Opening Hymn #357 Bright Morning Stars
Words: Anonymous
Music: American folk song, arr. by James A. Lucas,
© 1983 Plymouth Music, used by perm. of Walton Music Corp.
Tune BRIGHT MORNING STARS

Rev. Christopher Watkins Lamb and Amber Lamb
Foothills Unitarian Church (5 April, 2021)

Meditation – Fix You by Coldplay – Performed by the Calgary Physician Choir

Sermon – MVPs (Most Valuable Players) – Rev. Rod

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Those among you who are into sports will know that – unlike the internet-related abbreviations I’ve previously used – this month’s abbreviation, MVP, has been around way before the internet was a thing.  MVPs are the most valuable players in a particular team or league – the VIPs of that particular sport community, granting them recognition and a certain special status among their peers.

Over the past year, there has been some version of this “game” playing out in the larger labour market.  Except it isn’t a game – it’s sometimes been more of a debate, or a lobby, or a struggle, to figure out some kind of… categorization, or even a type of hierarchy, among different kinds of workers.

We first started seeing this kind of conversation intensify around March of last year, when the question arose around what work could be considered “essential”.

There are many answers to this.  It is subjective – which is to say, it depends on whose perspective you are trying to answer this from.  It can depend on what we are actually asking, and it is perhaps more helpful to ask “essential for what?”

From a sociological perspective, one might consider something like health care to be a primary industry during a global health crisis.  It was probably never a question that health care practitioners would be considered essential during shutdowns or other restrictions on mobility.

With a slightly larger scope, the provision of food and household necessities were also quickly identified as primary needs, so that grocery stores – and importantly – their workers, were deemed essential quite universally.  Grocery stores may have adapted, but they never closed.  And certain fears around the availability of things like toilet paper and other household items were mostly unwarranted.

Things got fuzzy around things like providers of alcohol and cannabis.  These too were designated as essential.  The rationale behind this can be a whole conversation of its own, but the bottom line is that these stores also never closed – and their employees showed up.

From an economist’s point of few, the subjective filter used a slightly different question – something to the effect of, “what industries need to continue functioning, so that the economy doesn’t completely collapse?”

This included areas such as transportation – specifically regarding the chain of supply – as well as banking, construction, and… to varying degrees, education and childcare.

I could devote a lot of time and space outlining what the different provincial guidelines officially labelled as “essential”.  A year ago, I noted that Ontario’s guiding document listed several dozen industries, with several subcategories, as well as exemptions and allowances for adaptations for things that could be done from home, or in a way that reduced contact with the public.  There were many gray areas.

Last year, the Calgary Physician Choir sang the song Fix You, by the band Coldplay.  If you watch it, you’ll see that the last 30 seconds of the video are devoted to crediting over 40 singers – all of whom are doctors – and to whom we’re giving extra credit these days.  The title doctor has always carried with it a certain degree of prestige, and there are good reasons for that… from the level of skill and training required to obtain that title, to the hazards involved in that work, and the life-saving potential they have, for us as individuals, as well as for the health benefits of society as a whole.

That hasn’t changed – if anything we have been reminded of why that recognition is there to begin with.

The same could be said for other healthcare practitioners who do not carry as prestigious a title as doctor, but who also require similarly specialized skills, and contribute as team members in the provision of quality healthcare to individuals and society.

And we also recognize that many other work positions, in several sectors, are equally not often recognized for the value that they bring to us as individuals and to the functioning of society, and which themselves can carry their own occupational hazards, especially now.

Now that vaccines have become available – to varying degrees – a similar set of questions around what is “essential” has been floating around.  Part of this has revolved around which industries – and their workers – have been prioritized in the immunization order of precedence.

Now, it’s important to note that many of the decisions made around this kind of conversation are not necessarily tied to which jobs are “more important”, and often try to follow a practical set of rationales, including risk factors, such as the possibility for exposure to disease – for the employees and their clients.  Though it is also important to note that these metrics have at times seemed to have been applied… unevenly.

Which brings us to a larger question around what kind of work is important.  And again, the answers are somewhat subjective – which is to say, the answers revolve around the subjects that we focus on.

In our economic system, jobs – and the work attached to them – exist because there is value that our society places on that work.  Which means that, at some level, every job has an element of importance.

At an individual level, the stakes become even higher.  For most of us, a job is a means to a livelihood – a way to eat, a place to live, a form of pursuing fulfilling activities – a matter of survival.

