Dear friends,

Yesterday evening, I turned in my last assignment for this semester, which was my final for my Faith Formation class. For this final, integrative assignment, we were given the space to pick any topic that had come up for us during the semester that we found we wanted to spend more time with.

I ended up with a topic similar to the sermon I shared last week: how to “reimagine” adult faith formation in Unitarian Universalist settings as a trauma-informed practice. I have to tell you, doing this work was one of the most exciting academic experiences I’ve ever had. I have told a few of my colleagues at school that I have found myself feeling a shift between talking about the ministry I want to do and actually living it out loud. It feels like I am stepping through the doorway I have been standing beside for years.

This is what this entire season feels like… like a period of transformation where I’m coming into myself in new and different ways. I have said it a million times, but it bears repeating again. I am just so thankful.

This week of the Thanksgiving holiday is, of course, a time as good as any to think about gratitude — what we feel it for, where we find it lacking, where we feel it in our bodies.

As I have been moving through this work, I keep noticing how different this season feels compared to the pace I have kept for so many years. There is a kind of internal quiet that does not come from having less to do, but from letting myself stop performing urgency, or at least working to structure my life in such a way that I can move away from that performance. And it keeps bumping into the way this time of year usually goes. Most of us arrive at the end of the year stretched thin, bone tired from holding far more than anyone else can see. The world around us turns up the volume and demands cheerfulness and productivity at the exact moment when our spirits start to fray.

I have been preaching about the practice of enough all month, and I am realizing how much it speaks to this end-of-year tension. Enough is not about tamping down our hope or ambition. It is not a moral claim about restraint. It is the moment the striving quiets down enough for us to hear our own lives again. It is remembering that worthiness has never been built from accomplishment, and that rest is not the opposite of growth.

The work I turned in this week, the deep thinking and integrating and wondering, has been shaping me in ways I did not expect. But maybe what it is teaching me most right now is that transformation does not always arrive with noise. Sometimes it looks like finally letting yourself breathe at the end of a long year. Sometimes it looks like naming the truth that you are tired and letting that be enough for the moment. And sometimes it looks like a simple kind of gratitude that rises when you simply take a deep breath, look around, and pay attention.

As we move toward the end of the year, I keep coming back to that. The quiet and steady reminder that the life we have right now is already full of meaning and wonder, even when we are worn thin. And maybe the most honest gratitude we can offer is to let ourselves rest inside it.

Rest well, my friends. I wish you a peaceful holiday.

With care,
Rachel

A few things I’m paying attention to right now:

• 🎧 Lux by Rosalia. I am transfixed by this record.

• 📚 Trauma and Recovery by Judith Herman; Fevered Star (Between Earth and Sky Book 2) by Rebecca Roanhorse

• 📺 The Synanon Fix on HBO (I will never say no to a cult documentary…)