Ash Wednesday Blessing

written by Emma Donohew for Ash Wednesday Wild Church - February 2020

Don’t wash away the mark on your forehead just yet
Let it linger there a little longer
Allow this solid residue to sink into you

We bear ashes that often mark an end
To mark something new
Embrace this cyclical blessing
This threshold in time

Welcoming the earthly ashes to sit with you

Solid Residue
Leftover from our ancestors 
who kept fires lit before
and for us

Maybe everything is reusable 

Even us

For every part of us comes from
Something
Not just from somewhere

Ash Wednesday
Just another day to embrace the humility of our 
Residual nature

Not running from our known future
But welcoming our deep connectedness

Our shared origins
Invisibly interchanging between the generations

So embrace this residual blessing
These ashes from a fire
As a mark of memory
Of remembering
That you come from dust

And through dust, earth and water
You shall return

Amen

Day 7 - SERVICE CHURCH

“Moving as a group, planting trees, cleaning up the environment…these things allow us to talk to each other, and other people while we work. This puts meaning to our lives and the lives of people with whom we share conversation.” --Rich

Service Church is a monthly activity at Echoes. We look for ways to give back to our local community, often by helping other groups with environmental stewardship. Caring for the land or “our natural home” as our mission statement names it, is one of the crucial ways that Echoes continues to build and maintain connection to the place in which we live.

Service puts the emphasis of the church and its congregation back into the world. Service allows us to share our gifts and talents with the whole community. Service is God’s call to us to “love your neighbor as you love yourself.”

On this last day of giving, consider how you have been of service to others in your own life: in your daily work, the people with which you interact, the way you care and greet the animals (domestic and wild) around you. You probably serve in more ways than you realize.

Please help Echoes continue the important work of giving back in the new year. Your donation is tax-deductible. With your gifts, we continue to serve our community well beyond our own front door.

Give to Echoes today!

Day 6 - 'HAMSTER CHURCH

Each month Echoes hosts a monthly gathering where we invite members from the larger Bellingham area to share about their lives.  Why are they here? What are they doing to make life better here in the ‘ham? How can we learn from them?

These conversations allow us to meet people living alongside us in the community that we may never otherwise get to know. ‘Hamster Church extends Echoes’ reach into Bellingham and also practices the value of neighborliness. There is no “other” in God.

“Sometimes the topics are uncomfortable, like when we heard from the homeless people and the trans person at different ‘Hamster Churches. People often face hardships and difficulties in their lives and that can be hard to listen to. But I always come away with more insight and compassion for people.” –John

Contributing to Echoes today, helps us to keep having these important conversations with our neighbors. It creates connections across perceived barriers and divides. Your gifts grow kindness and community.

Give to Echoes today!

Day 5 - CREATIVE CHURCH

What is the connection between spirituality and the arts? Each month Creative Church explores this important question, and offers an opportunity to engage our own creativity in a mindful setting.

“The story we share of the interaction of humanity with God begins with the story of creation…I like to think of that piece of the creator in me as some of the source of my creativity. In Creative Church…we acknowledge and explore what that means. We don’t do it as an intellectual exercise. We do it by actually exercising that creativity…for me often not one I would do on my own.” –Tim

People who know they aren’t creative, come out the other side of Creative Church with tangible evidence that they indeed have the capacity and ability to be a creator themselves.

“To experience what that link to the creative God within us might be. It is another of the ways that Echoes approaches the full range of ways to connect more closely with God, especially that piece of God within us.”--Tim

Your giving to Echoes helps us continue to link spirituality with the creative arts. Help us to dream new and wonderful ways of express the deepest parts of ourselves and that small spark of the Sacred within.

Give to Echoes today!

Day 4 - PUB CHURCH

We believe that Church has never been confined to a building, so why not meet in a brewery, pub, tap house or bar? Pub Church brings church into the wider world, and brings the wider world back into church.

Each month, Echoes shares conversations that engage both the head and heart in a relaxed, informal setting. We know solid answers are hard to come by, but good questions can be just as enlightening. When we gather, when we congregate together, we believe that God is with us, among us, and in-between us in the conversations we hold.

“I enjoy Pub Church; it reminds me of the centuries when folks gathered at a warm inn during the evening.  Pub Church takes us to a comfortable place to share and discuss our lives, faith, joys and concerns—together.  This is safe space for us to listen and to be heard.” –Shari

Please support us in all the ways that we worship. Your contributions help us to bring God into the lives of people, no matter where we gather. Join us in our work, from near or far. We raise our glasses to you!

Give to Echoes today!

Day 3 - WILD CHURCH

“Engaging with nature has been a spiritual practice for me and a pathway to experience holy mystery in all seasons and types of creation. I love that Echoes provides a regular rhythm of setting aside time together to be quiet, listen, and notice what is humming in the natural world around us, within ourselves, and how we’re interconnected.” --Danielle

We know that we are part of God’s wonderful, diverse and complex creation. We are interwoven into this precious and fragile planet we call home. Echoes seeks to repair the disconnect between humans and the natural world, God’s first book of revelation.

Wild Church is a practice, a worshipful posture, and a way of re-connecting and re-membering ourselves and our place in Christ’s kin-dom.

