled on me, and as I sat there I had an inspiration for this month. Instead of talking abstractly about courage, I came to realize that we’ve had numerous American icons who have passed away in the last weeks in short succession. I imagined how cool it would be to spend a Sunday looking at courage through the lens of these American lives, and my list of people came to me at once: Dolly Parton, Gloria Steinem, and Wendell Berry. They died within days of each other within the last month, and I felt excited to offer a glimpse into how courage can manifest by looking at these beautiful, surprising, committed true lives. So that’s what we’re doing. I’m excited to open the first Sunday with an engagement with Dolly Parton, a true American Spirit, who embodied a way of being a true person.

All of these people have something to teach us about being true: both to ourselves and our vision/ambitions. I’m excited to wonder aloud what lessons we may be teaching one another as we each live into our own true lives…whether we’re aware of it or not. Love truly is the spirit of this church, and I look forward to living into that with you all this month with courage.

In Faith,

Rev. Joseph