Inspiration

UU thoughts, sermons, music

Chalica 2017 Day Three

CZ

For each day of Chalica we will offer activities, some are fun and some are more reflecting, a chalice lighting, and a meditation. Gather everyone together, light the chalice, and breathe into the principles with us each day.

Activities:

  • Cook a meal you’ve never made before, especially one from another culture
  • Attend a lecture, visit a museum, or go to see a play. Discuss the event with someone around you.
  • Discuss your religious beliefs and how they have changed over the years.
  • Write a journal entry about acceptance and spiritual growth
  • Play a board game with family or friends that none of you have ever played before
  • Meditate on something from each of the Six Sources

Chalice Lighting: (If you don’t have a chalice at home, remember that the point of a chalice is that it is a symbol so any candle will work.)

Thirsty By Gregory Pelley

And so we gather, from the ebb and flow of our lives
Thirsty for connection to ourselves
Thirsty for connection to others
Thirsty for connection to the larger life.

As we light this chalice
May all who gather here be filled:
Filled with joy and hope
Filled with compassion and love

Here, may we be filled
So that we may pour ourselves out
into the world.

Meditation:
There are two meditations today one about building spiritual walls and one about choice.

Towers of Babel by George A. Tyger

Choice by Alex Kapitan

 

Here is a musical meditation as well. U2’s “Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For” is about doubt, which is part of Acceptance and Spiritual Growth.

Season’s Blessings,
Cricket

Chalica 2017 Day Two

CZ

For each day of Chalica we will offer activities, some are fun and some are more reflecting, a chalice lighting, and a meditation. Gather everyone together, light the chalice, and breathe into the principles with us each day.

Activities:

  • Write a Letter to an elected official about an injustice
  • Pay for the person behind you in the drive-through line
  • “Want me to pick something up for you?” If you know someone is overwhelmed – perhaps by a new baby, family health issues, or something else – give them a call when you’re going out to the store. Ask if they’d like you to pick something up. We’ve been the beneficiaries of this random act of kindness, and it’s great.
  • Try to go the whole day without arguing with anyone
  • Go out to eat and tip the server double
  • Go to the store or mall with the family and stand outside and open the doors for people
  • Find a social justice cause and/or a new way to support it.
  • Educate yourself and your family on a social justice issue. These Youtube channels are a great way to start.
  • Write a journal entry about what Justice, Equity, and Compassion mean to you.
  • Write a poem about being kind.

Chalice Lighting: (If you don’t have a chalice at home, remember that the point of a chalice is that it is a symbol so any candle will work.)

Justice, Meaning, and Purpose By David Breeden

We light this chalice
remembering and honoring our own tradition
and celebrating the rich diversity of traditions among us.

As we search for justice, meaning, and purpose,
may we remember that justice, meaning, and purpose
live first in deeply listening to one another.

This chalice lighting was written for a multifaith gathering.

Meditation:
Our Meditation today is about Love. Focusing on love helps us to remember that each person is important.

May We Reach Out in Honesty and Love by Dennis McCarty

Here is a musical meditation as well. This is “Do What the Spirit Say Do” as performed by Sweet Honey in the Rock.

Season’s Blessings,
Cricket

Chalica 2017 Day One 

CZ

For each day of Chalica we will offer activities, some are fun and some are more reflecting, a chalice lighting, and a meditation. Gather everyone together, light the chalice, and breathe into the principles with us each day.

Activities:

  • Watch a Christmas Carol. (Scrooge learns an important lesson)
  • Make “I am Thankful for you because” cards for your friends and family.
  • Make nice notes, cookies, or a small craft for your neighbors, especially the ones you don’t get along with.
  • Write in a journal what the first principle means to you.
  • Spend time with people you don’t usually get along with, those with different religions, political views, or cultural identities. Find things you like about them
  • Go serve at a homeless shelter
  • Donate toys, blankets, or clothes to a shelter (do it in person so you can see who you are helping).
  • Write an apology letter to someone you hurt this year.
  • Write a letter of forgiveness to someone who hurt you this year.

Chalice Lighting: (If you don’t have a chalice at home, remember that the point of a chalice is that it is a symbol so any candle will work.)

Love can transform the world By Maureen Killoran

Love is the aspiration, the spirit that moves and inspires this faith we share.
Rightly understood, love can nurture our spirits and transform the world.
May the flame of this chalice honor and embody the power and the blessing of the love we need, the love we give, the love we are challenged always to remember and to share.

