{"id":5700,"date":"2022-02-27T06:50:42","date_gmt":"2022-02-27T11:50:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.wellspringsuu.org\/new\/?post_type=ctc_sermon&#038;p=5700"},"modified":"2022-03-22T19:53:53","modified_gmt":"2022-03-22T23:53:53","slug":"sharing-space","status":"publish","type":"ctc_sermon","link":"https:\/\/www.wellspringsuu.org\/new\/messages\/sharing-space\/","title":{"rendered":"Sharing Space"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>This week, Rev. Lee begins by taking a few moments to reflect on the situation in Ukraine. She then welcomes guest speaker Cathy Farrell from St. Mary&#8217;s Franciscan Shelter. They talk about the issues facing families looking for housing in and around the Phoenixville area, and what we can do to help as a community.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Sharing Space<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p><br>START OF TRANSCRIPT<br>[00:00:00] Speaker1<br>Andy he wrote that song in the last year. We&#8217;re so lucky to have such talented musicians, aren&#8217;t we? Yes. Those for you, while you<br>were busy making sure your guitar was OK. I know I&#8217;ll keep an eye on it. Well, gosh, it is good to see you all. It feels like pieces of my<br>heart are back in the right place when it&#8217;s not just the ten of us or 12 of us who love each other, but we&#8217;re getting a little tired of having<br>Julie light the chalice every week. So. So this is actually the final Sunday in our winter message series. Spring is coming. This is yes,<br>let&#8217;s cheer for all good things today. Right, spring. But this is the final Sunday of winter of our winter message series neighbors and<br>helpers. And I personally, I&#8217;ve loved this series. I&#8217;ve actually heard from a lot of you that you&#8217;ve enjoyed it as well. So if you hated it,<br>speak up and let me know, because right now I&#8217;m thinking that we might make this something of a regular practice. Maybe once a<br>year, maybe every other year that will continue to invite some outside voices to speak to our congregation, to share our pulpit and talk<br>with our neighbors about their experiences living right here in this local community that we share. I hope that building these<br>connections helps weave a stronger net between our spiritual community and the various communities that are around us, that we<br>can all be better neighbors and helpers to each other.<br>[00:01:48] Speaker1<br>Hopefully, our trash cans don&#8217;t catch on fire, but for anything that any of us might need whenever we need support in the years<br>ahead. And, you know, one of our intentions for this message series all the way back in the summer, which does feel like a long time<br>ago of 2021, when our lay leaders and our ministers, as we do every summer, we got together to dream up our plans for worship for<br>the coming year. And one of our intentions, as we thought about the connections we could make in this series was also to consider<br>our responsibility to each other as neighbors. What does it mean to look around at our world? And realize that we do have the power<br>to do something on behalf of someone else, to support someone else. What do we do with that power? And how do we use it well<br>and responsibly? I believe, personally, that everyone holds some kind of power. And yet power is a touchy subject for many of us<br>because, well, it&#8217;s powerful, it can make things happen and it can be dangerous. Think about that third rail on a subway track. If<br>you&#8217;ve ever been in the city, seen a subway station, there&#8217;s a sign with a big electric lightning bolt on it that says, Don&#8217;t touch, stay<br>away. It&#8217;s a metaphor for those big, powerful subjects that come up in our politics, the third rail, right, the third rail, the powered rail<br>literally moves things forward. But you don&#8217;t want to approach it without understanding how it works.<br>[00:03:41] Speaker1<br>Power can be scary. And power can be dangerous. And right now in our world, we see big. Terrifying, sad examples of that. We see<br>it on our TV screens, on our phones. On our social media feeds from halfway across the world in Ukraine. We see how when people<br>hoard power. When people use their power, their God given power to dominate, others to control. To take more and more and more<br>and more. We see that that kind of power destroys lives. Literally. It destroys whole communities, it destroys whole peoples. Power<br>can be used to hurt and harm. And that can happen to anyone, it can be used to hurt anybody. We know that this is true. And yet we<br>also know that there are patterns. And those patterns only get more clear when we have the courage to be curious, to look around at<br>the world, to ask around to our neighbors. We know that there are people and communities and circumstances that mainstream<br>America, whatever that is, does not want to see and recognize. We know that there are systems of power that we can fall into without<br>realizing it. And that if we&#8217;re not paying attention, sometimes we can end up on the wrong side of history or at least on the side, that<br>doesn&#8217;t really match our values. So this question came up as we planned this message series about power. About what it means to<br>hold it responsibly, not to hoard it, not to control with it, and also not to disavow it and pretend we don&#8217;t have it, but rather to share.