July 2010 Newsletter of the Keweenaw
Unitarian Universalist Fellowship
We are a Welcoming Congregation of people of diverse religious and
spiritual beliefs.
July 2010 Newsletter of the Keweenaw
Unitarian Universalist Fellowship
We are a Welcoming Congregation of people of diverse religious and
spiritual beliefs.
July 4:
"The Fate of Nations" The song we sing to the tune of Finlandia
reminds us that while we have deep and abiding affection for our country, so
too do other people for theirs. In order to fulfill a patriotic duty,
let's look at the bigger picture, and the changes in the scope and nature of
nationhood itself.
July 11: Forum.
Ken Kraft talks about Susie Kraft’s
grandfather, W. A. Wheeler. Born in 1876 into a Congregational family, he
evolved into a Unitarian. He was a college professor and a pioneer in the U.S.
Dept. of Agriculture.
July 18: "Inch by Inch" The annual garden service
extolling the virtues of patience, and all green growing things. POTLUCK TODAY!
July 25: "Why World Religions?" Our Principles
imply respect and lifelong learning about so many things: why a world full of
religions, when we have our own - or do we?
Our minister is The Reverend Dr. Sydney A. Morris, ph. 370-3927, samorris@uuma.org.
___________________________________
July birthdays: 6th, Mari Clanaugh; 7th,
Jim Belote; 16th, Tom Hiltunen, Rolf Swanson; 17th, Jim Boyce; 21st, Bruce
Granat; 22nd, Cory McDonald, David Owens; 23rd, Joe Dobbs; 24th, Bowen Li,
May Amelia Shapton; 27th, Nick Rao. #
Please help with hospitality 5 times per year
or about every two months. Choose dates that work best for you. Thank you! #
Sign outside a
“There
are no passengers
on Spaceship Earth. Everybody’s crew.”- Marshall McCluhan #
CROP Walk, Communities Responding to
Overcome Poverty, a fundraising project of Church World Service, working in some 80
countries, seeks to help by:
• Providing emergency food
aid and long-term development assistance
• Promoting educational
opportunities for women and girls
• Supporting infant health
and nutrition services
• Securing durable
solutions for refugees and displaced peoples
• Developing sustainable,
safe sources of drinking water and promoting water as a basic human right to
policymakers
•
Advocating for just trade rules and the reduction of the debt of poor nations
UUSC
is a member organization of Church World Service. Our annual participation in CROP Walk will be
on Sunday, Oct 3rd. See Barry
Fink to join the team of walkers and/or plan to sponsor a walker. #
There will be a memorial service to celebrate the
life of Susie Kraft at 2 pm, Saturday, July 31 in our meeting room. At 6 pm that day there will be a potluck
picnic for friends and relatives of Susie in the large pavilion in
The oil spill and the soul
of nature:
You
don't have to be a Pagan to know that animals have awareness and are capable of
both suffering and compassion--every dog owner knows that! Pagans see all the
world as animate, imbued with life and spirit. Every aspect of life is
important and has a role to play in the whole.
The
Pagan view sees everything as interconnected. As we look at the pictures of
birds and sea creatures drenched in toxic oil and dying, we are horrified both
by the individual suffering they represent and by the toll on the larger
systems of life. The suffering of a seabird causes me pain, whether or not I
allow it to come to consciousness. The toll of the spill on the life and
biodiversity of the Gulf diminishes us all.
No
amount of money can ever repair the damage that BP has done by its criminal
negligence and carelessness. BP never had a realistic plan to deal with an
accident or a spill. They cut corners on safety and plumbing, and attempted to
conceal the scope of the disaster and the amount of oil that is actually
leaking. Their callousness has caused irreparable damage to the ecosystems of
the Gulf and may have destroyed whole communities whose culture is linked to
the once-thriving biodiversity of the bayous and deltas of the south. They must
be held accountable for the damage as far as amends can be made, and in a way
severe enough to prove a deterrent to other companies tempted to put profits
above the safety of their own workers and the environment.
If
a vandal spilled oil over a neighbor's yard, he'd be sent to jail. Why should
BP executives go free, when they are responsible for the greatest environmental
catastrophe in
The
BP disaster should be a clear lesson to us all--that the age of oil is over. We
cannot afford the impact on the earth's climate of continuing to burn fossil
fuels, nor the risks inherent in searching for oil in ever-deeper water or more
pristine places. Were the costs of disasters and cleanups, the immense costs in
life and suffering factored into the costs of production, it would be clear
that oil has become unaffordable by any standard. Yes, we will all be required
to give us some comforts and convenience to make the shift--but not nearly as
many as people fear. Safe and renewable alternatives exist--sun, wind, water, a
bit of muscle power, a focus on the local and the truly sustainable would give
us an energy policy and the beginning of a new culture and economy that could
bring us back into balance with the natural world. Without that balance, there
is no security. No terrorist attack on the
The
world needs to shift to values which have long been held by Pagans but are
certainly not unique to us. Indeed, every religion holds within it an
imperative to care for and nurture creation. We must make a shift to a culture
that values life over profits and the health of the environment over the
financial balance sheet. To do so is not only a moral and religious imperative
but a matter of survival. We are meant to be earth healers, not destroyers, and
a moral person is one who cares for the web of life which sustains and supports
us all. –Starhawk, June 19,
2010. #
From Peter Morales, President of
the UUA:
Some congregations have it. Others don’t. And it
doesn’t take long to figure out if a congregation has “it” or not. We sense it
right away. It is unmistakable.