Meditation:
Our Meditation today is about Love. Focusing on love helps us to remember that each person is important.

Psalm 23 for This Moment by Kevin Tarsa

Here is a musical meditation as well. “Perfect” by P!nk is about knowing that you have worth and others have worth. Enjoy.

Season’s Blessings,
Cricket

Chalica 2017

CZ

Chalica is a week-long celebration of our Unitarian Universalist Principles. The holiday first emerged in 2005 out of a wish to have a holiday organized around Unitarian Universalist values.

Chalica begins on the first Monday in December and lasts seven days. Each day, a chalice is lit and the day is spent reflecting on the meaning of that day’s principle and doing a good deed that honors that principle. Not all Unitarian Universalists celebrate Chalica, but it has a growing following. There is a Chalica Facebook page, blog, and many Chalica-themed videos on YouTube – from the UUA Website. 

This year we will share some activities and meditations everyday to help us all celebrate Chalica. 

Season’s Blessings, 

Cricket

Meditation Monday for Indigenous People’s Day

CZ

Today we celebrate the Indigenous People’s of the world.

In honor of Indigenous Peoples Day, our Monday Meditation is “We Are Not Guests” by UUA staff member Alicia Forde. It reads, in part:

“Am I a guest here. Here in this House. Are you?

Are we guests here. Here in this House. And, whose House do we inhabit?

In the small world of our lives the borders between us: easements, fences, gates, hedges—serve to delineate, to separate us. To remind us of where my property begins and ends…

Whose House do we inhabit?

For we are not hosts. We are not owners.

Nor are we guests.

What, then, is our responsibility?”

Read it in full from WorshipWeb: http://tinyurl.com/y9rnyvkw

Have a Blessed Day,
Cricket
Image from https://www.highline.edu/event/celebrate-indigenous-peoples-day/

Meditation Monday: Stronger in the Broken Places

CZ

“This month brings the Jewish High Holy Days—the New Year, Rosh Hashanah, followed ten days later by Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. The days in between are known as the Days of Turning—a time devoted to fixing what has broken in one’s relationships. There is wisdom in admitting that our brokenness is how to make a new start…

Mystical Judaism teaches that the Ark of the Covenant is a symbol of the human heart. And there, in our hearts, brokenness and wholeness live side by side; we carry them wherever we go.”

Read the full reflection from Rev. Teri Schwartz online at Quest for Meaning: http://tinyurl.com/y799h4t4

The Church of the Larger Fellowship’s spiritual theme for September is resilience.

 

Image Credit: UUA

 

Joy as a form of Resistance

CZ

This podcast is from December 22, 2016, brought to you from the Church of the Larger Fellowship. 

Joy is a great thing. When people tty to take away our joy, it is a powerful thing to celebrate joy. What little things bring joy to your life? How can you celebrate joy?

[The VUU] 164: Joy as a Form of Resistance

https://media.blubrry.com/clfvuu_latest/www.questformeaning.org/podcasts/vuu/latest/vuu164.mp3 via @PodcastAddict
Namaste,

Cricket

PS: There’s some Santa business here, so little ears might not want to listen.
Image from  https://www.theodysseyonline.com/choose-joy-feeling

Meditation Monday 

CZ

​Our Monday Meditation is “Benediction for the Heavy Heart” by UUA staff member Mason Bolton. It reads:

“Good morning. I missed your ‘good’
because a plane, because a truck, because
a gun, because a cop, because a government,
because a people suffering, because too many
people suffering, because war, because famine,
because some mornings it is so hard
to rise, to wake, to be a self.

There is a pause here. There is a deliberate
cessation. I want a cessation to the noise
in my head, to the ache in the collective
heart of this world. When I was young
this seemed possible. . . .

I want your mornings ‘good,’ your evenings ‘good,’
all the late nights and sunrises and afternoons
and moments pressed against the ticking
glass of your life ‘good.’

Breathe. For yourself. For each other. Let
us breathe in when others cannot. When we
can do nothing else. Let us stretch ourselves
open to embrace our friends, extend
our bodies outward to anyone willing to meet us
and even those we think may not be willing. Let us
hold each other for this moment. For this
blink of human existence.”

Read this and other meditations in the new Skinner House Books title “To Wake, To Rise: Meditations on Justice and Resilience” available at inSpirit: The UU Book and Gift Shop http://tinyurl.com/ybsj9f49