June 5, 2022
We will host an in-person and virtual worship service on Sunday, June 5th at 10:15 am.
The Blessing and Beauty of Community
We celebrate the annual tradition of the flower communion, a cherished and uniquely Unitarian Universalist ritual, created by Unitarian Minister and founder of the Unitarian Church in Czechoslovakia, Nobert Capek (1870-1942), to lift up joy in the midst of despair. Please bring flowers, whether from your garden or purchased, to add to our collective bouquet. Together we will express gratitude for the resilience we bring to one another.
Please submit your Joys and Sorrows through this online form. If you submit a message by 9 am, we will try to read it that Sunday. Thank you for your patience as we are adapting to best serve you all! Note there will only be one service time so that we can gather together as a whole community of faith. You can still give to the shared offering through “text to give,” mail a check to the office with “shared offering” in the memo line, or go to our website and hit “give” on the upper right or click here. This Sunday’s shared offering recipient is Restore Justice Foundation.
From Rev. Susan Frances: May 27, 2022
Dear Friends,
I just returned from a road trip to Chesapeake, Virginia, where I participated in the installation of The Rev. Viola Abbitt as the minister of the Coastal Virginia Unitarian Universalists. The photo is of me enjoying the beauty of the sunrise over the Atlantic Ocean. The ceremony was a beautiful reaffirmation of our faith tradition’s reliance on covenant to bind us together.
Covenant, or the promises we make to each other about how we will be in relationship, is the how to our what. The what is our mission and our vision. Having just adopted our new Values Statements or vision at our annual meeting, my thoughts are on how our agreement to be in a covenantal relationship as reflected in our Sunday morning covenant, our Covenant of Engagement, and our Principles aids us as we live out our stated values within our UCE community and out in the world.
When I think of covenant, I often think of a story from my childhood. The story of Noah and the ark. The version I learned as a child is the version from the Torah and the Biblical Old Testament, which ends with a rainbow to mark God’s covenant with humankind. The story is about a great flood sent by God that destroyed everything on earth but the people and animals in the ark that Noah built. When the waters of the flood subsided, God made a covenant with Noah that God would never again send a flood to destroy the earth. And as a sign of that promise, God said, “I have placed My rainbow in the clouds, and it shall be a sign of the covenant between Me and the earth. When I bring clouds over the earth, the rainbow will be seen among the clouds. I will then recall the covenant that exists between Me, you and every living soul in all flesh.” (The Book of Bereshith (Genesis) 9: 13-15, The Living Torah: The Five Books of Noah).
The part of this story that I have been thinking about this week is that God left a reminder of the covenant. Not a reminder for the humans, but a reminder for God. That when God next becomes mad, angry, disappointed, exasperated, or heartbroken with how humans are behaving, and again sends the storm clouds for a flood to destroy the earth, a rainbow will appear in the clouds as a reminder of how God promised to behave. It is a story that affirms for me what I have experienced about how the promises we make about how we will engage with one another are often hard to keep. That we break our promises with each other and need to be called back into covenantal relationship.
Some reminders are put into place so that we come across them on occasion, like the rainbow. Each Sunday morning, we say our covenant from 1894, written by The Rev. James Vila Blake:
Love is the spirit of this church
and service is its law.
This is our great covenant:
to dwell together in peace,
to seek the truth in love
and to help one another.
It is a reminder of our promise to engage with each other fully and honestly. It is a reminder of our fuller Covenant of Engagement that this congregation proactively developed in 2011 to help us engage with each other as we do the hard work of caring for and growing our community. It is a reminder of our Congregational Relations Team that is available to support us when being in relationship is difficult.
Reminders may also be something unplanned that reminds us of our commitments. My time at the Atlantic coast this past week was a reminder to me of my personal promise to care for the earth. My time with colleagues during Rev. Viola’s installation was a reminder of my personal promise to care for my colleagues. This week, as I vacillate among rage, heartbreak, and numbness after the school shooting in Texas, I am trying hard to be open to those unexpected reminders that bring me back to my commitment to living out our new Values Statements and our 8 Principles in the world.
Before I returned home from the wonderful installation ceremony in Virginia last Saturday, the horrible school shooting in Uvalde, Texas occurred. Already in 2022, before the horrific events in Uvalde, there had been at least 77 incidents of gunfire on school grounds, resulting in 14 deaths and 45 injuries across 31 states. And that does not count what we call mass shootings at locations other than schools.
