The final words of my final letter to you as Board President is about the upcoming year. WSUU has experienced a long transitional period. Rev. Peg retired just shy of three years ago. Our DRE Betsy Lowry retired a year later. We had an interim minister who stayed with us
Continue readingIt is with great joy and excitement that I announce that I have graduated from the Chaplaincy Institute in Berkeley and have been approved for ordination as an Interfaith Minister and chaplain. The ordination ceremony will be held on September 22, 2018 in Berkeley. In the world of Religious Exploration,
Continue reading“What’s the hardest part of being an interim Minister?” The above question was one of those questions from last summer’s “Stump the Minister” service. I’d planned to respond to the unanswered questions over the course of this church year. Events caught up with us and I had to delay the
Continue readingBelow is the podcast our wonderfully caring 4th-5th grade class students wrote and recorded about fighting hatred. Please check it out!
Continue reading“Are We Having a Church Fight?” Someone asked me that question recently. I had to pause for a moment to think about the implications of what they were asking. After all, we all *know* that church fights are bad… I forget what I said exactly in response, but I wouldn’t
Continue readingWhat if you woke up each morning to a poem instead of an alarm? Poet Naomi Shihab Nye, famous for her poem “Kindness” (you can read it here: https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/kindness), woke her son up for years with poetry from poets all over the world. Always short, sometimes just a stanza of
Continue readingAt a Social Justice Council meeting earlier this month, we discussed plans for a new Racial Justice initiative at Westside. We’d met with representatives from Eastshore UU’s Beloved Racial Justice group and we’d reached out to nearby UU congregations to see if they were interested in joining with us to
Continue reading“White What….?” Language is powerful. The spoken and written word carries great symbolism and it can be skillful or harmful depending on its use and interpretation. Take the current national conversation about white supremacy in America. When I began to hear the term white supremacy earlier in my life, images
Continue readingThere’s been a lot of worry and pessimism on Facebook and other social media in the last year or so. People worry about the state of the world, climate change, race relations, and much more. It’s probably tempting to take a break from information and emotion overload. When I was
Continue readingWhat is in a name? Great question! I just read a wonderfully provocative book by Rabbi David A. Cooper’s book “God is a Verb: Kabbalah and the practice of mystical Judaism.” His suggestion? That we begin to think of all beings as verbs rather than nouns. So, you would see
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