July/August 2002

Some keep the Sabbath going to church; I keep it staying at home; with a bobolink for a chorister, and an orchard for a dome.

-Emily Dickinson

• Sermon: "The Seventh Day," by Calvin O. Dame
• From Your Minister, by Rev. Jane Rzepka
• REsources for Living, by Betsy Hill Williams
• Spiritual Reflections from a Thru hike , by Roderick Forsman
• The Perfectly Useless Afternoon, by Kirk Loadman-Copeland
• How Do We Grow?, by Henry David Thoreau
• Notices, by Quest staff

The Seventh Day

I grew up in a family whose life was bound up in the life of the church. My parents were both ministers, and the rhythms of home were very much the rhythms of the church: ingathering; Thanksgiving; Christmas; Easter, and always Sunday morning.
When people hear that I was a preacher's kid, twice over, they sometimes ask me with what seems to be a trace of pity, "Well, what was that like, must have been pretty tough?"
I don't think it was so tough; like most children I assumed my life was normal and other people's lives were odd. I thought our lives were pretty special, and I usually felt kind of bad for people who didn't get to move to a new church and a new town every couple of years.
But I know that behind the concerned question lies a thought that I might have been brought up in an atmosphere of repression and restriction and denial, that I might have been raised in a home where the practice of religion was a matter of deprivation and limitation.
Well, that was never really the case, although the tradition in which my parents came of age, the Salvation Army, was a tradition that found expression more in opposition to the world than the Methodism in which I was raised. There was no card playing or dancing during my parents' youth, and I was in college before my mother ever used any more makeup than a touch of lipstick.
There were a couple of restrictive holdovers from my parents' upbringing, some smaller, some larger. For the longest time we never kept a pack of regular playing cards in the house, a deck of Old Maid was about it.
And, in the background, there were certain prohibitions regarding what we could do on a Sunday, which was a day for church and for rest. For instance, I never went to a movie on a Sunday until I was off to college and beyond my parents' immediate supervision. And I never felt comfortable sitting in a movie on a Sunday until I was a grown man and a long way from home.
Sunday is the Sabbath, that is what I learned. I grew up with the remnants of a restrictive religious practice that traces back through the demanding and severe piety of early American Protestantism, all the way to the Emperor Constantine. It was Constantine who, newly converted to Christianity, decreed in the year 321 that all of the Roman Empire would observe Sunday as the Sabbath with the suspension of work and business. And beyond Constantine, the observance of the Sabbath traces back to Hebrew tradition.
One of the contributions of Judaism to the western world has been the idea of Shabbos, or the Sabbath. It is from the sacred books of the Jews, remember, that the familiar passage is taken: "So God blessed the seventh day and hallowed it, because on it he rested from all his work which he had done in creation." So, the week, with a Sunday in it, is in large part a creation of Jewish culture. And the observance of the Sabbath originates in Jewish tradition.
Jewish texts prohibit 39 specific acts during the Sabbath-acts traditionally associated with the rebuilding of the temple in Jerusalem. If God could rest in creating the universe, God's people could rest in the building of the sacred temple. Tasks such as sowing, plowing, reaping, threshing, and winnowing are prohibited, as are grinding, sifting, kneading, and baking. Spinning and weaving, hunting and slaughtering, building, hammering, and transporting are also prohibited.
Over time, as with all ecclesiastical precepts, Sabbath laws became overly legalistic. The Jewish Sabbath could be so restrictive and morose that, for some, it became a day of lethargy and depression rather than a day for renewal, for sensuality and delight.
In fact, though it is sad to say so, for most of its history, most observers of the Sabbath seem to have missed the point almost entirely.
Jesus said, "Man is not made for the Sabbath, but the Sabbath is made for man." The point of the Sabbath was never to suspend all activities so we could glumly sit around doing nothing. The point of ceasing from all the usual activities and usual work is to take a rest from the usual obligations and worries. With the time we gain, we are to celebrate and appreciate the wonder and glory and beauty of the universe, and the mystery of our presence in it.
Wayne Muller, in "Sabbath: Finding Rest, Renewal and Delight In Our Busy Lives," his book on the Sabbath, quotes Rabbi Zalman Schacter-Shalomi as saying, "Lots of people will swear allegiance to the Sabbath and criticize those who do not keep all the Sabbath laws. But their inner experience is not one of spaciousness and delight. It is too easy to talk of prohibition, but the point of the space and time created is to say yes to the sacred, to spirituality, sensuality, sexuality, prayer, rest, song, delight. It is not about legalism and legislation, but about joy and the things that grow only in time."
He suggests that the appropriate way to begin the Sabbath is to simply say, "Today I am going to pamper my soul."
Well, that is a whole different way of looking at the Sabbath. Growing up, I can't say that I ever really got this idea in the way that Wayne Muller presents it. The point of the Sabbath is to take a break from our busyness in order to look up, to stop, to pause, to cease from doing, to rest, to renew, to taste and to savor and to celebrate, to make love with our partners, to gather our family around, to take a moment to exhale before we inhale our next breath.
It would take no great genius on my part to observe that for most of us, the demands of our lives seem nearly overwhelming. Ask just about anybody in our congregation how they are doing, and you are most likely to hear, "I am busy. I am so busy!"
