Join Skyla on the RE playground deck on July 21st at 11:45!
Your kids have been missing the playground and I am looking for feedback about your family’s RE experience as we plan for the upcoming year, so let’s meet up on the playground for lemonade! The kids can play while parents share how the RE programs have been supporting their families and ways we could improve the experience when we are able to return to regular Sunday morning offerings for children and youth.
No need to register. Just come and play, sip, and share!
Who doesn’t love a good story time? Many adults delight in reading to their children or finding their child curled up with a good book. We know that there is so much for our children to learn and be inspired by, but we could never teach it all ourselves. Books are a magic portal to worlds, cultures, and values beyond what we’ve gotten to explore yet with our own life experiences.
Below, you’ll find some ideas for selecting books and reading with your children.
Historically speaking, a lectionary is a collection of scripture, studied and revisited in a cycle for various seasons or occasions. This traditional understanding of a lectionary isn’t common to Unitarian Universalist practices, but many UUs and UU leaders have their own version of a lectionary; a curated set of books or passages that they know they can return to again and again to fill their spiritual cup or be challenged anew. Revisiting a poem or book seasonally gives us an opportunity to dive deeper or to notice what has changed in us since our last reading. Highlighting or underlining in a different color each round can help you notice how the inner landscape of your life changes how you experience the same passages year after year.
Curating a collection of meaningful reads is a great summer project to engage in with your children. Make a list of topics you’d like to dive into, and then hit the library and look for titles to bring home. Bring home more than you think you need, because you want to be able to put down a book that isn’t a good fit and still have more to explore.
Try expanding your exposure to age-appropriate reading materials that have a deeper layer of meaning, and spend time together reflecting on whether it’s worthy of revisiting and why. The process of adding to your list never had to end. Any time you find a book or poem or essay that feels rich with meaning, propose adding it to your family lectionary, and discuss where it fits. Do you want to come back to it every solstice? Is it one to reach for when you’re feeling lonely? How will it serve your spirit?
Finally, consider how you will organize your family lectionary. Will it be a book list by topic or occasion? Will you own a coy of each? Will you have a dedicated shelf in your home? There’s not right or wrong as long as the books that feel worthy of your family’s time and attention are organized in such a way that you can find the words you need with the time is right.
The idea of lectio divina dates back to the fourth century, and means sacred reading. It’s a way of diving deeper into sacred texts, with the idea being to spend time listening intently for what God (or the universe or your intuition) is trying to communicate with you. While this is traditionally practiced with scripture, this way of approaching a text with intention can be highly engaging for almost any kind of text. Okay, maybe it’s not gret for Captain Underpants, but it’s still fairly universal.
Lectio Divina has four parts that work for any age, but here’s a way to think about those four parts with your family.
Read the passage you’ve selected several times. You and your child will mark or write down any words or phrases that jump out at them. No need to know why. Just notice which bits you notice and make note.
2. Reflect on the passage, and in particular, the bits that stood out. Ask yourself questions about what meaning or lessons it might have for your life. Look up the dictionary definition or root words of the key terms that stood out to you. Would you have worded it differently? How would you live differently if you took the possible lesson of the passage seriously?
3. Respond by inviting something bigger than yourself to give you guidance. This could look like prayer or talking to a mentor about your experience with the passage.
4. Rest for a while, living thoughtfully with the passage in mind, giving yourself time to process what you learned not only from the passage, but from your own reflections on it and from your prayer or mentoring experience. Don’t just set the passage aside and move on with your day. Give it time to sink in.
Good Choices for Lectio Divina with Kids
Zen Shorts and Zen Ties, by Jon J Muth
The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse, by Charlie Mackesy
Hope for the Flowers, by Trina Paulus
Cry, Heart, But Never Break, by Glen Ringtved
The Little Prince, by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
When God Was A Little Girl, by David Weiss
HOMEWORK FOR CAREGIVERS
As a parent, creating my own core of useful, spiritually challenging reads has been invaluable in helping me squeeze more meaning out of the seasons and replenish my soul when enduring a period of great challenge. I look forward to gifting my children with a complete collection of my personal lectionary as they become adults. I remember being a teenager and listening to Des’ree sing “read the books your father read,” and wondering if my father read any books at all. I wanted to know what was important to him, what was shaping his ideas.
Consider nourishing your own spirit by working on a separate lectionary for your caregiving heart. Ask people who inspire you which books they return to over and over again and start building your own list. As Rev. Jill turns our attention to the holy days and holidays that are important to us as individuals and as a community, consider what words you need to read over and over again to deepen your connection to the season and occasions that help you mark the passage of time.
