Sunday, September 17, 10:30am
Hotel Posada de la Aldea, Ancha de San Antonio 15
Free

Mary Oliver: Poet of Wonder, UU Service - spirit

Mary Oliver, long considered one of the United States’ most read and best-selling poets,celebrated her 82nd birthday on September 10th. Since her first book of poetry was published in 1963 she has received many honors. This Sunday the Reverend Wyman Rousseau will examine why Mary Oliver’s poetry resonates so well with so many people, and why we need a poet like Mary Oliver. What is it about her poetry that makes it so appealing and vital?

Engaging poems explore universal themes and emotions. They invite us into an experience that awakes our senses. In her slim manual on poetry, A Poetry Handbook, Oliver writes, “The poem is an attitude, and a prayer….poems are not words, after all, but fires for the cold, ropes let down to the lost, something as necessary as bread in the pockets of the hungry.” In other words, poetry feeds the spirit – affirms emotions, longings, sorrows and joys, common to the human soul.
Like a modern day Henry David Thoreau or Walt Whitman Mary Oliver is a mystic of the natural world. She invites us to wonder, and reminds us “To pay attention…our endless and proper work.” Her instructions to the living are “Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.”

…just pay attention , then patch a few words together and don’t try to make them elaborate, this isn’t a contest but the doorway into thanks, and a silence in which another voice may speak.

Many regard her poetry as spiritual. Elsewhere she has written “Attention is the beginning of devotion.” She is hopeful that by paying careful attention to the natural world we will learn to approach the world with a greater sense of wonder that might bring on a greater sense of respect, which the natural world so badly needs.

Reverend Rousseau has been a Unitarian Universalist minister for 49 years, serving congregations in Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Minnesota, Florida and
North Carolina. Wyman is the founder of Hospice and Palliative Care of Greensboro, NC. He also served six years as the Southeastern Regional Coordinator for the Haiku Society of America.

The U.U. Fellowship meets every Sunday at 10:30 a.m. at Posada de la Aldea, Ancha de San Antonio 15, and welcomes people of all ages, races, religions, sexual orientation, and gender identity. The meeting room is wheelchair accessible. For more information, visit our website at uufsama.org.