Minister’s Message for May 2026

Theme: The Sacred Crack

Rev Abigail Schairer

Beloved Community,

“There is a crack, a crack in everything / That’s where the light gets in.”

Leonard Cohen wrote those words as a kind of permission slip — permission to stop pretending your life is a perfect offering. I’ve been sitting with them for weeks, and I keep coming back to the same realization: the crack isn’t the problem. The crack is the portal.

In Science of Mind, we talk a great deal about affirmative prayer, about knowing, about holding a clear consciousness of Truth. And that practice is real and it works. But somewhere along the way, many of us — myself absolutely included — can slip into spiritual performance. We start trying to do it right rather than live in alignment. We manage our doubts instead of meeting them. We keep the crack sealed, because sealed feels safer. This month, we’re going to try something different. We’re going to let the crack show.

We begin in Week 1 with the most intimate territory: the self-doubt we rarely speak aloud, even to ourselves. Not to wallow in it, but to make honest contact with it — because you can’t transform what you won’t acknowledge. From there, we move outward. What happens when we debut our doubting self in our relationships, not just our confident self? What becomes possible when we carry our uncertainty together as a community rather than hiding it? And — in what I think will be one of our most courageous Sundays of the year — we’ll ask: what does CSL itself doubt? What do we, as an organization, keep sealed? What light might enter if we named it?

We close in Week 5 with what I believe is the heart of the whole month: the possibility that doubt, held with courage and curiosity, is not the enemy of a spiritual life. It is one of its most honest expressions. To question is to remain alive to something greater than our current understanding. To wonder, to ask questions, to lean into uncertainty, is to stay Open at the Top. Your doubts are not stopping blocks. They are signposts. They are pointing somewhere. I can’t wait to find out where — together.

Big love,

Rev. Abigail