Index of Rev. Grey's Columns

I remember my childhood anticipation just before I was to go to Camp Ayapo, a Y camp in Connecticut, for my first sleep away experience. I worried. Would I make any friends? Would I know how to make a campfire when the time came? Would I pass the first swimming test? Would I miss my mother? I survived the first two weeks of camp, and must have even enjoyed some of it, because I went back a second year!

My granddaughter faced some of those same questions as she had her first experience of summer camp away this July. We, her mother, grandmother, and other relatives were encouraged to be in touch by email (we didn't have that option when I was 11). We were told to keep our messages positive, and I did that. But it was not all fun and games. Like me, so many years before, as the weeks progressed she had her ups and downs, and like me, she learned some new skills and maybe even new things about herself. There was some joy and some sorrow mixed in together.

Sometimes the hard experiences are the ones that finally bring us greater learning and growth. But we may not have chosen them and, at the time, we may wish we did not have them. We also may be tempted to slough them off, or close ourselves off to their impact, to shut down to awareness of pain or difficulty, loss or grief. But as a wise woman once emphasized to me, to shut down to the feelings of our sorrow is to diminish our capacity to feel deeply, and we will also miss our joy.

This summer I take time to drink in the wonder of water and birds, and also the sorrow of lives lost and people badly hurt in our neighborhood, city and the world. I especially remember and hold in my heart our brothers and sisters in London, Iraq, Afghanistan, and other places where people face sudden or daily violence. This season I celebrate the liveliness and joy of Chicago summer festivals, and the blessings of another August birthday, another year of life, and also am aware of the anniversary of a great August tragedy, the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the current daily reality of bombings and their destruction, in Iraq especially.

The ways I know of to hold all sides and dimensions of life together in one heart, is to allow feeling, to breathe them in, yet also to breathe out, so as not to get stuck in feelings but to let them flow, to participate fully and bodily in a full life of both joy and sorrow, to seek and embrace the companionship of loved ones and of religious community, and to open myself to the greatest of Love which can hold and sustain me, and, I believe, my granddaughter and all of us in the sorrow and in the joy.

In another place in this newsletter, I welcome our new religious educator, Danielle Gerrior, and reflect on religious education in our congregation, but in this place, I simply want to acknowledge that religious education doesn't only happen in a class or classroom. Learning to embrace the wholeness of life is a lifelong experience and an essential part of the religious learning and growing of the human experience, of our lives.

With love, in faith,

Nina