As always, if you want help finding inspiring books or anything else relating to your family’s faithful life, my door is always open!
Parenting is hard, no matter your stage in life. It can be made needlessly harder if you’re doing it without a village. In an effort to create a scaffolding of support for families of every age, we would like to gauge interest in two distinct support spaces:
A peer support group for parents of children and youth (with the possibility of breaking into sub groups by age) and
a peer support group for parents of adult children.
If there is sufficient interest in either of these groups, we will start with a 3 month initial commitment. At the end of that time, we can assess whether the group would like to continue through the church year or consider making this a regular summer support group. These groups are intended to help parents in all phases of life strengthen their web of mutual support, not as a substitute for qualified mental health care.
If you are interested in a parent support group, or a group for parents with adult children, please fill out one of the following surveys.
Bring the whole family to the ballpark on July 28th and sit with your UU friends! This is a fun, laid-back place to get to know the other families in our community while your kids scream-sing along with Journey at the top of their lungs. If you’re not a family, but you want to get to know our families, come sit with us! All are welcome!
The game starts at 5 at Goss Stadium (on OSU campus). Purchase your General Admission tickets in advance or at the ticket booth, and we will meet inside in section 2. PLEASE REGISTERto let us know how much space we should save and to receive a text if our seating location necessarily changes at the last minute. If fewer than 3 families register, we will cancel this event via text.
If you have children or youth who would like to attend, but the cost is an obstacle, please contact Skyla (dre@uucorvallis.org) and we’ll get you taken care of.
Mondays July 15-August 5th, 11-12:30 on the social hall deck. REGISTER HERE!
The 2023-34 UU Common Read is On Repentance and Repair: Making Amends in an Unapologetic World (Beacon Press, 2022).
This Common Read offers a glimpse into one of our faith’s foundational sources, Judaism. Readers follow the author, Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg, into a framework for making amends offered by the 12th century Jewish physician and scholar, Maimonides.
Written for people of any or no faith tradition, On Repentance and Repair introduces practices for accountability that can bring us into wholeness and make a difference in our personal, community, and national relationships.
This 4-part book discussion is offered as a brown bag lunch series, so bring your lunch and join us on the back deck for discussion.
Session 1: Meet Maimonides
Session 2: Repentance and Repair in Our Lives and Relationships
Workshop 3: Repentance and Repair in Our Covenanted Communities
Workshop 4: Repentance and Repair to Transform Our World
Contact Skyla King-Christison with questions or if you need assistance with the purchase of the book.
Our necessarily abrupt move to multigenerational worship has caused me some apprehension. Children do as the spirit moves them, so the power of my careful planning has its limits. While I’ve been focused on trying to mitigate all the ways this experiment could go horribly wrong, I hadn’t yet let myself dwell in all the ways it could go beautifully right until this past Sunday, when I experienced a magic so unmanufacturable that I find myself suddenly very willing to trust this process.
One of our smaller members spent the service at my feet, giving me the warm feeling of being chosen even though it certainly had everything to do with my proximity to the Soul Work shelf. He was engrossed in pipe cleaner construction as our choir sang a song called Glenda and Lauree: Certain Kinds of Love. The song was painfully beautiful, about two women who loved one another in a time when their love was discouraged.
The song was too much to bear. A dear friend sitting in front of me left the sanctuary to cry alone. The woman beside me audibly sobbed, as did I. Of all the days to be this achingly moved in the service, did it have to be the day I couldn’t flee because I’d committed to sitting here at the Soul Work shelf in case a wee one needed help cutting yarn?
The child at my feet occasionally looked up at the two of us ugly-crying above him, all snotty and wet-faced, but he didn’t look distressed. Near the end of the song, I put my arm around the woman beside me. You can only cry with someone for so long without at least sharing a half hug. When I let go, the child stood up, leaned in with a hand on my knee, and whispered, “I know it’s sad. It’s really sad,” and then went back to work on his pipe-cleaner creation.
How different his experience in the world is from the one I was given as a child! I seldom saw adults in my life cry, and when I did, they made every effort to hide it, to protect me from witnessing big emotions, as if feelings were something shameful. What might it be like to grow up in a world where you feel what you feel out loud, and let your people sit with you in that? To not have to figure that out as an adult, but to just always know it?
