01 Orientation Packet T of C.doc
02 A Welcome Msg to the Prospective New Member.doc
05 Board of Directors.doc
07 Standing Committees and Chairs.doc
08 Sample of Standing Comm_Activities.doc
09 Activities Meeting Times.doc
13 Volunteer Positions Form.doc

Have a green tip? Send email to WICK at wick@uufec.com with “green tip” in the subject line.

When it comes to religion, what are your expectations?  Growing up, did you expect:  Promises of heaven.  Happiness.  Truth.  Moralizing Threats.  Authority.  Certainty.  Boredom.  Music.  Pomp.  Smiles.  Frowns.  Incredulity.  Judgment.  What are your expectations coming in the door?

I grew up with expectations that religion was all about fantastic stories, heaven and hell, threats and fear, moralizing judgment, sweetness and light.  It’s a wonder I ever darkened the doorway!  When I go to church, it’s easy to expect theologizing authorities and fantastic truth claims.

What did you expect?  Did you ever imagine that a community of passionately different people could build bonds of mutual appreciation, based on a promise, a covenant of mutual trust and support?

We arrive expecting absolute truths to anchor our values—my truths, of course.  What we find are diverse religious sentiments rather than a single set of beliefs.  What makes us Unitarian Universalist is that we promise mutual trust and support rather than trying to destroy one another’s sacred storiesl.

The Latin term `religio’ means to bind together.  It’s hard for many to imagine a `religio’ community to have no single sacred text nor truth claims (creed, beliefs) nor authority figure. `The right of conscience’ seems like having no value commitments at all, like you can believe whatever you fancy!  The truth is, we are a humanistic community of people who have pluralistic beliefs articulated in a wide range of religious, scientific and secular metaphors.  We promise to respect one another’s views.

This is all the easy part—embracing diverse beliefs.   When it comes to running the church, we promise mutual trust and support as well.  We bring many gifts, and just like with beliefs, they differ.  The “spiritual growth” we experience in congregational governance is not just theological or mystical insight.  It is learning relational skills: learning to listen, to appreciate others views, learning to accept when the group sees things differently from me, learning to want to hear others’ views, learning to forgive when slighted— learning to live the covenant of mutual trust and support despite the variety of relational skills and limitations.  Now that’s real spiritual growth!

Not what I expected from religion.  Building bonds of appreciation for one another’s gifts, laughing despite our quirks, embracing one another’s best efforts, restraining and being restrained from non-mutual breaches of covenant, and celebrating the unexpected joys of one another’s presence, this is what “religio” community really is.  Not theology, but loving bonds of mutual trust and compassion in our relationships.

Though it may take time to leave our expectations at the door, welcome to the warm and vital embrace of covenant community, a community of hope and compassion with a mission for a better world.  Will I see you in a committee or small group this week?

Blessings!

Rev. Rod Debs, pastor

So what happens next? We are nearing the end of our current Canvass Drive, asking our Members and Friends to step forward and fund our special religious community we have here. We will see where we are at the end of February, but early indications are we are doing very well. We need each in our Community to step forward and assist in the financial support of this most special place.

And what now? We seem to be becoming limited, again, by space. Yes, we have room for all who attend our Sunday Services, but we are limiting what we can do during 2nd Hr. We have little to no room for additional classes. Our kids’ programs must be combined and one moved back to 1st Hr; our Adult Classes are restricted to 3 or 4 a Sunday because of limited space. We have a number of members come forward with new and exciting programs for 2nd Hr, but can’t add them – no room. So we need to look at how we can add more room, more flexibility. Our various Committees and our Board will begin looking at options, short and long term options.

And each of us can join in. We need volunteers and ideas. Come join in this exciting time. Our Members and Friends stepped forward when we realized we’d outgrown our older building. We now need to look again at how we support our growing Community. Come join in the fun!

In Fellowship,

Denny Lauer

The 2010 – 11 stewardship committee wishes to thank all those members and friends who have responded so generously to the financial needs of UUFEC.

