If you read your April newsletter, you may have noticed that I am making a pitch for the adult OWL class, which my co-facilitators and I hope to begin teaching in May. My husband and I are also teaching K/1 OWL, which begins today. OWL stands for Our Whole Lives, which is the lifespan sexuality education curriculum developed jointly by the Unitarian Universalist Association and the United Church Board for Homeland Ministries.

In lighting the chalice, I want to speak personally, and not specifically about sex, though that might be more interesting. What’s interesting to me is that my OWL classes are the only official responsibility I have accepted at the moment. After a life of working as a family physician, raising three children, being president of two PTAs, remodeling a house, and even teaching high school algebra, I just stopped. I am currently having what I describe as a thinking year—or maybe two. The end of this period is not planned and the future is not known. I am living a back-to-basics life—exercising, cooking, gardening a little, starting a compost heap, rediscovering a relationship with my husband that allows much more time to be alone together. I have gone through the death of my mother, the official emptying of my nest, the serious mental illness of a friend, and the discovery of the pain and anxiety of nurturing fledgling adults who sometimes seem most present when they are suffering.

I recently reread Judith’s sermon The Broken Heart is Smart, which reminds us that the periods where things go out of our control, the disorienting periods when we develop gaps in our resumes, are the times when we open ourselves to spiritual growth. Apparently I am on some kind of a spiritual quest. It’s a comforting way to think about it.

So why is teaching about sexuality important enough to me to cause me to make the effort to do it? I think it’s because I believe in it and because it’s fun. Our experience of our sexuality is one of the most back-to-basics experiences there is. It provides us with heat and light and connection and at its best, with the joy of being alive. In K/1 OWL we sing a song, which begins, I’m Unique and Unrepeatable. It’s so good to remember this--such an important product of the way our genes combine and recombine. As a family physician I have wandered with people through many quagmires of the mind and body and I come out on the side of acceptance—acceptance of our weaknesses as well as our strengths, of our failures as well as our successes; acceptance of our needs and desires and longings.

I light the chalice in celebration of body, mind and spirit, which are one, and of each person as a unique and miraculous physical living being.