June 1 - We are going to be trying something new (to our knowledge) on the first Sunday in June: a discussion service, based on one of the topics suggested by Penelope, the editor of this newsletter.  As Rich Malen mentioned in his discussion of Unitarian-Universalism's First Principle, we have been criticized by representatives of (other?) Christian denominations for having no doctrine of evil adequate to interpret the enormities of the past century that are, alas, spilling into the current one.  We may not be able to formulate such a doctrine, but let's at least explore questions like: What is evil?  Is it an active force, the absence of good, or misdirected attempts at good?  (For this last possibility, think about the recent flap over Will Smith's comments on Hitler).  Is it, as Socrates said, essentially ignorance? Can we say a person is evil, or only behavior or ideas?  Is evil behavior a product of a person's evil disposition, or does it arise mainly from the situations people find themselves in?  (Think about the social psychology experiments of Asch, Milgram, and Zimbardo). Are certain behaviors (e.g., war, despotism, lying) always evil, and if so, are they still sometimes necessary?  If there is a God, can that God be individuals, civil society, and government to eliminate evil?


June 8—"Something Christian for a Change."  Bob Bledsoe will be taking a seminary intensive on 'Preaching the Gospels" the first two weeks of June, and this Sunday's sermon will be written for that class.  Unfortunately, he doesn't know in advance what the topic will be, only that it'll be from one of the books of the Newer Testament, so join us to see what he's learned and to what purpose he's putting it. 

June 15 - Father's Day.  I will give a brief talk on 'Daddy, I hardly knew you'.  Please come prepared to share your own thoughts on fathering or being fathered.  You may also want to think about the reasons for and consequences of the common conception in the Abrahamic religions of God as Father.  Rich Homa

 
June 22 -"Hidden Lives."  There are beautiful and staggering events happening continuously and we tend to miss them simply because they happen outside our purview.  Join us as Bob Bledsoe examines what some of those events are and what it means to take note of them and the changes its notice engenders for both the viewer and the viewed.

June 29 - We will be spending one Sunday a month away from the Mabel Tainter, and this is that Sunday for June.  For this service - a kind of walking meditation - we will meet at the northern (Menomonie) trailhead of the Red Cedar Trail at 921 Brickyard Road, just west of town.  Feel free to bring along something by Thoreau, Muir, Leopold, or anyone else you think might provide a thought or insight that would contribute to the mood.

From the Chair

    This is the last month of our church year. June 1 will usher in another year with new board members, new committee chairs, and new members. We recently received recognition for our growth this past year and we have many plans developing for the next year. I am grateful for the many talents of each one of you as we seem to manage quite well with new ideas all the time. Thanks for all you do, day in and day out, in support of UU Menomonie. Our official title being Unitarian Society of Menomonie.
    On July 20th we have decided to do some fundraising and PR and social action, and member support, all rolled into one activity. Thanks to the Smith-Tourville family we will be the sole food vendor at the "Music for Peace" benefit for Red Cedar Peace Initiative at Wilson park. There will be six bands performing that day from 1-8 p.m. and many will be hungry! I am getting the permits from the City Council, and the Health Department, and the Rec Department has already given a permit for the event. I could really use a wiser person, in the kitchen, than I to chair this food event. Anyone willing to lead the way with the food? We already have a number of people indicate a willingness to contribute, I would be willing to seek out donated foods, help with setup, selling, and take down, and be the chief 'gopher'. As usual I need someone to tell me what to do, sorry Elizabeth!  It is a day to wear our t-shirts and strut our involvement in peace issues, have some fun together, listen to some great music, and raise some money for our stretched budget. All help is welcome, so please let me know how you would be willing to help out.   

With summer coming fast and many people out and about we tend to have smaller groups at service. With the transition taking place I ask all with keys to pay particular attention so we make sure the Tainter gets opened early for setup. Also I would ask all parting committee chairs to pass onto the incoming chair the details of how we have coordinated in the past, as well as all pertinent information about the committee responsibility.  Thanks again for all the past great work.
   
I am looking forward to a productive year ahead.
   
P.S. I really liked the live music from the younger set last week. Thanks Keith and Kelan - I love it, and will request your regular involvement. Hope it works for you too.
Dennis Spader – Chair

WHAT'S GOING ON

            Last month I wrote about Mother Stephanie Speller's book Radical Welcome and asked a couple questions from it for people to consider.  This month I'm expanding the questions:  the following are from a questionnaire she developed for church leaders called "Studying Your Reality."