Deeply disappointed by the lack of gun control policies, the lack of mental health care services, the lack of funding for education and support for educators, the overfunding and lack of accountability of the police, and the way we are failing our children, I must admit that I am struggling to find those reminders that bring me back to the covenants articulated through our Principles. Those promises to address my anger by acting to make our society a safer and more peaceful place (6th & 8th Principles), to address my despair by caring for myself and others (2nd & 3rd Principles), and to address my numbness by finding ways to connect with other people and with nature (7th Principle). So, I hope this note may act as a reminder for you to care for yourself as well as caring for others. To get engaged in caring for and improving our society, in whatever form that takes from conversations with children and youth to letters to protests. To do what you can to stay connected, whether online or in-person, with friends, family, and this faith community that shares in the many ranges of emotions we are feeling in the wake of the ongoing gun violence.
We are often practicing how to hold both hardship and joy. Figuring out how to bask in the glory of our celebrations and successes, whether that is the birth of a grandchild or participating in an installation service, and simultaneously embrace the depths of grief, whether that is due to the death of a loved one or of strangers in a far-away place, is challenging. Our covenants and promises to each other, to our society, and to the earth are there to guide us on this complex journey. To comfort us. To buoy us up. To bind us together.
You are invited to leave yourself a reminder that you will come across on occasion to remind you that you are part of a covenantal community, called into accountable and loving relationship. To remind you that you are loved, you are valued, and that if you need help, to reach out to me, or Rev. Eileen, or someone on the Pastoral Care Team.
Yours in covenantal community,
Rev. Susan
May 29, 2022
We will host an in-person and virtual worship service on Sunday, May 29th at 10:15 am.
Tending Our Metaphorical Cups
Grief and trauma have all too often been a part of our lives over the past two years. The strain and stress of such events often drains our energy, manifests in physical pain, brings up existential questions, and affects our disposition. During times such as these, it is important to attend to our metaphorical cups, so they don’t run dry. On this Memorial Day Weekend, we will honor our grief, acknowledge our trauma, and attend to the care and hope that has the ability to fill our mental, physical, spiritual, and emotional cups.
Please submit your Joys and Sorrows through this online form. If you submit a message by 9 am, we will try to read it that Sunday. Thank you for your patience as we are adapting to best serve you all! Note there will only be one service time so that we can gather together as a whole community of faith. You can still give to the shared offering through “text to give,” mail a check to the office with “shared offering” in the memo line, or go to our website and hit “give” on the upper right or click here. This Sunday’s shared offering recipient is Mother and Child Alliance.
From Kathy Underwood: May 20, 2022
Grand Parenting and the Congregation
Sometime within the next few weeks, my spouse Todd and I will become first-time grandparents. I know many of you have experienced the joy of a new baby to hold and help raise, no matter the geographical distance between you. Added to this joy, my son and daughter-in-law want to raise their daughter in a UU congregation. A fifth-generation UU in my family! How many mid-westerners can say that?
And yet I worry that as they navigate parenthood and look towards the congregation for support that they will be let down. Not intentionally. It rarely happens that way, thank goodness. It can happen in smaller, more subtle ways.
When our middle child was born, our congregation was in the process of reconstructing an old barn on a rural piece of land and was renting space at a local middle school for worship and Sunday programs. It was a fairly large space that was open, and while not as big as UCE, sound was a bit of an issue. And although we were fortunate that our kids were pretty mild-mannered for their age, they did babble in baby-talk and make some noise when scribbling on the back of the order of service.
One winter morning we sat near the back of the space as usual. Maybe 10 minutes later, we heard “Shhhh” behind us. I couldn’t tell where it came from. I glanced at Todd with a questioning look, which asked “should we stay or go?” We just shrugged a bit and stayed, although feeling awkward and self-conscious. For the rest of the worship service, I was so paranoid that my kids were disrupting people that I couldn’t tell you what the service was about that day.
I’m glad to say that this was the only time we experienced this (I’m sure it’s because of my well-mannered kids, tongue in cheek), but over the years I have thought about it occasionally. I wonder how many other parents have had a similar interaction, and whether or not it led to them leaving our doors never to have returned.
On occasion, I have witnessed a toddler having a meltdown at the grocery store. My first reaction is to make eye contact with the parent and say something like, “It’s a tough job some days.” Sometimes I offer to help, but many times I don’t.
While I don’t think a parent would avoid a grocery store because their child had a meltdown and caused a scene, a religious community is different, especially a UU congregation. It’s not like there is a UU congregation in every town to choose from. Because we are a covenantal community, building relationships is so important. How do we put our trust and faith in our community when another’s action is not in covenant? What compels us to stay?
In going even further, I think generations of white, European-centered culture play into this too. We are challenged by those expectations about parenting that we grew up with and are now ingrained in us. And in many UU circles, educational status plays into this as well – as in the stereotype that highly educated people behave in a more controlled, refined manner. Somewhere in time the idea was presented to think of those who can’t control their children as “less than” and it continues today. Maybe it will never change. Maybe it will change when white, European-centered culture becomes the minority. For us at UCE more importantly, how do we change our culture and attitude about children as vital (and sometimes noisy) part of our worship life and faith community?
