September 2010 Newsletter of the
Keweenaw Unitarian Universalist Fellowship
We are a Welcoming Congregation of people of diverse religious and
spiritual beliefs.
September 2010 Newsletter of the
Keweenaw Unitarian Universalist Fellowship
We are a Welcoming Congregation of people of diverse religious and
spiritual beliefs.
September 5:
Labor Day Service "In Praise of
Work"
September 12: Forum: A sing along with songs from the
50’s and 60’s led by David Owens at the piano. David will choose and talk about the first few
songs and then he will take requests. Word sheets will be provided.
September 19: "Margaret
Fuller, Before Her Time" Transcendentalist, scholar, feminist, writer and
editor, a visit with this remarkable woman illuminates some of our current
dilemmas. Pot luck lunch.
September 26: "Fellowship
Anniversary: 25 Plus Ten" In the nation of
FELLOWSHIP PICNIC at
Our minister is The Reverend Dr. Sydney A. Morris, ph. 370-3927, samorris@uuma.org.
___________________________________
There is a link
"Sermon Recordings" on the left side column on our www.kuuf.net
website. You can hear audio recordings of many of
September birthdays. 7th, Sydney Morris;
8th, Laurie Bornhorst; 12th, Maya Rao; 15th, Meagan Harless; 29th, Dan
Alder. As always, if you know of anyone who should be on this list (or
any of the birthday lists) please let Dorothy Love know. #
Directions to the
Crop Walk: You can make a secure
online contribution to the KUUF CROPwalk team. Go to www.churchworldservice.org; click
on CROP Hunger Walks; click on "find a walk"; click on Michigan on
the map; click on Copper Country in the list; click on find a team and enter
kuuf. There you will be able to make a contribution on-line. The
walk is October 3rd at 1:30pm, speak to Barry Fink to be a walker. Barry
will also be accepting donations on Sunday mornings. UUSC is a member
organization of Church World Service. 75% of the collection is for
national and international aid and 25% stays with local food banks. This the
21st annual Copper Country CROP walk.
Church World Service has earned the
highest rating--four out of four stars--from Charity
Navigator, the independent
organization that evaluates the financial health of
Is there a KUUF committee you would like to serve
on? Tell Harriet King at 482-0506. #
Please help with hospitality 5 times per year
or about every two months. Choose dates that work best for you. Thank you! #
We have created a page for sharing all sorts of
interesting information that is not directly KUUF or UUA or Midwest District
related. To access this Facebook page, go to our kuuf.net site and go
down the links on the left side. The link to click is just below
"minister's midmonth". Then bookmark the page and check it
regularly for new events, articles, entertainment, etc. Anyone can see
it, you don't have to be a facebook user. If have something to share but aren't
on Facebook yourself, you can send your item to Barry Fink barryfink@chartermi.net
or Amlan amlan.m@gmail.com to
post it for you. #
A Retrospective show of
John Haro's
renderings, architectural drawings, paintings, etc will open Saturday evening,
Aug. 28, at 7 PM in the Rozsa Gallery on the Lower Level. According to
Susanna Brent, who is coordinating it, there "will be a brief
reception" at that time and it will be open to the public daily until
October 15th. Admission to the gallery is free of charge. #
Lets Take Off the Hair
Shirt –
Marilyn Sewell:
Unitarian Universalists have been, as Paul Rasor puts it, “engaged in wrenching
self-examination” since we declared our earnest wish to become truly
multicultural and multiracial almost eighteen years ago in the 1992 General
Assembly. Over the years, we have continued to witness to our “failure” in
countless articles, speeches, and sermons, castigating ourselves as insensitive
and intransigent. It’s time to take off the hair shirt.
We UUs are precisely human,
nothing more and nothing less. What distinguishes us, if anything, is our
fervent wish to become better than we are and to heal a broken and suffering
world. But when we try to bring together people of different cultures and
classes, we are subject to the same challenges as other human beings. Some of
the challenges are especially daunting. A growing body of research shows, for
example, that higher diversity results in less interaction and cooperation
among people.
Robert D. Putnam, the Harvard
political scientist and author of Bowling
Alone: America’s Declining Social Capital, completed another
significant study in 2001, this one regarding the impact of diversity on trust
and community-building. Interviewing 30,000 subjects, he found that “in
ethnically diverse neighborhoods, residents of all races tend to ‘hunker down.’
Trust (even of one’s own race) is lower, altruism and community cooperation
rarer, friends fewer.”
A sense of community can grow
amid diversity, Putnam argued, but it takes a long time and requires extended
interaction between groups.
