Sermons/Talks/Archives

Soul Matters: Flourishing Together

• The Longest Day
  • Midsummer — the peak of light
    • Solstice
      • (Latin) sol, sun + sistere, to stand still.
      • For one day at the peak of summer, the sun pauses at the height of its arc before beginning its long return.
  • World outside
    • In motion and turbulent.
    • Hasn’t gotten easier.
    • In this community, we pause at the peak and take stock together.
    • Stillness is defiant—a refusal to be swept away.
  • Ancestors knew this time well.
    • They gathered.
    • They built fires.
    • They feasted.
  • This is a time to meet in community.
    • Gathered here this morning for exactly that reason.
    • Some of us gathered yesterday, some will gather tomorrow, some again this afternoon.
      • In the streets.
      • In the sun.
      • In quiet rooms.
      • On Zoom.
      • In the company of ones or tens or hundreds or thousands.
  • Celebration in community.
    • Keep spirits high through the summer.
    • Even as repression continues to happen.
    • Joy isn’t escapism; it’s resistance.
    • Sometimes the feast is the defiance.
  • What happens in this room today, or in small gatherings, or in the streets are not different things.
    • They are one continuous act.
    • Not “pausing the sacred” to do the civic.
    • Not “taking a break” from spirit to go do politics.
    • Spirituality is not something we do for an hour a week.
    • All of this is what flourishing together looks like when it’s actually happening.
  • It’s been a long year.
    • No need to tell you!
    • We’ve watched things we love come under threat.
    • We’ve shown up:
      • Town halls.
      • Rallies.
      • Phones.
      • Polls.
      • Doors of neighbors who needed us.
      • Here, in this space.
      • In other groups, for other interests, building community one at a time.
      • Doing the harder, quieter work of keeping ourselves spiritually whole enough to keep going.
    • That is not nothing.
      • It is everything.
  • Ancestors understood something about this time.
    • The peak of summer.
    • The fullness of light.
    • Midsummer is not an ending, nor a beginning.
    • It is standing still at the height of things—a moment:
      • To feel the fullness of what is before the wheel turns again.
      • To feast before the work continues.
      • To tend the fire together, in community, so that everyone who needs its light can find their way to it.
  • Welcome to Midsummer.
    • Welcome to the solstice.
    • While the sun stands still, let’s use the time to:
      • Take stock of where we’ve been.
      • Name what we have built.
      • Ready ourselves for what comes next.
• Retrospective Moment
  • Not a sentimental one.
  • Year’s themes as a journey.
    • Didn’t just hear these stories.
    • Maybe didn’t change our day-to-day much.
    • But learned how we are already living these themes.
    • This year’s harvest being named aloud.
  • Built Belonging.
    • Changing attitudes toward the “monsters” in Norse mythology.
      • Loki’s children, made into monsters.
  • Cultivated Compassion.
    • Toward the past (ancestors).
    • Inward (introspective).
    • Toward the future (we are the ancestors).
    • Our resistance is where we build legacy.
  • Nurtured Gratitude.
    • Endings transformed into beginnings.
    • Found not only peace—but purpose.
  • Chose Hope.
    • Named our challenges and made a choice.
  • Practiced Resistance.
    • Antigone.
    • Acts as simple as a handful of dust demonstrate power.
  • Embodied Resilience.
    • Demeter.
    • Staying human, connected, capable of love and anger at the same time.
  • Paid Attention.
    • Verdandi.
    • To what is breaking.
    • To what is healing.
    • To ourselves.
    • To one another.
  • Embraced Possibility.
    • Inanna.
    • Cracking open the seeds.
    • Trusting that what we do, however small, will ripple outward in the Well of Possibilities.
    • Mythological cycle of loss, endurance, and emergence.
  • Awakened Curiosity.
    • Eve, Pandora, Persephone.
    • Not a flaw to manage, but a capacity to cultivate.
  • Movement.
    • Inward work.
      • Belonging.
      • Compassion.
      • Gratitude.
      • Hope.
    • Active work.
      • Resistance.
      • Resilience.
      • Attention.
    • Agentic work.
      • Possibility.
      • Curiosity.
    • Collective payoff.
      • Flourishing together.
  • Community / Belonging.
    • Loki’s children opened the cycle, asking who gets to belong.
    • “Flourishing Together” closes the loop.
      • What belonging looks like when it’s working.
  • The Norns.
    • Interspersed throughout all sermons.
    • Shapers:
      • What has become.
      • What is becoming.
      • What should become.
    • Shaping, not weaving.
      • More collaborative with the world.
      • Not spinning an already-determined thread.
      • Shaping is not solitary work.
      • The Norns work together at the Well, in community.
    • Well of Wyrd.
      • Into it go all of our individual actions, causing ripples that affect everyone’s fate.
      • It’s also fed by the community’s actions.
      • What feeds the Well is what the community does.
      • The Norns shape with the deeds of humans.