1.       Who are you?  Take stock of the congregation's dominant races, ethnicities, linguistic groups, ages, sexual orientations, class backgrounds, regional affiliations, physical abilities, etc.
2.       Which group's voices and values have historically shaped your congregation and its practices?  How?  Ask the same question of your denomination.
3.       Which groups of people shape the congregation and its practices—who are the "insiders"—today?  What is the story behind this pattern?
4.       Which groups have historically been on the congregation's margins, either inside or just outside?  Why?  What groups are on the denomination's margins?
5.       Which groups are inside the congregation but disempowered today?  What is the story behind this pattern?
6.       Which groups of people are within a one-mile radius?  Are they part of the congregation?  Is so, why?   If not, what is the story behind this pattern?
7.       What is already radically welcoming about your identity?  How does this prepare you for the work ahead?

            We're likely to each have differing answers for each of these questions and that's how it ought to be.  We're individuals and we see the same world through different lenses.  We need to contemplate them as a group in order to come to a consensus about the congregation and its direction.  I can, however, add some demographics to question 6. 
            These are demographics from Percept, an organization that pores over census information and compiles it for communities with an eye specifically toward religious and denominational polity.  These figures are for the five mile radius surrounding Menomonie.  Much of the information is expected:  Menomonie is absolutely average in relation to population density and projected population growth.  Just a glance at a local map will bear out that our population is very dispersed –we tend not to clump but to spread. 
            We're primarily Middle American families with a low non-Anglo population.  As you'd expect of a college center, we score very high in educated population, although a closer look at that shows we have exactly the same percentage—30%—for both "some college" and "high school graduates," while our "college graduate" rate is 17%.  We are slightly lower than average in our stress conditions—fewer layoffs, factory closings, citizens on social services, single mothers and similar social problems—and we're also about average in our resistance to change.
            But there are surprises.  For instance, the fastest growth among ethnic groups, including whites, is among the Native American and Other group.  (I'd love to hear anyone's theory for that increase.)  The majority of our population is solidly between ages 7 to 26—we are a very, very young place.  And our families are mostly non-traditional, many of us, whether gay or straight, either divorced or in cohabitation. 
But the demographics most associated with religion and spirituality are the most interesting.   Most of our neighbors are Somewhat Receptive to faiths and denominations other than Christian.  Our neighbors like both traditional and contemporary faith aspects, seeming to prefer traditional music and contemporary methods of worship.  Our neighbors also are solidly in the national average group for preferring their churches as places of recreation—somewhere they can attend classes, seminars, groups devoted to social causes and social activities.  Once they find a congregation, they're often willing to shift churches and denominations for one they prefer, or at least they're as likely to do so as the national average.   
What these demographics may mean for UUism and for the Unitarian Society of Menomonie is undetermined as yet.  But we should be looking at both these questions and these demographics and considering our future.  This is, after all, the faith we hope our children and grandchildren will follow, and if we intend for it to be around for them, we need to take the above into consideration.      
—Bob Bledsoe, Commissioned Lay Leader

 

Rich Homa – Program Chair

First, I want to invite all readers of this newsletter, whether they are UU members or not, to consider themselves at least honorary members of the program committee.  The full name of the national body our society is affiliated with, The Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations, emphasizes the bottom-up character of our religious community.  There is no one at Number 25 Beacon Street to tell us what to believe, how to conduct our lives in accordance with those beliefs, how to approach the Mystery (if it exists) beyond those lives, so it's up to all of us reading this to raise those issues pertaining to our spiritual lives that we feel the need to have addressed.  You don't have to give any sermons or plan any services - that's up to the 'formal' program committee - but don't depend on our psychic skills (nonexistent in my case) to uncover your souls' needs.

The Web of Life by Robert T. Weston – from Juliana Schmidt

There is a living web that runs through us to all the universe
Linking us each with each and through all life on to the distant stars.
Each knows a little corner of the world, and lives as if this were his all.
We no more see the farther reaches of the threads
Than we see of the future, yet they're there.
Touch but one thread, no matter which;
The thoughtful eye may trace to distant lands
Its firm continuing strand, yet lose its filaments as they reach out,
But find at last it coming back to him from whom it led.
We move as in a fog, aware of self
But only dimly conscious of the rest as they are close to us in sight or feeling.
New objects loom up for a time, fade in and out;
Then, sometimes, as we look on unawares, the fog lifts
And then there's the web in shimmering beauty,
Reaching past all horizons. We catch our breath; stretch out our eager hands, and then
In comes the fog again, and we go on,
Feeling a little foolish, doubting what we had seen.
The hands were right. The web is real.
Our folly is that we so soon forget.

 

Announcements

Social Action will meet to formulate goals/timelines:
May 27 at 3:00 p.m. Church Office

A Facilitating Training Session is set for May 27 at 1:30 at the church office for all who might be interested. We will start our first discussion service on June 1 as part of a new discussion series.

Knitting Group is at Naomi's House on 6/21. Time TBA. (You may have heard from Naomi about this already.)

Knitting Group is working on environmentally friendly grocery bags to give to new members. Contact Juliana (715) 505-3525 or anoldsweetsong@hotmail for details, yarn, and printed instructions.