<br>[00:05:53] Speaker1<br>To share power within our communities, to hold power in partnership. To ally with each other and to leverage the privilege that we<br>have, the power that we have to pour into places that need support in any given moment. You know, this concept of recognizing our<br>privilege has come up in nearly every one of our conversations with these community partners this winter, whether privilege for you<br>looks like racial privilege or gender privilege or socioeconomic privilege. It comes up over and over, not because it&#8217;s some PC<br>buzzword, but because privilege is a form of power. Privilege is a form of power that we can lend. To others and share and use for<br>good. If we have privilege, we can use it to heal and to try to make things right where they&#8217;ve gone wrong. Knowing our neighbors,<br>knowing people who have different experiences in life than we do. Asking questions about how things work in our society and why.<br>Taking an honest look at who we are connected to and disconnected from and why. It all helps us use the power that we have for<br>good. It all helps us share our space. Well. And treat each other well and resist the temptation that we see how dangerous it can be,<br>the temptation to turn each other into enemies or obstacles or ghosts. Right, people, we don&#8217;t see at all. Knowing our neighbors may<br>seem like a small place to start in a world with enormous problems.<br>[00:07:51] Speaker1<br>But knowing our neighbors has to come before loving our neighbors. And loving our neighbors truly does lay the foundation for<br>peace. And so we&#8217;re going to connect. With two local communities today. The second is the one that we planned originally, which I<br>will tell you about in a moment. But the first is the Saints, Peter and Paul, Ukrainian Catholic Church. They are the closest Ukrainian<br>community center to us, they&#8217;re just down the road about 15 minutes that way. On the north side of Phoenixville. And they hold two<br>two services, they hold mass twice each weekend, one on Saturdays in English and one on Sunday mornings in Ukrainian. So you<br>know who&#8217;s in charge in that church? So the Ukrainian speakers, we have never met them before. But after a week like this one, I<br>have a feeling. That they are scared. That they may have loved ones, family and friends. Who they are terrified for their safety. But<br>even if they don&#8217;t have a personal connection, a relationship to someone in Ukraine. That it is their land and their home. I&#8217;m going to<br>make a modest donation today from our Minister&#8217;s Assistance Fund to an international aid organization in the name of Saints Peter<br>and Paul Ukrainian Catholic Church. And we&#8217;ll deliver a bouquet of sunflowers to their community this afternoon along with a card.<br>That I&#8217;ll put outside by the coffee table for any of you who wish to sign it after the service.<br>[00:09:48] Speaker1<br>It&#8217;s just one small way. Of letting our neighbors know that we see them and that we care. The second community that we will connect<br>with today. Is the one that we already planned. A community that also represents a sometimes touchy subject. The subject of poverty<br>and economic inequality. Now, many of you know, I&#8217;ve heard many of you say, you know, the statistic that Chester County ranks on<br>average as the wealthiest county in our state. But averages are tricky things. High numbers pull up low numbers. The minimum wage<br>in Chester County is still $7 and 25 cents an hour, just like it is across our whole state. And economic inequality is a significant<br>problem right here in towns and in neighborhoods all around us. So for our final message in this series, I&#8217;m going to share with you a<br>conversation I had earlier this week with a woman named Cathy Farrell. Cathy is a case manager at St Mary&#8217;s Franciscan<br>Franciscan Shelter for Homeless Families. This is a shelter that WellSprings has partnered with for years now, and we will again next<br>month to provide a week of meals for the families that they support who live at the shelter. And as we think about the power we all<br>have and the power we can all share, let&#8217;s remember that there are opportunities always all around us. I&#8217;ll ask Chris to play the clip,<br>and I&#8217;ll invite you to listen in on a bit of our conversation now.