The Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Corvallis
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March 3 Love and Chaos: Invitations of the Spiritual Life, Rev. Jill McAllister
March 10 “Who Killed Caesar?” We welcome Jacob King back to the Fellowship
March 17 Wheel of the Year: Ostara All Ages Worship Service
March 24 Guest Rev. Rosemary Bray McNatt, President of Starr King School for the Ministry
March 31 Easter Sunday, Rev. Jill McAllister
We’re looking forward to a visit on March 24 from the Rev. Rosemary Bray McNatt, a long-time UU minister who serves as the President of one of our two main theological schools – Starr King School for the Ministry. Before she entered the UU ministry, Rev. McNatt was a writer /editor for the New York Times Book Review. Before going to Starr King she served as Senior Minister of the Fourth Universalist Society of the City of New York. Rev. McNatt has been voice of reason, challenge, wisdom and leadership within UUism for decades. Plan now to join us! For all who are interested in her work as President of Starr King, and in the new frontiers in theological education, a reception will be held at 2:30 PM on March 24. Let Rev. Jill McA know if you’d like to attend.
Thank you so much for your interest in participating in the Chalice Circle Sampler Series. Unfortunately there were not enough people who signed up for this offering in March, so we will need to cancel. That said, we’d like to offer you a few options:
1) Shikha is willing to meet with you after this Sunday’s service and help you find an existing chalice circle to join. There are several in person as well as Zoom chalice groups that would welcome new members, all offered at different days and times. She’s also open to answering any questions you may have about chalice circles in general or these in particular. IF you’d like to meet, please send her an email (shikha@alumni.stanford.edu) so she knows to expect you. Please plan on gathering in the back of the Sanctuary after service.
2) The Sampler Series will be offered this Fall, sometime between September-November. Please look for more info in the Weekly Announcements starting in August! And… get others to join in the fun! We usually offer multiple days and times to choose from. If you have preferences for certain days or times, feel free to influence our choices. 🙂
3) We’d be happy to facilitate a Sampler Series at another time if you can find enough people to participate. Everyone must be willing to commit to 4 sessions that meet weekly or bi-weekly and at a time that one of us is available to facilitate.
Sorry this won’t work out this Spring. It’s difficult to get enough people to commit to being able to add this to their schedules. We hope that you persist in this endeavor- it’s well worth it!
Kindly,
Shikha Ghosh Gottfried and Nancy Sowdon
What might it take for us to understand that the way things are, what the World includes, is not simply a problem or problems to be solved? That Life calls us to be present (and humble, honest, courageous, grateful, amazed) in all the ways we can, no matter what is happening? A new generation of philosopher-theologians have much to teach us.
Rev. Jill McAllister
The Corvallis “Dial-a-Bus” service — part of Benton County Area Transit — provides transportation at little or no cost for local residents who, for whatever reason, are unable to drive themselves. These include some UUFC members. Many of the drivers are volunteers and more drivers are always needed. Jack Elder has been a driver for over a year. Anyone who is interested in serving as a DaB volunteer driver may want to talk to Jack, or visit https://www.dialabus.org/volunteer or call 541-752-2615 for more information.
You are always welcome to the weekly Tuesday coffee hour, via Zoom, where we share joys and sorrows and catch up with each other, and share in the metta blessing. We meet from 1:30 pm to 2:30 pm.
For more information Contact Mary Craven
“Justice” has been named as a central value in Unitarian Universalism for generations. We are for it. We work for it. We work to understand it. And still, there is much to learn. Most often we think that justice is public work, community work, political work. But what if it is first and foremost soul work? Without getting waylaid by wanting to define “soul,” let’s consider what justice requires, what it asks of us, what it needs from us.
Rev. Jill McAllister
(I wrote this in 2016. Re-reading it during this Black History Month was helpful – as if I had written a reminder to myself check in some years later..)
I’ve heard that as we age and mature, the best we can do is replace one habit with another habit. That doesn’t sound very promising, but it certainly can be. If the habit is projecting anger on others by use of physical force, and it’s replaced with a practice of walking away and cooling down on your own, the effects are immense. If the habit is to address sorrow and grief with alcohol and drugs, and that habit is replaced by finding someone to talk and cry with instead of reaching for a bottle, the effects can be life-changing and life-giving.
Replacing destructive habits with less destructive or nurturing habits is not limited to big problems, or to those with the most intense emotional content. Often our smaller habits are what get in our way – sometimes because we can’t even see them, much less name them as habits. Racism is like this most of the time, and sexism, and ageism, and homophobia, and religious prejudices, and other similar habits. For example, simply calling our approaches to diversity ‘habits’ might be something new. It is usually quite a challenge, for any of us, to recognize that what we might think are facts about the way things are – such as “those people are……” are simply habits that we have been taught, that we have learned, that we have internalized. Why for example, do White people almost never say “I met a White person”, when we nearly always say, “I met a Black person,” as if white is an accepted and therefore unspoken norm for what a person looks like? (The reverse is true in many black-dominated cultures and societies.) Of course this represents a limited perspective, which we have definitely been taught somewhere, which we have internalized so that it is a habit. If you think this doesn’t make sense, try changing it, for at least one whole day, by describing the skin color of EVERY person you meet.
Many of us at the UUFC are challenging ourselves to be more active in living our religious values in our daily lives. We keep aiming to live in right relations with others who are of different faiths, ethnicities, persuasions, personality types, etc. Right relations sometimes requires challenging truths that others hold, and sometimes having our own truths challenged. Right relations often requires being able to hold two opposing truths in order to simply stay together. This requires going beyond our initial reactions to things and people (which give evidence of our own habits), and it is often uncomfortable. That is the work of right relations.
While he was serving as a ministerial intern at a UU congregation a few years ago, a seminary student named Ricky Klein noticed how hard this work can be for both individuals and congregations. He wrote, “The greatest challenge to counter-oppression work is that (some people want) to see greater diversity without doing the deeper soul work to understand why and what that would mean.”
Deeper soul work. Perhaps that’s what it means to replace one habit with another habit. Perhaps that’s the most important thing we can be doing, the soul work or emotional work, of understanding how our habits can both help and harm. I know this requires calling on all our resources – intellectual, spiritual, and physical – and I know from experience that it’s something I can almost never do on my own. That’s why I love being part of this congregation with you. May we continue to help one another in this work.
See you Sunday — Jill
At our February meeting, the Board: Discussed
Join us to launch our letter writing campaign for 2024 with snacks and coffee in the Social Hall on Sunday March 10 at 1:45pm after the Social Action Lunch. We’ll write letters together, help you get started, and answer questions. You can get started on your own by signing up with Vote Forward (https://votefwd.org/). They’ll provide addresses and letter templates. Critical elections are decided by tiny margins and our letters can make a difference!