Yes and No

Mark and Shiloh

The Sanctuary’s music coordinator, Mark David Buckles, and his daughter, Shiloh — as seen through a cell phone camera’s haze.

The Sanctuary Boston’s last two worships have gone hand in hand. On January 2, we gathered to welcome in the new year with song and fellowship. Matt Meyer gave an amazing reflection, asking us the questions, “To what things can we say ‘no’? What kind of un-resolutions can we make?” Matt helped us enter the New Year with more, much-needed, space — space for just being, space for each other, space for the spirit to bubble up in our lives.

The Sanctuary’s coordinator, Dave Ruffin, couldn’t stop himself from jumping straight to saying “yes” to things, so we let him run wild at the next service on January 17. Our theme? “Say Yes!”

Dave invited us to reflect on the power and the practice of saying yes to the things we love most.  In our first experiment with multimedia services, our service included witnessing  Andrea Gibson perform her poem, “Say Yes.” Here’s a little snippet of the words which shaped our worship:

when two violins are placed in a room
if a chord on one violin is struck
the other violin will sound the note
if this is your definition of hope
this is for you
the ones who know how powerful we are
who know we can sound the music in the people around us
simply by playing our own strings…

We heard stories of saying yes to life from Mykal Slack and from Kim Paquette, and we shared our stories with each other.

And of course, we made some incredible music together! We sang the Zo Tobi song, “Show Me The Song” and Shawn Mullins‘ “Somethin’ to Believe In.

Three-year-old Shiloh Buckles led the charge in saying yes to dance parties, as we jumped and twirled and sang to “Glory, glory, hallelujah.”

May we all dance our way into a spacious and passionate 2013!

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