And this means that employment is – or has been – one of the most important parts of one’s life for a large segment of the population.  Which makes for an especially difficult decision, when the means to a livelihood can also represent a risk to one’s life, or the lives of those near us.

Over the past year, we have been called to give a closer witness the hazards of work.  To be clear, there have always been hazards and dangers attached to all manners of labour.  In the past while, it has been clearer that some kinds of work are more hazardous than we realized, and some of them have become even more hazardous still.

For too many in our community, that has been a choice they’ve had to make – survive, or put one’s life at risk.  That choice has always been present for too many among us, and now, that choice has come up even more often.

Leading epidemiologists and labour analysts have made it clear that, one of the main mechanisms that we can keep workers, their coworkers, their families, and society at large, safe – especially now, but also at other more… typical times – is for paid sick leave to be a standard, normalized, part of our culture… a part of our work ethic.

This was true before, even when the greatest threat was a regular flu, and it is just as true today – as the stakes are higher.

My friends, this week we recognize that people make this kind of difficult choice every day.  Whether their work is officially categorized as essential, or not.  On the national Workers’ Mourning Day, on Wednesday, we remember those who gave their all, in the service of our community and in the service of their families.

And, my friends, we recognize that, in an economy that relies on the work of all who offer value to our society, all employees are the economy’s Most Valuable Players.  May we recognize that value.

So may it be,
In Solidarity and Love,
Amen

Copyright © 2021 Rodrigo Emilio Solano-Quesnel

Closing Hymn #128 For All That Is Our Life
~)-| Words: Bruce Findlow, 1922-
Music: Patrick L. Rickey, 1964- , © 1992 UUA
Tune SHERMAN ISLAND

Foothills Unitarian Church (9 August, 2020)

Click here and enjoy!

Time for All Ages – TRAPPIST Transits

The TRAPPIST-1 system revolves around a red dwarf star, which is pretty small – around the size of Jupiter, but much more massive – and the seven planets around it, are so close to it, they’re even closer to their star than Mercury is to our sun.  But because the red dwarf is so much colder than the sun, many of their planets might be just right, in the Goldilocks zone.

Another thing that astronomers on Earth have found out about these planets is that their orbits are kind of synchronized with each other, in such as way that each of their orbits are whole number ratios of the other, meaning that they have a kind of rhythm, a bit like musical notes.

Some people who are into music and astronomy have wondered what it would sound if we played a note every time one of the planets passed in front of their star – when they are in transit.  So one team did just that – playing a xylophone note when planets b to h transited the star TRAPPIST-1, with each note being the letter of the planet, and planet h given the note A.  This is an interstellar collaboration between Earthlings and the TRAPPIST-1 system!

TRAPPIST Transits – Composed by the TRAPPIST-1 System, with help from Tim Pyle (Caltech/IPAC)
Posted on ExploreAstro (22 February, 2017)

Meditation Song – Space Oddity by David Bowie – Interpreted by Commander Chris Hadfield

Posted on Rare Earth (12 May, 2013)

Sermon – Planet Ground – Rev. Rod

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It costs tens of thousands of dollars to send something into space – pound for pound it is the most expensive shipping option.

And yet, years before the current pandemic, the medical officers at NASA, who are in charge of their employee’s mental health, understood that, when people are cooped up in a confined space for weeks on end, they can get… a bit edgy, which is not healthy.  It can be rather hazardous for astronauts to step out of their housing, so there are limited options for stress relief.  One option is exercise, and astronauts on the International Space Station do that regularly.

Another option is music.  And even though it can cost tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars to send instruments into space, NASA understood that sending things like a guitar, a keyboard, bagpipes, or a didgeridoo, was an investment in their employee’s health.

For over a decade there has been a guitar on board the International Space Station.  And in 2013, Commander Chris Hadfield, a Canadian astronaut, played it as he sang and filmed a reinterpretation of David Bowie’s classic song Space Oddity. This is the first music video filmed in space.  And while the equipment used was quite expensive, they didn’t set any budget for special effects.  What you see is what they filmed.

In this version of the song, the astronaut makes it back to Earth, landing near the Kazakhstan cosmodrome.  And, while Commander Hadfield sings solo, you can see that there are billions of people in the background, as Earth is visible through the windows of the space station.