<br>[00:11:35] Speaker2<br>Well, Cathy, thank you so much for joining us. I really appreciate you taking the time to talk to our congregation as part of this series.<br>You know, we&#8217;re starting every conversation I have with one of our guests. I&#8217;m starting by asking a little bit about how you became<br>our neighbor. The series is called Neighbors and Helpers. So I&#8217;m curious just to hear a little bit about you to start. Are you from this<br>area originally? And then what made you want to join the organization you do and do the work you do now?<br>[00:12:01] Speaker3<br>I actually grew up in Delaware County. I lived a large chunk of my adult life in Chester County, and now I live in Philadelphia. I&#8217;ve<br>tried. I&#8217;m trying all the counties, apparently. I was raised Catholic. And part of me has always liked helping others. So in my adult life,<br>I&#8217;ve had many career changes. My last career was I was a teacher. I got my teaching degree with 11 children and I decided to go out<br>on my own and tutor and I was doing that and that freed me up to do some volunteering. So I volunteered with Home of the Sparrow,<br>which is another nonprofit, if you&#8217;re familiar with them.<br>[00:12:43] Speaker2<br>Do they serve primarily families, experienced domestic violence, or is that this part of?<br>[00:12:48] Speaker3<br>That&#8217;s part of it. They also women. One of the big programs is that women reentering society after prison, and they also work with<br>older. It&#8217;s all women working with women who are having trouble staying in their own place. They have a program where they put<br>women together and they can share a place, and they also have eviction prevention. So it really got a love of working with people<br>there and decided to make a career of it. So that is when I joined over here at St. Mary&#8217;s.<br>[00:13:27] Speaker2<br>And you look ahead.<br>[00:13:28] Speaker3<br>Now go ahead.<br>[00:13:30] Speaker2<br>You said you live in Philadelphia now.<br>[00:13:32] Speaker3<br>Oh, Roxboro. Yeah. Oh, OK. I&#8217;ll say forty five minutes, but I start early and leave early to accommodate the traffic getting back and<br>forth to Roxbury.<br>[00:13:45] Speaker2<br>Up until last year, I actually lived in South Philadelphia, and so, you know, I do. I do the Schuylkill Expressway as our friends and our<br>enemy. Yeah, no. When you were a teacher, were you teaching in Delaware County, Chester County, Philly? Different places.<br>[00:14:02] Speaker3<br>I was teaching throughout Chester County. I had I held several long time. I didn&#8217;t get my teaching degree until I was about thirty five or<br>thirty six and I was doing long term substitutes, but I found that I really enjoyed working one on one. I have a reading specialist<br>certification and was working more and more with one on one with kids, and I really decided I like that one on one, and that&#8217;s when I<br>went out on my own to run my own tutoring business. So I did that for ten years and I was still doing that here when I was part time.<br>Now I am full time, so I have shelved my tutoring for the time being and focus just on this job.<br>[00:14:41] Speaker2<br>Yeah. So the shelter where you work focuses on on families. It&#8217;s a family shelter. So I imagine you still get some of that one on one<br>work with kids and with young people.<br>[00:14:51] Speaker3<br>Yeah, it&#8217;s it&#8217;s it&#8217;s all families here. You have to be a family and that the family could be any composition of a family. We have largely<br>it&#8217;s women and children, but we&#8217;ve had men with children. We have both parents with children, we&#8217;ve had grandmothers with children.<br>It&#8217;s whatever the composition happens to be because we know in this modern day and age the composition of the family is not your<br>traditional nineteen fifties.<br>[00:15:16] Speaker2<br>Let&#8217;s say I always leave it to beaver. Yeah, yeah,<br>[00:15:21] Speaker3<br>Absolutely no pearls or anything like that. So every everybody is in the same situation in that they&#8217;re all homeless, but everybody&#8217;s in<br>particular situation is very, very different for the families who come here. And but the only thing that they&#8217;re all looking for is housing in<br>the long run.<br>[00:15:42] Speaker2<br>Yeah. Well, and that was a little bit of my next question was just that. I&#8217;m curious to hear a little bit about the families you serve at St.