The Quaker teacher Parker Palmer tells us this Hasidic tale:

A disciple asks the rebbe: “Why does Torah tell us to ‘place these words upon your hearts’? Why does it not tell us to place these holy words in our hearts?” The rebbe answers: “It is because as we are, our hearts are closed, and we cannot place the holy words in our hearts. So we place them on top of our hearts. And there they stay until, one day, the heart breaks and the words fall in.”

This month, at UUCVille, we invite one another to not just remember or retell our history. We offer one another the comfort and support to grieve as we uncover the hurts from the past, to rejoice in the good times we recover, and to feel the capacity to learn, to forgive and to release one another from the burdens of regret. As our Soulful Matters teachers suggest, the world needs broken-open hearts, not just good historians. That is, indeed, the only way the past gets in.