When people talk about the first music video to be filmed in space, they sometimes wonder if it’s also the most expensive video ever.  It probably isn’t, since most of the costs for the “set” were already absorbed as costs for other purposes.  Even the tens, or hundreds of thousands, of dollars spent on sending up the guitar have been amortized over the years, and paid dividends in maintaining the mental health of several astronauts.

But it does raise the question, why spend all the money to get up there in the first place?  It’s a question that NASA comes across from time to time.  And there are a lot of answers.  At the most practical level, the scientific advances from experiments in space have direct use back on Earth – from new products, to new medical techniques, that have been developed over the decades.

There are also indirect benefits just from taking up the challenge of sending people up.  Simply figuring out the complex problems that come with sending stuff and people into orbit has spurned technological advances of their own, which would not have happened otherwise… or at least, not as quickly.  Such jumps in innovation were previously usually seen only in warfare and the development of war machines.

Space exploration is kind of the opposite route to stimulating technological development.  Not to mention that nations need to cooperate with each other to work on something like an international space station.  Canadian Commander Chris Hadfield, got there and back in a Russian Soyuz capsule, and worked with a team from several other countries.  Space exploration is like an anti-war recipe.

At a more abstract level, going out inspires awe and excitement for learning about what goes on out there – and what it means for us down here.  In the same way that rabbit holes, inspire us to dive deep, and encourage passions when we rise back up from them.  Space exploration is a kind of… space wormhole, that invites us to look up, see what’s out there, and come back with new inspiration and passion.

Aside from physically going up into orbit, simply looking up can do that as well.  Astronomers are professional looker-uppers – and they do that in a more disciplined and systematic way.

That’s how they came across the star TRAPPIST-1 and its system, with planets TRAPPIST-1 a through h, just 40 light years away.  Far enough, that… it’s impractical for any of us here, at this time, to realistically get there any time soon.  But close enough that we can see it with enough clarity to get a sense of what the place looks like.  And even fantasize a bit of what it might be like if we were ever to get closer to it.

Since 2017, we’ve gotten to know the TRAPPIST-1 system.  Orbiting around what is called an ultra-cool red dwarf star, the seven planets are so much like ours… and also very different.

The star TRAPPIST-1 is smaller and cooler than our sun.  And its planets orbit so tightly around it that all of them are closer to it than Mercury is to our sun.  Their orbits are so fast that a year on the planet TRAPPIST-1 b is less than two earth days.  In fact, the longest year in the system takes less than 19 days, on TRAPPIST-1 h.

And yet, this is the system we know of that has the most planets like ours.  Seven terrestrial planets, rocky planets.  And out of those seven, three or four are in the habitable “goldilocks” zone.

But it gets complicated.  Since the planets orbit so close to their star, it is very likely that they are tidally locked – which is to say, they all have one side always facing the star, in perpetual day, while their other side is in perpetual night.  A very different situation than ours – a very alien situation.

And despite this vast difference, it is also speculated that some of the planets in the habitable zone may also have liquid water, and some kind of atmosphere… all factors that may allow for life.  Water and an atmosphere may also allow for some more even distribution of temperature around the planet, even if one side is always day and another is always night.  And it’s possible that in between – in the perpetual twilight zone between day and night – the conditions may be just right for some kind of life to thrive.

Even if there’s no life that we recognize on the TRAPPIST-1 system, the planets of the system exhibit a special relationship with each other.  The planets’ orbits have full integer ratios between them, which allows them to have a certain musical rhythm, but it’s also part of what keeps the system running.  Without that orbital resonance, it is speculated that the planets would collide with each other and the system would fall apart very quickly.  Showing that even at long distances, things are interconnected.

Thinking about the terrestrial planets of TRAPPIST-1… and the possibility – however remote – that they may harbour life, has sometimes led me to the rabbit hole (or wormhole) of thinking, “what would the aliens call their planet?”

One clue might be on how we categorize these planets: terrestrial… which is to say, earth-like.  In one of the most fundamental ways, they’re like our planet Earth.  And we happen to name our planet after… earth – the stuff that we walk on, grow food on, live on – the stuff that makes part of who we are, and which we are a part of.  I sometimes wonder if hypothetical aliens might follow a similar naming convention.

If we were to somehow encounter these aliens, and after we figured out the whole translation bit, it turned out that they’d say something like: “We’re from planet Ground”.  Or maybe their language has the subtlety for them to say “Our world is the planet Land”.  And maybe another species would say, “That’s funny, our home is the planet Dirt”.

