H is for Helpfulness.
Dear friends,
It has been a tough and frigid few weeks. As we struggle to dig ourselves out of these midwinter mountains of snow, I know I am not alone in feeling a bit buried by the weight of the world as well. When feelings of overwhelm or despair threaten to settle in like a dense fog, we need ways to regroup and reorient the soulâs compass.
âLook for the helpers,â the Presbyterian minister & childrenâs TV creator Fred Rogers famously reminded us, passing along wisdom received from his mother as a little boy. Even when something very bad is happening, âyouâll always find people helping.â And when we do that, we stubbornly focus our energy not just on humanity at our worst, but on humanity at our best. (Some might counter, rightly: But what do we do when the helpers keep getting shot? We grieve. We do not look away. We use our voices. We become helpers, too.)
I came across a complementary nugget of wisdom last week from Sociologist Tressie McMillan Cottom (also via PBS!), that felt a bit like Mr. Rogersâ advice 2.0 for today. McMillan Cottom emphasized the exhaustion so many of us are feeling these days: âWe are getting so much passive information and we have so few opportunities to act. We are tired then not from doing too much but from doing too little. ⌠The more time you spend doing something, the less exhausted you are by the onslaught of information.â
As we move into February, our worship theme pivots to âLove in the World.â We encourage all of us in the FPL community not to retreat or isolate during this troubling time in our nation. In fact, if youâre feeling tired, getting more involved in one’s community (not less!) â in small, meaningful, tangible ways â can help: such as volunteering to help a child in RE or attending a protest with FPL friends. This is how we enact love in the world, together, one step at a time. As one of the authors of Glimmerings put it, âGod is more of a verb than a noun.â And so is Godâs best alias, Love.
A minister in the Twin Cities recently described a phenomenon he calls Learned Helpfulness (as opposed to the psychological state of learned helplessness). His point was that we ought not to shrink from feelings of despair but to welcome them as a counterintuitive  precondition of a real and active hope, lived out loud in the world.
And friends, church is a very good place to learn and practice helpfulness! Stick around here long enough (or even a couple of weeks!) and someone might ask you to usher, or lead a workshop, or help us imagine our collective future together. Just look through this monthâs Parish News to see all the ways our growing, spunky First Parish community is chock full of antidotes to despair and opportunities to act and serve.
One invitation to highlight: We hope to see many of you at Sundayâs Special Congregational Meeting for the next step in discerning our shared future to better open our doors for seekers and moral leaders for generations to come. Wonât you help us?
Love,
Kit and Nate
