We’re gradually emerging from a year+ with COVID, step by step, with as much wisdom as we can glean from developments around us. We’re all on different timelines and in different comfort zones in this process. We’ll no doubt need a full measure of patience with ourselves and with one another as we make our way into a new chapter of life together.

And in addition to life beyond the pandemic, we’re facing into serious and divisive social and political issues as a nation, as well as increasingly urgent imperatives to address climate change, now called by many “the climate crisis.”

A social commentator recently reminded me of the work of the American Philosopher William James from the early 1900’s, work that might help and guide us. James wrote of the necessity of people choosing to participate in a world “not certain to be saved,” yet nevertheless a world dependent for its salvation on the condition that each person “does their level best” to help heal and redeem. James envisioned people in a cooperative, co-creative relationship with God, in James’ philosophical parlance described as “the unseen order,” whose initial act of creation was left incomplete, inviting humanity to join the project.
I like the invitation to each and all of us to “do our level best” to create harmony and mutuality, adding our part to the kind of world we seek. I think faith and God’s Creating Spirit undergird this choice and this commitment and that a life of prayer and praise helps form and sustain us in living this Way of Love.

Come, Holy Spirit—come heal, restore and renew.