Where You Belong

“Where you belong is where you choose to constantly choose to show up.”

– Karina Antonopoulos

“There is a lovely balance at the heart of our nature: each of us is utterly unique and yet we live in the most intimate kinship with everyone and everything else.”

– John O’Donohue

It is somehow just two weeks from the first day of autumn. The seasons turn and our new year together as a congregation begins!

This September, the Soul Matters theme is “belonging”. Some questions offered for reflection are…

What feelings come up when you hear the word “belonging”?

Was there a time you first thought to yourself, “Now I belong” or “Here I finally belong”?

What pieces of your religious past do you wish still belonged to you?

What one change at North Parish would increase your sense of belonging here?

How might we deepen our sense of belonging to each other, to the earth or the holy?

As the year unfolds, I hope each of you- and every one of our children and youth- will find a sense of belonging at North Parish.  As author Brene Brown points out, that is not the same as fitting in. She writes, “I was so shocked to learn that the opposite of belonging is fitting in… true belonging never asks us to change who we are. It demands we be who we are.”

At North Parish we come together with all sorts of quirks, personalities and theologies, don’t we?  And yet we know that we belong to each other, to a wider religious community, to the earth and cosmos, to love and life, to all that is. That is good.

Hope to see you at the Crossroads Concert Saturday night and/or the Sunday service. Bring some water, a shell or a rock from a sacred place, or just show up and we’ll supply some high quality symbolic water… and bagels, too!
Yours, Rev. Lee