Wouldn’t it be interesting if we all used a different word that essentially meant the same thing?  If we all called our home planet that stuff that we walked on, grew food on, lived on?  The stuff that made part of who they were, and which they felt they belonged to.  “We’re from the planet Dust,” one species would say, “that’s where we come from, and to that we shall return.”

My friends, we look up at the heavens as they inspire a sense of awe, reminding us that there are impressive and unique worlds out there.  We don’t know how many – if any – of these worlds can harbour life, or if that life is anything like what we know here.  Either way, it’s a cause for awe.  If we are the only ones in the universe, we can marvel at the uniqueness of our spot in space.  And if there are others that we share this space with, we can be grateful that we are not alone in this vast expanse, sharing in the amazement that, against the odds, they are out there – today, we can share in the amazement that, against the odds, we are out here.

And looking out upon the heavens, my friends, we are reminded of the many specific, particular, peculiar, circumstances that are needed to support the kind of life that we have come to know – in a place that is just right.  And of how precious the place where we are is, that allows us to walk on it, grow food in it, and live on it.  A place that is part of us, and of which we are a part.  The dust that we come from, and to which we shall return.

My friends, may we steward this place that is just right, celebrate it, and stay in awe, as we look up to all else that is out there.

So may it be,
In Solidarity and Love,
Amen

Copyright © 2021 Rodrigo Emilio Solano-Quesnel

Closing Hymn #1064 Blue Boat Home
~)-| Words: Peter Mayer, 1963- , © 2002 Peter Mayer
Music: Roland Hugh Prichard, 1811-1887, adapted by Peter Mayer, 1963 – ,
© 2002 Peter Mayer
~)-| keyboard arr. Jason Shelton, 1972 –
Hyfrydol

Aviva Heston – Unitarian Universalist Church of Studio City (12 May, 2020)
Musical Director: Nancy Holland; Editor: Nick Pierone; Singer: William Rapp, Marilyn Shield, Aviva Heston, Alex Heston, Shirley Kahn, Karen Juday, Heather Stewart Jorden, Polly Pierone, Dan Cragan, Theresa Hassman, Cheryl Caplow, Yoshi Inman, Nick Pierone

Sermon – Called to Serve – Lt. Nicole McKay

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What does a doula, an officer in the Canadian Armed Forces, and a minister have in common? 

This sounds like it should be followed by the punch line to a joke, instead, it is the winding path of discernment for my call to serve at a military chaplain. 

I joined the Canadian Armed Forces in March of 2005 as an officer in the Cadet Instructor Cadre, a branch of the military set aside for working with youth. This group is made up of reservists, part-time people in communities across the country who work and volunteer their time to mentor young people as they become good citizens and leaders. There is no training for deployments and there are no moves unless they are voluntary. The training is specific to working with youth, how to empower them and how to set up boundaries for the safety of all who participate. These officers are formally responsible for the administration and training delivery of the Cadet Program. Although I have held a variety of positions at the local units where I worked, including a few years as the Commanding Officer, the paperwork was often done at home because, I often found that the spirit called for me to serve in a different way. This would happen repeatedly over my time with the cadets themselves. The young woman crying on the bathroom floor, and I joined her to listen all while decked out in my full dress uniform. The young person who was hiding in the bushes outside the building in which we met. He knew his parents weren’t coming to pick him up for several more hours, even though our meeting was over, and the staff would always stay until everyone was on their way home. Another young person came through the doors crying and when I asked her what was going on, she shared that she had just witnessed her best friend get shot at school that day, news that had been on my car radio as I was heading in. She chose to come to us before going home. Together, we called her parents to let them know she was safe and we continued to talk for most of our evening gathering. This was important work in my life knowing that I was being asked to be a positive adult role model for those who are navigating the challenging teen years. I didn’t understand the ministry that I was so clearly doing but simply acting out of the place where my great joy and great sadness met.