Many of us are busy. Work, school, children, houses, cars, phones, television, computers, church, travel, hobbies, gardens, politics, entertainment, sports, self-improvement-you name it, we are doing it.
Even in retirement, many of us cannot seem to shake loose the internal or external demands that keep us so occupied. Ask anyone, and you will get the same report; "I am so busy."
We are not made to be this busy.
It is not healthy, it weakens families, it puts barriers between us and other people, it dilutes and weakens the community that we so often say we want, it puts blinders on our eyes and robs us of the rich vision of the world we live in.
We know this. I don't think this sermon is going to be startling news to anyone reading it. And yet, even when the outside demands upon our time and our attention slacken, many of us sign up for more, or take on more, or increase the pace, or commit to something new. Why is this?
For starters, Western culture doesn't approve of idleness. "Idle hands do the devil's work," my grandmother used to say. And she was just speaking her version of a strong cultural norm.
And then there is the question of what we might discover if we were to stop. Another folk aphorism goes, "Don't look back-something may be gaining on you!" Some of us, I think, may actually be a little nervous about what might be gaining on us if we cease the constant pursuit of both work and entertainment.
And then there is the perpetual pressure in some cultures to achieve and to acquire. Society may judge people by what they have and what they do. People who choose reflection and experience over achievement are given dismissive labels: dreamer, ne'er-do-well, aging hippie.
Muller describes another powerful force that works to prevent our taking the time we need for rest and renewal: many of us think we cannot rest until we get everything done. He writes that, "There is astounding wisdom in the traditional Jewish Sabbath, that it begins precisely at sundown, whether that comes at a wintry 4:30 or late on a summer evening. Sabbath is not dependent on our readiness to stop. We do not stop when we are finished. We do not stop when we complete our phone calls, finish our project, get through this stack of messages, or get out this report that is due tomorrow. We stop because it is time to stop."
"Sabbath," Muller continues, "requires surrender. If we only stop when we are finished with all our work, we will never stop-because our work is never completely done. With every accomplishment there arises a new responsibility. Every swept floor invites another sweeping; every child bathed invites another bathing. When all of life moves in such cycles, what is ever finished? The sun goes 'round, the moon goes 'round, the tides and seasons go 'round, people are born and die, and when are we finished? If we refuse to rest until we are finished, we will never rest until we die. Sabbath dissolves the artificial urgency of our days, because it liberates us from the need to be
finished."
Muller continues, "The old, wise Sabbath says: Stop now. As the sun touches the horizon, take the hand off the plow, put down the phone, let the pen rest on the paper, turn off the computer, leave the mop in the bucket, and the car in the drive. There is no room for negotiation, no time to be seduced by the urgency of our responsibilities. We stop because there are forces larger than we that take care of the universe, and while our efforts are important, necessary, and useful, they are not, nor are we, indispensable."
So, if we know that our lives are too busy, and we know that taking the time to take time is both healthy and enriching, and we know that nobody else is going to fix this for us, we're going to have to do it ourselves, then how do we go about incorporating Sabbath time into our lives? Sabbath time need not be a particular day of the week; it can be any time intentionally set apart for rest and renewal. It is intentionally finding the time for ourselves alone, or for being with our deepest friends. It is taking time away from work to use for prayer or reflection or walks or solitude.
The good news is that you can start small, it does not cost any money, you can learn as you go, you can invite friends to join you if that is the best process for you. But you have to do it. And you have to do it on purpose. You have to be intentional.
You can sit each day for five minutes, or for ten. Just sit.
You can write in a book any thought that occurs to you as you sit.
You can walk, or most of us can walk.
You can drive somewhere beautiful and be there for a few moments.
You can make a meal and eat it with care. You can invite friends over to share the meal, and read a favorite poem before you eat.
You can select objects or memories or hopes and spend time with them each day.
You can arrange a personal retreat.
You can listen to music.
You can rise early and listen to birds. And to the wind.
You can arrange to take time with your family each day to talk. Or call someone that you can really talk with.
You can find ways to create, to engage your hands and eyes in a craft or piece of art.
And most of all, you can decide not to be driven to distraction. You can decide that you will take the time that you need to renew and restore yourself, to do what you know will feed and revive your soul. If you do not know what this is, you can decide to find out what will encourage a sense of rest and well-being in you.
In "Sabbaths," by Wendell Berry, he says:
Whatever is foreseen in joy
Must be lived out from day to day.
Vision held open in the dark
By our ten thousand days of work.
Harvest will fill the barn; for that
The hands must ache, the face must sweat.
And yet no leaf or grain is filled
By work of ours; the field is tilled
And left to grace. That we may reap,
Great work is done while we're asleep.
When we work well, a Sabbath mood
Rests on our day, and finds it good.
Sabbath is the time when we might lie fallow, and be renewed and restored. We are not made for the Sabbath, rather, the Sabbath is made for us!


