Slowness

Sermon delivered by Rev. Doug Inhofe, Guest Minister, July 1, 2007.

Doug Inhofe is a long-time All Souls member, and Harvard Divinity School-trained Unitarian Universalist minister. He currently practices law here in Tulsa and frequently preaches at UU churches and fellowships in our area.

It’s Summertime, and the livin’ is easy. It’s been put that way since the 1930’s, but the idea is older yet. One of these mornings we really might rise up singing, spread our wings and take to the sky, but, hush, there’s no need to hurry. Summertime lets us lay down the burdens of modernity—a chronic dissatisfaction with what we have, an ever-present panning into the future—and gives us our lives back.

We are set free “to front only the essential facts of life�—as Thoreau suggests, to find what we seek inside ourselves, to learn what life has to teach, to gaze at God’s windows. Approached slowly, life is not boring but instructive. The need to fill it up with activity is vanquished, and the sense of living on stage, in others’ eyes, is set aside. Slowness allows this, as a way of sensing the moment, as a way of living a spiritual life, as a way of letting go of tomorrow for the sake of today.