- June 10, 2023
Weaving the Web: Please note this significant change in Caring & Sharing
Dear UUCPA folks,
As I’ve reviewed the next several months in my mind, I’ve noted some processes that have become more complex because, well, when they’re all in one person’s head, they can get that way. Handing them off, as I’ve been doing in preparation ...
- June 10, 2023
Dear UUCPA folks,
The sabbatical is here! Tomorrow is my last day until next January. I hope I’ll get to see you at the service and chat over lunch, and wish you well in person.
A sabbatical is supposedly for the minister’s development. I know I’ll learn a lot, grow from what I read and make and ...
- May 20, 2023
Dear UUCPA folks,
It’s really great to see the return to community by the numbers. Looking at our Sunday participation, the number of folks going to services, Sunday School, and Forum has risen dramatically between 2022 and 2023. (We compute average weekly attendance for a month, then compare that month to the same month in the ...
- April 29, 2023
Part I: Welcome to Dismantling White Supremacy
Dear UUCPA folks,
When I brought the idea of a “White Folks Dismantling White Supremacy” group to UUCPA, it was exactly that: a group for white folks to address themselves to a stubborn problem: US society has systems in place, constructed over centuries and never entirely dismantled, that favor white ...
- April 22, 2023
Dear UUCPA folks,
What a beautiful day on this beautiful planet. I hope you have some time in the company of other creatures of Earth today, in the sun and the breeze.
We usually have an appropriately-themed service sometime in April, but April was packed with other hard-to-schedule services this year, and anyway, Earth Day is every ...
- March 25, 2023
Dear UUCPA folks,
I’ve had an exciting week here.
Several people joined the congregation, and several more asked for membership packets. We’ll be formally welcoming these new members on April 9, Easter. That service was already shaping up to be full of wonderful stories and music (I just love planning services with Rev. Cat), and now this!
The ...
- March 11, 2023
Sayings about the past and the future are all over the map. Some exhort us not to dwell on the past (“Change is the law of life. And those who look only to the past or present are certain to miss the future”–John F. Kennedy) while others remind us that there is wisdom to be ...
- February 18, 2023
Dear UUCPA folks,
You may have heard that I have a sabbatical coming up, so I want to make sure you know the details. First, it’s a ways off! I’ll be away from UUCPA from June 12, 2023. through January 1, 2024.
Many UU congregations fill in the minister’s role only with volunteers and guest speakers, but ...
- February 11, 2023
Dear UUCPA folks,
Can I be real a second?: I hate asking for money. I hate asking people for anything, really. What I love is real conversations with people who are being real–talking about things that matter to them, and inviting me to do the same.
That’s why I love being a Steward and visiting as many UUCPA folks ...
- January 14, 2023
Dear UUCPA folks,
A few weeks back, I put out an email inviting people to participate in some of the ways we make spiritual connections at UUCPA. I noted that while “many people want to meet with others specifically in order to ask spiritual questions together, or undertake practices that are explicitly spiritual in nature,” it ...
- December 10, 2022
Dear UUCPA folks,
Weaving the web of community can get messy. Sometimes it’s practically picture-perfect:
Cephas, CC BY-SA 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
That’s how we want our welcome to be on Sunday mornings. Our goal is to have everyone in place, welcoming each person with a smile and a head full of information about where to register ...
- November 5, 2022
Ten things to love about the UUCPA Auction:
10. Grooving to live music by The Outer Half
9. Fabulous finger food
8. That moment when the ticket number is called and the raffle winner
jumps up with a big, incredulous grin
7. Bringing home something beautiful that someone made with their own hands
6. Filling your social calendar for the ...
- October 29, 2022
Dear UUCPA folks,
Can I confess something? I think about 20% of my motivation in becoming a UU minister was to recreate a peak experience of my teenage years. Experiences, since it wasn’t one time but something that happened most Fridays during the school year. That’s when several of us would gather around a table in ...
- October 22, 2022
Two Town Halls have been held to gather people’s thoughts about switching to one Sunday service year round. About 20 people have weighed in, either by attending one of the Town Halls or by sending me an email, and the strong feeling is for one service (at some time earlier than 11). If you also ...
- October 1, 2022
It’s here! One part of UUCPA’s mission is to help you transform yourself by doing whatever gives you deep gladness. Another part is to help transform the world by feeding its deep hungers. The Volunteer Fair this Sunday, October 2, from 10:30 to 1, brings them together.
At the Volunteer Fair, you can:
Find out the ...
- September 10, 2022
Public comments on Juristac invited until September 26
Dear UUCPA folks, Our congregation UUCPA is a Green Sanctuary congregation, and we are also dedicated to reversing the effects of white supremacy. The proposed pit mine for Juristac (pronounced YUR-ih-stack), the Sargent Ranch Quarry, calls on us to act upon both of these commitments. We have ...
