Eleanor Rice was the minister at UUSRF in the 1990s and early 2000s. This excerpt is from the March 2003 UUSRF newsletter when the US was contemplating a war with Iraq. Its message is still relevant.
Think Eternally, Live Now
This is such an uncertain time. I don’t know what the situation will be by the time you read this. I don’t know if the urge to war and the massing armies will have burst forth. I don’t know if the diplomatic power struggle will have resulted in a breakthrough that will prevent war. I don’t know if we will still be in this limbo of not knowing and fearing.
And yet, this morning I watched a hairy woodpecker checking out my maple tree. With the temperatures now rising during the day, the sap will begin to run, and she was out there checking. Tap here, is it sap yet? Tap there. And yesterday, I had moments of delight when the student I was tutoring understood something, and I had moments of forgetting when a friend and I played around with music.
That really is the way of it. We live in the tension of larger political movements, and we live in the ordinary moments of our lives. It has me thinking that along with that slogan, “Think globally, act locally,” there should also be a slogan, “Think eternally, live now.”
Think eternally, live now. We must do both. If we only live now, we tend to hide away in a cave of privacy, oblivious, ignorant, unattached. If we do both, we will attend to the nows and continually return to face the uncertainty of our world. If we allow the delights and the forgetting to refill our hearts, we will be able to act in the world, to write another letter, or simply to be with someone else who needs comfort and reassurance.
In the first Gulf War, I remember keeping a candle lit in one of my windows. I don’t know where the idea came from, but it was so simple. Light a candle, as people have done for centuries, to light the way home for someone.