UPCOMING EVENTS

NEWS & REFLECTIONS

This year for Lent, we’re inviting everyone into a new practice during our Sunday services.

In the Breath Space, each of us will have a notecard and pen to write down a short prayer and and place in a communal basket. Then at the Table after receiving the Eucharist, we’ll have the opportunity to pull a prayer from our community out of the basket to keep with us for the week.

In this season of fasting and prayer, our hope for this exercise is that it will give us a tangible reminder that we are not alone in our Lenten journeys. May it call us into prayer for ourselves and each other, so that we all might become more like the Body of Christ.

So that we can all enter into Lent together, we are holding the service at 5:30pm. Bloom  Kids will be running, and we are providing pizza for all. We hope to see you all there!

There’s a long tradition in the church to source the ashes we receive on Ash Wednesday by burning palm branches. This year, we’re going to burn the same palm branches that many of us laid down on the unlit fire pit last year on Palm Sunday.

Directly after service, everyone is invited to exit the sanctuary via the back staircase that leads up to parking alley behind the church. After a brief prayer and distributing the palms, everyone is welcome to add their branch to the fire pit. This is a time to celebrate the illumination of Christ among us and also prepare ourselves for Lent, following Jesus into the desert for a season of fasting and prayer. The ashes that come from these palms will soon mark our faces as a reminder of our mortality.

In closing, we’ll have the opportunity to sing the Doxology together around the fire. Let us savor the sound of each other’s voices and the words as they pass our lips. It will be the last time we sing it until Easter.

- Derek

As humans, we have a natural tendency to look beyond and outside ourselves when searching for meaning to big questions. This tendency can be especially noticeable in discussions around things like, ‘the existence of God.’

For reasons I don’t fully understand, I'm increasingly finding myself losing interest in these types of discussions, especially regarding questions about reality beyond our lived human experience. However, I have find statements like these to be a reliable touchstone with the divine:

‘By this they will know you are mine; in your love for one another.’ 

‘What you have done for the least among you, you have done for me.’

To Jesus, the divine is revealed not in looking beyond our world, but experienced within our humanity. Catholic theologian, Johann Baptist Metz reflects this beautifully saying, ‘The only image of God is the image of our neighbor.’ More specifically, Jesus points us to meet and know him through our love for others. To me, this means that to know God, is to openly and sacrificially love others. I find this way of approaching the idea of ‘God’ not only tangible and relatable, but also completely terrifying. This is a mortifying reality; the point of contact for intimacy with Christ, lies at the threshold of our willingness to courageously love others.

Needless to say, this is a difficult and convicting teaching. For me, it feels nearly impossible on my own without the help of some divine intervention I might call Spirit. When I feel like this, I often discover the Kyrie appearing on my lips…and with it a source of hope and courage to open myself again to the divine already present.

‘Lord have mercy. Christ have mercy.’

If you’re searching for the Divine, may you courageously search the eyes of your neighbor and see the image of God.

If you’re desiring to know God, may you courageously love others and discover intimacy with the Divine.

If you’re aching for restoration, may you notice the divine Spirit groaning alongside you with all of creation.

If you feel abandoned by God, may you love courageously in self-abandonment, and find Christ alongside you.

-Derek

An invitation from the Center for Service Learning at Regis University and the American Friends Service Committee:

On Wednesday, February 11th at 6:00 pm at 3130 Oakland in Aurora, there will be in-person vigil with the theme- Love Knows No Borders, No Walls! We demand justice for our people in the for profit GEO detention center. We denounce detention and deportation, which tear families apart and and harm all of our communities. Join our immigrant-led efforts to advocate for fair and humane immigration policies that welcome and respect the dignity of all people. For the 17th year in a row, AFSC will deliver handmade valentines to detention center detainees. Make something beautiful for someone separated from loved ones, separated by borders and distance or by walls. We assert that our Love knows No Borders, No Walls.

We have a new space in our building designed to help moms make the journey back into community with a new child in the family. The closed room features a soft atmosphere with little cribs, toys, walkers, reclining chairs, and a microwave and fridge. The space was designed by Lauren Curry with moms in mind, giving them a place to both connect with each other and care for their infants during the Sunday Morning Gathering.

The room is located behind Bloom Kids check-in. 

*Please ask a staff person if you are not able to locate it.

It began as a survival strategy.

Most mornings in our house unfolded the same way: the dog barking to be fed, the baby needing a diaper change, the four-year-olds dumping our entire berry budget onto their yogurt, our oldest asking for help to reach the scissors for his latest invention. Before the sun had even risen, I felt the heaviness of starting the day already needed by everyone, already behind.

Desperate to start my morning another way, I began wrapping four little boys in blankets, tucking them into our wagon, and pushing them up the steep sidewalk near our house—hoping we’d catch the morning’s colors before they quietly disappeared.

As we climbed, everyone’s breathing softened. Brooks would stretch his hands toward the glow on the mountains or toward the spotted cows grazing on the hill beside us. Our curly-headed caravan climbing toward the dawn, a tiny hand reaching toward the widening sky—something in the tangle of the morning began to release. The world grew still enough that I could sense something sacred, almost imperceptibly, finding its way through.

My ‘why’ questions rose—why some kinds of pain feel so hauntingly familiar, why power is allowed to unmake what it should protect, why innocence so often meets the weight of suffering. The morning seemed to offer its own response. Why such intricate beauty in the slow movement of clouds? Why does every morning begin with golden radiance spilling over the ridge? Why such extravagance offered to a single, tired witness?

Only when I heard Alexander Shaia describe the radiance of Advent did I realize why this small morning pilgrimage had become so necessary for me.

 He tells the story of growing up in a Lebanese immigrant family, speaking Aramaic—the language of Jesus. In Aramaic, he said, there is no single word for “dark” or “light.” There are only images: stars shimmering against a deep night sky, the moon’s quiet glow, the way sunrise paints brilliance by using shadow and color. Light is always described in relationship to darkness, and darkness is never simply the absence of light—it is the canvas that makes radiance possible.

Shaia says that Advent is the night of our lives, the season in which we are held in the womb of God. Christmas, he reminds us, is not something we should try to celebrate despite our pain, but instead it is the story of love coming close enough to touch, an embodied, cosmic season that is for us in the very places we feel hidden, heavy, and unfinished. It is a reminder that the dark is not the ending—it is the beginning. It is the necessary place where seeds root and break open, where babies grow quietly in the secret world of the womb, where new life takes its first unhurried shape.

Just as the cosmos turns after the solstice and light begins its slow return, something in us, too, leans—almost without noticing—toward radiance. What began in my morning as an effort to outrun the noise became a kind of listening, a way of letting the dawn speak first about what is true. It’s arrival came in quiet increments, hinting that the deepest forms of growth move in similar ways: hidden, patient, scarcely measurable.

The sky shifts its palette, the earth inclines toward brightness, and beneath all my questions the heart seems to practice trusting what it can not yet name. Advent moves like this—soft as breath, steady as the turning world—a refuge where darkness is not hurried away but held long enough for its alchemy, where light slips back into the world as a gentle grace.

- Jaimie Morgan