The formal canvass got underway February 7 and culminated on February 21, Celebration Sunday. Throughout the month we heard many moving testimonies from members whose search for a spiritual home brought them to UUFEC. Over half of the active voting members turned in their pledge forms on Celebration Sunday as a symbol of their renewed commitment to one another and to UUFEC. Over $67,000 in pledges for the 2010-2011 fiscal year were received that day. An additional $38,000 is expected to be pledged before the start of the new fiscal year on May 1, 2010. Our members’ and friends’ financial contributions, along with special gifts and donations during the year support UUFEC’s social justice outreach programs, professional ministry and staff, and operating expenses of our building.

The finance committee estimates that to fully fund our ministry and programs for the new fiscal year, UUFEC needs revenues of about $137,000. Pledge commitments fund over 80% of our expenses, with the remaining 20% coming from fund raising, special gifts and donations. If you wish to give your financial support to UUFEC and have not yet done so, it is not too late. Additional pledge forms are available in the UUFEC office. As one UU expressed it, “Put your money where your values are!”

Thank you from the Stewardship Steering Committee: Brenda Fleming & Shar Farley, co-chair. Members: Martha Bunting, Karen & Denny Lauer, Don Harrison, Ed Farley. Rod Debs, ex-officio.

Bill White

March 13th the Panhandle Free Thought Society meets at 10:30AM at the fellowship to see if “The metaphor is the meaning”?

March 20th, the free thinkers meet at 10:30AM at the fellowship to ponder “What is the origin of sacrifice?”

April 10th, the free thought gang gather 10:30AM at the fellowship, to decide are “News papers are really doomed?”

April 17th the free thinkers meet 10:30AM at the fellowship, trying to decide “Is peace on earth possible, given our nature?”

Lyrics: ”The String”
by Peter Mayer, Bountiful CD

I have found a hole in the center of the heart
Through which a thread goes, enters and departs
It’s fastened in the middle to inside of me
From where it then continues through the heart of everything

Everything’s connected like peas are in a pod
Or beads upon a necklace, decorating God
Going around the rosy, we’re all in the ring
Hand in hand, like a strand through the heart of everything

Valentine’s Day is perhaps the most appropriate time to address `love,’ arguably one of the two most poorly defined words, concepts, realities in human experience. (The other ill-defined term is `God.’)  `Love’ has been used to speak of paternal or maternal possessiveness, kinship, sibling affection, compassion, infatuation, lust, loneliness, neediness, commitment, and myriad combinations of such sentiments.

My childhood notions of love were shaped by the cultural clichés that God is love, that Jesus loves everyone, and by the Beatles’ truism that “All you need is Love…, Love is all you need, Love is all you need, Love is all you need.”  Without a clear definition, I found it really hard to say that I loved my parents because, you see, I didn’t feel romantic affection for them.  And I knew that the infatuation I felt for potential partners was more lust than love.  `Love’ meant anything and nothing.

Buddhist use of the phrase “loving kindness” makes a lot of sense to me.  Kind, compassionate behavior rooted in a sense of personal affection— loving kindness seems to be something worthy of commitment.  Stories of Jesus’ loving kindness were planted in my earliest childhood memories, coupled with the teaching that Christianity is at its core, imitation of Christ, being like Jesus.  The Great Commandment defined “loving God” and “loving my neighbor” as two sides of the same coin: to love God was to love my neighbor.  “Love” meant the kind compassion Jesus showed to the poor and marginalized, outcasts, “the least of these, our brothers and sisters.”  Loving kindness.

Love was tough for me growing up.  I couldn’t love everybody.  I didn’t even like everybody!  It was not until I was in my thirties and in seminary that I learned a key element of love: mutual relation.  Power and control and submission are not qualities of love.  Since then I have come to feel that the mutuality I can offer is respect, to take each one seriously whether I like them or not.  On reflection, it is not sentimental affection that I long for myself.  The love I want is to be taken seriously, as in our UUA covenant we affirm “the inherent worth and dignity of every person”.  Mutual relation.

In his song “The String,” Peter Mayer sings:  “Everything’s connected like peas are in a pod / Or beads upon a necklace, decorating God / Going around the rosy, we’re all in the ring / Hand in hand, like a strand through the heart of everything”.

