Pastor's Message - June 2025

I am grieving. If you are reading this column, you already know that.

I might mention it in conversation on occasion. And I took some time off to adapt around the dogshaped hole in my life.

Mostly, however, I'm just getting on with things, trying to be a non-anxious presence during the present chaos, a spiritual trainer and coach giving you skills and tools you need in a time of serious evil, an advocate for justice for Elmira's poor and broken.

It isn't keeping busy to keep busy. I am busy. And I happen to have a trait called "grit," the focus of the "Grit Lab" program under Penn Psychology Professor Angela Ducksworth.

It is, I begrudgingly confess, an inheritance from my father, who had it in surplus. His dad, the grandfather I never knew, died of tuberculosis when he was a kid, and he experienced poverty and hunger as a child. His escape was underage enlistment in the Army and the Korean War, and he came back with physical and psychological scars and a Purple Heart.

Back home, there was a marriage that failed and the surrender of parental rights. Things got better once he met Mom, and they were together over fifty years, but early in their life together, they lost an infant son, and things were touch and go for me in the beginning. Yet Dad never turned to alcohol, never turned out the lights and got back in bed. He got up and went to work as a firefighter, 24 on and 24 off for the first decade of my life, with side gigs on his two or three "off" weekdays.

We'll be thinking about fathers later this month, though first we get to Pride, another example of grit, of queer folks of every variety fighting back against persecution, then acting up during the murderous silence around the AIDS Crisis. We'll celebrate Juneteenth, the culmination of a decades-long struggle to recognize the humanity of enslaved members of the African Diaspora, a struggle that is still real as the summary executions of Black-identified people of color continue un-checked and White Supremacists control our post-Constitutional government.

My point, if there is a point, is that grit matters. We wouldn't be who we are today, culturally and religiously, if those first followers of Jesus hadn't had it, if they had scattered after his torture and execution. It is still present in the church, still needed in the church. It isn't listed as one of the gifts of the Holy Spirit we'll celebrate on Pentecost (also this month, on Pride Sunday), but it may be one of the most important of all, right up there with hope, imagination, and a wicked sense of humor.

Blessed June,

Gary