A June Kind of Poem

Words That Make My Stomach Plummet

Committee Meeting.       Burden of Proof.
                  The Simple Truth.      Trying To Be Nice.
Honestly.   I Could Have Died.        I Almost Cried.
              It's Only a Cold Sore.
   It's My Night.     Trust Me.    Dead Serious.
I Have Everything All Under Control.
                I'm Famous For My Honesty.
       I'm Simply Beside Myself.      We're On The Same Page.
                Let's Not Reinvent The Wheel.
For The Time Being.   There Is That.
                      I'm Not Just Saying That.
   I Just Couldn't Help Myself.             I Mean It.

--Mira McEwan

Everywhen*

There's a place in the world where the ground is not firm, the air barely breathable, the horizon close, where you look in vain for a god to give you her hand, or an angel to look your way in favor.  It's a place in which you search for belief in something that will comfort and grant absolution - a land of minutes, not hours or days, just dusty, heavy minutes. 

This place ticks off heartbeats like some sort of insistent robotic eyeglass.  Should the breathing machine fail for a moment it screams in alarm, ripping your spine in two.  There's a small finger-end that sports a red light, a kind of primitive joke to ET and to the dreadful metaphor: "ET go home!"  You think of that and concentrate on it like a message you hadn't realized before and you want to take it off right away, but can't – these are the tools of survival.  You hear and see silent coughing, bubbles coming from her nose, a kind of begging unknowingness coming from her two large gray eyes.  The small body does not move – only those eyes that ask for some explanation, and even they are not synchronized.  For the time being, she is a broken doll.

People hover, doctors hover, talk, plan, discuss, poke, listen, prod.  Three levels of nurses come many times an hour and do their own task as written on some wall, learned in some school far away from the body that doesn't move.  Some look to the girl and say to her tired eyes something that she understands or doesn't.  A moment goes by.  It is a moment that is boundless and a moment enfolded in your sweaty hands that shake.

Parents hear every moan or breath and move to act, to try, to will.  Personalities long hidden come to the surface; territories bend, boundaries stiffen, there's the strain to blame, to run, to cry, anything for relief from the reality you must bear.  Ownership begs for room, heroic ownership, to be the one to fix it or at least understand.  If you understand, you open the door to calm, to answers, to bearing up.  There is no understanding, no definitive title, and least of all no bearing up, despite all the homilies in the world about such bravery – only a kind of pregnant silence.

A grandmother approaches and tries to smile to the eyes, but she instead finds her breath taken down and tears falling and words that say:  "You are my beloved and you will get well, it is only just now we are sad."  To this, a tear comes from the beautiful gray eyes, falling fast past the tubes and the tape and the mucus, and you know words would have been useless anyway.  There is a look from here to eternity and it says what all humans know about their fate and the time in between.  It is a pocket in the darkness – Now.

When a child becomes gravely ill, our frail, tentative grip on the universe slips.  Suddenly things are out of line.  The traditional mind cannot hold ground.  Things begin to puddle and become stagnant and dependent on what the monitor says as if this pixilated, over-colored screen were god itself.  Intellectually you tell yourself there are children dying in China, in Myanmar, in Africa, in the USA every minute, but this is only an exercise in mind-meandering.  This one is your child, your hope for the future, your own DNA. 

"You are beautiful, but you are empty,"  he went on.  "One could not die for you.  To be sure, an ordinary passerby would think that my rose looked just like you – the rose that belongs to me.  But in herself alone she is more important that all the hundreds of you other roses: because it is she that I have put under the glass globe; because it is she that I have sheltered behind the screen; because it is for her that I have killed the caterpillars (except the two or three that we saved to become butterflies); because it is she that I have listened to, when she grumbled, or boasted, or even sometimes when she said nothing.  Because she is my rose."   (The Little Prince, Antoine De Saint-Exupery)

The days have gone by and the remembrance of them grows sweeter.  My beautiful gray-eyed Sophia Penelope** has gotten better.  She has wheeled herself down the sterile corridors in a wheel chair, she has forced herself to hang onto the bars, counting the very seconds with her shaking body, to stand, in her determination. She can eat with her mouth, she can drink, she can hold up her head – a triumph that speaks more than muscle power.   She will be changed in every fiber of herself, buoyed by the knowledge that she came through, and if she must, she can do it again. 

But now, as mother and grandmother, and human being, I will ever be alert to the severity of nature; the minutes, the hours, the tiny little place we have here – the value of knowledge, and  help, and love.

Penelope Michler

·        "Everywhen" is a word we have lost, among so many, in our beautiful English language.  It means: At every point in time; always.

     **  Sophia Penelope is 14 years old and she came down with Guillain-Barre Sydrome, an auto-immune viral disease, three weeks ago.  She is my granddaughter.