Notice of Annual Meeting
Notice to all members of the Church of the Larger Fellowship, Unitarian Universalist:
Per Article VII, Sections 1 and 2, of the Church of the Larger Fellowship (CLF) Bylaws, the 42nd Annual Meeting will be held via conference call and screen-sharing on June 27, 2012, at 6:00PM Eastern time.
We will post all the necessary documents and contact information here by June 15, 2012. You can download the materials, print them, fill out the ballot, if it’s necessary, and send it along to the CLF office at 24 Farnsworth Street, Boston MA 02210. Or call the CLF office at 617-948-6166 and request a paper copy.
The purpose of the meeting is to elect a moderator from among members present to preside at the meeting, and to elect, if contested, from the slate of candidates presented on the ballot, three members to three-year terms and two members to one-year terms on the board of directors, and the clerk and the treasurer.
Lucia Santini Field, Clerk, May 1, 2012
From Your Minister
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I am talking to a man whose wife has just told him she loves someone else. I need to go to the ocean, says this Midwesterner, to see something bigger than my pain.
I am on the phone with a woman whose sister is dying. Her sister’s young child is inconsolable. Even here, says the woman on the phone, there is beauty. There is joy. Even here, there is something beyond the pain.
REsources for Living
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Get over yourself! Or at least get beyond yourself. That’s kind of the idea of “transcendence,” our theme for this month. When you transcend something you go beyond it. Read more →
Walking (Excerpt)
Tonight I walk. I am watching the sky. I think of the people who came before me and how they knew the placement of stars in the sky, watched the moving sun long and hard enough to witness how a certain angle of light touched a stone only once a year. Read more →
Missing God
“As our faith expands, we can find new, more complex ways of perceiving the unknowable.”
For many of us, it proves impossible to limit religious thought to a narrow creed. The more we learn, the more difficult it becomes to restrict ourselves to the definition of ultimate reality, or God, that we grew up with, or held when we were young. James Fowler writes about this in Stages of Faith: The Psychology of Human Development and the Quest for Meaning. But as we progress through different stages of faith development, we may find that certain concepts we felt we had outgrown still hold meaning for us. One of these concepts may be “God.”
The Challenge of Being “All of the Above”
I’m just not willing to choose only one.
I have been a student of religion all my life, it seems. But I have lived in worlds that press me to choose. I attend a Christian seminary. I have been in a “goddess group” of Wiccans. I honor humanism. I have had the holy joy of worshiping with Muslims, with Pagans, with Protestants, with Catholics, with Jews, with Hare Krishnas.
Sometimes, kind practitioners of one particular religion or another will profess that they know what I truly am (and it is always what they are). I take these as compliments, for I know they are intended that way.
Others are not so complimentary. Mine is a deliberately syncretic faith. “Syncretism,” to many in exclusivist religions, is a heresy, an un-holy mess, something to be avoided at all costs.
Well-meaning people will explain that it doesn’t matter what I choose, but I must choose, and only one. Only then can I go truly deep into a religion.
Amazing Grace
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Amazing grace, how sweet the sound
that saved a wretch like me.
I once was lost, but now am found, was blind,
but now I see. Read more →
Grace Happens
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Back when I was practicing law, I used to spend my days negotiating loan documents for clients. I would sit down with the lawyers from the bank and talk about repayment terms, insurance clauses in mortgages, and who would be responsible for doing what if there was a flood or a fire. Read more →
The Grace of a Bungee Jump
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A few years back, I went with my family in North Carolina to a big amusement park. After turns on the merry-go-round, the water slide and the roller coaster, our sights turned towards the bungee jump. My sister, my nieces and I stood watching the huge crane lift two people at a time up and up to the height of a 10-story building, then drop them towards the pavement. Read more →
From Pens and Postage to the Digital Age
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Like many other Unitarian Universalist congregations, the church of my younger years owes its existence to the Post Office Mission, a forerunner of the present-day Church of the Larger Fellowship. Read more →
