Letter from Sarah Boote

Dear All:

“What is Spiritual Formation!?”  It sounds flip, but the answer is “Everything!”  If we believe that God is in everything, that there is no barrier between the sacred and secular — in fact, there is no secular — and that we are blessed every day with opportunities to be connected with the Divine, then the answer really is “Everything!”

When we leave here on Sunday mornings, we are called as Christians to bring that awareness into what we do everywhere else.  We are required to be “a light to the nations,” to help others become aware that there is a sacred dimension to our interactions with each other and with God’s creation.

The development of that awareness of God in everything and holding that awareness as we go through our daily lives isn’t something that is confined to children’s Sunday school classes or to sitting in a pew.  Sunday mornings can be our touchstone, our place of challenge and comfort, a place to stretch our understanding for new learnings and insights.  In that sense, everything that is done here, from services, to coffee hours, to cleaning the facilities, to opening them to strangers, to newsletters, is in service to nurturing and growing our awareness of God’s presence in every aspect of our lives.

This month we will have some new worship and educational experiences as a community.  We begin with the April First Sunday Service in the Parish Hall.  We will be using a liturgy adapted from the Iona Community in Scotland — some of the language will be familiar and some will be the familiar heard in a new way.  The forums this month will also be about liturgy, sacred space, language and our beliefs.  I am looking forward to the conversations around our experiences together this month.

Love, Sarah Boote