Celebrate!
Even though Easter happened in March this year, April still has lots of great holidays, from the out and out goofiness of April Fool’s day to the serious—but fun—Passover celebration of the ancient Jews escaping to freedom. And, of course, April is a great time to celebrate and remember our responsibility for taking care of our planet, with Earth Day and Arbor Day.
Click on a link below to find out more about April holidays and how you can celebrate them.
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We Honor… |
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| The Passover story tells of how the Jewish people escaped from slavery to the Egyptians long, long ago. That story served as hope and inspiration to thousands of slaves in the United States. Although no one person holds the center of the story of how slavery was abolished in the US, the way Moses is the main character in the Passover story, there were many Unitarians and Universalists who played an important part in bringing freedom to slaves in the US. One of these people was Lydia Maria Child. Although she is probably best known today for writing the words to the Thanksgiving song “Over the River and Through the Woods,” Lydia was a free-thinker who questioned, amongst other things, traditional ideas about religion and about the role of women. She supported herself (and her husband, who was better at spending money than making it) as a writer, and her writing projects ranged from a novel that gave an unusually sympathetic view of Native Americans to a book of tips for housewives on how to manage on very little money to books of short biographies about important women. But in 1831 she read the writings of the famous abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison and was inspired to devote herself to fighting slavery. In 1833 she wrote a book entitled An Appeal in Favor of that Class of Americans Called Africans which made what many people considered extreme arguments about why slavery was bad for the morality of the white slaveholders as well as for the lives of the African-American slaves. Sales of her other books suffered, and she lost her position as an editor of a magazine for children because people didn’t like her views. But Maria went on writing about how slavery was wrong, and she became the editor of the National Anti-Slavery Standard, the weekly New York newspaper of the American Anti-Slavery Society.
Although political differences eventually drove her away from working with Garrison and the American Anti-Slavery Society, she continued to speak and write about her fierce opposition to slavery. When the Civil War broke out, she gathered supplies for the "contrabands," slaves who fled for safety to Union lines, and compiled her Freedmen's Book, a reading instruction book for former slaves. In addition to opposing slavery and helping former slaves, Maria also supported the women’s suffrage movement, trying to get women the right to vote, and spoke out in favor of the rights of Native Americans. A free-thinker to the end, when a group of Unitarians founded the Free Religious Association in 1867, Maria became active with them, and she published a book of quotations from different religions of the world. Whether the goal was literal freedom for slaves, the freedom for women to have a say in government or the freedom for each individual to hold their own religious views, Lydia Maria Child was out in front, leading the way. |
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Act!
As you probably know, one of the most serious problems facing our planet is global warming – the world is getting warmer because of human use of fossil fuels like oil, gasoline and natural gas. While having the earth get a few degrees warmer might not seem like a huge deal, it really is. For example, polar bears are starving because the sheets of ice where they have always hunted seals are melting, and warmer seas also mean bigger storms. Click here or here to learn more about what global warming is and what you can do about it.
Conserving energy helps to fight global warming, but there’s something else that actually helps to take carbon dioxide—the gas that causes much of global warming—out of the air. What is this amazing technological marvel? Trees! In honor of Arbor Day, why not plant a tree? Trees take in carbon dioxide through their leaves, and store it in their wood. The more trees we have, the more carbon dioxide comes out of the air. If your family joins the Arbor Day Foundation they’ll send you trees to plant as well as your money helping the organization to plant more trees. Or, if you’re not able to plant a tree or financially help others in planting trees, you can still help educate your friends about the importance of trees, and how we can be careful about our paper use and paper recycling so that fewer trees get turned into paper. |
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Nurturing Your Spirit
Whether or not you’re able to plant a tree, you can nurture your spirit by being a tree—at least in your imagination. Trees are strong, rooted deeply in the ground, but they also dance in the wind, responding to the lightest breeze around them. What might that feel like? Here’s a guided meditation to try to find out:
Stand in a way that is relaxed, but upright and not slouching.
Notice your feet, the way they bear your weight, the way they connect you to the ground.
Imagine that roots are growing from your feet, connecting you deep, deep into the earth.
Feel the way your roots connect you the planet, to the enormous strength and steadiness beneath us.
When you can sense your roots reaching and branching deep in the earth, then imagine those roots are feeding you, drawing nourishment from the earth.
Imagine that nourishment as a kind of light, or energy, flowing up from center of the earth to flood your body with a green or golden light.
Feel that light coming up through your trunk, the sturdy center of your body.
Feel that light, that energy, that nourishment from the earth, moving up and up, through your shoulders and your head.
Imagine that you have branches sprouting from your shoulders and head, reaching out and up, reaching toward the sun.
Imagine your branches filled with leaves, rustling and shimmering, releasing the energy from the earth out into the air.
Imagine that your lower branches reach out and down, so that the energy of the earth runs through your body, and then connects back to the earth.
Feel the energy of the earth move through you, and your energy through the earth.
Feel how you are strong, calm, energized, connected.
When you are ready, thank the earth, take a deep breath, and open your eyes. |
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Principles in Practice
In the Passover story the Hebrew people wander for forty years in the desert after they escape from slavery and before they find their way to the Promised Land. It is during the time that they are wandering around that they receive the instructions that become the center of the Jewish religion. This reminds me of our fourth Unitarian Universalist principle, “The free and responsible search for truth and meaning.” UUs understand that everybody is on a life-long journey of understanding. Sometimes we may feel like we’re just wandering around without really knowing what we think or where we’re headed. But if you pay attention, you learn all along your life journey what it is that you believe is good and true. You can look at your own life journey so far by getting a piece of paper (bigger is better) and drawing a winding path. Then mark the path with important events of your life, like meeting a best friend or getting a little brother or sister, or reading a book that meant a lot to you or moving or losing a grandparent or whatever comes to mind. Once you have the special places of your life marked out in order from when you were born to now, think about how your views of the world and your place in it might have changed because of each of these events. You might even want to get another piece of paper and see how many times you can fill out the sentence: “I used to think _______________, but now I think _____________.”
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