Some
congregations are full of life. The energy fills the room. The warmth is
palpable. We feel it in worship. We sense it in coffee hour. There is something
about the “buzz.” We see people smile and embrace. They engage one another.
Alas,
some congregations—far too many—don’t have it. They feel lifeless, cold,
moribund. Why is this? What makes the difference between being full of life and
warmth versus being dead and cold?
I
think the difference is religion. Really. Religion. The key to the future for
every single congregation and for Unitarian Universalism as a movement is
whether we can “get religion.” If we “get religion” we will thrive. We will
touch lives and change the world. If we don’t, we will decline.
Perhaps
I should explain.
We
tend to think of religion as a set of beliefs. That is a huge mistake. Religion
is much more about what we love than about what we think. This emphasis on
belief, especially on “true religion” being about correct belief, is a modern
aberration. If we look at religions historically and across cultures, we
discover that in fact belief has very little to do with religion. Some
religious traditions, like Buddhism, have virtually no beliefs.
Consider
the Hebrew tradition that gave rise to Christianity. The prophets in the
scriptures show no interest in correct belief. They show a lot of interest in
how people behave and whether they are faithful to their covenant.
Actually,
the very word “religion” comes from a Latin root that means to tie, to bind.
Ultimately what ties us together, what makes us a religion, a united people, is
what we love. Religion, our religion, is what we truly care about, what we want
to preserve, embrace, and create.
The
questions we ask one another are so critically important. If you and I ask each
other what we believe, we will get into talking about very heady stuff. We will
put forth our beliefs and then support them with evidence and argument. All too
often we will end up arguing. I know. I have done more than my share.
However,
when we ask one another what we truly love, what we truly value, what we care
about more than anything else in life, something amazing happens. We don’t
argue. We listen. We connect. We discover that we love and want the same
things. We care about one another. We want honesty, depth, and intimacy in our
relationships. We want enduring friendships.
We
also discover that we realize that we are all in this life together. We want to
help heal the world. We want compassion, understanding, and justice to guide
our actions and our governments. We want to work together, hand in hand, to
build a world beyond exploitation and violence.
When
you and I focus on what we love and what we long to create, something almost
miraculous happens. We are energized. We form lasting bonds. We become eager to
commit ourselves and to work together. We become more generous. We come to care
more about “us” and less about “me.”
In
other words, when we focus on what we love we “get religion.”
The
truth is that we do care deeply about the same things. We share a vision. In
our congregations there is love, idealism, and energy waiting to be released.
When we release these, when we really let our people go, we transform lives and
change the world.
Let’s
get religion. I can’t wait to see what we can do together.
#
May 23 marked the bicentennial of the birth of Sarah Margaret Fuller, one of the three principal thinkers
of the Transcendentalist movement, the vanguard theorist on women’s equality
and gender roles in
In her relatively brief life,
from her birth to a Unitarian family in
“Of all the women in [Unitarian
Universalist] history who have made a really significant contribution, she is
certainly at the top of the list, yet we’re relatively ignorant about her,”
says the Rev. Dr. Dorothy Emerson, who is cochairing one of three UU-related
Margaret Fuller bicentennial committees. She admits that she herself only
recently learned the full scope of Fuller’s work. “It’s really revealing of how
we lift up men and what men do, that we could claim Transcendentalism and not
understand how significant her role was in it. In so many ways she’s embedded
in our whole movement.”
Fuller is best known for writing
the first American manifesto for women’s equality, Woman of the Nineteenth Century,
published in 1845. It was forward-looking for any time, but especially in a
time when women’s lives were confined to home, an era when colleges didn’t even
admit women. It became an internationally known bestseller.
“If you ask me what offices women
may fill: I will reply—any,” she wrote. “I do not care what case you put; let
them be sea-captains, if you will. . . . I have no doubt, however, that a large
proportion of women would give themselves to the same employments as now. . . .
Mothers will delight to make the nest soft and warm. . . . The difference would
be that all need not be constrained to employments, for which some are unfit. .
. . By being more a soul, she will not be less woman, for nature is perfected
through spirit.”
Fuller went further than calling
for the need to open colleges and professions to women and to give women voting
and property rights. She also dove into the concept of “gender roles”—which few
really explored until the Second Wave of feminism in the 1970s—arguing that we
all have characteristics that our culture has deemed male or female.
Keweenaw Unitarian Universalist Fellowship
But to characterize Fuller’s
contributions on that work alone would be like describing an elephant by
looking only at its trunk.
“One reason she’s a little
confusing to people is that she can’t really be pegged,” says Megan Marshall,
who is now at work on a book called The Passion of Margaret Fuller.
“She had so many activities; it’s hard to say what she was. You can say Emerson
was a philosopher, Thoreau a naturalist. Fuller really was the first female
public intellectual, like Susan Sontag, Mary McCarthy, or Simone de Beauvoir.
I’m personally shocked that she’s faded from the public mind.”
Fuller was just three when her
father decided it was time to begin her education. A Harvard-trained lawyer and
congressman, Timothy Fuller instructed her in the same rigorous classical
education he’d had: Latin, Greek, grammar, history, math, music, and modern
languages. (Continued on the UUA web site.) #
Please send material for the August Newsletter by July 20 to
Ken Kraft, kkraft2@earthlink.net.