The Wednesday Brown Bag Oct 3

Bring your brown bag lunch to the Common Room at noon, Wednesday Oct 3.
It's a chance to discuss, really, anything that's on your mind.
Our "default" topic for Oct 3 will be some short pieces in the UUWorld, Fall 2012, pp. 14-19.

The articles are:
"A Different Church,"
"Sitting and Writing,"
"Voices from the Margins,"
"Stitching It Together."

A Different Church

Our Rev. Gail Geisenhainer recounts a version of her story that she also told in the worship that she led at General Assembly 2006 in St. Louis. It was a powerful sermon -- and you can see it here. (Geisenhainer's portion begins at 49 minutes into the video.) She says:

"I expected the gray-haired ladies in the foyer to step back in fear. That would have been familiar. Instead, they stepped forward, offered me a bulletin, and a newsletter, and invited me to stay for coffee. It was so . . . odd! They never even flinched."

UU faces many challenges. We have a lot of work to do and changes to make. Yet here we have the essence of what we do well and can be proud of: unflinching acceptance. We don't always have unflinching acceptance of everyone -- but we do usually have unflinching acceptance of people that often have not been very well accepted elsewhere.

Geisenhainer goes on to mention the challenge that arose a few weeks later when a women spoke

"during Joys and Concerns that all homosexuals had AIDS; all homosexuals were deviants who could not be trusted with children, public health, or civil society. All homosexuals should be quarantined, packed off to work camps to provide useful labor of society and keep their filthy lifestyle and deadly diseases to themselves."

Geisenhainer then describes how the congregation engaged that crossroad -- not that week, but the next week. How did they engage their crossroad, and how is UUFG doing at engaging its?

Sitting and Writing

The article gives a brief description of two "Contemplation Practices" and two "Writing Practices."

Have you tried these? Will you try any of them?

If you have done these practices -- or practices similar to them -- why do you do so? What does it do?

If you have not tried practices like these, what do you imagine these practices do for those who do practice them?

Voices from the Margins

There are three short readings:

"I too am beautiful" by Kristen Harper
"Faith and belief" by Jackie Clement
"The Stars are dancing," by Om Prakash

In what ways do these speak to you?

Stitching It Together

Rev Jory Agate uses the metaphor of a quilt to describe Unitarian Universalism.

How does our individual quilting go? How does our collective quilting go?