From the Minister

Between Us (November 2023)

It is a challenge to be present to the world – a challenge to be willing to acknowledge all that feels frightening and dangerous. If some years ago many of us felt successful and safe in the world, and deserving of it, we do not have that luxury now. We know more, we’ve seen more, we’ve learned more about what is true. As Unitarian Universalists, that has long been our aim – to see and learn more truth. This is not an exercise in intellectual posturing, though sometimes we have been mistaken in that direction.

We’re working with the theme, “Building A New Way,” this year – because we must! If it were only climate change we were facing, it would be immoral to not change the ways we live and interact with everything and everyone else. As we all know, there is more.

I’ll admit, the amount of change which is happening, and the amount which is needed, is daunting, and often, I feel discouraged. Here at the Fellowship, it can feel dizzying: folks who’ve been here a long time miss the way (they think) things were and wonder who will carry on when they are too tired to do everything, while folks who are new wonder what is going on, how to find out, what are the requirements, and where is the calendar of events?

I try to remind myself, every day, that this is exactly what change looks and feels like! We are in fact changing, and that is very good news. But it’s unsettling. Of course it is. I want to remind all of you of this as well. We need to be able to step back from our wonders, worries and concerns, and help ourselves and each other recognize that we have set off from whatever shore (and assumptions) we may have stood on, and now we are in the currents, together.

Together is the most important thing. When faced with this kind of unsettledness (which is increased by all the anxiety we piled up during the pandemic) we too often resort to finding others to blame for our frustrations and fears – the elders, the younger, the new ones, the old ones, etc.

For these times we need as much openness as possible, as much willingness to learn as possible, as much loving-kindness as possible. We need folks who are willing and able to listen and lead and guide for the good of all. We need to help one another live into our covenant of right relations. The future is unfolding between us – may we stay focused on our highest ideals!

Daily Practice: a Weekly Reminder 10/29/2023

Samhain, Halloween, All Souls and All Saints Days. All describe a point on the Wheel of the Year when the veil between worlds is thinner, according to the ancient Celtic calendar and other traditions. Inwardly, it’s a time to remember that the world we live in is many worlds, many layers, constant connections between life and death; continual birth, continual growth, unending relatedness even among the cells of our bodies. Because even at the cellular level everything is in motion and constantly changing, we are not so much beings as “becomings.” The parts of Life we “see” and what we think we know, are fragments. Sometimes it takes being in the dark, like now when night comes sooner, being in states of “not seeing” to begin to feel the depth and breadth of our connectedness.

At the Fellowship we take time to honor ancestors, to bring to mind those who have died, to feel how the past and present are intertwined, to feel how we are connected to the lives of those who came and went before, to feel how we carry their lives in ours. We think about ourselves as ancestors and of our parts in this great progression. We think of what we may now be setting in motion for those who are coming after us.

We can do this with attention to breath – the coming and going of it, to us, through us, not of our own making. We can realize that waves upon waves of lives are carried on each breath, and that what we call “my life” is really simply Life moving in everything. We can let ourselves be carried.

This can be a daily practice – to give thanks for all the lives that are carried by each breath, which carries the possibility of “me” and all who are coming after. May we ask for the courage to be ancestors worthy of those who will live in the world to come, sources of peace and loving kindness, expressions of love, examples of compassion, nurturers of justice. Knowing that we are ancestors together, and that we are all carried by the breath of Life, may we bow to this day with gratitude.

Flowers deposited on All Saints’ Day in tombs in the cemetery of Cambados, Spain
A Neopagan celebration of Samhain

Wheel of the Year – Samhain/ Halloween 10/29/2023

All Ages Together

We’ve moved into the season of longer nights and shorter days, and we arrive at the point on the Wheel of the Year called Samhain and Halloween. We’ll honor this season, considering our lives within in, considering the ancestors who made our lives possible and live in us still, considering our connectedness within the ever-turning wheel of birth and death.

All are invited to come in costume, if you like, and to join in Trick or Treat with UUFC teams and councils following the service.

Daily Practice: A Weekly Reminder 10/22/2023

Once a week on Sundays, we enter together into a time of reflection and centering, as we prepare to share and hold sorrows and joys among us. I often note, as we begin that practice, that centering involves discerning what is most important and what is not most important. Perhaps that distinction is obvious, but more likely it is not. Worship, for us, in general, is an ongoing practice of this aim – to discern and lift up what is most important.

It is easy to believe that what we think is important in any given moment is actually important, because we think it is! We know that is not always true. How often do we carried away with an idea – such as “I have to clean the house before I can invite friends over,” or “I have to get this project done, and then I’ll rest,” or “I have to send these few emails and texts before I give my full attention to my child,” or many other similar ideas which we assume are the most important things – but really aren’t?

The tendency to give most attention to things that are not really important is common among us, and well-practiced. It is accentuated in turbulent times such as these, when it feels easier and safer to focus on making dinner plans, or criticizing a spouse for small things, or complaining about friends or relatives, than to pause and acknowledge war and more local forms of destruction. Of course there are the small things of daily life and personal preference to deal with, and they do have consequences! The challenge is in assuming that they are the most important things.

This is part of the human condition, to be sure. We are not the first nor the last humans to avert our eyes and ears and hearts from much of what is truly important. We are not the first to be afraid, or worried, or eager to let ourselves be distracted. As in every generation, the work is ours to do – to learn to distinguish the most important things, and then to respond as well as we can. We begin again every day – the daily practice.

