Monday, June 20
7:00 pm, Buddhist Meditation, Sanctuary
Tuesday, June 21
7:00 pm, Board Meeting, Fahs House
Wednesday, June 22
5:30 pm, Roots and Wings Covenant Group, Fahs House
6:30 pm, Wake-Up Meditation (Young Adults), Parker House
Thursday, June 23
10:00 am, Meditation, Sanctuary
2:00 pm, DBT/Construction Meeting, Parker House
7:00 pm, WUU String Band Rehearsal, Fahs House
7:30 pm, UUA GA Service of the Living Tradition Live-Stream, Sanctuary
*There will be no air conditioning in the sanctuary Monday, June 13 through Thursday, June 16 due to construction. Please check to make sure meetings have not been cancelled or moved.
10:00 am
"Life Lessons"
Guest Speaker Charles Tankersley
When asked to speak, I am filled with anxiety because I don’t see myself as a preacher. On the other hand, I am much more confident in the role of a teacher, and I have therefore decided to speak as a teacher. I want to share with you some things I have learned in my life. Things I have learned from poverty, from a serious illness, and from aging. I have found these things helpful to me at different times in my life, and I hope they in turn help you at some time in your life.
"Roots and Wings": A Covenant Group for Holding Close and Setting Free
Wednesday June 22, 5:30 - 6:30 pm, Fahs House
Sally Fisk and Rev. Dave Johnson, Conveners
Amidst the horrors and trauma in Orlando, the words of Yeats' poem "The Second Coming" are once again deeply poignant:
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Amidst these devastations of body and soul: How shall we, as a congregation, become a community that nurtures "the roots which hold us close", and "the wings which may set us free"? How shall we be a sanctuary of healing, and a crucible of transformation?
Come join us in Fahs House next Wednesday June 22nd (5:30 pm to 6:30 pm), as we gather a new Covenant Group (tentatively titled "Roots and Wings: Over the Rainbow"). The purpose and emphasis of the group will of course be agreed upon by those who choose to participate. Our intention is that this group be for restoration of the heart and soul. Other groups are in place and more appropriate for debate / discussion / action-oriented initiatives. The Roots and Wings Group is about messages from the heart. We welcome all.
Celebrating our Director of Religious Education: AUSTEN PETERSEN
Austen Petersen will receive national recognition on Thursday evening June 23, at the UUA General Assembly in Columbus OH. She will be among a very few who are becoming designated as Credentialed Religious Educators. She gets to walk across the stage before an audience of thousands of Unitarian Universalists -- at the annual Service of the Living Tradition -- and receive her award.
This service will be live-video-streamed on the UUA website (www.uua.org/ga ) . We will be live-streaming this event at 7:30pm on Thursday, June 23 in the sanctuary at WUU.. I hope that many of us might be present, and cheer for Austen on this major achievement.
Join us in the sanctuary on Friday, June 17th at 6pm to enjoy a potluck dinner and August Wilson play-reading group will offer a public reading. Please bring a dish to share.
Food For FISH (Our local community food & clothing pantry)
Let's stock the FISH shelves withcanned fruits and vegetables in celebration of summer!
If you are going to FISH during the week pick up a bag from the wagon and take it along with you Please make sure packages are sealed and all "use by" dates are current Thank you all!
Dear Friends:
I deeply appreciate your generous responses earlier in June to support our congregation’s TEN delegates to the SUULE 2016 leadership training during the week of July 24 to 29. Twenty-one responses pledged $5,757! This is sufficient to cover registration fees. We are still about $1,000 short of the total that we need for 2016 leadership training and follow-up expenses in the six months following. If you have not contributed and wish to do so, please respond to me or to Suzanne in the office. Of course your contribution may be anonymous if you wish. Thanks so very much for your support of leadership training at WUU. Rev. Dave Johnson
Dear WUU's,
In several months, the MSC will have completed a Congregational Packet and we will present copies to worthy candidates in our search for a new settled minister.