Some of us talked about it afterward, the way he participated in the tending of his fellow community members, not only as a child who was learning about how to be in community but as one of us, seeing grief and acknowledging it. And maybe even as a teacher. He didn’t, as many adults have a habit of doing, try to fix it or say it would be okay. He simply said, “I know. I know,” which is all most of us really want when we’re feeling big feelings.
So I saw the magic of multigenerational worship with my own eyes and heart, as did several folx seated near the Soul Work shelf. Were there distractions? Yep. But the impromptu learning community that explored our shared humanity near the back corner felt more transformative than any sermon or RE lesson. It appeared to be less remarkable to the child than to us adults. We’re still talking about it days later over coffee and during commercial breaks. Perhaps it will be the adults who have the most to gain from this summer in service with our children. If this is what we have to look forward to, even only once in a while, I’m here for it!
*This story and image was shared with permission from the child’s family, who asked that his name not be used online.
As we enter a period of multigenerational worship, it will be useful to consider some best practices for being together in a sacred space. People of all ages belong here and can be enriched by one another’s presence. We want every person to feel welcomed, comfortable, loved, and respected here. We are all growing together in faith.
We believe the following guidelines, borrowed largely from the Unitarian Universalist Community in Charlotte, can help us enter this time more thoughtfully.
Suggestions for children:
We are so glad you’re here!
Try Soul Work materials from the shelf at the back of the aisle. You may find that you feel calmer and can focus more on the service when your hands are busy.
Please return your unused materials and completed work to the shelf before you leave. We’ll incorporate your sewing into a quilt for the classroom wing when it reopens, and display your coloring in the “Artist of the Month” frame in the social hall! We’re excited to see what you create!
Try sitting where you can easily see what’s most interesting to you. Maybe it’s the speaker’s podium or the choir. Maybe it’s the tech team. What can you learn about being in community and helping out by watching people who are doing things that interest you? Probably a lot!
See if you can follow along in the order of service. That’s the folded paper that tells us what is coming up next in the service. You can compare the children’s order of service with the adult version. What’s the difference? Which do you prefer?
Please walk slowly and speak in a whisper when you are in this special, sacred room.
It’s okay if you need to get up and use the bathroom or get a new supply once in a while, but see how long you can remain in your seat and how few times you can get up. Learning to control our bodies and our attention is an important skill. It might help to make it a game and see how long you can stay in your spot without making a sound or try to get up fewer times this week than you did last week. Pretty soon it will be easy!
Tips for families:
Consistent attendance is the best way to increase your child’s comfort and participation in worship.
Explain what is going on during the service, and answer questions that your child may have with a whisper.
Consider sitting on the aisle so that if your child needs to go to the bathroom or get a supply from the Soul Work station, they can do so with minimal disruption. Encouraging your child to have plenty to keep them busy before you sit down will also help them minimize the ups and downs during the service. If you find that your child simply needs to get up more than a time or two during the service, consider sitting near the back or in the gallery that has been set up as a family zone.
You are welcome to step out into the social hall if your child needs a break but you wish to still hear the service. Keep in mind that parents have a higher capacity for tuning out child sounds than other adults, and try to step out before your child’s needs become an obstacle to community engagement in the service.
Ask for support from those around you. Many people here would love to carry a baby or take a child for a walk, but may be nervous about offering for fear of offending. Your willingness to speak what would feel supportive for you and your family helps those around you feel comfortable offering help.
If your child isn’t able to be in worship for long at first, please keep trying. As they have more experience, their capacity grows, and we find their presence a blessing to the congregation.
Suggestions for other adults:
Recognize your role as models for children in worship. Welcome children as you would others — learn their names, make a connection, smile and let them know you’re glad they are here. A little goes a long way in welcoming a child or family.
Share the experience of worship with children near you. You may find that you can share a hymnal or help them locate a passage in the order of service. Families are often thankful for the helping hand, and children enjoy the attention from nonparental adults.
While you may be eager to offer help to a child near you, you may be intimidating if you are a stranger to the child. Take time to get to know the children in our community by engaging with their whole family before services and in the social hall. If you’re a familiar face, your offers to assist will be more meaningful.
When children have a role in the service, treat them as worship participants rather than performers. If they make a mistake, even well-meant laughter can hurt and make it hard for them to want to try again.
Show patience and gratitude for the blessing of children in our midst. It means our faith is still growing! Keep your heart and mind open to what we can learn from each other as we work to be inclusive and loving as a congregation.
Gratitude is one of those things that is deceptively simple and ridiculously effective. It’s kind of like magic if you actually do it. I remember talking to one of our youth during our summer programming, who said, “My mom is making me do this gratitude thing where I say three things I’m grateful for every day, and it’s like super annoying because it, like, I actually feel better and it doesn’t make any sense.” I have had that same feeling. How can this work so well, and also, if it works so well, how come I have so much difficulty sticking to it every day?
