Uu Fellowship Of San Luis Obispo County

A congregation brings together many different perspectives, preferences, and perceptions. This is a community which explicitly embraces pluralism...with all its gifts and challenges.

Busy intersections caused some amount of anxiety when I was a child, if not for me, certainly for my parents. They warned me to be careful. As we consider "intersectionality" in a wider context, that may still be good advice.

Earth Day Service The 2nd century bishop, Iranaeus, said, "the glory of God is the human being fully alive." In this sermon, I will be looking at how, from a Christian perspective, the human being fully alive is the whole planet (cosmos?) fully alive. Reverend Caroline "Caro" Hall ...has lived in Los Osos for over 30 years with her wife, Jill, whom she first met at Findhorn, a spiritual community in Scotland. She has been an Episcopal priest for 20 years, during which time she worked for full LGBTQ inclusion in the international church, locally helped to found and lead People of Faith for Justice, and has worked for environmental justice. Caro seeks to live lightly on the planet in harmony with all beings who are working for the highest good.

The familiar phrase is "guilt by association", but today we take a look at what it means to be part of the UU Association of congregations and how that relates to interdependence. (Worship participants will also share experiences from Camp de Benneville Pines.)

Transformation sounds like it involves changing into something new. It may be the process of revealing what is already true.

Members sharing transformation stories - Jamie Woolf, Steve Kadin, Dorothy Pitkin with Gina Whitaker as worship associate.

Miraculous stories surround the lives of great prophets, teachers, and figures of religious importance. What do these stories tell us about these people? And what do they tell us about ourselves?

We live in a society where (it is said) "Money talks." However, the transformative piece of this is that we have the power to tell it what to say.

Inform. Conform. Reform. Perform. Transform. All of our lives, we are forming and being formed by our experiences, our relationships, our realizations and reflections. With every breath, we are in formation.

What in the world does death have to do with justice and equity? And how might fully acknowledging our own mortality empower us to work for those things?

Both science and religion have played pivotal roles in the work toward justice and equity...and both have been used in ways that thwart that work. How can we be sensitive to this history and challenge those tendencies in the present time?

The Pagan holiday, Imbolc, falls exactly halfway between Yule (Winter Solstice) and Ostara (Spring Equinox). It strikes me as important that we develop ways to celebrate "partway" points, especially in relationship to our ongoing struggles for justice and equity.

We recognize that there are many kinds of beautiful lives if we step outside the self and walk beside it with humble nonjudgmental curiosity about the many other selves on their own paths.

Freedom has traditionally been identified (along with reason and tolerance) as central characteristics of Unitarianism. But...does that sufficiently capture our most deeply-held values? Is freedom the same as liberation? And how does it relate to love? The lyrics to the song Rev. Rod refers to at the beginning are here.

Though freedom is generally understood to be something that people embrace, psychologist, Erich Fromm pointed out that there is also a basic human urge to "escape from freedom."

Each Sunday we welcome you in and...about an hour later, send you forth. Which mirrors the way we welcome new members. Enter, rejoice, and come in! we say. Make yourself at home...Now, come and go with me to that land where we're bound!

"Life is a riddle and a mystery..." So says our hymn. And ain't it the truth?

"Bless you," can often be heard post-sneeze. In some parts of the country, they "bless your heart." Rebecca Parker encourages us to choose to bless the world. What is a blessing and how do we bless one another?

How do the very words we use display generosity? What does it mean to learn a vocabulary of kindness and inclusion?

No, I mean it…all of us. I’m not talking right now about our congregation or a particular activity or a community organization, I’m talking about us—all of us.