Monthly Reflection Themes

Month of June 2024

The June Flowering

The rose is the flower that marks the month of June, beautiful and sweet. The rose is unique but it's hardly the only one that is flowering these days. All around us we see irises and poppies, peonies and delphinium, lilies and lavender and honeysuckle. What beauty and what sweetness is flowering within us?

Previous Sunday Services

June 23, 2024

Reflection by Chard deNiord 

"Bio Note"

“The Two Roads That Diverged In My Yellow Wood And The Voice That Led Me”

As a seminarian at Yale Divinity School in the mid seventies with a wife and two children, I had to decide just how to take Yogi Berra’s impossible advice: “When you come to a fork in the road, take it.” The two roads that “diverged in [my] yellow wood,” as that other sage, Robert Frost, put it in his poem, “The Road Not Taken,” were “worn about the same.” So, which one to take? Which one exactly was so “less traveled” that it would "make all the difference" and thereby ultimately “unite my avocation and my vocation/ as my two eyes make one in sight” as Frost writes in another poem titled "Two Tramps In Mud Time" about finding a way to unify his vocation (teaching) with his poetry writing? My talk, titled “Bio Note,” will address this spiritual, as well as professional crisis that led ultimately to my dual vocation as a poet and teacher. 

Chard deNiord is the author of eight books of poetry, most recently Westminster West (Tupelo Press, 2024), In My Unknowing (University of Pittsburgh Press 2020), Interstate (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019), and The Double Truth (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2011). He is also the author of two books of interviews with eminent American poets: Sad Friends, Drowned Lovers, Stapled Songs, Conversations and Reflections on 20th Century Poetry (Marick Press, 2011) and I Would Lie To You If I Could (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018). deNiord is Professor Emeritus of English and Creative Writing at Providence College, co-founder of The New England College MFA Program, and former Poet Laureate of Vermont (2015-2019). He lives in Westminster West, Vermont with his wife, Liz.

Because of technical difficulties the reflection was not recorded on Sunday, June 23.

Memorials and Tributes

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