Now Let Us Sing!

June 1, 2025:Music often serves as entertainment or as a backdrop to other events in our lives.  Come join us as we free music from those expectations, and celebrate its power to inspire, to illuminate, to heal, to create community.  […]

Imagining Beloved Community

May 25, 2025: Grass Valley’s own Josiah Royce originated the idea of “Beloved Community” which theologian Howard Thurman and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. built upon. It is a term that gets used in Unitarian Universalism, but what do we imagine it is? The music of special guest Michelle Amador will help us explore the idea of Beloved Community and what it can mean for us, here, now.  […]

Two Questions and a Welcome!

May 18, 2025: On May 21, 1995 a set of adventurous and visionary souls signed their names as the first members of a new Unitarian Universalist community taking shape in Grass Valley and Nevada City. […]

Boundary or Horizon?

May 11, 2025: Barry Lopez writes that “the effort of the imagination is to turn the boundary into a horizon…The boundary says, Here and no further. The horizon says, Welcome.” What if […]

Flower Communion – Planting Seeds of Joy

April 27, 2025: You are invited to bring a flower to this beautiful Flower Communion. There is much to learn about joy from delicate blossoms whose seeds can sprout and blossom even on barren rock. It is as if their seeds are seeds of joy. We too have those seeds within us. […]

Saving Paradise

April 20, 2025: With this Easter Sunday and Earth Day in such close proximity, in this month that asks what joy has to do with anything and everything, we’ll let the first thousand years of Christian imagery –  not portrayals of crucifixions, but instead lush scenes depicting this world as paradise […]

Disobedient Joy and Pleasure Activism, Oh My! 

April 13, 2025: adrienne maree brown notes that “pleasure is a measure of freedom” and advocates “pleasure activism” not as an escape or spiritual bypass, but as a path toward personal and collective liberation. In a similar way, Shannon Willis encourages “disobedient joy” by which […]

This Joy that I Have

April 6, 2025: Really, how do “they” expect us to feel our joy right now? Is it even okay to feel joy with what we are going through? Well, let’s look more deeply. Some say underneath everything Joy waits as a patient foundation of our being, sometimes covered with woe, […]

Knitting up the Frayed and Raveling and Broken Heart

March 30, 2025: In a review, Marilynne Robinson claimed both that “It is trust that knits up the world,” and also that trust “is a stuff peculiarly liable to fraying and raveling.” This is the often tender nature of the world and our relationships. We end our month with an invitation to hold this truth with care, and to live accordingly. […]