<br>Mary&#8217;s and if there were common threads in their stories about how they came to need housing. But it sounds like you feel like there<br>aren&#8217;t so many common threads, except that they need housing, that people are coming from all different circumstances and<br>situations.<br>[00:16:03] Speaker3<br>Yeah, I mean, we have some women who a lot of them are leaving bad relationships, unfortunately, and it doesn&#8217;t mean I mean, a lot<br>of times when we talk about domestic violence, we think just physical abuse. But women are leaving for many, many reasons these<br>days along with, you know, mental abuse, verbal abuse. And some of them reach the point, especially when they have babies. We<br>have quite a few women who come through with babies and they have to leave that horrible situation. So this is kind of like a haven<br>for them then with the pandemic. A lot of things changed in that way in that we have people who just couldn&#8217;t afford to stay in their<br>places, so we have<br>[00:16:47] Speaker2<br>A job loss or losing ours.<br>[00:16:50] Speaker3<br>All those things, and especially at the very beginning, that has kind of waned a little bit. But for instance, we had a couple who the guy<br>had a great job. The woman was looking working on her nursing degree. And when the pandemic hit, that was it. They couldn&#8217;t afford<br>nursing anymore, and he lost his job. So everybody&#8217;s different in how they arrive. But like I said, in the end, everybody&#8217;s just hoping to<br>move forward and hopefully be housed when they leave our program.<br>[00:17:20] Speaker2<br>Yeah, I saw on your website, I think it referenced eight weeks and I wasn&#8217;t sure if that&#8217;s like a standard. Is that how long housing<br>services are available in general and why that number?<br>[00:17:32] Speaker3<br>No, although we&#8217;re affiliated with the county. Ours is a private program, and many programs do only allow you to stay eight to 12<br>weeks, which is what ours is. Now, that&#8217;s not hard on the firm because if somebody would get into the housing programs in Chester<br>County, there&#8217;s two main housing programs. There&#8217;s rapid rehousing and they&#8217;re Section eight housing. If you get put into that while<br>you&#8217;re here and you&#8217;re trying to find a place sister role, allow you to stay while you&#8217;re working through the ins and outs of finding a<br>place. And it&#8217;s very, very difficult. Probably since the pandemic started to even find houses, people are not renting to lower socio<br>economic people. People don&#8217;t want to work with the county. There&#8217;s just so few places and prices have just continued to rise and<br>rise and rise. So, yeah, it&#8217;s been very difficult for people.<br>[00:18:29] Speaker2<br>Yeah. A couple of years back, I had a conversation just privately with I can&#8217;t remember her last name, Kelly, who runs Open Hearth,<br>which is another social magazine.<br>[00:18:39] Speaker3<br>Yes.<br>[00:18:41] Speaker2<br>And I would. I was surprised when I was just out of college. I lived in Washington, D.C., and I worked at an agency where we would<br>hear all the time about the long waiting list for Section eight, for the housing vouchers. And so I assumed that was where the rubber<br>met the road and Chester County. And Kelly said, It&#8217;s really landlords. It&#8217;s really, unfortunately, it&#8217;s discrimination. You know, it&#8217;s the<br>landlords don&#8217;t want to rent to people who have a housing voucher, even though it&#8217;s guaranteed payment. You know what a housing<br>voucher represents is that the county is paying most of your rent, right? But yeah, she she mentioned that then you know, she she<br>said, if anybody in your congregation as a landlord owns a place that they rent, please encourage them to look into taking housing<br>vouchers because that&#8217;s that&#8217;s where the rubber meets the road here generally.<br>[00:19:26] Speaker3<br>Absolutely. And nobody wants housing built in their neighborhood. It&#8217;s it&#8217;s not. It&#8217;s not in my neighborhood type of thing. So it&#8217;s very<br>difficult. It&#8217;s very, very difficult. And for Lake Neighborhood in phoenixville at one time, which was boarded up windows and things like<br>that before, you know, gentrified again, the prices then were so inexpensive. St. Mary&#8217;s has been in business for thirty five years. I<br>think now they always were able to find housing until the gentrification, and now prices have just skyrocketed. And it&#8217;s, I will almost<br>say the word impossible to get a apartment of any kind for any of our people in phoenixville and the surrounding areas,<br>[00:20:12] Speaker2<br>Which is where you&#8217;re located, right?<br>[00:20:14] Speaker3<br>Yet we&#8217;re right in the center of of phoenixville.