Take Your Place: An Ecosystem Has No Spare Parts, and Why Your Worth Is Not What You Do (9/13/2026)

<p>&quot;Your contribution to the work does not define your worth.&quot;</p><p>A shorter episode than usual — homily length. Before the service we held a teams fair, where congregants could visit every team that makes this church function internally and do justice work in the wider community. This is the message that followed.</p><p>&quot;Take your place&quot; is not the theatre&#39;s <em>places, everyone</em>. It is not a performance, and it is not a way to earn prestige or credits toward the chosen afterlife. It is an invitation: to claim your place if you know it, and to find it if you&#39;re still searching.</p><p>Along the way I say something I have been working toward for a while. Maybe the simplest, most reductionist account of a life — a meaningless stew of atoms and chemistry that we happened to emerge from — is the simplest explanation without being the truest. Maybe there is something that called you into being and calls you forward into meaning. I spent more of my life believing the reductionist view than I have believing what I believe now, so I&#39;m comfortable with the skeptical eyes in the room.</p><p>Then the paradox at the center: an ecosystem has no spare parts because an ecosystem is <em>all</em> spare parts. Health and resilience depend on redundancy and abundance — but redundant and abundant are not <em>spare</em>, because spare is the language of scarcity. Three other people can step up when you&#39;re away, and your contribution is undiminished.</p><p>And a near enemy worth naming: the expectation that work which feeds you should be easy.</p><p>Our Great World House marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of September 11th, and why I did not participate in our town&#39;s day of service. Kris Verdeyen reads Lynn Ungar&#39;s &quot;Camas Lilies.&quot; Recorded live at San Gabriel Unitarian Universalist Fellowship in Georgetown, Texas.</p>