Of course, the work I was doing as an officer with the cadets was meaningful but it only paid 25 days a year. In my “civilian” job, I worked as a doula. Alongside families of all shapes and sizes, I provided physical, emotional, and spiritual support during pregnancy, birth, and the early weeks with a new baby. Strangers invited me into the sacred and vulnerable times in their lives, as a witness and caring presence through uncertainty, fear, and pain. From my perspective, it was also beautiful and holy work. While labouring at home, a muslim couple danced in their dimly lit kitchen to the sung Qu’ran. Later, at the hospital, I helped create space for the father to whisper to into the new baby’s ears the call to prayer. The woman who became a mother by choice – choosing to conceive a child without a partner – as she laboured through the night and into morning. We watched far too many late night tv movies. The baby who had their own schedule and who arrived at home before the midwives and before the EMS had arrived. Together with her extended family, we were able to quickly set up what we would need including warm, dry blankets which had just come out of the dryer. I was asked in that moment to be the non-anxious presence, the calm in the storm, and to trust the process knowing that this family had gathered together in love. I think it worked. Mom had asked me to catch her baby, and by a small miracle, since doulas are not clinical care providers, I had one sterile glove in my backpack. As I was preparing to leave a few hours after the arrival of this new life, she asked me how many times I have had to act in this capacity to which I had to confess, it was the first. Whether my work took me to a home or a hospital, I knew I was walking on holy ground. 

Then everything changed. 

It was a typical January day and I was on-call for two birthing families. We had a fair amount of snowfall and school had been cancelled for two days in a row. The next day, my daughter, who was 6.5 at the time, woke up with a tummy ache and she stayed home from school. Within the hour, we were at the hospital and before the day was over, I held my daughter as she took her last breaths. To say that this turned my life upside down would be an understatement. 

When it came to work, I asked my colleagues to cover the births I had in the coming weeks knowing that I needed to tend to my own grief and I wouldn’t be able to be fully present with another in that way. From this place of deep grief, there was also a lot of growth. Life had slowed down to the bare essentials but this time of reflection also revealed something to me: I had believed that I was functioning rather well but in reality, I was still keeping parts of myself hidden. My life remained compartmentalised, each version of my identity coming out in its own setting. One of those identities which I only let come out with specific people and trusted circumstances was my deeply spiritual nature. This had been part of my life from a young age and something that I nurtured myself as my family was not religious or spiritual. A spiral path which has had me revisit old places only to take me deeper each time.

After a few months of not working and feeling unsure if I could go back to birth work, I turned to the military for some employment options that would at least pay the bills. I had run my own business for a number of years, so I applied to take on a role in public affairs or communications for a summer contract. It turns out, the work came naturally and that they later sent me to public affairs school which has led me to the full-time position I held in a headquarters, where I provided advice to senior leadership about crisis situations. Life had once again begun to settle.

Little did I know what would be around the next corner. In the first two weeks at the school, we took a class on the government where in one of the readings, they defined the word “minister” as one who serves. It was as if the proverbial light bulb went off in my head. I was no longer listening to the instructor but re-visiting the path which my life has taken. A minister is one who serves. To work in the military is often spoken as being in service. Doula is a Greek word meaning “woman’s servant.” Everything that I had been doing in my life made sense. This had nothing to do with the job title I held but about the calling that could be lived out in many ways. I had unlocked a new understanding of who I was.

I was being called to a life of service and it wasn’t going to be as a public affairs officer. I knew I had to start taking my Master of Divinity, something I had toyed with a few times before, so I applied and was accepted. It still took some time to discern where this call was headed. Two years later, it had become clear, as I sat in a tent, checking my emails and reading an advanced copy of the newest defence policy. It explained that the military was aspiring to be more diverse in its understanding of religion and spirituality. I needed to embark on the journey to become a military chaplain, our first UU military chaplain. 

I share this deeply personal story, not to draw attention to my own personal journey, but to underline our humanity with its joys and sorrows. Right now is a difficult time for many, if not all of us. Our lives have taken a sudden turn and we don’t know exactly how long this will last or what life will look like on the other side of this pandemic. We are doing a lot of grieving – grieving the many losses including those of our hopes and plans for the future. 

This process of discernment isn’t an easy one. I can be trying. 

We don’t get to see the journey each of our lives will take from start to finish. We live in uncertainty. We do our best to lay out our plans, think ahead about what may come, but we are never 100% prepared for everything. Just as when we head outside at night under the street lights, they only shine enough to see the next section, the next step. We are only revealed the next part of the journey and we will build upon it from there. As we contend with this uncomfortable reality, our spiritual response must be one of cultivating hope. This is the work we do together as Unitarian Universalists and it is something that we can draw out from our principles and sources. 