To experience this “string,” this sense of being connected to everything and everyone, seems to me to be the defining goal of religion, from the Latin, religio, to bind together.

Albert Einstein explained the fact of interconnectedness that we find so hard to feel, when he said:  “A human being is a part of the whole that we call the universe, a part limited in time and space.  He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separated from the rest–a kind of optical illusion of his consciousness.  This illusion is a prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for only the few people nearest us.  Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living beings and all of nature.”

To be whole, to experience the reality of interconnectedness, is that elusive “meaning of life.” To achieve wholeness is to realize that each person is literally a part of me, my own flesh.

Our natural proclivity to seek union, wholeness through religious practices of loving kindness is regularly challenged by another natural proclivity to see ourselves as separate and to fear and fight the other, each against all.  In recent years, functional MRI brain scans localize in different lobes of the brain, perceptions of separateness and perceptions of interconnectedness.  The question is:  Which will prevail in shaping our relationships?

The story is told (and deserves retelling) of a Cherokee elder teaching a young boy that we all have two wolves inside us.  “One is a wolf of honesty, kindness, justice, moderation, selflessness, compassion and love.  The other is a wolf of greed, lust, selfishness, calculation for his own benefit and wickedness.  And these two wolves are forever opposed to one another.”   “Which wolf wins?” the boy asked excitedly.   And the answer?  “It depends upon which one you feed.”

Aikido master Mitsumi Saotome writes:  “If you were all alone in the universe with no one to talk to, no one with which to share the beauty of the stars, to laugh with, to touch, what would be your purpose in life? It is other life, it is love, which gives your life meaning. This is harmony. We must discover the joy of each other, the joy of challenge, the joy of growth.”

To realize life’s purpose, we must feed the good wolf of honesty, kindness, justice, moderation, selflessness, compassion and love.

In his metaphor of the Charioteer, the ancient Greek philosopher Plato also presented a psychological model of human motivation. In The Republic Plato described the individual (and the state) as consisting of three distinct human competencies, our Appetites, Passions and Reason.  Plato painted us a picture of a Charioteer with two powerful steeds: one represented the Appetites which drive us to material consumption, and the second, our Passions that drive us to psychological pleasures, good feelings.  Although these two steeds might easily drag the Chariot to excess from one appetite to another, or chasing after myriad, fleeting feelings, it is our human capacity to Reason, the charioteer within this metaphor, which by harnessing and directing the steeds of Appetites and Passions towards wise goals, that Good and Just ends can be attained.

Both metaphors, the wolves and the Charioteer with two steeds, both affirm that we humans have powerful motivations, passions, feelings, appetites, which wisdom would instruct require both respect and direction.

Religious and secular society often moralize and condemn the individual Charioteers for not whipping our steeds under absolute control.  On the other hand, at our best, both secular and religious culture help direct our steeds and feed our better wolves.  How often we take for granted the support we receive and owe to one another.  How often we miss opportunities to guide, support and encourage one another’s better efforts and forgive so that another might stand and try again.  George Odell wrote:

“We need one another when we mourn and would be comforted.
We need one another when we are in trouble and afraid.
We need one another when we are in despair, in temptation,

and need to be recalled to our best selves again.
We need one another when we would accomplish some great purpose,

and cannot do it alone.
We need one another in the hour of success,

when we look for someone to share our triumphs.
We need one another in the hour of defeat,

when with encouragement we might endure, and stand again.
We need one another when we come to die,

and would  have gentle hands prepare us for the journey.
All our lives we are in need, and others are in need of us.”

My hope and prayer for this congregation, is that we will feel the strings that attach us to one another and to our neighbors close and distant.  May we feel tugging on our heart strings.  May we make it our mission to find what we can do to make our interconnections healthy and joyful and effective for those who need our collective support.  We are part of one another.  May our passion be compassion.

Everything’s connected like peas are in a pod
Or beads upon a necklace, decorating God
Going around the rosy, we’re all in the ring
Hand in hand, like a strand through the heart of everything