Our theme for the month of March is Wisdom. We will be posting about it and incorporating it into our services.
“If you have knowledge, let others light their candles with it.” – Margaret Fuller
Here’s a song to get you started …
Month of Wisdom
UU Lent 2020 – Day 5 – Sanctuary
🎶Make us aware we are a sanctuary Each made holy loved right through
with thanksgiving we’ll be a living
sanctuary a-new 🎶
The dictionary defines sanctuary as a place of refuge or safety.
The reflection That They May Have Like-Mindedness by DeReau K. Farrar talks about what brings us together and keeps us alive. The prayer at the end is powerful:
“That which is in us and all around us and which constantly draws us to our holiest selves, commit my heart to the call of making life more abundant — for myself as fiercely as for others. Drive me away from comfort that excludes, hates, or divides. And remind me every day that I am not the end of knowing. Amen.”
What Trauma Taught me About Resilience
UU Lent 2020 – Day 4 – Passion
“You have to be burning with an idea, or a problem, or a wrong that you want to right. If you’re not passionate enough from the start, you’ll never stick it out.” – Steve Jobs
“Yes, in all my research, the greatest leaders looked inward and were able to tell a good story with authenticity and passion.” – Deepak Chopra
Both the Burning and the Light by Rev. Sean Parker Dennison
UU Lent 2020 – Day 3 – Risk
The dictionary defines risk as possibility of loss or injury : PERIL
Yuri Yamamoto discusses risk in the reflection Angry Birds, which is not about the video game.
I chose this song for Risk because it was such a risk to create and produce.
UU Lent 2020 – Day 2 – Commitment
According to the dictionary commitment is “the state or quality of being dedicated to a cause, activity, person, or people.”
In his reflection, “What on Earth is worth saving”, Jake Morrill discusses what is important about commitment.
Why your critics aren’t the ones who count
UU Lent 2020 – Day 1 – Prayer
In his essay “On Prayer,” Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote:
“Prayer is meaningless unless it is subversive, unless it seeks to overthrow and to ruin the pyramids of callousness, hatred, opportunism, falsehood. The liturgical movement must become a revolutionary movement, seeking to overthrow the forces that continue to destroy the promise, the hope, and the vision.”
Our prayer this morning is “Sacred in the Ordinary” by Tamara Lebak
Blessed Tuesday
Today is Fat Tuesday, Mardi Gras, Shrove Tuesday, Fasnacht Tag, and many others.
Whatever you may call it, it is the day before Lent. In the Christian tradition, Lent is a forty-day period before Easter. (Sundays are skipped in counting the forty days, because Sundays commemorate the Resurrection.)
We will be celebrating UU Lent with daily posts again this year. Here is the calendar. We hope you will join us on this spiritual journey.
Sunday, March 1, 2020: Dissent, Heresy, and Toleration
Tolerance is a social rather than a religious virtue. A broad-minded view of the private belief of others undoubtedly makes for the happiness of society; but it is an attitude impossible for those whose personal religion is strong. For if we know that we have found the key and guiding principle of Life, we cannot allow our friends to flounder blindly in the darkness.
— Steven Runciman, The Medieval Manichee: A Study of the Christian Dualist Heresy
Unitarianism and Universalism were both born in heresy, challenges to the beliefs and mores of the world around them.
Welcome before prelude
Good morning and welcome to West Fork Unitarian Universalists. I’m Robert and I feel blessed to serve this congregation as a lay leader. I’m glad to see all of you here today.
Thank you for joining us.
Let us use the prelude for centering. We are about to enter sacred time. We are about to make this time and this place sacred by our presence and intention.
Please silence your phones… and as you do so, I invite us also to turn down the volume on our fears; to remove our masks; and to loosen the armor around our hearts.
Breathe.
Let go of the expectations placed on you by others—and those they taught you to place on yourself.
Drop the guilt and the shame, not to shirk accountability, but in honest expectation of the possibility of forgiveness.
Let go of the thing you said the other day. Let go of the thing you dread next week. Be here, in this moment. Breathe, here.
