This Sunday’s All-Ages Service will include a blessing for the new year ahead, inspired by the picture book Tomorrow I’ll Be Brave. All of us are entering something, carrying something, and needing courage, curiosity, kindness, and community. Together, we will bless what we carry and what we hope to offer one another.

If we subscribe to this progressivist view of history, of evolution, of the unfolding of life in the universe – a view nominally...