Service No. 3 -- Feb. 5 at Philly UU

It's taken me a long time to get around to this post because my feelings about the service were of a particularly low wattage. And I still don't know how much I can say about it.

As it was Super Bowl Sunday, it was fitting that the guest homilist was from Detroit. Her name was Diana Heath. Maybe she was renting out her home to some visiting Pittsburghers or Seattlites, and took the opportunity to get away from the craziness that descends regularly on the Super Bowl host city. She had good intentions, and I imagine her sermon has worked well on other days, in other years, but I wasn't feeling it.

A week and a half before Valentines Day, the sermon -- entitled "Love and Other Aggravations" -- was about love, and the true nature of love. It was the basic stuff, as I recall these many days later: Love is hard work, and it's often not that lovely, but it's the only thing that really heals us. It was just the wrong sermon on the wrong day for me, because I felt like the romantic I used to be is gone, bled pale and dry. Even the sound of the word -- love, l-o-v-e -- was so insipid, I was getting nauseous.

Ms. Heath's talk was constructed of a series of seveal stories, vignettes, depicted people made whole by love. It went on for a while, and I confess I stopped listening, and retreated into my own thought about the people I love and certainly my marriage. I don't feel like this is the time and place to delve there, but my sister attended this service with me and the post-church talk we had gave me a release that I didn't expect.

So I guess is was good, because we certainly wouldn't have come to that place together without the sermon. I hope my sister got as much out of it as I did.

The service itself was beautiful, as always, and the choir continues to be worth the five bucks I customarily put in the collection plate. I was grateful to my sister that she didn't ask to stay for coffee/tea afterwards, because I didn't really want to mingle. It was cold enough feeling like I was beyond the healing reach of love, but to be reminded of my own insecurities, and the fact that I'm stuck in this anteroom of a welcoming community with no clear way in... that wouldn't have been fun, and I might have abandoned the entire exercise right there.

As it is, I'm coasting along on less than inspired wings. If it weren't for the goal -- the 30-service resolution and the knowledge of the pace that I need to maintain to get there -- I might not still be looking for a spiritual space within myself right now. It's work, and more work is something I don't need. But my leap of faith for the time being is that I won't always feel this way. Breakthroughs will be made, with love or without.