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From Your Minister
by Rev. Jane Ranney Rzepka, minister, CLF

You have a month-long vacation and all the money in the world. Your assignment is to enjoy yourself, to spend those 30 days in such a way that at the end you can say you felt happy. OK, maybe it's only a Wednesday evening and loose change from your pockets, but still, could you find a way to spend the evening happily? Summertime often presents the prospect of happiness: the memorable vacation trip, homework-free evenings with the kids, a hiatus from the heating bills, daylight more the way you'd like it. Not to mention the sweet corn, peach ice cream, and whatever-it-is that you've tossed on the grill. So the pressure's on-it's time to be happy. Happiness. How do we get it? The quandary about how to spend a summer vacation or an available Wednesday evening can quickly morph into what we'd do if we won the lottery, or more poignantly, how we'd spend the remaining time if we knew we had six months to live. Before we know it we've become existential, pondering the meaning of life and how best to live it. What is a worthy life, a satisfying life, a good life? What is a happy life? The champ, of course, when it comes to asking these questions, is Ecclesiastes, in the Hebrew Bible. He wonders what the point is: "I, the Speaker, ruled as king over Israel in Jerusalem; and in wisdom I applied my mind to study and explore all that is done under heaven. It is a sorry business that God has given us to busy ourselves with. I have seen all the deeds that are done here under the sun; they are all emptiness and chasing the wind." Cultures, families, and individual people each find their answers in the face of the emptiness and wind-chasing. Maybe you were taught that job security was the key to a good life, or a close-knit family is all that counts, or charity work, or healthy food and exercise. Maybe for you it's playing the drums with old high school friends that makes the difference, or hiking the Appalachian Trail, or working night and day for a tutoring program, or finding regular Sabbath time. More likely, it's a combination of things that offer us a satisfying life. A balance. A sense of proportion. Getting soaked on theme park rides can only make a person so happy before it's time to dry off and write that letter to the editor, help your nephew build a tool shed, or finish up the lesson plans for the fourth and fifth graders. By then it may be past time to kiss somebody you love, scrub out the really quite disgusting bathtub, dance a jig, tend the baby, change the oil, or put the coffee on. Or hunt for a new job that seems worth doing, or retrieve a relationship from wherever it's gone, or write the poetry before it's too late, or finally register for classes. Some of a meaningful life is the big stuff and some of it's little; some of it's a passing fancy and some of it's in deadly earnest; some of it doesn't amount to much in the end and some of it turns out to count for something-and we don't always know in advance which will be which. I do know this. The broad outlines of life bear thinking about. Talk shows, self-help articles, sermons, friends and relatives-they can all offer advice about how busy you should or shouldn't be, how much time you should spend alone or in the company of others, how much you do or do not deserve, and yes, exactly what you need to do to be happy. But of course, in the end, the job of thinking it through is yours. Personally, I love a good water ride-even the planned surprise of a splash in the face. Does it make me happy? Sure. Does it make for a happy life? That's another question.


