Sep 24, 2021
It was a lot of fun getting together to celebrate and share music and desserts last Saturday even in the rain and the dark! Thanks to all of the musicians and storytellers. All of the bakers and folks who helped with setup and cleanup! And thanks especially to Bev Lawson who was the head organizer for the event and to our MC Art Holmberg who is also leading our Stewardship 2022 effort. We got a great start on pledges for 2022 and I hope we can keep that momentum going! If we averaged out our budget needs equally among our households, I think it comes to just over two thousand dollars each, but of course we are not all of equal means. Give what is right for you. We need Unitarian Universalism to be healthy and vital for ourselves, and Saratoga Springs and our surrounding community needs a vital UU congregation for its own well-being!
The all-online UU congregation, the Church of the Larger Fellowship, sponsored a collection of individual UU’s testifying to how Unitarian Universalism saved their lives. In the resulting book, Testimony: The Transformative Power of Unitarian Universalism, Scott Sammler-Michael says,
“I know that Unitarian Universalism saves lives, because it saved mine. Salvation is no metaphor. Unitarian Universalism offers us a faith that restores vision, a faith that is emotionally literate, intellectually mature, socially relevant, spiritually grounded, morally courageous, ethically innate, concerned for other, and self-loving—especially when things fall apart. Our focus on the transformative power of love derives from the intuition that we are expressions of divinity in the deepest core of our souls. And because of this we are called to unconditional, redemptive love. We love ourselves by loving each other . . .”
It’s always been true that we need one another, but let’s take a moment to feel the new ways that we’re needing one another and our best UU selves these days. And let’s recognize anew how, in the acts of loving ourselves loving each other “we imitate the divine, that creative power of the universe and of human culture . . .” (to again hear Sammler-Michael’s words). In my colleague Theresa I. Soto’s words: All of us need all of us to make it! You can make your pledge to the vitality of UU Saratoga here: bit.ly/uusaratoga-pledge2022.
Blessings,
Rev. Joe
P.S. I discovered when setting up for Saturday’s event that one of the folding chairs that I had brought for people to use at our water communion service on Sep 12 at High Rock hadn’t made it back to my car. What I expect is that, looking neglected, somebody took pity on it and took it home. So if you picked up a folding chair by CGI Outdoors that is a rocking chair, please let me know! It is one of a pair that were a gift from my mother-in law. (It looks just like the picture below.) Thanks for taking care of it for me!