A Life’s Work

Do you know what I didn’t like growing up? Homework. Especially math homework. If my mother could have back the hours that it took to get me to do my math homework, she could have earned another degree. I don’t even have a great excuse for why I didn’t do my math homework. Mostly I think it was because I didn’t want to do it and I had a pretty high opinion of my own likes and dislikes as a willful (but very spirited) child growing up. But what I did like was in-class group assignments.

This weekend we held our second Family Chapel in Nu’uanu Valley District Park. And one of the central parts of the service was learning a little more about three of the endangered species here in Hawai’i. And we did this together by creating head bands with the likeness and features of the endangered species. We had little snails sliming their way around the park. There were even flies and bees! Since there were also scissors involved, all of the families worked together to color, construct, and wear these fun headbands, quite literally taking on the identities of animals whose time on Earth is being threatened presently.

This was a beautiful example of the kinds of work that I really liked to do in school growing up. But it also took a lot of preparation by members of our community. Our parents got together all of the pieces to print out, brought all of the crayons to color the headbands, send out numerous emails to remind everyone what was going on, and I even had to practice our story some (it started with rhyming couplets in iambic pentameter then changed meter and rhyme structure). Having this great group activity took a lot of homework for a lot of people.

I have been through periods of my own life when I thought that all I needed was a weekly recharge of a gathering of my spiritual community. I’d get a few good songs in and a message I could take with me for the week. But somewhere around the next morning, usually Monday morning, I’d be nervous or anxious again about all of the things I’d stacked into my life. I couldn’t see very often how the messages and the songs were supposed to work in a world so devoid of spiritual principles, it seemed. There were times I wondered if I was in danger.

So I went to a spiritual director. And the first thing he did…was give me homework–spiritual homework. What unfolded from the experience of making my spiritual relationship to the Universe more personal and part of my daily life, combined with communal gatherings, was nothing short of a personal revolution for me. Yes, my job changed. But this was only an ancillary effect of the change in the relationship between myself and the Universe where I live, where my destiny is held, and where I am no longer endangered. And homework was a small price to pay.

May it ever be so,
Rev. T. J.
minister@unitariansofhi.org