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O Love, here I am, at this moment, on this planet, in this place, utterly in awe that I am alive and that everything is. In awe because I know I would not be here at all except for what has been revealed in a grand and sacred text written in strata, stars and grateful observation:

That I am here proclaims the tale of billions of years of gathering stardust, solar birth, gravity and other forces scooping the dust into the solid orb on which I stand; thunder and lighting and boiling seas for countless years; lava, proteins, cells, unnamed early blobs of what we now call life; a billion,   billion trilobites in warm seas; soft molluscs in their spiral shells, bony fish, and a hundred million years of shiny amphibians, centipedes the size of my body; ferns and trees that no longer exist; a hundred million years of great reptiles, feathered creatures morphing into birds; great sloths and woolly mammoths and wide-eyed lemurs grabbing onto branches with almost-human hands; early humans gathering around waterholes on the African veld; pyramids and reed boats, star-watching and calendar-making, the vain smoke of sacrifices, the groan of chants curling into songs, the taming of horses and dogs, the refinements of cruelty and their antidote, empathy; the mutation of genes and chromosomes, the cry of language, the prophets, farmers, sea-farers and laborers in stone and wood; the struggles and wonders of genders, sexualities and spiritualities; war, peace, famine, greed, critique, abundance, loss and love. And all of these things together lead to this moment, and to me and you, fragile leaves on the tree of life who now keep silence before this wonder.

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Rev. Dr. Mark Belletini

Senior Minister Emeritus at First UU Church of Columbus, Ohio

Mark Belletini was born in Detroit Michigan in June of 1949. He grew up there, attended parochial schools, and Oakland University in Rochester MI, then discovered his embrace of the Unitarian Universalist way at the Universalist Unitarian Church of Farmington MI. He graduated from Starr King School for the Ministry in 1978, served our congregations in San Francisco and Hayward CA, and retired from his last call from First Unitarian Universalist Church in Columbus OH. During his ministry he taught at both SKSM and at Meadville Lombard, and chaired the Hymnbook Resources Commission which put together the hymnbook Singing the Living Tradition. He served on our credentialing body for ministry, The Fellowship Committee, for 8 years. Skinner House Press has published his books Sonata for Voice and Silence, (a small collection of the devotional writings he used for years to lead into the great silence at the heart of worship he led on Sundays,) and Nothing Gold Can Stay, a book on grief. He is an active member of the Ohio River Study Group for which he has enjoyed continuing scholarly pursuits in the papers he has written and delivered. He has been an artist throughout his life, loves to cook, has been active the GLBTQ struggles both within the UUA and outside it, and is deeply and gratefully steeped in his Emilian Italian heritage and culture from all four grandparents. He counts his friends and colleagues the joy of his life, with his adopted and amazing son Tony Hess as the focus of his daily gratitude.

Latest posts by Rev. Dr. Mark Belletini (see all)

• Ode to Silence - December 1, 2020
• Sequence - July 1, 2019
• Soul - June 1, 2017