Some people find this hope in God or the divine. As I prepare to minister in a multi-religious setting, I have been giving a lot of thought to how I might define God, the divine, the spirit of life. I believe that the divine is something that is life giving – whether for you that be a creator or the creative spirit within, the renewal of your spirit when you are out in nature or catching up with friends, this is what I find in our sources. So I ask: What is life giving to you? Is it the time you take for yourself to create art, is it listening to a favourite compose, is it your experiences in nature? Are you a story teller who delves into the wisdom from around the globe learning from the many voices? Where are you cultivating hope through these times of uncertainty? 

May we stay connected to our truth, to what gives us meaning. May we share these moments with one another because we are the beacons of hope for one another. Even when our journeys are not going in the same direction, we need the company of good hearts to remind us that we are not journeying alone.

Copyright © 2021 Nicole McKay

Time for All Ages – Rise Again by Leon Dubinsky
Performed by Voices Rock Medicine
a Toronto-based choir of Women Physicians

Sermon – Rising from the Rabbit Hole – Rev. Rod

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Easter always brings a great deal of imagery: life coming back from the ground that appeared so dead for so long; lifeless eggs cracking open, revealing the life hidden inside; bunnies emerging from their burrows, buried deep within the earth, after being seemingly entombed over the winter.

Rabbit holes, as it happens, are a great place to be at times when we need to hunker down and let the harshness of the outside pass over.

And in a broader sense, they can also be places of unexpected inspiration.  Just as the storybook Alice chased a hurried rabbit and fell down the rabbit hole to find an unexpected land of wonder, so do we sometimes find ourselves unwittingly falling down rabbit holes that capture our imagination and invite us to expansive exploration.

Over the past few months, we’ve all had the need to stay inside for longer than we’d like… and not just for the winter.  For many of us, that might have also meant more time spent online, or digging through some of the books on the shelf that haven’t been seen in a while – or perhaps haven’t been visited at all, since they were placed on the shelf!

These rabbit holes have existed long before the internet after all.  Another way you may have found yourselves into this kind of setting is on a forgotten corner of the library, with many books about the same subject lumped together on the stacks.

For me, falling down an internet rabbit hole has become a regular occurrence.  One of my characteristic pandemic rabbit holes has been browsing through virtual choirs, which have already been around for several years, but have experienced a boom over the past year – for obvious reasons.  And I was amazed by the qualities of many of these creations.  Not only were many of them well put together, but they were also playfully put together, witnessing to the harsh realities of our current times, while also finding reasons for – and moments of – levity, seeking and finding spots of joy to shepherd many of us through these times.

Along with the sheer entertainment and inspirational value that they bring, I’ve also found that these proverbial rabbit holes tend to reveal small subcultures you might not have even realized were there – but enough people who share niche interests and talents can get together to really make a kind of cottage industry about specific needs – and excuses to get together, even if it’s “only” online.

I was quite piqued by the fact that there were many amateur choirs made up of medical professionals, which I didn’t know was a thing.  And many of them were in fact Canadian medical professionals.  Voices Rock Medicine is specifically a group of women physicians in Toronto, who share joy, and offers support to each other – and to the rest of us – by getting together, while apart, and singing.

A few of us here at Olinda have even gotten into the virtual choir racket… just this week, some of us sent our recordings for a Canadian Unitarian Universalist song that will be added to a composite choir and unveiled at the Canadian Unitarian Council’s national service in May.

Among the other rabbit holes that I’ve found myself falling into, I’ve also found a few other interesting subcultures that offered me experiences I didn’t even realize I’d enjoy.

For instance, I’ve always liked music by Enya.  (And if you don’t know who I’m talking about, Enya is a unique singer who is hard to categorize – she’s sometimes labelled as “New Age”, but could also fall under Celtic… although she’s really a genre unto herself.)  Essentially, she sings beautifully about beautiful things, and she arranges her songs with multiple layers of her own voice.  For about four decades she has been singing oddly ethereal music that is both uplifting and oddly relaxing.  Chances are you’ve heard one of her songs – perhaps you’d recognize her classic hit Orinoco Flow, with the iconic refrain “Sail away, sail away, sail away”.

So, over the past months, I found that there’s a whole subculture of DJs who specialize in making Dance Club remixes of Enya’s songs.  And I love it when a good remix or mashup can show me a new dimension of an old favourite.  Surely enough, there’s an entire catalogue of electro-dance versions of Enya’s iconic Orinoco Flow, as well as many of her other hit tracks (and there are many of those).

