March Thoughts from our Board President

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So What’s Next?

Thanks to many of you, we had a very successful Visioning Party last Sunday with almost 30 people attending. Six groups met to plan for TRUU’s future. These were the six topics they discussed:  Spiritual Growth, Belonging and Connectedness, Family Integration and Multi-Generational Programming, Social Justice, Community Visibility, and Sustainable Presence. This visioning exercise was the culmination of several months of personal interviews to find out what your hopes and dreams for this congregation are.

So what happens next? The board will review the proposals made by each group this coming Monday night and you will hear about these proposals and how we plan to implement them at the TRUU Green Gala on St. Patrick’s Day. Come help celebrate all that we have accomplished this year and then look to the future. The visions that we all have for the future will become reality because of your stewardship. “Stewardship is about taking care of something we value and enabling it to grow. When we become stewards, we take responsibility and contribute our time, talent and treasure.” (uua.org)

If you value TRUU and want to see it grow, please join us on March 17th.

Thelma Zabel

The Beloved Community Within

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The Chance to Love Everything – February 2012     —-

“The Beloved Community Within”      —-

In the February 5th Worship Service, I offered a series of questions about what it means to be loving. “When one of us is in need – hungry in body or spirit – how does love call us to respond? When one of us is rude or shaming toward another, what does love ask? And what would it mean for us to be known for our love?”

These types of questions ask us to consider our own behavior, how we will treat each other – in personal relationships, in community, in the wider world.  Though it’s easy enough to say “Love is the Spirit of this Church,” figuring out what it means to be loving isn’t necessarily obvious.

Recently, a UU colleague, the Rev. David Miller, shared a series of questions he and his congregation had come up with for helping their community consider if their actions are loving – if they are in what we call “right relationship.”  I share these with you here for you to consider, and invite you to use them in your personal lives, and in your interactions within this congregation, and in the wider world, as we continue to let love guide us.

  1. Am I assuming the good intentions of the other?
  2. Am I communicating directly with the person with whom I am having an issue?
  3. Am I resolving issues or am I spreading them through gossip, anger and/or
  4. frustration?
  5. Am I reflecting on what personal wounds, issues, and tendencies of mine are contributing to the issue?
  6. Am I willing to be an active participant and to work in good faith to clear up issues?
  7. Am I projecting onto someone else through my own framework what they are thinking or doing vs. engaging them and asking them to share their thoughts and story?
  8. Am I actually trying to live the principles and values of Unitarian Universalism by acting with compassion, respect, and a high value of our interdependence?
  9. Am I actively listening to what others are saying and not formulating a response or the next comment or question while they are talking?
  10. Can I let go of my need to control the situation?
  11. Can I graciously leave space for others by letting someone else speak first or by not speaking my mind if the point has been raised or made already?
  12. Can I help lift up the life of another or the group in my words and actions?
  13. Can I have disagreements with an individual or group, do so in love and
    respect, and continue to stay in community?
  14. Can I take into account the importance of the task in relation to the importance of the relationship?
  15. Can I reflect on how my attitude and actions contribute to the tone of our community?
  16. Am I willing not to have to be right?
  17. Am I being the change I wish to see in the world and that means really acting the way I would like others to act?
  18. Am I willing to be changed?
  19. And finally, can I remember to ask the question, “What is the most loving thing I can do or say right now?”

To act in the world with love, we must cultivate love in our own lives.  To hold the world accountable to loving, right relationships, we must hold ourselves accountable to the same. In the coming weeks, I am going to take each morning and read two or three of these, and just spend 5 minutes bringing them into my consciousness.  I invite you to try this practice with me.  Together, we can change the world.

Looking forward to seeing you this Sunday as we delve more deeply into the spiritual roots of justice work and consider how TRUU can grow in our engagement with social change work in our community.

With love and in faith,

Gretchen

 

 

February Thoughts from the TRUU Board President

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Your TRUU Board is committed to greater communication with you. We are available after the services to hear your comments and suggestions. Minutes of the meetings are on the website and my monthly columns will appear there, too. Do you have questions or topics for me to address in future columns? Let me know, tjzabel@gmail.com.

In January, I shared information about the Visioning process that TRUU is currently undertaking so you would know what your board and some of the committees are working on. Also in January, when our theme for ministry was Authority, Gretchen reminded us that we “must continually decide whose voice to listen to, what the truth is, and what that truth asks of us is.” This month I’d like to expand on that.

How often have you heard non-UUs say that our religion is one in which you can believe whatever you want? Is that accurate? Are we free as Unitarian Universalists to believe anything at all? I’ll refer you to our Seven Principles listed on the website, and listed in each Sunday’s Order of Service and also to the six sources from which we as UUs draw our faith. I’ve listed them below.

I’ll quote from an esteemed minister. “So, if freedom is not the exclusive property of our Unitarian Universalist lifestyle, what might be a more accurate characteristic of our lifestyle? I suggest that a far better characterization is openness…. And that when we so open ourselves the end result can be an evolution of knowing that is attended by a terrible joy. Terrible meaning overwhelming in its ecstasy.”

This minister goes on to quote Mohandas Gandhi, “My aim is not to be consistent with my previous statements on a given question, but to be consistent with truth as it may present itself to me at the given moment. The result has been that I have grown from truth to truth.” 

So think about what you’ve been asked to do this year. I hope that each Sunday with Gretchen, on each Fellowship Sunday, and all the other events you have experienced like the Blessing of the Animals or the Solstice celebration that you have been placed “on the edge of (your) growth potential and the evolution of truth in (your) living.”

Our “job” as we sit in those chairs on Sundays or as we attend other TRUU events is to be open to new truths and new ways of approaching old ideas. The upcoming visioning party will give all of us an opportunity to really open up to the great future ahead, to the potential for growth, both individually and collectively. How do we decide, as we try on new ideas, which ones we will adopt as our own and which ones we will reject or take more time to mull over? For Unitarian Universalists, we use logic and our inner voice to determine these things because we are not chained by dogma. We are asked to think for ourselves, to practice openness when presented with new and maybe even uncomfortable ideas.

And if we wish to participate in “personal and societal transformation” as our mission urges, societal transformation being our social justice work, we must first be open to that personal transformation. To quote that esteemed minister once again, “In freedom, each of us chooses how open or closed to new truth we will be.”

How open will you be?

Thelma Zabel, TRUU Board President

The quotes in this article are taken from “Nope! It’s not Freedom, Reason, and Tolerance” a sermon by Rev. Robert Latham on 11/14/10. The entire sermon is available in the archives section of our website.

Our Six sources:

  • Direct experience of that transcending mystery and wonder, affirmed in all cultures, which moves us to a renewal of the spirit and an openness to the forces which create and uphold life;
  • Words and deeds of prophetic women and men which challenge us to confront powers and structures of evil with justice, compassion, and the transforming power of love;
  • Wisdom from the world’s religions which inspires us in our ethical and spiritual life;
  • Jewish and Christian teachings which call us to respond to God’s love by loving our neighbors as ourselves;
  • Humanist teachings which counsel us to heed the guidance of reason and the results of science, and warn us against idolatries of the mind and spirit;
  • Spiritual teachings of earth-centered traditions which celebrate the sacred circle of life and instruct us to live in harmony with the rhythms of nature.

 

The principles and sources of faith are the backbone of our religious community. From uua.org