Celebrate!
We have a pretty wide variety of holidays to celebrate this month, from Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement to the fun spookiness of Halloween. So rather than a single theme this month, we’re going to match up bits and pieces to different holidays.
Click on any of the links below to find out more about the holiday and how you might celebrate it.
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We Honor… |
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| In celebration of Halloween, it seems appropriate to honor Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, the author of Frankenstein. The story of a scientist who puts together a monster out of body parts and brings it to life, Frankenstein was written as a kind of a dare. Mary Shelley was on vacation with her husband, the famous poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, and their equally famous poet friend Lord Byron. Byron suggested that they each should write a ghost story, so they all did – but Mary Shelley’s was the only one to get published. Since then the story has been turned into several movies, and you probably see masks and costumes and Halloween decorations this time of year in the shape of Frankenstein’s monster. (Frankenstein is the name of the scientist creator, not the monster.)
OK, so Frankenstein pretty clearly connects to Halloween, but what does it have to do with Unitarian Universalists? Well, Mary Shelley’s mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, was a Unitarian who became famous writing about the rights of women (in 1792, when women didn’t have many rights!). So we’ll honor Mary Wollstonecraft and her book A Vindication of the Rights of Women while we’re at it. Click here to learn more about Mary Shelley and Frankenstein (including the full text of the book) or here to learn more about her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft. |
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Act!
October 13th brings Columbus Day for those of us who live in the US. Columbus Day is a strange kind of holiday, because it was started as a way of celebrating Christopher Columbus’s discovery of the Americas. But over time people have come to realize that a) Columbus didn’t exactly discover the Americas, since there were plenty of people already living there when he arrived, and b) his arrival meant pretty terrible things for those people who were already there. Columbus called the people that he met when he landed “Indians,” since he mistakenly thought that he had landed in India. (Heck, he was only off by seven or eight thousand miles!) But he didn’t really see these people as being people. He and his men killed lots of them, enslaved many more and generally acted like anybody who wasn’t European was just a thing to be used. So for many people, Columbus Day is more of a day of mourning than a day of celebration.
So what can you do? Well, for starters, you can learn the true story about Columbus coming to the Americas, and share it with your teacher and friends. Some of the information is pretty brutal and hard to read—you might want to start with this sermon from a few years ago. Better still, you can think about how you act toward people that you think are “different.” How to you relate to people who are a different color than you, or speak a different language than you, or who go to a different school or wear different kinds of clothes? Many times people like to hang out with other folk that they see as being like them. But in honor of Columbus Day, maybe you’d like to spend time with somebody that you think of as being different than you. We can’t change how Columbus treated the folks he met up with when he landed, but we can try to treat each person we meet as a welcome adventure in learning something new. |
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Nurturing Your Spirit
From October 14th through the 20th this year, Jews will be celebrating the holiday of Sukkot by spending time each day in a little homemade hut called a sukkah. The idea of a sukkah is that you should be able to go inside it like a little house, but still be able to see the stars through the roof. The sukkah is usually decorated with fruit or other fall-themed decorations. A family might eat dinner in the sukkah, or just hang out there for a while, enjoying having a little home that is still open to nature.
Whether or not you celebrate Sukkot, you can nurture your spirit by setting up a place where you can connect with nature. Maybe you have a treehouse, or a clubhouse, or a place behind a big bush or under a tree where you like to hang out. Maybe you can get permission to build a hut from a big box or by hanging sheets from tree branches. Maybe you have a balcony where you can put some pillows out. Get creative, and you can have your own little place where nature feels close and your heart can feel glad. |
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Principles in Practice
In honor of the Feast Day of St. Francis, it seems like a good time to remember our seventh principle: “Respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part.” In other words, we recognize that all of life is bound up together, and that we need to remember the importance of our relationships not only to other people, but also to the animals and plants of the world. St. Francis was known for his respect for all living creatures, whom he addressed to as “sister” and “brother.” But in one of his most famous writings, St. Francis also talks about Brother Sun, Sister Moon, Brothers Wind and Air and Sister Water. Both St. Francis and our seventh principle remind us that we are related not only to animals and plants, but to all of the natural world—rocks, wind, water—everything. And, of course, how we relate to the water and the soil affects how well the plants and animals do. If you are careful not to waste water, taking short showers and turning off the water when you brush your teeth, then there is more water left in the rivers for the fish. If you compost food waste, then less of the land gets taken up by garbage dumps and more nutrients go to the plants. Like the principle says, it really is all connected!
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