Happy New Year! I hope that this season finds you well, renewed and hopeful for things to come. And if you are troubled or weary, please know that you may always reach out to me, or to our UUC Care Team members.
We begin this year, 2023, with the invitation to travel the path of finding our center. January’s Soul Matters Theme will be explored in worship, small group ministry, and religious education. The path of finding our center invites us to turn within. I see this turning within as one of peeling back layers of pretense and obligation, so that the inner light might shine and pour forth. It is a process of returning to that inherent worth and dignity we embrace so easily in the smallest of children, but struggle so often to embrace in ourselves.
It is in this spirit, that we begin the month with the most celebratory of occasions: A Child Blessing! I hope you will join us on January 8th for this special celebration as we celebrate our youngest congregant, Oliver Waruch Mann. This month also offers us new opportunities to find our center at UUC through spiritual practice, including Sunday morning Tai Chi and 2nd Wednesday evening Vespers (details below).
Finding our Center means turning within, not to withdraw from the world, but to enter it most fully ourselves. It is the work we do to be the change that is most needed. Our month ahead also includes opportunities for reflection and action to undo oppression with transformative love. Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. saw racism, poverty, and militarism as the three evils of his time (there are others we can add to this list). But change requires us to begin with ourselves. Our services on January 15th and 22nd invite us to focus on this deep inner work in order to build multicultural anti-racist beloved community.
So I invite you this month to join me in finding our center- so that we might reclaim that growing light within, and shine it brighter in service to our world.
Blessings and love,
Rev. Terri