UU Music Break:We Are the Cosmos

Composed by Keith Mesecher for the “Cosmos” celebrations at First Unitarian Universalist Church of San Diego. The Cosmic All Stars performed all 5 songs live at the world’s first “Evolutionary Revival” February 2008

Blessed Ostara

Ostara is the pagan holiday celebrating the Spring Equinox.

 

Blessing from A Book of Pagan Prayer

The snow sinks back into the Earth,
there to nourish the sleeping life
that waits patiently for its time come.
Goddess of spring, you have performed this miracle through many ages.
Transform, again, the frozen white into the pliant green.
Work, again, the ancient magic,
and bring spring to our land.

 

Blessings on the holy day.

Namaste,
Cricket

 

 

Following in the footsteps of Hypatia—some personal reflections

1) All formal dogmatic religions are fallacious and must never be accepted by self-respecting persons as final.

2) Reserve your right to think, for even to think wrongly is better than not to think at all.

3) Life is an unfoldment, and the further we travel the more truth we can comprehend. To understand the things that are at our door is the best preparation for understanding those that lie beyond.

hypatia_portrait 4) Fables should be taught as fables, myths as myths, and miracles as poetic fancies. To teach superstitions as truths is a most terrible thing. The child mind accepts and believes them, and only through great pain and perhaps tragedy can he be in after years relieved of them.

5) In fact men will fight for a superstition quite as quickly as for a living truth often more so, since a superstition is so intangible you cannot get at it to refute it, but truth is a point of view, and so is changeable.

From a post from British Unitarian minister Andrew Brown

http://andrewjbrown.blogspot.com/2016/02/following-in-footsteps-of-hypatiasome.html

 

Some comfort for the Angry

[First Unitarian Universalist Church of Austin] Respecting the Fire => http://www.austinuuav.org/audio/2016-02-07_Respecting_the_fire.mp3 via @PodcastAddict

Dear friends,
The past few weeks surround by politics, court trials, and injustice have left me filled with a cold and mushy rage. I have had to do a lot of soul searching. I found this sermon from First UU in Austin, TX at just the right time. I hope it offers you some comfort as well.

Namaste,
Cricket

 

Singing!

It was wonderful to see those who made it today, and we were thinking of those who couldn’t.  I’m putting together a page of our songs. It has our opening and closing songs, the one we sang today, one we might want to learn, and will have a few more we sing frequently.

From a UU Church of the Larger Fellowship service:

Pax, Lisa

Church Going

There has been an ongoing discussion on the UU-Leaders email list called “Let’s Get Out of the Box and Do Something Meaningful”. This poem, imagining an abandoned church building, was quoted.

A serious house on serious earth it is,
In whose blent air all our compulsions meet,
Are recognized, and robed as destinies.
And that much never can be obsolete,
Since someone will forever be surprising
A hunger in himself to be more serious,
And gravitating with it to this ground,
Which, he once heard, was proper to grow wise in,
If only that so many dead lie round.

Church Going – Philip Larkin

For Valentine’s Day: A Love Letter to My Friend

UU Rev. Cynthia Kane shares a beautiful message and reflection for her friend on Valentine’s Day. “Maybe, in a better world, that is what Valentine’s Day would be about? Not celebrating romantic love with awful candies, but remembering love in all its forms—remembering to send and share it in ever wider and widening circles. Because, with all due respect to the vocal stylings of Whitney H., I am not one bit sure that learning to love yourself is the greatest love of all. I am still stuck on the idea that learning to love one another is. And learning to hold our hearts open, to really feel and collect all the love and Spirit that travel our way. So whether we are looking at our own face in the mirror—or into the face of our One True Beloved—we see reflected there all the strength and love and care that fill us from so many different quarters.” Read the full letter in The Huffington Post.

http://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/for-valentines-day-a-love_b_9192476.html

We do not lead single issue lives — Standing on the Side of Love

http://www.standingonthesideoflove.org/ourstories/we-do-not-lead-single-issue-lives

“When we speak of racial justice, we are not talking about a theoretical framework. We are talking about principles and values that lead and inform the way that we do base building, create policy and monitor policy implementation. We’re talking about building power to dismantle systems of oppression.”

Namaste,
Cricket