I came to this church just four and half years ago having been away from organized religion for all of my adult life. The religion of my youth, Roman Catholicism, doesn’t have much use for people like me. Yet today I stand here a candidate for the Unitarian Universalist ministry. I could not have dreamt of such a possibility when I showed up here a weary stranger that first Sunday.

At some point in life we find ourselves standing at the edge of a chasm between who we have been told to be and who we are called to be. The task of a religious community is not to help us cross over this divide, but to descend to the chasm floor and journey through it together. For in its depth, the chasm holds all possibilities, possibilities unimaginable from distant heights.

“Sometimes it is necessary to re-teach a thing its loveliness,” writes the poet Galway Kinnell. In welcoming me to the journey through the chasm, this church has re-taught me my loveliness…my worth. You have renewed my faith in life and in myself. Here I have been affirmed, inspired, encouraged, disappointed, surprised, comforted, challenged…saved.

I don’t know that one could ask more of a religious community, but I’m going to anyway…There's a hurting world beyond these walls… live always with willing hands and open hearts that the love and support abloom in this community, love and support this once weary stranger has experienced first hand, might take root in the larger garden of the world.

By Craig Nowak, member, The Universalist Church