I write this a day after the privilege of doing some of the music in Majil Fausel’s memorial service.

For quite a few years now, I have marveled at how much we really don’t know about the people around us in church—and, indeed, in our lives as a whole. I am always dumbfounded by learning of the breadth and depth of whomever we are celebrating in a memorial service. It is as if each person is viewed as the tip of an ice berg during interactions in life, and only in memorializing them do we catch a glimpse of the whole being, with all the inherent complexities and wonders that entails. Of course, family and friends know much more, but even then some of those depths can be almost untouched.

So I write this to remind myself and you to give yourself the gift of really getting to know other people in our congregation. Our lives are busy and it is too easy to miss the riches that others have to share. Do it NOW—while you and they are alive! What a loss to discover the value in another after they are gone.

Deb Jacquemin

UUCS Music Director