From the dark and cold days of winter, there is a desire to go deep. Deep with one another, deep with God, deep with ourselves. In response to this craving for depth, Holden’s Worship Team invites you to join the Village in the inspired monthly series Practicing Our Faith. Join us each month as we explore a new theme in relation to justice and worship.
February’s theme is Honoring Our Limitations.
In this month’s Practicing Our Faith series, Villagers are exploring the Christian practice of honoring limits. The Worship team reached this theme by combining two of Dorothy Bass’s practices from her book, “Practicing Our Faith”: Keeping Sabbath and Saying Yes / Saying No. Our society can often push us to extremes, sometimes well past our limits. But the limits of the earth, body, and spirit are natural and healthy, and honoring them can liberate us from systems that oppress us. Honoring limits can help us to see through capitalism’s “greed is good” to the truth that a system that is founded on the lack of limits ultimately hurts our bodies and the earth. Honoring limits can help those who have been conditioned to always say yes, even when it isn’t healthy, to say “no,” shamelessly. Honoring the planet’s limits can help us act with intentionality to combat climate change by changing our habits. Sometimes limits make us small. Sometimes limits enlarge us and free us to discover who we truly are.
Through cold snaps and power outages, we honor the limitations that surround us while practicing graciousness and care for one another, in personal and necessary ways. We stoke fires, cook nourishing meals, and clean our dishes with intentional effort, presence, and care. We invite you to join us in recognizing and honoring the limitations and boundaries in daily life as opportunities for cultivating deep relationships with expansive hope and faith.