We had a really great worship service on Sunday. If you were present with us, you know that we explored giving our word wisely, honoring our word when we fall out of integrity, and balancing love and accountability. Also, we failed to follow through on an area where we’ve implicitly given our word. 

For awhile now, we’ve encouraged people to participate in worship remotely through our livestream. Over time we continue to make improvements, investigating how our sound quality can be stronger and how we can maintain a consistently adequate internet connection to provide the experience we hope for if you worship with us online.

Although we never explicitly gave our word to providing a livestream on Sunday mornings, there are a lot of ways in which we imply that this will be an option. I’m sorry that we didn’t do a better job of ensuring that anyone who needed to be remote this Sunday could still join us. My commitment is that we’ll do all that we can to offer a quality experience for online participation. 

We don’t ever have to manufacture situations in which we can practice getting back into integrity. We fall out of integrity as human beings all the time. On Sunday, we reviewed that we can honor our word by (1) owning responsibility for not keeping our word, (2) apologizing without making excuses or justifying our behavior, (3) hearing from the other party how our failure to keep our word affected them, and (4) recommitting, which may involve renegotiating or clarifying what we are able to realistically give our word to. 

Our lack of a livestream offers an opportunity to acknowledge that we didn’t keep our word. And I hope that if you were intending to participate remotely this past week, you’ll be willing to share with me how that integrity gap affected you. In committing to do all that we can to provide a quality livestream, I also want to be clear that there are some things I don’t control. I don’t control our internet signal, for example, although we continue to make improvements to our technology. I don’t personally run the livestream either, so a piece of my commitment involves investing trust in other people. Potentially, investing trust in a larger pool of willing collaborators, who would also give their word to doing their part.

On Sunday, we talked about trust through the example of a jar of marbles. A full jar of marbles represents complete and healthy trust in a relationship. We add marbles one by one as we cultivate trust. But marbles get taken out by the handful when trust is damaged. In spiritual community, we’re in the complex and vulnerable position of having individual jars and a communal jar that we add marbles to or take marbles away from. 

Not having a livestream on Sunday most likely took a handful of marbles out of our jar with some of you. I hope that we can collectively restore marbles in the weeks ahead. And also, I hope that we can continue to gently consider where we give our word implicitly to one another. How conscious or mindful are we about the assumed promises we regularly make and break? Is there a way to make those implicit commitments more explicit and clear?

The other major piece of Sunday’s service was a framework for the kind of loving accountability we hope to foster in Unitarian Universalist contexts. You’ll have a chance to explore that more with the UUs Together group on Monday, and I can reflect on that in a future Bonus Track. For now, I hope that this has been a meaningful start to honoring our word about a commitment that matters a great deal to many of you. And I hope that we continue to grow in our capacity to give our word wisely in all of our spaces where we co-create community with one another. 

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