Featured News

With this Sunday’s theme of “Beyond Welcome,” I had already long intended to share with you this link to Carrie Newcomer’s song, Room at the Table:

Too long we have wandered, burdened and undone
But there is room at the table for everyone
Let us sing the new world in, this is how it all begins
There is room at the table for everyone

Imagining ourselves beyond “welcome” has both close in and out-at-our-edges implications.

Here, close in, as we seek to connect and reconnect as a community, I am aware of the power of bringing who we are to the table – who we are in terms of the gifts we have to offer, and who we are at our most real and honest and imperfect and vulnerable. Again and again I witness it, the willingness to be genuine in an intimate enough circle of others opens and connects people in ways that surprise, move, and strengthen everyone present. It is powerful medicine. And a foundational ingredient of community.

This is why I encourage you, and why it’s one of our goals for this year for everyone, to find at least one small-enough circle of others in the life of the congregation in which you might feel connected, seen, heard, known, and in which who you are and what you bring is appreciated.

Soul Matters Circles, Walking Groups, the Book Group, Men’s or Women’s groups, the Spirituality Sharing Circle, Starting Point, Singing Meditation, the choir (soon, we hope), the various committees and teams and justice task forces, upcoming classes and other circles…or the circle or group you are imagining that is yet to manifest. Look, listen, watch, search, ask on Sunday mornings or via UUCM’s various newsletters and website and communications.

There is room for us all, and no gift is too small…
No matter who you are, no matter where you’re from…
Here and now we can be, the beloved community…
There is room at the table for everyone.

And, important as that is, thinking beyond “welcome” out at our edges is where Carrie’s song actually begins:

Let our hearts not be hardened to those living on the margins…
This is where it all begins, this is how we gather in
There is room at the table for everyone

The appalling disregard for human worth and dignity evidenced in the recent shipping of people seeking asylum at U.S. borders from border states to elsewhere brings such abstract edges closer in. As does The U.S. and the Holocaust documentary airing this week on PBS, linking the past and the present, shedding light on the U.S. unwillingness “to open its doors to more than a fraction of the hundreds of thousands of desperate people seeking refuge . . . as the catastrophe of the Holocaust unfolded in Europe.”

Whether as close as the people in our monthly Soul Matters Circle, or as seemingly distant as the Earth’s many refugees, the ways we practice belonging and extending belonging, and the ways we live into moving beyond a surface “welcome,” grow our capacity to open our hearts across the spectrums of our life connections.

As we seek deep and meaningful belonging – important to so many of us, as last Sunday showed – may we learn at the same time to extend our welcome beyond the easy and the familiar, near and far.

Too long we have wandered, burdened and undone
Let us sing the new world in, this is how it all begins
There is room at the table for everyone

Oh, may it be so. May WE be so.

With care,

Rev. Kevin
Hope to see you at the workshop and party Saturday!

Help Support our Weekly Service

We need YOU to help with the A/V technical needs on Sunday morning. It’s easier then you think! 

We know it appears complicated with all the wires and 3 monitors, but thanks to some recent upgrades, all you really need to do is push buttons – and who doesn’t like pushing buttons?! You’ll assist with the PowerPoint slides and camera-switching during the service. We have detailed written instructions, lots of helpful notes, and friendly, forgiving folx to support you every week. 

Training is provided along with lots of support so you wont be alone!

Please contact AV@uugrassvalley.org with questions or to get started!

This Sunday we invite you to bring some water from home to the service, a little bit of water to pour into a common bowl.

I write this in the midst of the 109-degree Tuesday heat (having, with some pride, sent my Michigan family photos of the weather app stats on my phone), and so the value of water is near the top of my thoughts.

Some of you will know this annual UU ritual, called a Water Ceremony or Water Communion. The original was created in 1980 for the Women and Religion Continental Convocation of Unitarian Universalists by Carolyn McDade and Lucile Schuck Longview. They “wanted to create a new ritual ‘that spoke to our connectedness to one another, to the totality of life, and to our place on this planet.’ They included a new, inclusive symbol of women’s spirituality: water.”

Eight women were asked to bring water from their far-flung homes across the continent, to pour them into a shared bowl, and to speak to the significance of that particular water, now joined with the rest. Women at the convocation brought the powerful ceremony home to their congregations, and so a new UU ritual was born.

For many years, the localized versions of this ritual involved people bringing water from special places to which they had traveled over the summer, and naming the water’s significance. It has long been a fall ingathering ceremony in UU congregations. As you might anticipate, this has often led to some very clear distinctions between those who have the means to travel the country or world in the summer, and those who do not.

Here, this year, as we enter our theme of belonging, we invite you simply to bring water from your home or someplace special nearby. (If you bring water from a special far away elsewhere, that’s okay, too.) Once again, we will pool our waters in a shared bowl, with all the layers of meaning such a gathering of waters might call forth in these sweltering, arid, and bifurcated times. In fact, I’ll ask you about the meaning you find in this! NOTE: If you will be joining online Sunday, we invite you to have some water to pour into a bowl as well. We’ll invite you to be seen on-screen as you pour, if you are willing.

Meanwhile, may you find the hours of respite you need from the many kinds of high temperatures that hover over our lives.

With care,

Rev. Kevin

Today we enter the September theme of “belonging.” Belonging has been a resonant if unofficial theme for the past nine or ten months, and the Board has wisely identified “connection and reconnection” as a primary goal for this current congregation year.

I know that some of you are feeling disconnected and distant, wondering whether and how this community continues to be important to you.