I am thinking about the two different 'worship' experiences that my family had on Sunday. I attended First Parish, and Janet, along with the 7th/8th grade class, visited Sri Lakshmi Temple in Ashland.
In our service, Jane Trudeau gave a heartfelt testimonial about her experience at First Parish, speaking eloquently about the love and support she has given and received from this community since becoming a member, and noting that she was not part of a church community for a long time before she and Tom started coming here. At the end of her testimonial, it was hard to imagine First Parish not being in Jane's life and vice versa.
The Good Reverend's service asked us to think about our future and challenged us to look ahead. What do we want for ourselves and our community? The Board is currently going through a long range planning process to identify what more we as a church can do to further enrich the lives of our community and our world. It is a challenging task because we are doing a lot already.
Janet's experience was different. As the group walked the inside perimeter of the temple they stopped at shrines, learned about the deities honored, what one should pray for at each shrine, and the specific meditative ritual for that site. Though there are many events and activities for their community, many of their worship activities are performed solitarily. And where they come to their temple to find their deities, we come to church to find the divine in ourselves.
Sri Lakshmi broke ground in 1984 and their large and beautiful temple opened in 1986. It took several more years to complete all the work of carving the shrines and installing the granite statues of the deities, but they had a clear vision of what they wanted to do. Now they are in the middle of a capital campaign to expand again. Seeing how far they have come in such a short time is inspiring. It took real vision to get to where they are today, the largest Hindu temple in the northeast. Imagine what we can do with a clear vision. Three hundred and fifteen years old and we're just getting started. |
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