Jane Rzepka
Minister

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REsources for Living
by Betsy Hill Williams, Director of Religious Education, CLF

Often when I finish reading a book, I like to talk about it. So I joined a book group. I don't always get the month's assignment finished on time, and I don't always like the books we read. But I almost always benefit from the discussion and I've also gotten to know a group of people in ways I never would have if our encounters had been limited to the soccer field.
I'd like to suggest that CLFers start book groups. It's not as far-fetched as it sounds, thanks to the Internet and to a new series called Beacon Press Discussion Guides for Unitarian Universalist Communities. At the time of this writing, guides are available for 11 Beacon Press books. They are available online or in printed form with a purchase of the book from the UUA Bookstore. Each guide includes brief readings and questions for reflection and discussion in two, three, or four sessions. As always, the authors suggest that groups adapt the material to fit their unique situations-nothing new to CLFers! As I read through the guides, I found that most will require little adaptation to make them useful tools for online discussion. And the list of books in the program is wonderfully varied, both in topic and style.
Glancing down the list, I was immediately drawn to a 1979 novel, Kindred, by Octavia Butler. It's a story of a contemporary black woman, married to a white man, who is repeatedly transported through time and space to the antebellum South to rescue her ancestor-a white slave owner. Now I've never been a fan of science fiction or time travel, but Butler's concern in this book isn't about how this happened. It's about what happened to all members of slaveholding families and communities-black and white-and how powerfully we are tied to the lives of our ancestors. During the past 10 years of anti-racism programs and initiatives at the UUA, I (like many other UUs) have struggled to understand the effect of past racism and contemporary white privilege on my identity. What is the legacy of slavery for me? For my family and friends? Kindred offers a unique, 20th century "experience" of 19th century slavery, which raises many provocative questions about racism then and now.
Ironically, just last week a CLFer asked me if I thought other CLFers saw this congregation as a place one can turn to in times of life crises. How can we support each other through adversity the way congregations do when they meet regularly and know one another personally? With this challenge for CLF fresh on my mind, I read Lifelines, by Forrest Church, another book in the Beacon Discussion Guide series. "Everyone suffers," states Church, "but not everyone despairs. Despair is a consequence of suffering only when affliction cuts us off from others. It need not." As an isolated UU, you may find yourself feeling cut off from others when adversity and suffering strike. We need to create as many opportunities as possible for each other to both throw out new lifelines and hold tight to lifelines through crises great and small. "The most important thing to remember," Church writes, "is that lifelines have two ends. To grasp one end, however tightly, avails us nothing unless the other end is secured. Unless we reach out to and for others, seeking meaning not in our own suffering but in our shared experience of the human condition, our lifelines will not hold." The sensitive discussion guide prepared by Nancy Palmer Jones is surely one such opportunity for a small group of CLFers.
How to start a CLF Book GroupTake a look at the list of books for which discussion guides are available. If you are on the CLF-L or CLF-RE e-mail list, you might start by asking if there are others on the list that would like to read and discuss one of the books that interests you. If you are not on one of CLF's electronic lists, e-mail me at bwilliams@uua.org and I will post your request on the lists for you.
With the names and e-mail addresses of a few people, you can either set up a distribution list on your computer (so all correspondence goes to all members of the group), or you can set up a separate address for your group, using a free service like Yahoo groups (www.yahoogroups.com) or MSN Communities (www.msn.com). Some people find it easier to track conversation that is posted on a group site than to receive it in their daily e-mail.
Once the mode of communication is established, group members buy the book from the UUA Bookstore (CLF members receive a 20 percent discount) and either download the discussion guide (www.beacon.org) or ask for a copy from the bookstore. You could also simply read each section online as the discussion
progresses.
It will probably work best to have a group convener who sets the pace and moves the group along from session to session in the discussion guide. Please consider sharing your book group experience with the CLF staff so we can evaluate this method of adult religious education and community building.