One section of the Packet will address WUU members' activities in the community at large. Please send to me (fredgilbertson@msn.com) a listing of your involvements in the community in the areas of Social Justice, Culture and the Arts, Politics, Athletics, Education, etc.
We might list activities w/ brief or no explanation, but if you have suggestions for some narrative about significant activities, maybe we will include some of that.
This is just one of many ways that you can be helpful to the MSC over coming months; please send a reply soon; I will compile and edit them into some form for the Packet.
Thank you,
Fred Gilbertson
Ministerial Search Committee member
An Open Letter to Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Queer-identified Unitarian Universalists. Today, we are a people in mourning – mourning not from natural causes but from an unnatural act of hatred directed against us. We hear the horrors of what happened at Pulse in Orlando and it cuts into us like a hot blade. Suddenly our world, which, with the tremendous gains we have made in recent years, had begun to feel a little safer, is ripped open, bleeding and raw, once again.
We hear the words of US Attorney General Loretta Lynch, just last month, when she addressed the transgender community by saying, “no matter how isolated or scared you may feel today, the Department of Justice and the entire Obama Administration wants you to know that we see you; we stand with you; and we will do everything we can to protect you going forward,” and those words ring hollow today. “You can’t protect us,” we scream! Not when hatred and division are the order of the day.
It is times like this when retreating into the safe place inside ourselves beckons. We long for security, for safety, for peace. And many of us have learned that the sanctuary of a dark closet with a locked door offers the safety we seek. So we stop reaching for our lover’s hand as we walk down the street. We scrape the rainbow sticker off our car. We seek shelter in our welcoming congregations but don’t lift our voices too loudly. We opt for the thousand little cuts that slash our souls instead of the bullets that rip open our hearts.
For others of us, we defiantly fly our rainbow flag and dare anyone to mess with us. For many anger turns to rage directed at a perceived enemy, in this case, Muslims, and, in countless other cases, Christians. We want to fix what allowed this to happen. We assert the need for gun control. We demand that the government do a better job of tracking and shutting down the terrorists among us. We blame the politicians, the trolls on social media, each other.
And still there are others of our community who feel so overwhelmed by grief, so devastated by this senseless attack, that we find ourselves immobilized -- unable to cry, unable to act, unable to love.
If you’re like me, you have traversed the full range of these emotions in the last thirty-six hours. You have felt the urge to hide, to strike out, to give up. Whatever your response today, know this. We are an intrepid people, a people whose only demands are that we’re free to be ourselves and to love who we love.
It is because we love so well that we hurt so profoundly. Love is our gift to the world.
Let your love shine through today.
Start this with loving yourself.
Start with believing, with knowing, that it is only by loving ourselves that others love us in return, and that when others love us in return, the world shifts on its axis.
We’ve seen this so many times before. It was only a year ago this month when we celebrated our legal right to love, something that most of us never believed would happen in our lifetimes. And it wouldn’t have happened without the thousands upon thousands of Unitarian Universalists who harnessed love’s power to end oppression by standing on the side of love. Love is our theology. Love is our spiritual practice.
It’s OK not to be brave today. It’s OK to let your heart be heavy, to let yourself cry, to wallow in your pain. It’s OK to be angry and, perhaps even for a moment, to cast blame where blame does not rightfully belong.
But then, when you’ve cried all the tears you have inside you, when the rage has washed through you, I entreat you to reach out to a friend and help them empty their well of tears, tear down the wall of rage inside of them.
When the two of you have fortified each other, then reach out to someone else.
Eventually, one by one, two by two, community by community, we will restore our wholeness and regain our beautiful audacity. I believe that as deeply as I feel the pain that sears my heart today.
We will not forget Pulse, as we have not forgotten Stonewall. In the years to come, it will motivate us to transform violence into peace, hatred into love. And someday, we’ll find ourselves in the place we have created through our love and courage, that place over the rainbow.
With love,
Annette Marquis
LGBTQ and Multicultural Programs Director, Multicultural Growth and Witness, UUA
