Creating the “Beloved Community” is an aspiration that has meaning for us.
As a community, some of us might go out to lunch to celebrate one of our member’s 90th birthday at a local restaurant.
We celebrate together, and one of those important events is our annual Winter Spiral (held in Kendall Hall of the Meetinghouse) the night of the Plymouth Tree Lighting in Town Square.
Celebrating can can even mean carving pumpkins together. We mourn together: weddings, births, graduations, illness, death. With our minister we design our own rituals for these stepping stones in our life so the rituals have personal meaning.
We play together. From our biennial talent show (the Minister & Office Administrator always strut their stuff), to a cook out, from a hike to a service auction, we like to have fun. Stodgy we are not.
We also gather together in small groups for meaningful, and sometimes not so meaningful, conversation.
Some of us might even reminisce about days gone by.
There are 3 breakfast groups at First Parish, a Men’s, Women’s, & LGBTQA. Parents meet to talk about the joys and struggles of being a parent. We have a group of folks that get together to go to a play, a movie, a concert, or maybe just hang out at the beach.
We work together. Sometimes our work is aimed towards creating a more just world. Sometimes it is clearing away the brush that grows on the hill alongside our driveway, or just cleaning up our garden beds. We agree with the Lebanese poet Kahlil Gibran, “Work is love made visible.”
