Our image/metaphor informing our worship this month is a bowl.  You can take this into your life beyond Sunday mornings by musing on questions such as these:

• How many kinds of bowls (with how many uses) can I think of?
• Do I have any kind of association with a bowl? (Maybe, for example, there was a favorite cereal bowl you had when you were a kid that you still remember, or the comfort of a steaming bowl of chicken soup on a cold day.)
• There is an ancient practice known as scrying — taking a bowl, filling it with water, and then looking into it to discern … the future, the answer to a current conundrum in your life, a needed message. You could try this at some time – or several times – during the month.  At the least, though, you could ask yourself these questions:  If I believed in such things, why might I use a scrying bowl?  What would I be searching for in the water’s surface, and what would I hope to find?
• What do I do with a bowl when it gets a crack in it?
• What do I think of this poem by Marge Piercy? What does it mean to me?  (The full poem can be found here:  https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/57673/to-be-of-use.  An excerpt is included in our hymnal, #567)

I want to be with people who submerge

in the task, who go into the fields to harvest

and work in a row and pass the bags along,

who are not parlor generals and field deserters

but move in a common rhythm

when the food must come in or the fire be put out.

The work of the world is common as mud.

Botched, it smears the hands, crumbles to dust.

But the thing worth doing well done

has a shape that satisfies, clean and evident.

Greek amphoras for wine or oil,

Hopi vases that held corn, are put in museums

but you know they were made to be used.

The pitcher cries for water to carry

and a person for work that is real.

• What else does the image/metaphor of a bowl or bowls – broken or whole – bring up for me?