What Was Your First Love?
The sermon this last Sunday by Reverend Cynthia was “Memory is Morality.”
The sermon begins around -28:15 if you’d like to listen.
Monkey had a part in the service, too, which was lovely.
Here’s the slide everyone saw in the service:
And here’s Monkey saying the chalice lighting in German:
There were several key points in the sermon, but the two that we discussed most afterward were; telling the whole story, even the difficult parts, is important, and, what was your first love?
When Buds, Fi, and I talked about it, we each had a clear insight for our first love.
For Buds, it was legos. The quiet joy he remembers in creating with those smooth, beautiful pieces. A lego set would have been the pinnacle of delight for him.
For Fi, it was her baby sister, Carol. Fi was the 3rd of 4 siblings, and she remembers bringing Carol home from the hospital when she was 4 years old. Fi was seated in the middle in the back between older siblings Rick and Kat, and she can still recall the joy, love, and pride she felt when she was given Baby Carol to hold for the drive home.
For me, it was reading and books. Opening the Little House On The Prairie set of books on Christmas when I was 8 was life-changing. I can still remember sitting on the green shag carpet in the living room of the house I grew up in, holding them with joy welling up in my heart.
I still have the books, although some had to be replaced because they were falling to tatters, and when Monkey began reading them the pages would fall out.
These stories of the things we first loved each have more to their story, and as Cynthia shared on Sunday, the whole story is important.
For Buds, what comes up is the family lore about the only time from childhood (and adulthood) that anyone recalls him being violent was when another child was over to visit and destroyed a lego creation that Buddie had been working on so diligently and devotedly. He chased, tackled, and pounded that other child. (And to this day he is not sorry.)
For Fi’s story, it’s fun to know that when she held Baby Carol on the way home from the hospital, she wasn’t “Baby Carol” yet. Her name hadn’t been decided so she was actually “Baby Sam” for the first two weeks of her life.
And for me, as deep and rich as my love of books is, as a child they were an escape from a childhood that was filled with moments of anger and anxiety.
The whole story matters.
What was your first love?
