Welcome to Lectio Divina with JoAnn Anglin. The group meets on the 1st and 3rd Mondays at 10 a.m. on Zoom, and this week JoAnn writes: I’ve decided to go ahead with Monday’s Zoom despite the 20th being a holiday and the Presidential Inauguration. You enter via our UUSS website: uuss.org/online and click where it says “Zoom Stream”.

Some of you may have been at the first UUSS Sunday service of 2025. In an unusual turn, one of our regular worship associates, Courtney O’Neill, read a poem of her own, “The Gray”. It seemed to me that her work really addresses the ambiguities or contradictions many of us live with, and struggle with, from time to time, whether ethical, familial, political, etc.

I don’t normally use, nor do I plan to use poems by our UUSS members, but I was really struck by this one, and Courtney gave me permission to share it for our discussion.
The Gray

I’m sanding my rough edges
And trying to descend
From the hill that I kept dying on
I’m trying to make amends
My breath, it comes out ragged
I don’t know what to say
I’m trying to move from black and white
To living in the gray

So rigid and inflexible
Unable to see the skew
Burn down the house to build up myself
And my limited point of view
But after I’d reached a breaking point
And saw I’d lost my way
The color faded from my world
Leaving shades of gray

Now, trying to grow past myself
And listen more than speak
And realize that compromise
Is not a sign I’m weak
Heavy grief is no excuse
No matter what it may weigh
My hurt hurt others with absolutes
When I couldn’t see shades of gray

I burned my oldest bridges
And am learning now to swim
Leaving one shore for another
Scrubbing off some sins
I’m don’t know where I’m headed
But I’m grateful along the way
Striving beyond the black and white
And ever toward the gray

–Courtney O’Neill