First Parish Bedford UU

Meeting Megan
by Doug Muder

"UUs can be such amazing mutts," Rev. Megan Lynes, our new parish minister, told me in her office. "It's a wonderful way to be."
Megan herself, like our senior minister John Gibbons, was raised Unitarian Universalist. She sang in the choir (and participated in the annual Gilbert & Sullivan musicals) at the Follen Church in Lexington. Her family's connection to Unitarianism goes back to a great-grandfather who played the organ at the Arlington Street Church in Boston.
But in the course of the hour or two we talked, she demonstrated how a lifelong UU can be as much of a "mutt" as any of us. Her spiritual life certainly is not a purebred version of any brand-name religion.
She made sure I got coffee, but took none herself because she was (for the fourth consecutive year) observing Ramadan, the month when Muslims fast during the daylight hours. “For me, it’s a spiritual practice about awareness and gratitude,” she says. If she's home when her Muslim friend and housemate performs her daily prayers, Megan participates -- in Arabic. She's also connected to her Jewish ancestral roots, honoring an informal Shabbat on Friday nights, and works with a spiritual director: the well-known UU-Christian minister Carl Scovel. And when did she decide to become a minister? While living at the Beacon Hill Friends House, a small intentional community started by the Quakers, and attending the Tuesday noon worship services at UUA headquarters up the street. As she wrote in an essay for the UUA's Ministerial Fellowship Committee: "All people are 'my people'."
She describes her personal spiritual practice as prayer, and the word God rolls off her tongue easily, without verbal quotation marks or irony. She describes God not as "a supernatural Other" but as a "listening presence" full of mystery and metaphor. She experiences her sense of the divine in nature and in the creative, transformative aspects of human relationships. "God is love," she said, “but God can also be righteous anger, or present in the depths of despair.” 
Megan talks about life in upbeat, optimistic terms, but emphasizes that she "is not Pollyanna." If she was ever Pollyanna, her years as a chaplain at Brigham and Women's Hospital have shown her life's harsher side. She has sat with the grieving and the dying, and has shared both their pain and the remarkable strength they sometimes find under the most difficult circumstances. "I don't deny the horribleness," she said, "but I look to the Good."
She was still searching for her path when she started divinity school at Andover-Newton, but the residency at Brigham and Women's (where she continues to be a per-diem chaplain) sold her on ministry. "It’s very humbling to be with someone who’s losing a loved one, or to pray with someone at their request, or stay with someone as they die," she said.  "In those moments I become intensely aware of how precious it is to be alive at all, even in the letting go.  I can only describe it as a blessing to share that deeply human experience with another person.”
As intense and fulfilling as chaplaincy was, Megan missed being part of a congregation. She wants to bring the same listening, loving presence to First Parish in relationships that are longer lasting and slower paced.  She’s looking forward to experiencing the rhythms of our everyday lives “and not so much terror and blood.”
She and John are still negotiating exactly how they will split the duties of ministry, but Megan thus far has inherited many of the roles that were filled last year by Diane Teichert: pastoral care, small group ministry, adult education, and a variety of "outreach and inreach" efforts to extend First Parish's impact on the larger community as well as deepen the connections between current members. Megan has a long-standing interest in young people and looks forward to working with First Parish's youth and teens.
She is not expected to preach nearly so often as John, but we will see her in the pulpit. Her first Bedford sermon is scheduled for September 27. What will she preach about? She needs to listen to us for a while before she decides, because she wants to preach sermons that are "not about what I need to say but rather what the community might be needing to hear."
But it's a good bet that the importance of listening will be part of her message. "To truly understand each other," she said, "we need to listen very deeply." Another theme might be the relationship between acceptance and change. "People change through time," she said. She encourages people to "be pleased with who you are and where you come from" but also "to be ready to turn over a new leaf whenever you need to."
Megan already knows that First Parish is turning over a lot of new leaves this year, and that she is just one of them. Moving to two services will disrupt a lot of our habits, and it is just one symptom of the ongoing challenge of growth. A loving, listening presence; an upbeat outlook; someone who knows the horribleness but looks to the Good -- that all might come in pretty handy as we mutts learn some new tricks.