With our work with Rev. Karen, we said we wanted our children and youth to be integral to our community and our mission. We said we wanted children to be heard, not just seen. Parents tell me that they want support to raise kids who are independent thinkers, who question and seek answers, who dream of a better world and help make it a reality, and who are able to be their full selves among us.
Yet we also need to balance the needs of our youngest with those of our eldest and those with other challenges, such as hearing, sight, and mobility. How do we welcome and accommodate all of the people with all of their needs at the same time? Perhaps we are setting ourselves up for failure as we can’t make every experience fit everyone’s needs. We do our best to direct our efforts to as many of these challenges as we can. We most certainly can stay in covenant as we navigate through these challenges and doing so with respect and grace says a lot about our community.
And the next time I see a child and parent struggling, I will smile sympathetically and ask how I can help.
In Faith,
Kathy
May 22, 2022
We will host an in-person and virtual worship service on Sunday, May 22nd at 10:15 am.
Owning Our History, Envisioning Our Future
Sankofa is a word in the Twi language of Ghana, meaning “go back and get it;” we must look back and know who we are to move forward into who we want to be. Our newly adopted values statements include a commitment to honestly and bravely explore our shared history and this exploration will inform our actions in the future. How will we embark on this exploration of our history, bravely telling the truth and imagining the more just and equitable world we want to build? Rev. Eileen leads this service with Joe Romeo as Worship Associate.
Please submit your Joys and Sorrows through this online form. If you submit a message by 9 am, we will try to read it that Sunday. Thank you for your patience as we are adapting to best serve you all! Note there will only be one service time so that we can gather together as a whole community of faith. You can still give to the shared offering through “text to give,” mail a check to the office with “shared offering” in the memo line, or go to our website and hit “give” on the upper right or click here. This Sunday’s shared offering recipient is UU Prison Ministry of Illinois (UUPMI).
Nominating & Recruiting Task Force: May 13, 2022
At the urging of our interim minister, Rev. Karen Gustufson, and in response to concerns expressed by members of the Nominating and Recruiting Committee, the Board has determined to form a Nominating and Recruiting Task Force. If you are interested in becoming a member of this Task Force, please send an email to Joe Romeo, (BoT@UCEvanston.org) by May 31. We want to form a group that will bring as many different perspectives as possible to this endeavor. If you know someone who would be an excellent addition to this task force, please encourage them to contact Joe.
The Task Force will review the policies and procedures that support and guide the work of the Nominating & Recruiting Committee, which is charged with creating a slate of candidates for elected leadership roles for consideration at the UCE annual meeting. Their work is done in alignment with our UU principles and with the specific goal of minimizing bias and widening the circle among those invited, nominated, and elected. This Task Force is a temporary group whose specific purposes will be defined through discussions and surveying of the Nominating & Recruiting Committee and the congregation. We hope that this work will be completed by winter, 2023.
The Task Force will consist of fewer than ten members. It is the goal of those organizing this task force that it will be representative of all UCE members. In particular, we are looking for a member who has recruitment experience in a professional and/or volunteer capacity.
The members of the Task Force will work collaboratively. The Task Force will also be soliciting recommendations from the congregation. The end result will be for the Task Force to present the committee’s findings to the Board, and then, if Bylaw changes are recommended, those would be presented to the congregation at the annual May meeting in 2023. If you have any questions, please contact BoT@UCEvanston.org.
May 15, 2022
We will host an in-person and virtual worship service on Sunday, May 15th at 10:15 am.
Wider and Deeper Than Tolerance
Intolerance is clearly on the rise. The chasms between people on opposing sides of any and all issues are deepening and widening. Amidst such divisions and polarization, is mere tolerance really the aim? If we can’t count on basic tolerance, how can we build our capacity for genuine curiosity, openness, celebration of difference, and a willingness to be transformed in life-giving ways? Carla Williams and Cheryl Mounts were the bidders at the 2021 Serendipity Auction who won the chance to talk with Rev. Eileen and plan this sermon topic. Diane Markel will be the Worship Associate.
Please submit your Joys and Sorrows through this online form. If you submit a message by 9 am, we will try to read it that Sunday. Thank you for your patience as we are adapting to best serve you all! Note there will only be one service time so that we can gather together as a whole community of faith. You can still give to the shared offering through “text to give,” mail a check to the office with “shared offering” in the memo line, or go to our website and hit “give” on the upper right or click here. This Sunday’s shared offering recipient is UU Prison Ministry of Illinois (UUPMI).