<br>[00:20:18] Speaker2<br>Well, when when the families that stay with you are able to find secure housing, what does that pathway out of homelessness<br>typically look like for them? How does that how does that usually happen?<br>[00:20:29] Speaker3<br>Well, they try to do several. We have, we call it a program here. They have several things that they&#8217;re supposed to be doing while<br>they&#8217;re here achieving finding a job. If they don&#8217;t have their benefits, we help them get their benefits in place, getting their kids into<br>school, daycare, whatever the case may be, getting all those things almost like getting your ducks in a row. And then hopefully once<br>they do get housing, which takes, it&#8217;s not like they come in and they&#8217;re put on a housing list. It takes several weeks. We are working<br>with many, many nonprofits as well as the county, and we have to make sure that things are kind of lined up for them because the<br>idea is for them to be successful. The Rapid Rehousing Program is when you&#8217;re picked up in the Rapid Rehousing Program, you get<br>a referral and then a locator works with you and the resident here, and the locator and myself are looking for housing the way that<br>program is. Once you find a place, they set you up and they pay approximately 70 percent. You pay the first, third and the other 30<br>and they help you get in there. Then, over six months to a year, they start to pull back. And the idea is for you to be independent.<br>You&#8217;re also receiving case management services, going through their checking in on you, making sure the last thing they want you to<br>do is get the end of that period and fail. So the idea is for you to get more independent each and every month, and that&#8217;s why it&#8217;s<br>critical that they find some kind of a job and get their kids into whatever schooling that they need.<br>[00:22:04] Speaker2<br>You know, I think sometimes I know that when I have talked to folks throughout my life, like I said in my previous work experience and<br>also in my congregation, I think everyone obviously wants to end homelessness once there to be an end to poverty. And there is this<br>sense, though, of resignation or hopelessness about it. I think a lot of people have a have a feeling that somehow the problem is too<br>big, that it&#8217;s totally unsolvable. So I&#8217;m curious as somebody who works directly with families, as somebody who&#8217;s been in different<br>parts of the social service sector, it sounds like too. Do you think homelessness is a solvable problem? Let&#8217;s just say even in Chester<br>County and and where do you think we need to start if we want to solve it?<br>[00:22:47] Speaker3<br>Well, the housing crunch is probably the number one thing. There needs to be more housing available, lower priced housing<br>available, but when I say that I&#8217;m not talking about some of the things that some of the people who come from us leave roach<br>infested, rodent infested, horrible low income housing. So there has to be this physical building zoo&#8217;s physical places that are there<br>for our families. And I don&#8217;t mean just here. I mean, in general, I will say Chester County does a fantastic job of working with their<br>people. I work with other counties to and they don&#8217;t have a lot of the people coming together like Chester County does. And this<br>county works very hard to get people off the street and into something into some kind of housing, no matter whether it&#8217;s a shelter or<br>whatever the case may be the pandemic. They started putting people in hotels just for safety reasons, and they&#8217;re still in there. We<br>still have between that and that&#8217;s the big flood that we had.<br>[00:23:54] Speaker2<br>Ida Yeah, I just got an email about that this morning from Chester County partnership to end homelessness, saying that there&#8217;s still<br>30 families or something like that in hotels because of IDA. Yeah, yeah.<br>[00:24:03] Speaker3<br>So there&#8217;s there&#8217;s approximately, I think, 50 families in hotels right now between IDA and lack of housing and, you know, people<br>rotate in and out. I would love to say that I&#8217;m very hopeful that housing could be resolved, but I&#8217;m not sure because a lot of people see<br>people who are homeless and look at them like they&#8217;re for lack of a better word, lepers instead of people who have hit hard times.