“God is Not One, and Neither are We” 10/22/2023

One of the unique characteristics of our religious movement is pluralism – the willingness to be different and be together at the same time. Historically, this meant we did not require allegiance to a specific theological creed or doctrine. Now it is a much wider effort. The main question is not whether or not we are different from each other, but how we manage our differences while staying true to shared values.

Rev. Jilll McAllister

October 15th, 2023, Daily Practice: A Weekly Reminder

When we first entered into the pandemic shut-down, in March of 2020, we also entered into a shared daily practice to help ourselves stay connected to each other and to our religious lives. Over several months we began to consider skills that could help us, including cultivating inner nobility and steadiness, naming our fears and counting our blessings at the same time, and nurturing courage and trust within ourselves and between us. Later, we talked about “the art of embracing” as a practice of turning toward and moving toward what the world brings us — moving in that direction of with arms opened wide, as much as possible.

It has been three and a half years since we shut down and entered into pandemic living, and a little over a year since we finally returned to indoor Sunday services. There will never be a time when everything simply reverts to the way it was “before.” We are living in, and are part of, calamitous and fractious years in the human world. We worried in 2016, and then during the pandemic, and then the invasion of Ukraine, and now the horrible situation for Israelis and Palestinians. Horrors, and more horrors. For those of us dedicated to a practice of peace and justice making, there are constant opportunities to start over, to begin anew in a changed world, as always. The organizer /humanitarian / activist Valerie Kaur says this: “Our most powerful response to the horror in Israel and Palestine is to refuse to surrender our humanity. Opening our hearts to grief—others and our own—is how we hold our humanity in a world that would destroy it. It’s how we will begin to survive this.”

May our practice be dedicated to this – to maintaining and nurturing humanity, in all the ways we can. The question is, “What are you willing and able to move toward for the good of all?” Everything we have been practicing will help us. The way stretches before us, and we can only take one step at a time. There are blessings that live in the very act of reaching out. May we find the needed courage.

“What Is Transformation?”

It would be hard to argue that things don’t change, or that they aren’t changing constantly, and not always in ways we understand or are prepared for. Take this week for example, or almost any of the past seven years. A new generation of UU’s describes a need for us to be able and willing to not only change, but be changed, in order to keep adding love into the world.

Rev. Jill McAllister

Daily Practice: A Weekly Reminder

Autumn is a season of amazing contrasts. One could spend much of a day simply watching the sky. The colors of the clouds – from white to gray-brown to gray to dark deep blue-gray – all can be present at the same time. And when sunlight illumines red and yellow trees against the dark clouds – it is often breathtakingly beautiful. From cool rainy days to hot sunny days, as trees seem to turn colors overnight. Not to mention the sun on the trees against the clouds, which sometimes quickly turns to hail, which turns to sheets of rain, which eventually becomes a drizzle.

‘There is a deep kindness at the heart of everything,’ wrote John O’Donohue. I love that idea, yet the contrast with what seems like immense destructiveness – a collective insanity, a growing instability – is stark. I remind myself of the ying-yang symbol of Daoism, which illustrates the constant presence of and movement between dark and light, life and death, evil and good – all always present and interwoven.

Every day is unique; its unfolding cannot be slowed nor can its path be predicted. And, we always have the choice to begin again, to be open to the unfolding, to let ourselves be carried and to bring our best selves and highest ideals to whatever comes our way. And so may we greet each day: the clouds, the rain, the light, the colors, the beauty, the presence of evil and good. May we be thankful for the breath which is given to us again and again.

Not So Like-Minded After All

It’s not uncommon for UU’s to note that they like being part of a congregation because they’re among “like-minded” people. It turns out, the more we learn about how brains function, and the more we listen to people instead of making assumptions about them, we’re not very like minded at all! What, then, do we offer one another for our religious lives?

9-24-2023, Daily Practice: A Weekly Reminder

Rain Meditation

I’ve been traveling with family this week, and this morning we woke up to rain. As I paused to listen to the gentle, steady drizzling, and to breathe in and feel the day begin, the listening became its own kind of morning prayer. Do you ever hear or feel a prayer as you begin a day? What words do you say, to yourself, to the day? Or do you enter into quiet, into silence, without words? It makes a difference how we begin, whether or not we make a space, a way, some time to rest our minds from constant grappling and explaining. Whether or not we open the edges of the stories we tell about the way things are within us and around us, to let more in.

One of my teachers says that spiritual growth, or becoming wise, is a process of discovering at your core a story that can hold all the other stories. A foundation that makes room for everything that comes your way, for everything that is. In that place, that story, vulnerability and courage are the same thing. Courage is not simply the energy or power to defend our expectations or habits or “knowledge.” Courage is the ability to keep the doors of our minds and hearts open, to change direction, to leave things behind and keep moving, even – or especially – if we are mourning as we go. “What would it be like to wake into our bodies, our relationships and our work as if seeing them for the first time?”, the teacher asks. Yesterday there was sorrow and joy; today there is sorrow and joy – but today we are not the same as we were yesterday. Nothing is the same.

This is a daily practice – to find ways and time to open ourselves and our stories to the way things truly are. To be willing to be lived by pain and sorrow and fear in all the ways we are willing to be lived by happiness and love and joy. To move as life moves, in us and around us. For the days of this week I wish for you, and for me, the gift of of opening to the day, beginning with breath, and with thanks. Sending love to you all — Jill