Celebrate!
Happy July! And Happy Birthday to your country, if you live in the USA or Canada. Wherever you live, you might want to celebrate the Japanese star festival of Tanabata this month. Or, if you’re on vacation, simply celebrate the chance for some fun and relaxation, and the chance to spend time in nature.
Click on the links below to find out more about these holidays from around the world and how you might celebrate them in your family.
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We Honor… |
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Since the Japanese star festival, Tanabata, happens this month, it seems only appropriate to honored Unitarian Maria Mitchell, the first American woman astronomer. Famous around the world, she was one of the most celebrated American scientists of the 19th century.
Maria (pronounced Mar-EYE-ah) was born in 1818 to a Quaker family. Girls in those days often didn’t get much of an education, but Maria was lucky that her father was happy to teach her, and to respond to her constant questions. He passed on his love of looking at the stars to her, and had patience with the fact that she preferred standing on the roof staring out through a telescope to attending social events in the parlor, as was expected of young ladies in the 1800s.
When she was 18 Maria was hired as a librarian, which suited her perfectly, as it gave her the chance to study languages, math and navigation. She continued observing and studying the skies with her father, and in 1847 she discovered a comet, which was named after her.
Maria’s comet discovery made her famous around the world, and she went on to become a professor at Vassar College and the director of their observatory. In 1848 Mitchell was the first woman elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and she was a founder and an early president of the American Association for the Advancement of Women. Her Unitarian beliefs got her in trouble with some Baptist professors at the college, and perhaps the president of the college was not too pleased when she asked him to shorten his prayer at chapel so that it wouldn’t interfere with her observations of Saturn. But she remained a well-respected and much-honored scientist who believed that science was in no way contrary to religion. |
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Act!
Have you ever been to summer camp? If so, you probably know just how much fun it can be to spend active time in a natural setting. Did you know that in 1921 Universalists founded a camp for inner city kids at the birthplace of Clara Barton, the Universalist who founded the American Red Cross? That same year insulin was discovered as the treatment for diabetes, and in 1932 the Universalist women who founded the camp teamed up with Dr. Elliot Joslin, one of the first doctors to save the lives of children with diabetes, to create a special sort of camp. Today some 2,000 kids with diabetes come to the Barton Center for Diabetes Education to learn how to better manage their illness and to have a great time in an outdoor setting.
So how can you support the Barton Center? Well, one easy way is to contribute to them, or to any of a whole bunch of other good organizations, is through goodsearch.com. Goodsearch lets you choose a charity, and then every time you use Goodsearch as your search engine (instead of, say, Google or Bing) then they donate a little money to your charity. You get to give money for free! You can also encourage grown-ups to use their companion site goodshop.com , which automatically gives money to the charity you’ve chosen when you shop online, or do the same at igive.com. |
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Nurturing Your Spirit
Tanabata is the Japanese holiday known as the “star festival,” but it is also a festival which celebrates the story of lovers who are separated by a river of stars. One of the Tanabata traditions is to write love poems or wishes and hang them from bamboo. You might want to try writing your own poems, maybe in the Japanese haiku form. Remember, a love poem doesn’t have to be about romantic love—it could be about anything you love, from trees to chocolate. And a wish doesn’t have to be a wish for yourself—it could be a wish for a friend, or for the whole world.
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Principles in Practice
July 4th brings Independence Day in the United States, but it might be a good time to remember our seventh UU principle, which talks about the interdependent web of life. “Independent” means that you can manage by yourself. “Interdependent” means that you are connected, and that your well-being depends on the well-being of the plants and animals, as well as people, who surround you. One way to think about your personal interdependent web is to get a big piece of paper and put your name in a circle in the center. Then start writing down beings who affect your life, or who are affected by your life. That might include your family, friends, and teachers, but also pets, plants and animals who are your food, trees that provide you with oxygen, etc., etc. Draw lines between the beings you’ve written down for all of the connections. Does it look kind of messy? When you get down to it, it’s a lot harder to think of ways we aren’t connected than ways we are.
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