What We’ve Done This Year

• Real work has entered the world.
  • It cannot be undone.
• We’re always in the middle of shaping.
  • And we shape together.
  • The showing up.
  • The tending of relationships.
  • Not just responses to fate.
  • Not passive recipients of whatever this moment hands us.
  • Not just survivors of a hard year.
  • These are our acts of shaping.
  • We’re doing Norn-work.
• Everything we’ve done this year has fed the Well.
  • Every act of resistance.
  • Every moment of chosen hope.
  • Every practice of attention.
  • That’s the flourishing.
  • Not a destination, but an accumulation of shared shaping.
• Today.
  • This talk is not just about something—it’s part of something.
  • This service, the march, all we do are continuous acts, not separate ones.

Frigg

• Often overshadowed by Odin in popular imagination, but she is:
  • Goddess of home, community, weaving, and the bonds between people.
  • A seer who knows wyrd—the probable fate of all things.
  • Yet chooses to act in the present anyway.
  • The goddess who holds community together.
  • She knows how hard the world is.
    • Yet tends the hall.
    • Keeps the fire.
    • Maintains the bonds.
• Her sanctuary is Fensalir.
  • The place where the community gathers, strengthens, and prepares.
  • People go out from that place in strength.
  • She doesn’t keep the hall for its own sake.
  • The hall is where people are readied.

Summer Ahead

• Ongoing repression.
• Need to sustain energy.
• Danger of isolation.
  • Flourishing isn’t a solo achievement.
  • The hall has to be kept.
  • Community must be maintained and grown.
  • Everyone has work to do.
    • Some tend the hall.
    • Some take to the streets.
    • All are parts of the same act of community.
• Midsummer fire.
  • Found in Norse, Celtic, and Slavic traditions.
  • The community tends it together.
  • It isn’t dedicated to any one deity.
  • It doesn’t belong to any one person.
  • It flourishes because everyone tends it.
• Action.
  • Go into the summer as:
    • Shapers.
    • Warriors.
    • Hall-keepers.
    • Fire-tenders.
  • Flourishing is not ahead of us, waiting to be found.
    • It is what we are doing, together, right now.
    • The fire is already burning.
    • We gathered here this morning.
    • We will gather again:
      • In meetings.
      • At gatherings.
      • In the streets.
      • Today.
      • Next week.
      • Next month.
    • These are not different things.

