Speaker: Rev. Amy Zucker Morgenstern

The Magic Ring

“Ring theory,” or “Circles of care,” is a simple principle with many, many applications. It can help us help others and get what we need, ourselves. Today’s service explores its almost magical possibilities.
Today’s offering will be donated to the justice partner for July: California Clean Money Campaign. Nancy Neff will be the speaker.
10:30 am: Join via Zoom video: zoom.us/j/485021387

The order of service is here.

Meeting password is emailed to announce and creparents. If you didn’t get the password, call the UUCPA main #650-494-0541 to get it OR instead, watch the service live on our Facebook page: facebook.com/uucpa.

New Visions of Community

The human need for connection is undeniable. Yet for most of us, for the hundreds of thousands of years of human existence, those connections have arisen from, and been sustained by, proximity. How do we create community when physical closeness is so limited? Special Music: Margaret Davis, harp, and Kristoph Klover, acoustic guitar

The order of service is here.

How Change Happens

Fifty-one years ago today, the people gathered at the Stonewall Inn had had one police raid too many, and they fought back. Many consider this the birth of the movement for LGBTQA+ rights in the United States, and to a large extent, around the world. Why did the shift happen then? If we must lean on the moral arc of the universe to bend it toward justice, what lessons does this particular justice movement have to teach us?
The order of service is here.

Flower Communion

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The Flower Communion is an annual service in which we each bring a flower, create an altar full of bouquets, and end by each taking away a flower that another person brought. Special Music: Yuri Liberzon, Classical Guitar
The order of service is here.

The Wounds of Our People

In a faraway land, almost 2,500 years before the United States was established, the prophet Jeremiah wept and admonished: “They dress the wound of my people as though it were not serious. ‘Peace, peace,’ they say, when there is no peace.” The myth of white supremacy is a mortal wound to our country. It has been bandaged and salved, but never treated like the danger it is. Perhaps the one hopeful aspect of this terrible week can be that we will at last recognize the nature of this wound–the correct diagnosis being crucial for healing, as any doctor knows. As a congregation, as Unitarian Universalists, we are called to be such healers.

Special music: Aaron Lington, saxophone, and Victoria Lington, piano; Julia Bullock, soprano, and Christian Rief, piano

The order of service is here.

What We Learned from the Pandemic . . .

Not this one, but previous ones. Plague and flu, tuberculosis and smallpox: each has challenged us, shown us who we were and could become, and offered us some lessons that could help us today. Let us redeem this difficult time by emerging from it with more compassion and self-understanding.

Special Music: Eric Leong, violin

The order of service is here.

The Space Between the Notes

The order of service is here.

Today’s service invites us into the traditions of contemplative prayer, centering, silence, and music from the Taizé community. They are all meant to help us tap into our first source, “Direct experience of that transcending mystery and wonder, affirmed in all cultures, which moves us to a renewal of the spirit and an openness to the forces which create and uphold life.” Come drink deeply from the source.

Conservative Values for Unitarian Universalists

Order of Service: https://bit.ly/uucpa_oos_20200510

We’re mostly associated with liberal causes, not just because we are religiously liberal. Religious liberalism is a stance that affirms personal freedom to seek spiritual truth, and places trust in humanity’s power to discern rightly, via reason and other gifts, and one need not be politically liberal to be religiously liberal; but we tend to be both. However, many values that have long been associated with political and social conservatism in this country are ones to which we should, in your minister’s humble opinion, adhere. Special Music: Veronika Agranov-Dafoe, piano