- August 6, 2022
Dear UUCPA folks,
The web of our communities has gotten a bit frayed in the past two and a half years, hasn’t it? Having had to adjust to isolation, we may have lost the habit of gathering together. And it is a habit: a matter of momentum. When we’re in the habit of meeting a friend ...
- June 11, 2022
Dear UUCPA folks,
It was such a pleasure last week to see Cat on our campus and how warmly she was greeted. In keeping with the theme of tomorrow’s service, joy and sorrow are intermixed. I’m excited to get to know this new colleague better and to help her develop what I know will soon be ...
- May 28, 2022
Dear UUCPA folks,
June is usually a time of winding-down, when the church goes into its quieter season of summer. We’re a year-round church, no question, but in summer, a lot of activities take a month or two off, the ministers take a chunk of their study leave and vacation, attendance dips as folks are traveling ...
- April 30, 2022
Dear UUCPA folks,
This week has brought so many reminders of how delicately we balance as we create community.
Since COVID began, we have sought to balance safety and connection. And to make things more nuanced still, safety means not only protection from the virus, but sufficient connection to stave off isolation and its accompanying mental health ...
- March 5, 2022
Dear UUCPA folks, It’s the day we’ve been waiting for: two in-person services, right in the spaces we know and love. I’m going to make this a list because I don’t want you to miss a thing.
1. To attend online at 11 a.m., just do as we have been doing and go to our Zoom ...
- January 29, 2022
Dear UUCPA folks,
Sunday promises to be a lovely day, and we’re ready to add our 9:30 outdoor service back to Sunday mornings. Hooray! It is so good to be together, in person. If it is safe for you and your loved ones, I hope you’ll take the opportunity to be with your beloved UUCPA community ...
- January 22, 2022
Dear UUCPA folks,
We divide our budget up into two parts: the operating budget, which we raise each year and from which we pay staff, buy supplies, pay utilities, and so on; and the capital budget, largely funded by bequests over many years, from which we fund the care of our beautiful buildings and gardens. The ...
- January 15, 2022
Remember that service from last month when Jane and I talked about giving, and money, and talking about giving and money? You might recall that we both found it a complicated business at best. And now it’s time to make sure we have our budget for the coming year, aka the Stewardship campaign, so money ...
- December 11, 2021
Dear UUCPA folks, We will be holding our first indoor, in-person Sunday service in almost two years this Sunday, December 12! What a tremendous event.
We have sidled our way towards this moment with a couple of memorials and with the outdoor 9:30 services we’ve held all fall. Previously, though, when rain fell on a Sunday ...
- October 16, 2021
Dear UUCPA folks,
For many of us, singing together is one of the great pleasures of Sunday services. If you’re one of those folks, this Sunday is the day you’ve been waiting for. Thanks to a rising vaccination rate, a dropping infection rate, and my growing comfort with creating outdoor services, the Hybrid Services Task Force ...
- October 9, 2021
Like many Unitarian Universalists who grew up outside the tradition, I found our seven principles to be a powerful attractor. When I read them, I nodded along: here were the principles by which I actually tried to live, articulated by an actual religious community! I had never known such a close match between my own ...
- April 18, 2021
I have been talking to advocates for housing and the homeless in preparation for the service on April 25. And in the middle of my researches comes this wonderful news: that the California legislature is considering the Ballot DISCLOSE Act, and our Action Council has taken swift action to endorse it.
My question to the housing ...
- February 19, 2021
Dear UUCPA folks,
Today is an infamous anniversary, reminding us that the impulse to scapegoat the momentarily vulnerable is not new. On February 19, 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 imprisoning Americans of Japanese descent. There was no more logic in the idea that Japanese-Americans were agents of the Japanese army than that ...
- December 19, 2020
Clearly, the giving spirit is underway at UUCPA. Our annual Undie Sunday moved successfully online. Thanks to your making over $1700 in donations, we were able to give 20 sleeping bags and a couple of large boxes of underwear, socks, hats, and other essential items to the folks being helped at the Opportunity Center, as well ...
- November 14, 2020
In-person visits at UUCPA are now possible within these careful health guidelines
- November 7, 2020
How are you doing?
Photo by Chris Benson on Unsplash
This period of waiting is reminding me of a couple of times that I was waiting very impatiently for something that I cared about passionately and that was completely beyond my control. At moments, I literally paced my apartment, gritting my teeth and muttering, “Waiting is a ...
- July 10, 2020
One of the biggest challenges about online church, for me, is the loss of casual contact. I am used to seeing about 200 of our folks each Sunday. It’s a chance to see how people are doing: using a cane for the first time? looking sad? sitting with a new friend? If someone brings something ...
- June 27, 2020
“How can black people write about flowers at a time like this?” So whispered a woman (white) at a poetry reading, where a poet (black) was reading poems about flowers. The query inspired this poem by Hanif Abdurraqib, who also writes, on the same webpage, about the experience of overhearing it.