Racial and cultural integration
comes when people actually get to know one another, and the built-in fear of
“the other” is dissipated through experience. It will come, as it has already, when
people are brought together by institutional necessity, as in our armed
services, in sports, in integrated schools where young people learn and play
together. In these settings, people find themselves engaged in common tasks
where they encounter more than surface skin color and unfamiliar traditions,
settings where they can observe their common humanity.
Unitarian Universalists should be
commended for wanting to create churches where culture and class don’t separate
and divide. But it does a disservice to all when well-meaning progressives
underestimate the very real obstacles we are up against. We’re very long on the
“should” and very short on the “how.”
The only church groups that
approach being multicultural are Roman Catholicism and evangelical
mega-churches. Why have they been successful and we have not? Are they just
more open and accepting of differences than Unitarian Universalists? Or could
it be that their answers to the mysteries of existence are cleaner and clearer
than ours and therefore have a broader appeal?
.Perhaps we should begin by
humbly asking ourselves what realistic goals might be institutionally possible
for us, and then leave behind the hubris that has led us to so much self-flagellation
and so little accomplishment. #
Building Houses,
Strengthening a Church – Jane Greer: A Unitarian Universalist church
in
The
What makes
the Bridges program special? Many say that it’s working with the Nicaraguan
community. In the house-building program, volunteer groups are assigned to a
particular town or village with the goal of building one or two houses. The
Nicaraguan community is responsible for making all of the decisions about what
they want, and, in the case of houses, who should get them. Bridges provides a
Nicaraguan mason to oversee the construction of each project. The building
crews consist of the visiting volunteers, the family who will be getting the
house, and other members of the community.
Working with the family who will
be occupying the house as well as other community members creates a bond
between the volunteers and villagers. “At the beginning of each weeks, the
villagers made a speech thanking us for coming” Bruce Ambuel said. “They
thanked us for leaving our families and traveling so far, and they thanked our
families for being without us. Then they said, ‘You are members of our
community and members of our family and you will always be welcome back here.’
It’s very moving to have a personal connection like that.”
“We get as much out of it as the
Nicaraguans and we learn so much about family and community life and the value
of those two things and how strong they are in
Anita O’Conor believes that the
experience in
Some
Bob Chang, who went on his first
brigade with his two sons Stephen, 17, and Michael, 21, said, “I think it
changed my relationship with both of the boys. We were in an environment that
wasn’t the typical parent-child environment,” he said. “You were working side
by side with them. You were their peer down there; you weren’t their parent. I
think it’s led to a warmer relationship with both of the boys back home.”
Stephen Chang agrees. “It was a
lot of fun working with my father and brother,” he said. “I felt like I got to
know my father and brother better, especially my brother, who’s been away at
college.”
The experience has been life
changing for some of the teens accompanying their parents. “My daughter was on
three brigades,” Daniel said. “She subsequently went to college and majored in
Spanish and minored in social work. She graduated a year ago and went down to
O’Conor’s daughters followed a
similar path. One daughter went back and volunteered for a month in
Nic Cable, 21, went on two
brigades, one in 2008 with his mother and one in 2010 with his father and brother.
A senior in college, he is planning to go to divinity school to study for the
UU ministry. The trips were an important part of his discernment process about
entering the ministry. “These trips opened my eyes to the power of our liberal
faith tradition,” he said.
Ambuel, who has been on a brigade
with his three children and son-in-law, said that he thought that youth and
young adult participation in the trips was of crucial importance. “It’s hard to
keep adolescents and young adults engaged in church,” he said. “This is a
powerful way to keep them engaged.”
“I really enjoyed working
side-by-side with my own children and getting to know other young people on
both trips,” Ambuel said. “You develop a relationship with high school and
college kids that you wouldn’t get to develop in any other way in any other
setting. In our society and in our congregations there are not that many
opportunities to work together across generations. A Bridges trip is a really
powerful way to build connections.”
Bridges to Community, founded in
1992, is a nonprofit, nonsectarian organization that brings groups of all kinds
to
Keweenaw Unitarian Universalist Fellowship
projects. The organization is
headquartered in
The Brookfield congregation had
some initial reservations about participating in this project, said Rev. Lynch,
the congregation’s minister since 2003. “It was a reflection of where the
church was at the time,” she said. “It was in a hurting place. They had had a
conflicted departure of a previous minister and then three years of interim
ministry. I was brand new and they hardly knew me yet. So I think there was
some mistrust in the system.”
Sponsoring the
.