I love the Sundays when we welcome new members because they remind me to ask again the question that Dar asked in her sermon a couple of Sundays back: why have we come? What are we doing here? It’s good to take stock sometimes. There are lots of reasons why people visit churches and then join and keep on attending and working and helping and receiving and giving. Remember why you started coming here?  Today as we repeated the words, I remembered, too, that we promise to live into the various verbs of the Compact: to join, worship, welcome, learn, grow, follow, and act. This new worship theme got me thinking about our promises and our life together in another way—and it is this: maybe weare here to give and receive a spiritual form of occupational therapy?

Along with Zach, we have a number of folks in our congregation who are professional OTs and I thank you for your dedication.  They might describe what they do in this way: “Occupational therapy interventions focus on adapting the environment, modifying the task, teaching the skill, and educating the client/family in order to increase participation in and performance of the activities of daily living, particularly those that are meaningful to the client.” Because it is the day-to-day activity that is the point–that’s how “occupation” is defined in the OT world—so the therapist does not help with vocational counseling and job training, but rather with relearning how to do the activities of living the life in meaningful ways. Occupational therapy gives access and meaning and access to meaning and mobility. It is a beautiful and important work.

Our work at UCG is similar. Some of us learn early and others late whether we are millworkers or mds that our occupations, however known, can really occupy us.  The activities of daily living and/or our jobs—life in its totality can fully occupy your heart and mind. On the best days, accomplishing daily life tasks can both require from us, and be sources of, energy and hope. Daily living can feed your ego and put food on your table and maintain a family or an individual. But there are times when circumstances change and the activities of daily living can seem to take more than we’ve got. They can drain us of every aspiration we ever had.  They can become too far and high and deep and wide with their demands and become impossible to achieve.  Occupations can invite and provide a living and sometimes can challenge what it means to live a life.

When we get together here at UCG, week by week, we show up with what occupies us in our daily living, the good, the bad, and the ugly. And in those times, when limitations like fallen trees may block the road for some of us, as a spiritual family, we have the chance to help each other to relearn how to do the activities of daily living, to help one another adapt or to work together to change the environment so that life for others can be lived abundantly.

I love this OT quotation from the bulletin that says, like Occupational Therapists, we get to ask ‘what matters to you?’ And we do not ask ‘what’s the matter with you?’  To me, asking “What’s the matter with you” spiritually speaking is a judgment question. Not what we’re here to do. What matters to you? Is an accessibility question.  How can we,you, they—all of us–access healthy and abundant food and peace and safety and justice and education and human and civil rights because what matters to us is that sort of daily life. That matters to us. Having friends to lean on matters and someone to go with you matters. To be released from shame and to be reconnected to our selves and to let go of all that occupies and preoccupies us to access the highest self within and the holy beloved power of life that creates and  recreates–that is our work together.

And so when we gather in this room, we adapt the environment we and the occupations that occupy us by sitting, reminding each other to take a breath, to remember that we are here together, to let the weary world fall away for just a moment. We offer silence and music and prayers for each other and hugs. And not a small thing, we have coffee. And chances to learn and to be in beloved community. It’s not like this every Sunday, but it is like THIS ever Sunday– we’ll sing and pray for each other and we will hold on to each other and remind each other that we move through this life together, stronger together, stumbling or walking or rolling, sitting and smiling and crying the tears pent up all week—no one asking what’s the matter with you, but what matters to you, and then what happens in our spirit is that we touch one another—and in a way quite mysterious and extraordinary, we get to receive and to give, to restore, reinforce, and enhance performance so that we can get back out there to the activities of daily living. Occupational therapy.

You know what else? Occupational therapists in their work get to use adaptive devices to modify the environment. Zach showed us some of those and they are the greatest! They help people do their lives more effectively, with strength, with independence so that they can renew and relearn. And that is so important because most all of us want to be able to take care of ourselves and not be a burden and to have something to offer, don’t we? To feel like we matter. Don’t we all, whether we can walk or talk or move freely about a room, or now must learn to live constricted in our souls or our bodies, with whatever brands of challenge–internal or external, societal or psychological, physical or mental, still, I believe we all need for our lives to have meaning and to be able to bring something valuable to the collective table, to contribute, and sometimes we need help to be able to do that or to remember how to do that. We need one another to be like adaptive devices—to help get over, around, and through the barriers to daily living. We need people like Jesus’ friends in the story who raised the roof. Raised the roof, made an enlarged opening, made it possible for their friend to move into the place where he needed to be to adapt and to find whatever healing was possible. They opened the sky, for heaven sake; talk about modifying the environment! Adaptive devices, these guys.

I’ve had people, haven’t you? People and animals who broke down walls for me, and raised the glass ceiling for me, and got me the soul equivalent of one of those grabby things and extended my reach, so that when I was so weak or deluded or paralyzed with grief or hampered by whatever disability I was dealing with at that particular point in time so much that I couldn’t move freely, they helped me do my life.  I know you’ve had some of those blessings in your own life, too. I know you have been those blessings.

As a spiritual community it is our joy, our opportunity, our responsibility to be like spiritual occupational therapists in this world, to ask important OT questions like, “Why do some people have unequal access to all that makes meaningful daily life activity possible? Why? What in the current political, cultural, physical, spiritual environment needs to be adapted to make daily life possible and safe and abundant for ALL? Not just for my kind… for all?  How will that affect health and well being?”

Those are OT questions and they are also spiritual questions.

As I said at the beginning, there are lots of reasons to be part of a spiritual community, and one of those reasons is to work together for beloved community and common purposes. Occupational therapy always has “purpose” as central to its work. And that purpose is enhanced daily living—what Jesus called “life, and life more abundant.”  Let it be that you and I have as our purpose life and life more abundant for ourselves and for all, and in OT terms, may we practice an enhancement of our range of motion so that our reach is expansive and our movements free and our welcome wide, wide, wide.  Amen