Minister's Musing

Rev. Mark Ward
Unitarian Universalist Church of Asheville

December 2006

The writer Parker Palmer begins his book, A Hidden Wholeness, with this quote from Leonard Cohen: “The blizzard of the world has crossed the threshold and it has overturned the order of the soul.” Maybe it’s the time of year but I certainly feel caught up in the “blizzard of the world” these days. My days are full of busyness, dashing from place to place with little time to reflect in the space between.

The image of a blizzard is a good one. With all that we fill our lives with we may be making it from day to day, but we feel disoriented. We’re not connecting with something deeper inside that grounds us. In Palmer’s words, we lose contact with “that life-giving core of the human self.” We expend our energy with our frenetic lives, but lack a source that can replenish that energy and help us feel whole again.

The problem is that often there is little give in our busy lives. We have obligations to meet and chores to accomplish. And yet even amid that busyness, there are choices available to us. It may mean simply scheduling time for something renewing. For me lately it has been a ceramics class that helps take me out of the heady, wordy church life into my hands where my attention is focused on centering a lump of clay. I’ve found that I’ve had little interest so far in keeping the things I make. It is more that I welcome the opportunity to interact with the clay, to see how it responds to my shaping and how it resists. I enjoy learning techniques to help me mold things of simple and surprising beauty.

The hidden wholeness that Palmer speaks about is that deep source of integrity within each of us that embodies in many ways our gift to the world. There are many paths to finding that wholeness. I invite you to explore the paths that speak to you, that open the way to that source that replenishes you, over and over again.