On July 12, your troika shared our last worship service with the UUCM community. We broadcast from the sanctuary, along with the staff, and felt bittersweet at how the pandemic has affected our leave taking. But we felt your presence and all the ways you have shared yourselves with us these final weeks and these past two years.

And so we — Meg, Terri and Arif — want to say thank you! Continue reading →

My middle-schooler is done with the online camp she was participating in at the start of the summer and now we’re confronted with a long expanse of calendar when her parents are working and where she’s at looser ends than we’d like. We, like many others I know, have seen our way through to be ok with her participating in outdoor activities with friends, observing all the appropriate precautions. However, unlike her older sibling who’s recently acquired a drivers license and is therefore self-mobile (at least when she takes one of our cars), middle-schooler needs some parental involvement in coordinating schedules, and that’s how I found myself earlier this week, texting with some friends who have a similarly aged kid, wondering about a gathering.

Just as I was about to hit send, I had a powerful yearning to suggest that we also get together for dinner, and I remembered with bittersweet sadness the many wonderful evenings we’d spent in each other’s company, at each other’s houses, cooking, laughing, eating, playing games. All the things that we can’t quite do in quite the same ways or anywhere near as easily. I had to say no to the thing I wanted to do because the thing I wanted to do wasn’t actually the right thing to do in that moment. Continue reading →

Dear friends,

I’ve just emerged from the first-ever-All-Virtual UUA General Assembly (GA)!  Almost 5000 people gathered online to worship, learn, reflect, vote, and be with one another for five days.

As with moving from live to virtual worship on Sundays, there were pluses and minuses. It was the third biggest GA in history, because so many more people could afford to go than are able when attendance includes travel, food and lodging.  People with accessibility issues, fragrance sensitivity, hearing concerns could attend more easily and get their needs met.  And hundreds of people attended things like the budget hearings and business meetings who may have ducked out if we’d gone in person, where conversations with folks we met in the hallway might have led to coffeeshops instead of business. Continue reading →

Whenever we interact with each other as a community — during Sunday morning worship, in small groups, by email, in the Facebook group, wherever — we are doing so in intentional relationship. We are practicing ways of being together that aren’t always how things are in other spaces. We are fostering a culture that says, we need one another. Or more specifically (in words from the Rev. Theresa I. Soto): “All of us need all of us to make it.”

Get that? To make it.

How do we do that for each other? How do we honor each other’s inherent worthiness by fully recognizing that we truly, deeply and urgently need one another? And because all means ALL, how can the very act of being in relationship help to dismantle the structures and systems of oppression and racism that don’t want some people to make it? Continue reading →