A Midsummer Story

• The village had come through a hard winter.
  • Genuinely hard.
  • The cold had been long.
  • Food had been scarce.
  • The darkness had a way of getting inside people.
  • Some had not made it through.
  • Others had been changed, carrying things they hadn’t carried before.
• Spring came reluctantly.
  • A crocus here.
  • A muddy field there.
  • The slow, unglamorous work of recovery began:
    • Mending what had broken.
    • Tending what had survived.
    • Carefully replanting hope in soil that wasn’t sure it was ready.
• By Midsummer the community is tired.
  • Not the tired that sleep fixes.
  • The deep tired that lives in the bones and asks:
    • Is this worth it?
    • Can we keep going?
    • Does what we do here matter?
  • You may recognize that tired.
• Someone drags a branch to the center of the village.
  • Lights it.
  • Maybe they’re cold.
  • Maybe they’re lonely.
  • Maybe they just needed to do something with their hands.
  • Maybe they’ve been carrying that branch a long time and finally put it down in the only place that made sense.
• Someone else sees the fire.
  • Brings another branch.
  • Then another.
  • No one sends a message.
  • No one draws up a plan.
  • People simply see the fire and understand that this is where they’re supposed to be.
• They come from their separate exhaustions and griefs.
  • From the cold corners of themselves where they’ve been managing alone.
  • They stand together around something that exists only because all of them are feeding it.
• The fire belongs to no one.
  • It belongs to everyone.
  • Standing together while the sun stands still, something shifts.
  • Not the world.
  • Not the circumstances.
  • But the people.
    • They remember what they were to each other.
    • That remembering changes everything that comes after.
• The Norns stand at the edge of the firelight.
  • Working together on something no one else can quite see.
  • Shaping, the way a hand shapes clay.
  • The way a community shapes itself through the choices it makes together.
• Demeter and Persephone bring food for the feast.
  • The mother who loved so completely.
  • The daughter who took full control of her life.
• Inanna arrives.
  • Still wearing the marks of what she survived.
  • Makes no effort to hide them.
  • She stands at the fire like someone who has earned the right to stand anywhere—and chooses here.
• Brigid is there.
  • She who never lets the flame go out.
  • She recognizes this fire immediately.
  • She nods at it like something she’s been waiting to see.
• Antigone is there.
  • She who did what needed doing with nothing but her conscience and a handful of dust.
  • She stands close to the fire.
  • She’s earned her place.
• Loki’s children stand at the edge.
  • Fenrir.
  • Jörmungandr.
  • Hel.
  • The ones called monsters because it’s easier than making room for them.
  • They wait to see if the invitation is real this time.
• Frigg moves through the gathering.
  • Tending rather than presiding.
  • Making sure no one stands alone at the edge of the dark.
  • She sees them.
  • She steps aside.
  • Makes room.
  • Gestures as if to say, “You belong here too.”
  • The circle widens.
  • The fire burns brighter.
• This is not a story from ancient times.
  • It’s a story about this morning.
  • About this space.
  • About you—both here in person and joining virtually.
  • About what you’ve been doing together since last September, when I first asked what it means to truly belong.
• You are the community that came through the hard winter.
  • You are the ones who dragged the first branch.
• Demeter, Brigid, Inanna, and all the others.
  • These are names we give to forces already moving in this space.
  • In all of you.
  • In this work.
  • All year long.
• When you chose hope in December…
  • That was Verdandi’s work.
  • The present moment being shaped by human hands.
• When you practiced resistance in January…
  • That was Antigone in your bones.
• When you embodied resilience in February…
  • That was Persephone finding her way back to the surface.
• When you paid attention in March…
  • Really paid attention to what was becoming.
  • That was the Norns at work.
  • You were shaping alongside them.
• You’ve been doing this all year.
  • Feeding the Well.
  • Every act of resistance.
  • Every moment of chosen hope.
  • Every practice of attention.
  • Every time you showed up when it would have been easier not to.
  • It’s all gone into the Well of Wyrd.
  • It cannot be undone.
  • It is already shaped into what is becoming.
• Across this summer…
  • Some of us will carry the fire into the streets.
  • Some will march.
  • Some will tend the hall so there is always somewhere to come home to.
  • All of these things are necessary.
  • All of them are sacred.
  • The fire needs people to carry it and people to keep it burning.
• The sun stands still.
  • The light is at its longest.
  • We are standing in it together, exactly as we should at Midsummer.
  • We build a fire.
  • We make sure everyone has a place at it.
  • Then we tend it together for as long as the night requires.