Dickens’ A Christmas Carol and the Four Noble Truths
Dear OCUUC Community- Our December 2011 worship theme at OCUUC is world religions. Here is my Time For All Ages presentation that compares Unitarian Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol and the Buddhist Four Noble Truths. Dickensians around the globe will celebrate his 200th birthday in February 2012. Happy Holidays to All! Rayna Hamre, OCUUC Director of Religious Education ~~~~~~~~~~~ Once upon a time there was a man named Ebenezer Scrooge. He has become famous, many of the grown ups know…
Exploring Our UU Heritage, 1st Sundays, History with Some Zip!
Unitarian Universalists have a wonderful and inspiring heritage. We have many people in our denominational past who have been in the forefront and the background fighting for both public and private good. It is my pleasure this year to introduce our children and youth to some of those people during our Religious Education 1st Sundays together. Our 1st Sunday format is for all our children and youth to gather together for about 20 minutes, then to break out into smaller…
Embracing Change
Fall is a time of change for most American children. Moving up a grade can be a challenge and can be fraught with a mix of excitement and anxiety. AT OCUUC we hope to help our children with transitions in their Sunday classes, and to create a warm caring environment for them to feel safe as they explore new UU territories with their classmates. We have had a wonderful changes in the past year in our program. We have steadily…
Summer 2011
The summer days are racing by for many of us. OCUUC Religious Educaiton has had some great moments for our Going Green Summer. Water day, recycling sorting, and mask making have been just a few activities our children and youth have participated in over the past month. Some of us are able to travel and get away for a time. My husband and I were visiting Oslo about two weeks before the tragedies there began, and we were very saddened…
Standing On The Side of Love 2011 and 2012
Standing on the Side of Love. Powerful words, and I can feel the love and strength of our denomination when we sing this song together. One of the great things about being a Unitarian Universalist is that we don’t simply sing lines to our shared songs, we are called to live out the values of those words in our daily lives. And we are obligated to share those values with our young people. As I return from this year’s General…
Religious Education Summer 2011
Please join OCUUC Religious Education for our 2011 Going Green Summer! We will take a look at ways to save energy, how we use water, what happens to the things we throw away and more! Note our time change for summer services and Religious Education for Children and Youth. OCUUC will transition to our summer schedule of one service only. RE will gather from 10:30 to 11:30 a.m. Sunday mornings in July and August 2011. Rayna Hamre, Director of…
June DRE Report
June is the time of year to extend thank-yous to the many people who make our OCUUC Religious Education program vibrant and exciting for our youngest UUs. It takes many people to provide our Sunday RE classes and other activities throughout the year, and 2010-2011 was very busy. Our social justice work took some of our youth and chaperons to San Francisco for the April Faithful Fools Street Retreat. We had other opportunities for families to have hands-on work with…
May DRE Report
Traditionally, when we weave a Maypole on Beltane, or May Day, we visualize and then weave in our intentions for the upcoming year. As I taught our OCUUC children to weave a Maypole on May 1, I found myself reflecting on what we have woven together as a religious community over the past months. Our weave is something lovely. Our grades 7-12 youth group, led by Merrie Lee Wooten and Mike Scott, looked for the UU Messages in Music. Along…
April DRE Report
An umbrella. Six dollars. Dry shoes. These are items that middle class people don’t think very much about, that we can easily take for granted. After spending a day in the Tenderloin District of San Francisco on a Faithful Fools Street Retreat, I now see them very differently. The Faithful Fools Street Retreat program is designed for participants to step out of their everyday world and to directly experience the world of the homeless. I had the privilege of participating…
March DRE Report
I am always proud to be a Unitarian Universalist, but there are times when I am exceptionally proud. One of those times was last summer at General Assembly when I went into the dining area at the Minneapolis Convention Center. All the cups, utensils and plates were made from corn-based products, compostable and biodegradable. Another point of pride for me is our denominational Green Sanctuary movement and our upcoming Green Theology course at OCUUC. I was recently able to take…
February DRE Report
One of the wonderful things about being a Unitarian Universalist is our appreciation for the world’s religions that is reflected in our Six Sources. In January, in addition to our regular classroom curricula, I read a Buddhist story for our all-church “Time for All Ages” by Buddhist author Jon J. Muth. Teachers and youth spent our fifth Sunday all-ages-together time in a further exploration of Buddhism. Personally, I have strong ties to Zen Buddhism. I learned and practiced Zen at…
January DRE Report
Our Seventh Principle directs Unitarian Universalists to have “Respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part.” There are many ways that parents and religious educators can help foster that respect in our youth. This year our Pre-Kindergarten/Kindergarten class is using a UU curriculum called We Are Many, We Are One, by Colleen McDonald, published by the UUA. Two of these sessions caught my eye this year, since I am working on deepening my ties…