Below, you’ll find some resources and thought for practicing gratitude at home with kids of all ages. Read on!
If we’re not intentional about how we approach a gratitude practice with kids, it can accidentally turn into something known as Brightsiding. I first came across this term at a Queerly Beloved movie night, when we watched a Rom-Com in which the queer, Muslim main character was called out by his friends for denying himself and his friends their negative emotions around their experiences by always insisting that they look on the bright side while being marginalized by their communities. This is a form toxic positivity gaslighting.
When we encourage our families to notice the good, we need to be explicit that we’re not asking them to ONLY see the good, but to ALSO see the good. Our brains have a negativity bias, so we need to be intentional about noticing the good, but not in an effort to deny the bad.
One way you can honor both is by rebranding your gratitude practice as a “roses and thorns” practice. This is something my children and I did when they were small, and now even as young adults, sometimes they’ll ask me, “What was your rose of the day?” when we share time together.
Naming your roses and thorns – the good parts and the bad – is also easier for folx who struggle with decision making. When you say, “Tell me the top three things you’re grateful for today,” a child may feel overwhelmed by the task of choosing just three. When you ask for roses and thorns, there is the possibility of an entire bouquet or simply a single stem. The pressure is off!
We share our roses and thorns at the dinner table, but if you don’t always share meals together, try it as a bedside practice and see what happens!
Researchers at UNC Chapel Hill have been studying gratitude within families in their “Raising Grateful Children Project,” and they have developed some very actionable tools for maximizing the effectiveness of our focus on gratitude.
“The researchers found that most parents focused on what children do to show gratitude. While 85% of parents said they prompted their kids to say “thank you,” only 39% encouraged children to show gratitude in a way that went beyond good manners. In addition, only a third of parents asked their kids how a gift made them feel, and only 22% asked why they thought someone had given them a gift.” (Source: Greater Good Magazine)
The Raising Grateful Children Project have broken gratitude down into 4 component parts to discuss with children.
Parents can foster deeper gratitude with their children by asking questions in these four areas. Notice: Are there things and people in your life that you can be grateful for?
Think: What do you think about those things and people? Do you think you earned the things you have? Do you think the people in your life known what they mean to you?
Feel: How do the things you are grateful for make you feel? Do they make everyone feel that way? How do you think you make the people you are grateful feel?
Do: Is there a way you can show your gratitude for these things and people? How can you put your gratitude into action?
REFLECTIONS FOR CAREGIVERS
That old adage that the days are long and the years are short is so true for caregivers. Everything about parenting feels high stakes, and intense, and somehow both beyond our control and also entirely our responsibility. It can be hard to access gratitude in the moment, but that’s exactly when it can make the biggest difference. Next time you’re in a hard minute of caregiving, see if these questions can shift your perspective.
What quality is my child displaying right now that could be positive for them later in life? (Does this tantrum also reflect a child who knows what they want? Does their inability to sit still demonstrate a healthy body that can be active and vital?)
How can I demonstrate my gratitude for my child in this moment when their behavior is causing me distress? Does showing gratitude in the hard moment shift their energy? Does it shift mine?
Is there something I can identify in this moment that I’m lucky to have or experience?
Is my endurance in this time of trial developing a spiritual capacity in me? How can I move through this challenge with my integrity in tact, and with a new tool in my spiritual toolbox that I will be grateful to have next time this comes up?
If you want to chat about gratitude at home, or anything else, my door is always open!
Gather insight and information on how to move through the life-transitions of downsizing or trying to live more simply. Jesse will cover several aspects of these major steps:
Planning the setup of your future space
Exercises to simplify the sorting process, ex. “Plan of Attack”
Touch on emotional dynamics of decision making with belongings
Establishing support systems for moving and downsizing needs
And much more!
Feeling social? We’ll provide the form that makes it easy to be a host for a group social activity! Picnics? Games? Walking? Puzzles? Movies? You name it! Be sure to sign up at the June 5 meeting.
Come join us to create positive experiences for this time of life!
The RE Council will be hosting 2 post-sermon discussions for you to ask questions, voice concerns and ideas, and hear about the approach to multigenerational worship that we will be experimenting with this summer.
These will take place on June 2nd and 19th after the service in the sanctuary. Grab a cup of tea and come catch the vision for a summer of beautiful multigenerational worship!