<br>Many people are one paycheck away from losing their housing. And I think people forget about that. So I&#8217;m hopeful. But I don&#8217;t know<br>that there is a resolve to this because in our country in general, I don&#8217;t know that enough people care to make that solution like<br>something that they can work toward. There are a lot of really, really dedicated people who want to solve it. And again, Chester<br>County, in my opinion, does a great job and they do the best they can. But there&#8217;s just so many people out there who are struggling<br>and people who are hungry and just it&#8217;s it&#8217;s horrific, really, and it&#8217;s just not fair that anybody in this country would be living the way that<br>are a lot of people have to.<br>[00:25:22] Speaker2<br>Not at all. Not when we have so much, when some people have so much.<br>[00:25:25] Speaker3<br>Right, right. It&#8217;s so uneven right now.<br>[00:25:29] Speaker2<br>Yeah. Well, I appreciate I appreciate you sharing this with us, Cathy, because that is, I think, part of part of what we&#8217;re hoping to do<br>with this message series and part of what our community is hoping to do in general. I have talked a lot in this series about how if we<br>don&#8217;t know somebody who experiences a particular issue, we tend to think of it as an issue. It&#8217;s something we see on the news. It&#8217;s<br>something we debate about what&#8217;s the right policy, which politician do we like and their views on it? But all of these issues affect our<br>neighbors. There are people that live in our area and there are people without any sharing anything confidential. There are people in<br>our congregation who&#8217;ve been close to losing their homes, who we&#8217;ve been able to support with our emergency fund to pay their rent<br>for a month or two. And sometimes that&#8217;s all people need. There&#8217;s a, you know, there&#8217;s a job loss or there&#8217;s a crisis issue and they just<br>need a couple of months of support. And so this is this is an issue that affects people that we know even if we may not recognize it<br>because there can be so much stigma around it. Like you said, people don&#8217;t want to walk around saying, I&#8217;m afraid I&#8217;m going to lose<br>my house or I&#8217;m afraid I&#8217;m going to lose my apartment, so.<br>[00:26:32] Speaker3<br>Right? And you know, and then the hunger issue to people will put the money to keep the place because they want their family off the<br>street, then their children are going hungry. So it&#8217;s such a complicated thing. But when people like you and your congregation are<br>interested in asking the questions and want to be involved in some way, that helps so much. And we have so many churches that<br>support this particular, our shelter, particularly, I know they help other ones, but I don&#8217;t even know how many churches because<br>there&#8217;s such a huge amount of them. And it&#8217;s because people like your congregation who are interested and want to know and say,<br>Hey, what can we do to help? You know, so that&#8217;s a wonderful thing.<br>[00:27:18] Speaker2<br>Yeah. Well, I know we&#8217;re actually signed up to provide the meals for your families. I think the first week of March. So anybody in our<br>congregation?<br>[00:27:25] Speaker3<br>That&#8217;s a wonderful thing. It really is so helpful, right?<br>[00:27:28] Speaker2<br>Yeah. Anybody who wants to cook or if you&#8217;re like me and you hate cooking, I signed up last time around and I bought the bread and<br>I bought the snacks for the kids for school. So that&#8217;s just an extra trip to Wegmans. That&#8217;s pretty easy.<br>[00:27:39] Speaker3<br>So I&#8217;m not much of a cook, but you know, if there&#8217;s a night that something&#8217;s missing, I&#8217;ll put something in the crock pot. Yeah, I can do<br>that.<br>[00:27:49] Speaker2<br>Mac and cheese is my favorite thing to cook from a box, unfortunately. I love that. Oh, Cathy, is there? Is there anything else that we<br>didn&#8217;t talk about that you&#8217;d like our congregation to know, especially about, about the whole topic, but also about how we can support<br>our neighbors who are experiencing homelessness?<br>[00:28:10] Speaker3<br>Well, I guess I would like to say coming from the heart, if you see someone and you think that they are in some kind of trouble,<br>whether it be financially or they look hungry or their children are looking disheveled, reach out in a friendly manner and say, What can<br>I do to help you? And I know that&#8217;s not always easy. I mean, I can&#8217;t say that I&#8217;ve done it every single time that I should have but reach<br>out. And if you have the dime or the the box of juice boxes to spare, donate. Give your time, give your money, give whatever you can.<br>Because that&#8217;s what makes it go round when people want to be involved and help their neighbor the best way they can. And I think<br>there&#8217;s a lot of that missing in the world today, sadly. So I just I love when people can come together and help one another. That&#8217;s<br>that&#8217;s like my greatest joy, especially when it involves children, because they&#8217;re the ones who actually suffer the most in these<br>situations. Yeah.