Beacon books in this series:
Common Fire: Leading Lives of Commitment in a Complex World, by Laurent A. Parks, Cheryl H. Keen, James P. Keen and Sharon Daloz Parks.
Fist Stick Knife Gun: A Personal History of Violence in America, by Geoffrey Canada.
What Is Marriage For?: The Strange Social History of Our Most Intimate Institution, by E. J. Graff.
The Force of Spirit, by Scott Russell Sanders.
Waist High in the World: A Life Among the Nondisabled, by Nancy Mairs.
Taking Retirement: A Beginner's Diary, by Carl H. Klaus.
The Students are Watching: Schools and the Moral Contract, by Theodore R. Sizer and Nancy Faust Sizer.
Kindred, by Octavia Butler.
A Chosen Faith, by John A. Buehrens and Forrest Church.
Lifecraft: The Art of Meaning in the Everyday, by Forrest Church.
Life Lines, by Forrest Church.

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Spiritual Reflections
from a Thru hike

by Roderick Forsman, member, Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of the Eastern Slopes, Conway, New Hampshire

What follows is an excerpt from Roderick Forsman's sermon about his experience last spring and summer hiking the Appalachian Trail.
Within 15 to 20 minutes of getting underway each morning, my body went into autopilot mode, much as yours does when you are driving on the Interstate. In that mode, you can converse or think without allocating much conscious attention at all to the road. It is difficult for me to describe the meditative states in which I spent countless hours experiencing awe, wonder, and a strong sense of the sacred. These states were spiritual-experienced without words-that is, without any conscious verbalizing or narrating to myself. And so, they were not stored away in verbal form like some kind of textual recording.
I had totally forgotten until the other night, when I was talking with a couple of friends, an experience that I now remember happened repeatedly: I was on the Trail. I would become aware that I had stopped in my tracks and was just standing there, sensing, soaking in the whole surround of Nature, and feeling intensely that I was in a holy place. The sense of the Sacred left me half expecting something unusual to happen, and half expecting the totally ordinary to continue. And here is a key point-I had not stopped to rest or to have a snack. I was neither out of breath, nor fatigued, nor hungry nor thirsty. Quite the contrary, as I gradually became aware of how I was feeling in that emerging moment, I felt filled with spirit, rested and energetic. It required no courage to be happy. The moment felt like a prayer.
The first few times this happened, I felt surprised to discover myself standing quietly for no obvious reason. On subsequent occurrences I became less and less surprised.
I was not usually wearing a watch while hiking, so I had no way to time the duration of these experiences. I wouldn't even have thought of timing them. I suspect that my stopping was to terminate being distracted by all the sensory feedback from muscles, tendons, and joints. I think that I must have stopped to experience the sacredness of that moment, the holiness of where I was, both in the sense of a physical place of beauty and a spiritual place of joy. I am not embarrassed to tell you that the deep sense of being at peace sometimes brought tears of joy.
As I have reflected on these spiritual experiences, I have come to know that the inchoate feeling that I was on holy ground is one I have never experienced on pavement or concrete. Indeed, I have never experienced it when surrounded by the so-called "man-made world." As astounded and awed as I was when I visited the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris, I did not feel on holy ground there. For me, Nature has the greatest power to evoke spirituality. "Through the earth I am aware of what I am." I have come to understand that I spent a lot of my autopilot time in prayer. My praying was nonverbal. It was a stilling of the mind before the awesome beauty of the creation I walked into and through. It was a state of attentiveness to the rocks and roots that communicated to me through my feet and legs.
My praying was welcoming the darkness itself that silently gave me permission to give my body up to sleep. It was greeting the sunrise that put darkness aside, a sunrise often not seen but still fully known in spite of the dense cloud surrounding my tent.
My praying was the awareness of being loved by a woman over a thousand miles away, of being loved by four children no longer children, of being loved by my Unitarian Universalist friends, my religious home at home. My religious home away from home is anywhere in nature.
My praying was ravishing a steak and cold beer in a trail town. It was shivering under a cold shower in a hostel where the water heater had quit.
Nonverbal praying is direct, private, unpretentious, and vigorously honest. It is simply the opening up of the heart to the sacred. And so much of what is sacred is close at hand, "ordinary," familiar, and alas, unrecognized as sacred.
One only knows the Sacred is there by opening up to it. To do that, we must change how we relate to the immediate world around us. We must allow the intuitive impulse to replace the rational verbal concept. We must resist the urge to name everything we experience, or even to know its name. We must nurture awareness of simply being.
The poet Mary Oliver made this observation, "Every morning the world is created." Think of it! We awaken, and discover that we have been given the gift of another day. We look around and see that "Each pond with its blazing lilies is a prayer [already] heard and answered lavishly, every morning, whether or not you ever dared to be happy, whether or not you have ever dared to pray."