Speaking of channels that transcend musical genres, I also ran into a rabbit hole of channels that feature re-imaginings of current pop songs as medieval-style music, complete with medieval instrumentation, and some rewording of the lyrics to have a more “older” feel.  Quickly, I discovered that there’s an entire cottage industry of this kind of medieval adaptations, to the extent that the genre has its own label: Bardcore.  Some go to quite extensive lengths for authenticity’s sake, with one creator not satisfied with using slightly older Shakespearean-style lingo, but doing full-on Old-English translations (the kind of ancient English that looks and sounds like German, and has letters we don’t use any more).

And just over the past couple months, you may have also heard that sea shanties became all the rage, with many younger folks getting into revivals of the old genre, and inviting their friends to collaborate – remotely – on multi-part harmonisations of classic sea shanties and maritime hymns.  Among the most common of these were endless recreations of the old classic The Wellerman.

Professional musician Adam Neely has a hypothesis about why these maritime genres have experienced this kind of revival at this particular time – he thinks that sea shanties and maritime anthems have the perfect structure for singing collaboratively over electronic media because of their antiphonal call-and-response structure, which allows people to work with the time-lag effect that is so prevalent on online communication.

And yes, I even found a Bardcore medieval-style cover of Enya’s Orinoco Flow, sung as a sea shanty.  Amazing what you can find when you go deep enough into a rabbit hole!

I suspect many of you have also had your own rabbit holes to dive into.  Certainly, many of us have become “armchair epidemiologists” with a newfound fluency on the lingo of R-numbers, efficacy rates, exponential transmission, and the mechanisms of mRNA technology to produce protein spikes provoking antibody production as an immune response [which we can all talk about leisurely over dinner, or Café drop-ins].

Of course, few of us have become true medical experts, and we have been reminded of the value of trusting medical expertise, recognizing the realities that the field is not static, and therefore decisions need to be made with imperfect – and shifting – information.

And here’s where we come into the double edge of rabbit holes.  We’ve heard about these on the news, as folks get dragged into unfounded fears, misinformation, and conspiracy theories.  And they have real impacts – we’ve seen these with dubious personalities hawking dubious remedies, or denying the real risks of disease.  Most recently, on January 6, we saw some of the effects that follow large parts of a population getting stuck at the deep end of a conspiracy rabbit hole.

And perhaps this is a reminder that a well-balanced life invites us to emerge from rabbit holes – to rise from the entombed caverns of isolated exploration, to reconnect with the outside world and re-embrace it in its complexity… perhaps with a measure of new perspectives and a new depth of knowledge – but more importantly, with better questions about how we can better engage with our interconnected web.

On the other had, staying in a rabbit hole for too long – especially those that risk leading us astray – can develop into something that we might recognize as an obsession… an excessive preoccupation that can alienate us from all those other areas of our lives that offer value to us as we enrich each other.

By contrast, when a newfound interest – or an unexpected expansion of that which feeds us – invites us to look at our world in a new and richer way, with fresh motivation, and with a clearer sense of inspiration, we might say that we have… something else that is typical Easter lingo – a passion.

Passion, my friends is that fresh energy that leads us into… taking up a new hobby, getting physically active, learning a new language, getting involved with our communities, offering something to that which is larger than ourselves – to be of service to humanity.  My friends, passion is what leads us to be church together… passion is why I answered a call to ministry, and passion is why we share a ministry in this fellowship.

My friends, over the past year, we have taken some time to explore… to dig deep into some questions about how we can do church and be church – now and in the future.  We’ve taken some much-needed time to recoup and regroup.  We’ve explored some important rabbit-holes, growing our sense of who we can be, and how we can be.  And in the coming months… with some stops and starts… we can rise from the rabbit holes.  And continue to embrace our passion.

So may it be,
In Solidarity and Love,
Amen

Copyright © 2021 Rodrigo Emilio Solano-Quesnel

Closing Hymn #63 Spring Has Now Unwrapped the Flowers

Words: Piae Cantiones, 1582
~)-| Music: Thomas Benjamin, 1940- , © 1992 Unitarian Universalist Association
Tune BLACKBURN
Sung to the Tune TEMPUS ADEST FLORIDUM

Posted by Melissa Oretade (Vocals), Piano by Francesco Blackmore (17 January, 2021)