This week our guest speaker will be Rev. Bruce Bode, Minister Emeritus of the Quimper UU Fellowship in Port Townsend, WA.  Sermon title:“Deeper Than Our Separateness” – In his ground-breaking essay “The Over-Soul,” Ralph Waldo Emerson writes, “Our faith comes in moments; our vice is habitual. Yet there is a depth in those brief moments which constrains us to ascribe more reality to them than to all other experiences.” In this sermon I will share a personal experience of such a moment in my life, which speaks to the ground of my sustaining faith.

Bruce A. Bode, a native of Lynden, Washington, retired in 2018 as the Senior Minister of the Quimper Unitarian Universalist Fellowship (QUUF) in Port Townsend, Washington, after serving the congregation for fourteen years (2004-2018). He is now a Minister Emeritus at QUUF.

Before coming to Port Townsend, Rev. Bode was the Interim Minister of the First Unitarian Universalist Church of Houston, Texas (2002-2004) and the Hope Unitarian Church in Tulsa, Oklahoma (2001-2002). Prior to that, he served for twenty-two years (1978-2001) as an Associate Minister at the Fountain Street Church, a large, independent, religiously liberal congregation in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

One of his interests has been facilitating study groups in adult religious education on poets such as: Mary Oliver, Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, Walt Whitman, Robinson Jeffers, Billy Collins, Jane Kenyon, and Gary Snyder.

Bruce is a graduate of Calvin College (1969) and Calvin Theological Seminary (1973) in Grand Rapids, Michigan. He has been married to Flossie Boerema Bode since 1970 and is father to Katie Bode-Lang and Libby Bode, and grandfather to three-year-old Clara Grace Bode-Lang, one of this planet’s loveliest creatures.