Love is the spirit of this church, and service its law.
This is our great covenant:
To dwell together in peace, 

To seek the truth in love, And to help one another. 

– James Vila Blake

As we enter into this new year, it feels fitting to return to Blake’s familiar UU covenant. At least in my own spiritual practice and efforts toward ministerial growth, I find it helpful to return to certain expressions of Unitarian Universalist mission statements. I used to try to write my own every year but it got too overwhelming to stick to. Instead, I’ve come to trust that the words I need to help guide my way will reveal themselves when I need to see them. Blake’s UU covenant is simple and feels easy enough to live into. Not to say that love is always easy. Any one who’s ever had any kind of caring relationship with another human being can tell you that putting love into action is hard. But Blake’s covenant makes doing that work seem accessible in its teaching that in love in action just means to “help one another.” As a minister in the business of helping one another, I can attest to the liberating nature of being of service. I could tell endless stories about how one encounter after helping someone led me to notice something about myself that felt indescribably freeing. I want to explore and share that sensation of freedom, of liberation with people in this community and beyond. I look forward to speaking about this theme of Liberating Love, the Soul Matter’s theme for January.

Along those same lines I’m also really looking forward to engaging with the Unitarian Universalist Association’s Thirty Days of Love – Side with Love Campaign, which officially begins January 15th. I encourage everyone to consider participating in their offerings. https://sidewithlove.org/30-days-of-love-2024 Something else that I hope you might consider participating in is some of the amazing RE and Musical offerings that Alessandra and Angel will be starting to offer this month. I’ll also be offering pre recorded, on-demand adult RE videos on UUCT’s Youtube website. The offering will be called UU Living Out Values Everyday (L.O.V.E.). Stay tuned to the release date of the first series of offerings. 

The last bit of exciting news I want to put out into the new year is my intention to oversee a revamping of our primary methods of communication. Like many people during the New Year season, I’ve been recently accessing areas of my life and work that are blocked and could use more flow and support. As some of you may have experienced of me, I can sometimes be terribly slow to respond to emails. Even though many of you tell me that I don’t need to reply and I’m just included for oversight, I realize that even though I’m not ASKED to respond, other things that come up during the email thread CALL me to respond. My experience as a minister equipped me with a kind of energetic sensing system that allows me to get a “sense” that something is brewing in a conversation. Most times, the thing that I sense is satisfaction from a question or concern being clarified with a simple email exchange. Other times I sense the presence of an unnamed and unexpressed emotion that is often unconsciously passed along and it grows to the point of causing toxic energy in the email thread.  I can feel it in my body when that energy is leaking from someone’s thread. The problem is, in a community that has MANY conversations via email, it’s hard for me to discern where the toxicity is coming from. And considering the invisible nature of possible tension brewing from misunderstanding, it is particularly challenging to see and mend contentious threads. I say all to lead to my opinion that there is way too much church business conversation happening in email that would be better served with a phone call or text message. I’m not yet sure how to go about shifting the culture of church business communicated by email but in this moment I am really excited about collaborating on the most efficient and effective tools for us to better communicate our needs.

In Closing, I leave you with words from Rev. Naomi King * Full piece at https://www.uua.org/worship/words/reading/184319.shtml 

When the world’s violence shatters the joy of a moment
We pause and reach out for the hands that remain
We open our hearts with love.
When despair rises as a monster from the deep and drags down one of our own, our answer is that We open our hearts with love…