A Natural Bridge – Monthly Letter from Our Minister

First, let me share my schedule for the month of February. During the first week, you have helped make it possible for me to attend the third UU Institute for Excellence in Ministry. This one will be held at the Asilomar Retreat Center in Monterey, California. It is a beautiful setting.

There are several different week-long sessions. I registered for Leading From Within: Sustaining the Call. It is a small group retreat “based on the Circle of Trust approach as written about by Parker Palmer in his book, A Hidden Wholeness and practiced at The Center for Courage and Renewal. I think it complements our use this year of the Soul Matters themes and small group reflection materials.

That approach and program is also influenced by Parker Palmer’s work. A Hidden Wholeness, has two sub titles: the first is “The Journey Toward an Undivided Life.” It is the second that by simply changing the gerunds to active verbs would make a good statement of what we want our congregation to do. “Welcoming the Soul and Weaving Community in a Wounded World.”

I will also be visiting the UU congregation of Berkeley and attending two of their services. I will be available by email, phone or text while I’m gone and will be back in the office February 11-13. I will then be on vacation through February 26. Rev. Judy Long has generously agreed to be on call for pastoral emergencies. Thank you all for this opportunity.

And secondly, the worship theme for the month is Faith. We have begun to understand faith in the broader context of the important, meaning making that we do all the time. A faith-full life is not a limited religious term so much as it is a grounded personal understanding for our one well oriented, well lived life. Take a few minutes and see which small piece of the Soul Matters February materials on the UUFH web site stirs some reflection or thought.

Here are some thoughts on faith from Sharon Daloz Parks:

“We human beings seem unable to survive, and certainly cannot thrive, unless we can make meaning. We need to be able to make some sort of sense out of things; we seek pattern, order, coherence, and relation in disparate elements of our experience. If life is perceived as only fragmented and chaotic, we suffer confusion, distress, stagnation, and finally despair.”

“This capacity and demand for meaning is what I invite the reader to associate with the word faith. For most of us, this represents a shift from the usual connotations. Faith is often linked exclusively to belief, particularly to religious belief. But faith goes far beyond religious belief, parochially understood. Faith is more adequately recognized as the activity of seeking and discovering meaning in the most comprehensive dimensions of our experience. Faith is a broad, generic human phenomenon. To be human is to dwell in faith, to dwell in the sense one makes out of life – what seems ultimately true and dependable about self, world and cosmos (whether that meaning be strong or fragile, expressed in religious or secular terms). This way of understanding the nature of faith has value for secular and religious folk alike. It addresses our culture’s current hunger for a shared language about things spiritual.”

“Faith must be emancipated from its too-easy equation with belief and religion and reconnected with meaning, trust, and truth.”

“Faith is not simply a set of beliefs that religious people have; it is something that all human beings do.”

And that’s what we’re doing here at UUFH, this “inclusive community of faith for all ages,” as we welcome the soul and weave community in a wounded world. Thank you for doing this work together.

—Jim McKinley, UUFH Minister