<br>[00:29:15] Speaker2<br>Thank you for that, Cathy. Thank you for taking the time to talk to us.<br>[00:29:18] Speaker3<br>I&#8217;ve enjoyed it and I&#8217;m glad that you reached out. I&#8217;d love to be able to talk to people and tell them what our mission is and where<br>we&#8217;re going with everything.<br>[00:29:28] Speaker2<br>Well, Cathy, thank you.<br>[00:29:34] Speaker1<br>Some of you might know the name father, Gregory Boyle. He&#8217;s a well-known Catholic priest. He&#8217;s the founder of the world&#8217;s largest<br>gang rehabilitation program called Homeboy Industries. And he gave an interview back in 2016. Where he talked about the pressure<br>that people of good faith feel knowing that there is suffering in the world, the pressure that we feel to save the world. And he says,<br>you know, we get that all wrong. Because saving the world is impossible for any of us. By its nature, it&#8217;s completely overwhelming.<br>And it leads to nothing, he says, but a hernia. That&#8217;s the word he used. It leads to burnout and guilt and hopelessness, which<br>eventually means throwing up our hands right and giving up. But Father Boyle says when we savor the world. When we savor the<br>whole world, even the parts that are confusing or that we don&#8217;t understand. When we savor the whole world. We generate love. We<br>find that love is generated inside of us. Maybe loving our neighbors is at the core of every major religion for a reason. Maybe loving<br>our neighbors is truly the key to making these big, hard changes that we&#8217;re going to need to make if we care because they are big<br>and complex and scary and risky changes.<br>[00:31:20] Speaker1<br>But then again, what wouldn&#8217;t we do for someone we love? Father Boyle says I talk for that reason a lot about kinship. He says I say<br>no kinship, no peace, no kinship, no justice, no kinship, no equality, we&#8217;ve become focused, he says, on peace and justice and<br>equality. When the truth is, none of those things can happen unless there is some undergirding sense that we belong to each other.<br>That we belong to each other. And he says the good news is if we focus on kinship. The byproduct will be peace. And justice and<br>equality. In the end, Father Boyle says all mature spirituality is about tenderness. That&#8217;s the mark of a mature spirituality, because<br>tenderness and love is the connective tissue. That&#8217;s the only thing that joins us together. And so, friends, wherever you are, if you&#8217;re<br>here blessedly in this room or if you&#8217;re joining us from somewhere far away today, I hope you feel our sense of kinship. Our sense<br>that we know and belong to each other. And I hope that you will continue to feel in these days ahead, that might be scary. That might<br>be overwhelming. I hope you feel at the same time the sense of joy that comes from savoring.<br>[00:33:09] Speaker1<br>All of the gifts. Of our whole human family. Amen to all of us. And may we all live in blessing. When I invite the band to come up and<br>all of you to join me, if you will, in the spirit of prayer. God of our hearts, own language. Presence that gave us this life. Presence that<br>is with us. Even in the moments when we feel alone and scared. We pray this morning for safety for all people. We pray for the<br>miracle of hearts that turn to tenderness. We pray for the miracle of soldiers who look in the eyes of citizens and see human beings.<br>We pray for the miracle of strength of people who resist orders to do horrible things. And we pray for the strength closer to home to<br>take an honest look around us. To see the humans in our human family right nearby. And to take comfort in our kinship connections.<br>To remember how beloved each one of us is. And to remember that that beloved us always includes us as well. For the prayers, I&#8217;ve<br>spoken out loud and for the prayers that all of us are carrying on our hearts this morning, we say amen.<br>END OF TRANSCRIPT<br>Automated transcription by Sonix<br>www.sonix.ai<br>www.sonix.ai<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This week, Rev. Lee begins by taking a few moments to reflect on the situation in Ukraine. She then welcomes guest speaker Cathy Farrell from St. Mary&#8217;s Franciscan Shelter. They talk about the issues facing families looking for housing in and around the Phoenixville area, and what we can do to help as a community. Sharing Space START OF TRANSCRIPT[00:00:00] Speaker1Andy he wrote that song in the last year. We&#8217;re so lucky to have such talented musicians, aren&#8217;t we? Yes. 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