Dear Members and Friends,

Many of you joined BUUF long after 1992. I thought it was about time you knew more about me and my ministry. With that purpose in mind, I am repeating my pastoral letter from May 2001.

Our son, David, called the other night to tell us that he was taking the training for lay ministry from the northern New York Methodist Conference. His first assignment was to talk with several ministers about their call to ministry. He asked me what constituted my call to the ministry. It is strange that in fifty four years he had never heard that story. I told him about my starting out in church music with a plan to spend my life as an organist and choir director, one of my professors at Boston University, Dr. Augustine Smith, called me in to explain to me that all the major organ jobs were occupied by men and that in all likelihood I would have to settle for a job in a not great city, which meant I would also have to teach piano, organ, and voice to make out a decent living. He did me a favor. I remember telling him that I would enter the ministry, completely forgetting that the ministry was a male-dominated profession.

Long before this conversation, I had noticed the limousines in front of Symphony Hall waiting for the rich music lovers in their bundled furs. Three short blocks away were the slums of Boston with their wretched, violent poverty showing in thin wan faces of hopelessness. The injustice of this suffering bothered me. It was the recession and everyone was poor except for “old money” on Beacon Hill. My call to ministry was my sense of outrage that so many should be poor while a few were super rich. I decided it was my work to bend the arc of history toward justice.

You will notice there were no opening skies, no angel visitant, no mysterious call to service in the church. It was clear to me that the system of denatured and alienated culture could be changed through the church. If I had not been raised in church, I think I would have chosen the theater.

In a culture which has lost its sense of eros and celebration, we UUs should come celebrating compassion and passion, and a sense of being involved in a new creation. May the beauty of May’s flowers remind us that without the darkness there would be neither mystery nor glory.

Here ends the old letter.

I wish you all a new year of adventure and joy, the joy that wants all eternity.

Love,