“Being able to share insights, collective wisdom and this practice with the Echoes community has been a tremendous gift and I’m grateful for the ways it has helped cultivate awe and wonder and deepened my faith.” –Danielle

Your gifts to Echoes help us to reconnect with our natural home, God’s marvelous creation. All gifts are tax deductible. Return. Restore. Renew.

Give to Echoes today!

Day 2 - PRIDE

“I discovered Echoes through the Bellingham Pride Festival, it had a booth set up there, along with a sign that said, ‘Seeking Wholeness, Not Harm.’…As a former churchgoer, I felt the need to step away when I came out as a lesbian and seriously began to reconcile my faith and sexuality. Finding Echoes when I did, felt like coming home. Six years later, and I am still a part of Echoes. What keeps me coming back is continually experiencing the radical welcome, acceptance and knowing that my presence matters…” --Callie

Pride matters. It really does. Echoes was founded at Bellingham’s Pride Festival and has continued to have a presence there ever since. We believe in the promise of radical welcome. We accept and honor you just as you were created. Just as you are.

Deep wounding from previous religious experiences are most often the norm for LGBTQ+ people. The traditional church has failed queer people forever.

This is why Echoes practices radical welcome. You are loved. You are beloved. Just as you are. No exceptions.

Help us to continue to practice being a place of wholeness for the LGBTQ+ community instead of a place of harm. Your gifts continue to help us be a community of welcome, of healing and of hope.

Give to Echoes Today!

Learn more about Echoe’s committment to Pride in our video!

Day 1 - EVOLVING FAITH

“I came to Echoes rather grudgingly. I know that sentence seems odd to be used to promote a church. But I came out of curiosity after I had insisted both to myself and many others that I would never EVER attend church again. ANY church… There has always been a disconnect between what I believed Jesus cared about and what the church cared about.” --Julie

Echoes is a community of people who journey together, no matter where they currently are in their lives. By gathering together, over time, we grow in new and surprising ways.

“As I began attending Echoes, it was a contemplative church meeting in a cozy setting, driven by the social justice and relationship with God that our faith calls us to. Since then it has evolved to become a community interconnected through worship, creativity, neighborly outreach, and interaction with nature. Each of these four aspects draws us closer together as a community.” --Melissa

As we companion one another, we discover new questions, old fears, and evolving perspectives on our lives. We allow room to grow and change. We evolve to embrace our current needs and new revelations.

“Being a part of Echoes has encouraged me to grow in my faith, ask questions, and expand my understanding of a big, loving God who can be seen and worshipped in many ways.  It’s a good thing!” –Chris

Please consider giving to this evolving faith community. With your help, we continue to be a place where all those seeking answers, who want to travel with other doubters, or those who just want to check things out can gather, share, and grow!

Give to Echoes Today!

Winter Solstice Blessing

written by Emma Donohew - Winter Solstice - December 2019

This longest night of the year is here to offer you some stillness
Go on
Be still.

The days are grey
Fading quickly to black
The rain comes in sheets, drizzles and drips
Inviting all to retreat to different forms of shelter
The sun showing its colors in glimpses
Quickly hides behind clouds settling in for the cold

Winter is Arriving

But she comes with more than just dampness
To help you embrace this Blessing

The quickening sunrises
The early sunsets
Holy darkness fills in around us

The darkening nights allow us to find our inner light

You darkness
Offer us a chance to see anew
The possibility for rebirth of our light once more

Receive winters blessing
A gift to let go of the year and it’s unforgivable moments
A gift to remember all of its joy filled moments

Be Still and welcome the season’s darkness
Allow it to mark a threshold
A short day, but indeed a doorway into the unknown future
A future welcomed by nature and her rhythms of this solstice season

Let this blessing wiggle its way to you in your hibernation
Finding a way to pull the string on that heart light
To illuminate you deep from within

This blessing will be here all winter
Waiting in stillness

You people who have walked in darkness
Breath Deeply

May each day forward, you be blessed with more light
Amen.

Advent-Looking to the Life of Mary

Driving home from work in the dark last night, I heard one of my favorite traditional Christmas carols on the radio. In it, a pregnant Mary is being led to Bethlehem with Joseph and they pass a cherry tree (the hymn comes from England). Mary asks Joseph to stop and pick her some cherries, citing the baby in her womb. Joseph isn’t having it. He looks at her and says, “The father of your child can pick the cherries for you.”

How bold. How human. How often we forget, after hearing the story of the birth of Jesus our whole lives, what it must have actually been like for everyone involved.

Mary was a very young peasant girl. A girl. Some biblical scholars put her age at 13. She became pregnant out of wedlock, even though she was promised in marriage to Joseph, an older man she may have not known at all.

When I think of the story of Mary, about the Annunciation and the Nativity, I can only think of the popular political catchphrase, “Nevertheless, she persisted.”

Mary was a girl. Mary was poor. Mary was uneducated. Mary lived in a world where she belonged to her father, until she belonged to another man. Yet, Mary said yes to God. She said yes to danger, and to the unknown, and to the breaking of all the social and cultural norms of her day. She said yes.

What would it mean, this Advent, if we spent less time focusing on the coming of Jesus and instead looking at the life, choices, and story of Mary?

What could we learn about courage, persistence, and reckoning with truth if we looked to a young teenage girl from Palestine?