Making Music
Throughout my life, I’ve often reflected that music has literally saved my life. I can’t imagine my life without it. It’s how I communicate, how I bring myself peace, how I express myself, how I open to the Mystery, and so much more. How is music healing in your life? I’m reading the book The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma by Bessel van der Kolk. (Great book!) The author gives lots of…
Superhero Academy
This year the Elementary Religious Education class, for kindergarten to sixth grade, is using a curriculum called Superhero Academy. On January 22nd, they learned from Spider-Man that “great power comes with great responsibility” and also that you don’t always have to try to save the whole world. Sometimes it’s important to focus on helping in your own neck of the woods, just like Peter Parker started out being everyone’s “friendly neighborhood Spider-Man.” With that in mind, the class turned their…
Contractor’s Bid
The Sanctuary Construction Committee finally received a bid from the contractor on Friday, January 20th. Unfortunately, it is $2.7M, substantially higher than the $1.8M we have authorized. Bad news. As was presented at the town hall meeting in January, the principal reasons for the increased bids are inflation and increased requirements from the city. The Committee has met twice now since receiving the bid, and has asked our architect to propose cuts that would bring us closer to our financial…
Love is Love
You all know how excited I get when we talk about “love.” For me, it’s the way I experience the holy and how I see it act in the world. And of course, different cultures around the world often note that there are different kinds of love and have different words for it. The most common are words coined by the Catholic church: Philia, Eros, and Agape. Philia is meant to express the type of love between friends or from…
Our Whole Lives (OWL)
For ten weeks, nine 4th-6th graders from OCUUC, Tapestry UU, and the wider community gave it their all in the vital and life-affirming Our Whole Lives (OWL) Lifespan Sexuality Education program. With the intrepid leadership of our OWL facilitators, Maria Goode, Jacques Kilchoer, and Rev. Judy Tomlinson, they explored Sexuality and Values, Images in Popular Culture, Body Image, Changes of Puberty, Gender, Feelings and Attraction, Reproduction and Staying Healthy, Decisions and Actions, Consent and Peer Pressure, and Healthy Relationships. By…
We Made a Difference
“Look at all the work we’ve done, everybody showin’ up!” This is the first line of one of my favorite choir songs. We’ve really lived it this Fall! As we go into another calendar year, we can be proud of ourselves. We have had lots of “regular” activities with sermon discussion groups, book groups, another successful auction, and other groups that usually meet on a regular basis. Of course, Sunday mornings is our favorite activity. In addition, Rev. Sian taught…
Mantra
Welcome to the new year! Each year, people around the globe find a spurt of motivation to make a new year’s resolution – to diet, get in shape, expand their mind, see family more – the list goes on and on. We try year after year to change and grow. I think it’s a rather beautiful tradition even if it tends to fade away within a few weeks. It’s so wonderfully human to try! Recently I was talking to one…
Meaningful Worship Services
First a word of gratitude to Steve Morihiro and Susan Shaw, who have often been leading the music on my days off. They are consistent, conscientious, talented, and collaborative. We’re so lucky to have these two willing to be leaders in our church! I also want to give a shout-out to the tech crew – Avery Brown, our awesome weekly Audio Engineer, plus all the volunteers who run the camera, run the slideshow, act as Zoom MC, and create the…
Are We Getting Close?
Yes! But we aren’t there yet. Our building drawings for our new sanctuary for their second review the day after Thanksgiving, which means we hopefully have very few changes left to be done. Our architect is also supplying those drawings to our contractor so they can prepare an accurate bid. Yippee! Now for the hard part. The Sanctuary Construction Committee and the Board have been watching carefully. Given that it has been almost two years since we got the last…
Wonder
There is a lovely story I read recently about the history of the Christmas tree. Christmas trees were brought over to the US by German immigrants, but they were made famous by Harriet Martineau, a writer and abolitionist, who had been invited to the family of Rev. Charles Follen, a Unitarian, to stay with them over Christmas. Charles and his wife had secretly brought a tree into the house (usually Christmas trees were outside) unbeknownst to their three young children…
November Sanctuary Update – part 2
According to our sanctuary architect Toni Pyjar from domusstudio, who is our primary liaison with the City of Costa Mesa, things have been moving along this week: PlanningThe new planner assigned to the project, Christopher Aldana, has communicated with us many times this week. I’ve found him to be very responsive and service-oriented. A much-deserved breath of fresh air from the planning dept.He reviewed the site photometrics and the existing parking lighting passed entirely, except one area in the southwest…
Camp. And more.
My family and I had a wonderful time at our All-Church Weekend at Camp de Benneville Pines the second weekend of October. We hadn’t been there for five years, and our youngest had never been there at all. Camp de Benneville Pines is very special to my husband and me, as we attended UU Young Adult Camp there for many years be-fore we became parents. It was amazing watching it become a sacred place for our kids, too. Most of…