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The Perfectly Useless Afternoon

by Kirk Loadman-Copeland, minister, UU Church of the South Hills, Mt. Lebanon, Pennsylvania

If you can spend a perfectly useless afternoon in a perfectly useless manner, you have learned how to live.
Lin Yutang

By Lin Yutang's definition, too few of us have learned how to live. We are intent on usefulness, on filling all our time with purposeful activities, on doing or making things. We use sophisticated planners to make the most of our time. And many of our children have schedules that are just as imposing as our own. (My own childhood was absolutely boring by comparison and I still treasure it.) Anne Morrow Lindbergh wrote, "Too many people, too many demands, too much to do; competent, busy, hurrying people-it just isn't living at all."
Some suggest that this is a contemporary problem, shaped by urbanization, technology, mass society, and rapid social change; Alan Toffler's "future shock" in the present tense. Consider, however, George Sand's complaint, written in 1863, "Time is always wanting to me, and I cannot meet with a single day when I am not hurried along, driven to my wit's-end by urgent work, business to attend to, or some service to
render."
Chuang Tzu, a Taoist sage who lived during the fourth century BCE, wrote, "Produce! Get results! Make money! Make friends! Make changes! Or you will die of despair." Lest you misinterpret his point, he was contemptuous of such activity as a means of averting despair. Is our busyness an attempt to keep despair at bay or is it simply an active manifestation of despair itself?
Our words, "I'm busy, too busy," seldom contain a sense of well-being or joy about our busyness. Rather they are a mantra for being overwhelmed or burned-out. (Sometimes the mantra becomes inarticulate, reduced to a sigh.) When these words issue forth by way of explanation or complaint, we should pause to explore precisely what we mean. What motivates our desperate haste? What is absent in our life? Are we in need of deep rest or renewal? Are the actions of our outer life so disconnected from our inner life that we are constantly weary? Have we been seduced by activity for its own sake with little consideration for the meaning or the value of activity? Or do we believe that busyness confirms significance, importance? Regardless of its cause, our busyness effectively numbs us to need or desire and allows us to avoid our inner life and whatever suffering our outer life inflicts upon us. Busyness can become a metaphor for our life, or more appropriately, our lack of life.
The poet May Sarton advises us to seek "time, with no obligations except toward the inner world and what is going on there." Former UUA president William Schulz offers us "encouragement to look beyond the busyness of the everyday into the eye of life's blessings." He writes, "If you are like me, you are perpetually tempted to substitute weariness for wonder, to miss the magnificent in the midst of the mundane. But before all else, religion calls us to be attentive, to keep our eyes open..."
I have lost my desire to be busy. If wisdom could have come earlier and at less cost, I would have avoided being busy altogether. It is a chimera. This is not to say that I do not want to be active, involved, challenged, engaged, or understandably tired at the end of a full day. Busyness, however, sabotages the pleasures of the active life. It ignores the necessity for the "perfectly useless afternoon spent in a perfectly useless manner." When we can afford to invest time in such a manner without guilt, we begin to subdue the tyranny of busyness. Refusing to be busy takes discipline. While it may involve doing less, it depends on "doing" differently. The discipline involves shifting our attention from what we do to who we are, from doing to being. It also requires a willingness to be at peace with the limitations that shape our being and the realities of time. When we intentionally leave busyness behind we become free to pursue the art of living. This includes the perfectly useless afternoon as both a gift and a blessing.