Artists must follow their calling, ...
- June 26, 2020
Today’s meditation makes another reference to poetry, sent by Brian Weller:
Black earth turned into yellow crocus in undiluted hocus-pocus. --Piet Hein
We don’t have a lot of crocus around here, but the magic is the same. Plants turn earth into flowers. This delicate blossom that Geoff Ivison sent was made out of sunshine, water, ...
- June 25, 2020
My friend’s grandparents, all four of them, came to Boston from County Cork, Ireland. They started their families there, raised their children and saw grandchildren born, and grew old in this country. They were homesick at times, of course, and one grandfather talked about how seeing his toddler grandson play reminded him of his own ...
- June 24, 2020
Confession: I am not a fan of hydrangeas. I first encountered them by my grandmother’s front door, where there were a couple of pretty scraggly specimens, an inauspicious start. The big snowballs of flowers seem more comical than lovely. The foliage doesn’t add much . . . Oh, I don’t really know my reasons, and ...
- June 23, 2020
The poem “The Orchid Flower,” by Sam Hamill, is longer than these three lines, but on their own they are a haiku, and, in my view, a poem unto themselves.
Just as I wonderwhether it's going to die,the orchid blossoms
You can read the entire poem here.
The beautiful photo is by Jo English, of an ...
- June 22, 2020
My system for collecting flower photos via e-mail had one little hole in it, through which several people’s beautiful offerings fell. I apologize most profusely. It must have been so upsetting to attend the service and not see your flowers.
I hope I can make something worthwhile out of this error by posting a brief meditation ...
- June 12, 2020
Here are a few things that happened at UUCPA in the week leading up to the June 7 service.
Naturally, I changed the topic to address the surge of protests and demands for racial justice taking place around the country. (The originally-planned service, on creating community at a distance, will take place in July, if the ...
- March 27, 2020
Pat LandmanHerriot, a member of our choir, shared this offering from the Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra this morning, and I’m passing it along to you in hopes that it will mean as much to you as it does to me.
Ode to Joy
It’s not just the music that moves me. It’s seeing each person playing, ...
- March 21, 2020
Dear UUCPA folks,
I am loving Jimmy Fallon for his “home edition” of The Tonight Show, proving that the production values that really matter are presence, humor, honesty, and integrity. Our production tomorrow won’t be extremely polished (though more polished than his!), but I can guarantee you it will have:
beautiful music from Veronika, Bruce, and your ...
- December 29, 2019
I’m so excited. A small and mighty group of UUCPA members – Kristi Iverson, Anne Frahn, and Elsa Schafer – has put together a January packed full of voter empowerment events. This project is nonpartisan, as our political actions should be, and it’s an initiative that everyone can support, wherever they are on the political ...
- October 11, 2019
Midweek meditation: from fear to fulfillment
Thanks to the creativity and drive of UUCPA member Randy Helmonds, we will be hosting the Blood Donation Olympics on Saturday, October 26. I want to share my story with you.
In my family, donating blood has always been one of those no-brainer acts of
mercy, like giving clothes we didn’t ...
- August 10, 2019
— Rev Amy Zucker Morgenstern
Near the end of June, a year into the new “zero tolerance” policy of deterring immigration by separating families and locking up children, I learned that July 12 would be a day of nationwide protest (“Lights for Liberty”): against the camps in particular and for humane immigration and asylum policies in ...
- June 16, 2019
We start a lot of new groups at UUCPA, which, ideally, means a flurry of publicity and how-to-get-involved information. And sometimes groups end, and we should mark that as well.
Decades ago, several (as it was then called) Palo Alto Unitarian Church members who loved music and drama organized an arts-in- worship group. They created dramas ...
- May 18, 2019
More beauty and more layers of meaning are coming our way in the form of a permanent projection screen that will be installed in the Main Hall, near the ceiling above the piano. The AV Committee has been hard at work exploring all the options and issues, and has made a first-round proposal to the ...
- May 2, 2019
In last Sunday’s sermon, “Lima Bean Respect Day and Other Neglected Celebrations,” I asked about something you value and wish to honor with your attention that doesn’t show up in the civic or religious calendar. Animated conversations followed, as people paired up and talked about what is important to them
Two of the things that are ...
- February 23, 2019
Attendance is up, and there’s lots going on at UUCPA on Sundays! This has created a parking challenge: we have had several Sundays recently when there were few parking spots left during the second service. And a chair challenge: while the Main Hall is not actually full, the empty chairs can be scattered in ones and twos that make ...
- February 9, 2019
I’ve been pondering the relationship between trust and faith. Remember last year when the oleanders along the UUCPA entrance driveway were cut way back? Nothing remained but bare stubs. Our gardeners, paid (James Nelson) and volunteer (Nancy Neff, Glenda Jones), assured us that this was the way to make them healthier. ...
