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!
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.
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.
The Secure Housing and Food For All team and Ernest Cardona invite you to join us for a Spring Celebration Luncheon on Saturday, March 30th , 2024 at 1:00 p.m. The lunch will be served in the Social Hall and we’ll have access to the deck, weather permitting. Donations are $15.00 per person. After food costs, all donations will be gifted to the UUFC to support its efforts in housing and feeding our community.
We’ll be serving a fresh, seasonal Spring menu with interesting appetizers, entrée and dessert. Please see the contact form below for a full menu description and a link to send us a message about your interest.
We’ll need to know the number of guests in your party, your name, and your email address to send out a payment request.
See you all on March 30th ! Roberta Smith & Ernest Cardona
Gluten free and dairy free options will be available
Appetizers: *Smoked salmon endive leaves *Shrimp ceviche *Mushroom toasts with goat cheese and fresh herbs *Pickled radishes and red onions
First courses: *Green salad with fresh spinach, avocado, marinated artichoke hearts, pickled beets, toasted pine nuts, roasted sesame dressing, sesame seeds *Fresh spring pea soup
Entree and sides: *Chicken Francese with lemon sauce and capers *Roasted asparagus with fresh parmagiano reggiano *Rice pilaf
Many thanks to all who have reached out in the last month to ask about the future of the Wheel of the Year services. I love it when you communicate your vision for the ways we live into our mission at the Fellowship! It’s most helpful!
While we are committed to completing this Fellowship year with the series that you have all become familiar with over the last three years, the sense that many are interested in shaping a new vision for this program grows and is worth exploring. It is difficult, as you can imagine, to birth a new vision into the world when these conversations take place one-on-one, here and there. As such, I would like to invite all who have strong feelings about the direction of Wheel of the Year programming AND who are willing to commit some ongoing energy toward a re-envisioning effort to email me at dre@uucorvallis.org by March 15th so that we can find a time to gather as a group and see what might emerge.
Fee: Free for current Faith Forward congregation subscribers (UUFC is a subscribing congregation, so you get in for FREE! Yay, you!); $100 for non-subscriber congregations (no participant limit) or $25 per person.
The Faith Forward program out of the First Unitarian Church of Dallas is excited to offer an online session of our “Turning Points in UU History” series for all congregations! This series explores turning points and controversies in our history, delving into the complexities of these historical moments through primary texts, to understand how they shaped Unitarian Universalism and how we relate to our faith today.
For more information or to register, email Skyla King-Christison (dre@uucorvllis.org) by March 25th. I will share our group registration information with their program coordinator on April 1st, and then you will receive a welcome letter from Rev. Lora Brandis.
Last month, we explored ways to incorporate gratitude into our family life, and service is something that often prompts an impulse toward gratitude. All of these tools are connected! Serving others helps us step outside the immediacy of our own challenges and forget that minor irritation that has grown to outsized proportions in our minds, recognizing that we are powerful beings who can contribute to the wellbeing of others. When we do, our own sense of wellbeing skyrockets!
Not sure how to start the talk about being of service with your family? Read on!
When I was a teenager, I attended an urban evangelical church in the heart of downtown Nashville. I LOVED my church experience and our vibrant youth group, but when Spring Break rolled around each year and we were invited to sign up for mission trips to go serve in faraway places like Honduras or Belize, I remember looking at the people sleeping on the street right outside our doors and wondering why we would fly halfway around the world to serve when there were people ten paces away that could use a hand. The reality is that service is more exciting when it happens some place exotic. But that brand of service can be more about what you get to experience than about helping someone else.
Similarly, we may find that our children are more excited about going across town and bagging up pantry staples at the food bank than they are to help cook dinner at home, but home is the place where our children can learn the importance of contributing to community wellbeing most consistently and even when it’s not exciting. It’s important to cultivate the skill of serving simply to be of use, even when there’s nothing novel or exciting about it. This can look like unpaid chores done simply because all members of a community (and a family is a community within a community!) must contribute in the ways that they can for the common good. That doesn’t mean that other chores can’t be compensated with an allowance, but it’s important that our children have the experience of contributing without expecting anything in return.
Once you’ve mastered service at home, it’s time to turn your lens outward. Here are some ideas for how children of all ages can serve.
3-5 year olds:
Children at this age are excellent at sorting. You can put those sorting skills to use at the neighborhood food bank, helping children take the cans to the right bins (call Linn Benton Food Share for information about their monthly family service nights), or at a grandparent or elderly friend’s house sorting laundry or pairing socks.
Children of this age are also great at giving the gift of time to those in care facilities who may not get much company and would be delighted by a visit. Call first, but many memory care centers or assisted living centers are excited for an offer of visits and can point you toward residents who don’t have much companionship from local family.
It’s fun to bake treats and deliver them to neighbors or the unhoused. Children in this age group can assist in the kitchen and then help with the hand delivery. A load of banana bread from a child is always more delicious!
6-12 year olds:
This age group can do everything from the above list, and more!
The grounds team at the Fellowship is always looking for help raking, weeding, and spreading mulch. Contact Michael Hughes to ask about opportunities to contribute to the beautification of our grounds.
At this age, children can offer to read or play board games with seniors in care centers. I used to take a group of children to the care Alzheimer’s unit near our home every Friday. We’d bring cookies and paint the women’s fingernails for them while they told us stories from their childhood. A decade later, my grown children still tell stories from those visits with great fondness.
13 years old and up:
Children at this age can volunteer lots of places. Check out the Corvallis Youth Corps (YVC) for opportunities to serve all around Benton and Linn Counties.
The public library has service opportunities for this age group (Society for the Prevention of Boredom in Teens, aka SPOBIT), as does Habitat for Humanity’s ReStore and the local animal shelters.
Teenagers are capable of mowing lawns, raking leaves, and cleaning gutters for neighbors and aging family friends. Anything adults might do to serve, teenagers are perfectly able to participate in. In fact, there’s a huge opportunity for nonfamily mentoring to develop organically when we encourage our teens to not only participate in service activities designed for teens, but in general service alongside the adults in their community. Reach out to the justice council and find out what type of justice work is already happening in our congregation and might benefit from an infusion of youthful energy and vision!
Reflections for Caregivers
When you set out to nurture a sense of service to humanity within your family, it’s important to make some things explicit to younger children. As adults, it’s easy to assume that our kids know what we know and see the world the way we see it. Try to remember that you have decades of experiences and insights that your children don’t have, and frame up your service endeavors in a way that will help them develop healthy modes of service.
We want helpers rather than saviors. Helping has a vibe of humility. Saving has a vibe of superiority. One of those actually relieves burdens while the other adds a layer of shame when we’re the most in need. Talk to your little helpers about the difference. Invite them to recall a time when they felt helped or saved, and how did those feel different on the receiving end? Which would they like to give others?
Be mindful of when your child might witness a new brand of suffering in the course of their service, and offer context that might make it less alarming or anxiety-inducing. It’s important not to shield our children from age and developmentally appropriate suffering, but our first time encountering unfamiliar types of suffering often stirs up questions that our children might not yet know how to ask. Anticipating the emotional impact of the suffering of others and contextualizing it without minimizing it can go a long way toward preventing vicarious trauma.
Emphasize that our activism is shared within a collective, and we are not asked to do this work on our own. We want to participate in sustainable activism, that includes work and rest in healthy balance. You can mitigate the likelihood that our children will run full speed towards compassion fatigue and burnout by participating in groups of volunteers, reinforcing that we are just some of many, and the work will continue when we step away to rest and care for ourselves.
If you want to chat about service in the family, my door is always open!
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.
“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.
(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
