This Week at Trinity, Beamsville
Friday, September 17, 2021
Dear Friends,
This week I’m quite tempted to set aside any writing and just send you a couple of video links. I suspect you’ve come across one already, making the repetitive rounds on social media: the one with Ryan Reynolds and Will Ferrell at their incomparable best, together creating comedic distraction, and an earworm of the best kind. The other video was released a couple months ago, by a group called Improv Everywhere, but was brand new to me this week. I’ve watched both more times than I will admit – for joy, for laugh-out-loud relishing, for some escaping, but ultimately for sharing.
The latter video is the one I’ve offered in the link below, in part because it feels like you could watch it and get the jist of the Sunday sermon. Truly. You may see something entirely different, but in those spontaneous dance parties, I see the power of one person making a choice that few others would. The effects were communal. Positive rippling is at its finest, releasing life and renewing energy. I haven’t a clue if the project had any spiritual undercurrent, but it still managed to speak to many fundamentals of human experience.
I said before that I’ve turned to these videos for some escapism. Is it any wonder? The news this week has been particularly painful. The same is true for some of my personal interactions. Too often, in far too many places, fear is manifesting itself in impatience, selfishness, dismissiveness, and a blinding lack of empathy. In precious and privileged places, those working hardest to save lives, to make decisions for the good of the whole, to protect a future, are being confronted and abused. It is baffling, wearying, and almost, but not quite overwhelming.
The almost but not quite of it all is rooted in a perseverance I know and witness every day. It is grounded in a faith that will not be deterred from brave acts of compassion and care. Rest assured, it is bound by the belief that boundaries are essential, rules are to be obeyed, and facts will outweigh fiction. It is also defined by humility, and the awareness that fear is a powerful motivator, beyond most of our understandings.
Are we talking about the pandemic again? Or this is about the Season of Creation, climate change and action? And is there still even a fleeting connection to an urban moment captured on YouTube? Yes. In my humble opinion, in this complicated dance of discipleship, yes, yes, and yes.
With love to you all,
Heather
“I know now folks in those stories had lots of chances of turning back, only they didn’t. They kept going because they were holding on to something.
That there’s some good in this world, Mr. Frodo, and it’s worth fighting for.”
(Samwise Gamgee in J.R.R. Tolkien’s ‘The Two Towers’)