Next Steps

It was such a high, being elected the next minister of the First Unitarian Church of Providence. Exhilarating. Affirming.

Then a small emotional crash.

And now, what follows…

Now that we’re planning on moving to Providence, it means we get to spend a small fortune fixing up the house. Doing, you know, all the things we never got around to doing for ourselves in the almost eight years we lived here. Sigh…

The contractor begins on Monday, so we’re spending much of the weekend moving things out of the kitchen in anticipation of them tearing things up before putting them back together – hopefully much nicer than they were before.

The world of house-selling is now dominated by concepts of “staging.” After assuring that the would-be buyer doesn’t look at the kitchen and run screaming out of the house, we’ll be de-Buddhisting, removing the tankha from the living room, and various sacred images from around the house, and de-booking, removing bookcases (and more bookcases), so as to not offend the current house-buying crowd who, experts appear to agree, detest seeing books piled up in various places…

The whole process is revelatory in so many small and moderately large ways. While I won’t mind being a buyer when (I dare not say if) we get the house sold, racing head-long into a “buyer’s market,” is a major test of spiritual equilibrium…

Now, to paraphrase the sage, I’ve been poor and I’ve been middle-class, and honey, middle class is better. Still, it’s hard to gin up sympathy when one’s problems are preparing to sell one over-priced house in order to purchase another: my goodness the time it takes.

And energy…

But, all things have their rhythm…

While Jan continues a bit more, I’ve stopped picking up and moving, and after pounding out a few words of self-pity, I must turn my attention to cleaning up for this afternoon’s worship service. Yes, this is Saturday. And, no, Unitarian Universalists haven’t embraced the tenants of seventh day adventists (although they’re right in at least one regard, Saturday is the sabbath. But we can save that for a future rant…). There are so many kids in Newton’s Coming of Age program, and we give every one of them a couple of minutes to express their current theological thinking (admittedly, like most thirteen-year olds, they tend toward solipsism. But it is delightful seeing them discover how one can indeed put thinking for one’s self and faith into the same sentence…) that we need to have two services: today and Sunday.

Ah, the life of a minister on the move!

More anon…