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How Do We Grow?

by Henry David Thoreau

There were times when I could not afford to sacrifice the bloom of the present moment to any work, whether of the head or the hands. I love a broad margin to my life. Sometimes, in a summer morning, having taken my accustomed bath, I sat in my sunny doorway from sunrise till noon, rapt in a revelry, amidst the pines and hickories and sumacs, in undisturbed solitude and stillness, while the birds sang around or flitted noiseless through the house, until by the sun falling in at my west window, or the noise of some traveler's wagon on the distant highway I was reminded of the lapse of time. I grew in those seasons like corn in the night, and they were far better than any work of the hands would have been. They were not time subtracted from my life, but so much over and above my usual allowance.

From Thoreau as Spiritual Guide, Barry M. Andrews, Skinner House, Boston, 2000. It can be purchased at the UUA Bookstore or borrowed from the CLF library.

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On-line Course Goes Where No One Has Gone Before

A new on-line, intergenerational religious education course called "Star Trek Theology and Ethics for Humanists and Religious Liberals," is now available to members and friends of CLF. Come explore the ethical and theological ideals from the "Star Trek" cosmos. Rus Cooper-Dowda, a member of CLF and a UU religious educator, offers the on-line course to UUs of all ages. She says, "Gene Roddenberry, the father of Star Trek, saw it as a political, social, racial, and human philosophy. It is no surprise that he moved from his conservative Texas roots to become a life-long humanist." The emphasis is on newly released movies and television shows. That includes a weekly look at new "Enterprise" episodes on the UPN network. "We look at commonly held assumptions," Cooper-Dowda said, "through the eyes of a culture receiving more and more information electronically, and having fewer and fewer interpersonal connections. As we grow rapidly into this new cyber-culture, we see that the immensely popular 'Star Trek' vision provides a rich and abundant common language for political, social, racial, humanist, and religious philosophies." To sign on for this e-mail course at your own pace, contact Rus Cooper-Dowda at uudre@aol.com. You can also sign up by going to: http://hometown.aol.com/uudre/myhomepage/hogwarts.html.

Can We Talk?
This fall, the Church of the Larger Fellowship is going to make a second try at a new approach to funding its operating budget. We're going to run a canvass phone-a-thon from the office in Boston. Here's how we're going to make it happen. We will have a whole group of Unitarian Universalist students from Harvard Divinity school sitting in the office for several evenings calling CLF members all over the continent. We'd love to have them talk to you. When we tried this briefly this past winter, many members were very happy to talk to us. Actually, there's only one real problem. We only have telephone numbers for about 50 percent of you in our records! So, if you'd like to get a call from CLF as much as we'd like to reach out and talk to you, here's how you can help. Just get us your telephone number! You can fax, mail, telephone, or e-mail your number to Lorraine Dennis at: CLF, 25 Beacon St., Boston MA 02108; telephone: 617-948-6166; fax 617-523-4123; e-mail clf@uua.org.

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Last updated June 12, 2005