April 26 Service at 10:30 AM in the Church and on Zoom 

Guest Speaker: Rev. Dr. Rand Peabody

The sermon will focus on our need to awaken and articulate enhanced degrees of personal development through our opening up channels of creative activity. I am speaking of something beyond the mere journaling of insights or passing occurrences, valuable as such observing and recording can be.

I will draw upon the playwright Thornton Wilder’s sense of the eternal, the poet John Keats’ view of our creative acts as “soul-making”,  and the wisdom of Henry David Thoreau, to focus on our “everyday poetics”  as the forging of our timeless individual identity.  And while pursuing our creative endeavors can utilize many different avenues of personal artistic expression, I will offer examples of two readily accessible forms of poetry that I employ in such an everyday way– haiku writing, and what I call “snapshot poems”.  

As a UU responsive reading puts it, “Creativity is the spark that nurtures our curiosity individually, and together, lets us create a brighter world.”

Dr. Rand Peabody has ministerial standing in The Reformed Church in America.  Between 1988 and 2009, he filled a total of fifteen Interim-Pastoral positions in the Maine and Massachusetts Conferences of the United Church of Christ.  He has served regionally in Norfolk, Weston, Arlington, Melrose, Southborough, Boxborough, Newton, Gardner, Lynnfield, West Medford, and West Concord.  Trained in Pastoral Counseling at Andover Newton Theological School, Rand focused on bringing spiritual healing and systemic awareness to congregations in transition.  Since 2022, Rand and his wife, Sally, have greatly enjoyed living at Brooksby Village, where they are involved in a broad range of activities.