From Our Minister Archive
From Our Minister: Nurturing Beauty
The most beautiful people we have known are those who have known defeat, known suffering, known struggle, known loss, and have found their way out. These persons have an appreciation, a sensitivity, and an understanding of life that fills them with compassion, gentleness, and a deep loving concern. Beautiful people do not just happen.
–Elisabeth Kübler-Ross
The doors to our sanctuary are wide open on Sunday mornings, our church bell is once again tolling, and church life is rapidly returning to our campus. We’ve hosted a wonderful Green Living Fair for Earth Day, we are making Lunches for Bunches following our services each week, and we are once again collecting food for the Westside Food Bank–so don’t forget to bring some nonperishable goods to church with you!
Our Women’s Retreat is back at Camp deBenneville Pines, our annual pledge drive is ongoing (don’t forget to submit your pledge card or complete it online), and work will soon begin on the capital project to repair the foundation around the Arizona Street entrance.
We’re hosting Bylaws Refresh Town Halls to reflect together on our proposal to update our Bylaws, and our pastoral care leaders are organizing a new Pastoral Care Team that merges the ministries of the Pastoral Associates and CaRing. There is far more happening at church than I am able to share in this article but I hope you’re finding this return to so many of the activities we love to be life-giving.
How might you engage with all the renewing energy, events, and activities at church? I hope you’ll take advantage of this opportunity to be of service in this rebirthing of our beloved community on Sunday mornings and throughout the week!
Our Soul Matters theme for this month is “Nurturing Beauty.” We are invited to reflect together each month on a theme of spiritual significance through some of our publications, group meetings, and worship services. “Nurturing Beauty” asks us to consider a topic that is often neglected in religious life but holds much potential. We tend to think of beauty in physical terms, but is not beauty much more than that? One of my favorite hadiths (sacred sayings) cherished by Sufi tradition is “G-d is beautiful and she loves beauty.” What might it mean for us to consider beauty more holistically as a spiritual reality rather than something simply of an aesthetic nature?
Mevlana Rumi wrote, “Let the beauty of what you love be what you do.” Might we think of nurturing beauty as cultivating a state of being within oneself and acting in accord with it? Our friends at Soul Matters provide us with some excellent questions to consider as we reflect more deeply on this month’s theme: When were you first healed by beauty? When were you first protected by beauty? When did beauty first teach you something? When was beauty a doorway to the divine? What makes a beautiful soul? What do you do to beautify your own soul? What did your family of origin teach you about what it means “to be beautiful?” What parts of life have grown more beautiful as you’ve aged? You’re invited to bring some of these potent questions to your church meetings and activities to encourage community spiritual reflection.
If you are celebrating a joy or mourning a loss or marking a milestone that you’d like shared with the community at a Sunday service, please reach out to our new Pastoral Care Team at pastoralcare@uusm.org. You can also request confidential spiritual companionship if you’d like some additional support by contacting us at that email address.
Yours in ministry,
Jeremiah
Rev. Jeremiah Lal Shahbaz Kalendae
Developmental Minister
Developmental Minister
From Our Minister: Awakening to Life!
I believe God is everything, say Shug. Everything that is or ever was or ever will be… She say, my first step away from the old white man was trees. Then air. Then birds. Then other people. But one day when I was sitting quiet and feeling like a motherless child, which I was, it come to me: that feeling of being part of everything, not separate at all. I knew that if I cut a tree, my arm would bleed. And I laughed and I cried and I run all around the house. I knew just what it was. In fact, when it happen, you can’t miss it.
—Alice Walker
I hope you are finding time to get outside to enjoy the refreshing and vivifying energies of the springtime. As we cross the thresholds of the arrival of spring and the two-year anniversary since the pandemic shutdowns began, it is a good time to take inventory of our physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual wellbeing. The pandemic has certainly taken a toll on all, and the added stresses and fears that come with war and economic turmoil can make this a particularly difficult time to thrive. What do you need to find peace, stability, and wellness? How are you caring for your mental and emotional life? How is your body? What about your spirit? Leaning into community is an important way to practice caring for yourself and finding the support and resources you need to survive and thrive. Connecting with the natural world is another way to draw upon untapped reservoirs of strength, inspiration, and serenity. Spiritual exercises can also help us to instill our lives with greater compassion, discipline, and mindfulness. Please give yourself the time this month to holistically assess how you are and what you need to blossom like the fragrant Jasmine flowers.
Our Soul Matters theme for this month is “Awakening.” We reflect together each month in some of our publications, group meetings, and worship services on one theme with important religious significance. “Awakening” is a central topic of many of the world’s religions. The Buddha is called “the Awakened One.” Spiritual liberation in Hinduism is often defined as becoming aware that’s one’s soul is one with the divine. In Christianity, Jesus (peace be upon him) is often found in the Gospels calling his followers to awaken from a spiritual death to embrace life. At its depth, this theme is about transformation for the better. We are invited to explore the theme further with the following questions from our friends at Soul Matters: Are you the type that believes awakening most often arises slowly from discipline and dedication or the type that believes it is something that sneaks up on us and hits us like a ton of bricks? When did you first awaken to the truth that the world’s rules, judgements and strivings did not have to be your own? Have you ever read a book or watched a movie that “woke you up”? Are awakenings easier when you are younger or older? Has pain or loss ever led you to the door of awakening? What if the path to awakening is simply “wanting what you have”?
Pastoral support is available from our team of trained congregational leaders. We know times can be rough and having a trusted spiritual companion can lessen the burden in difficult periods. As we are regathering in our historic sanctuary, our pastoral leaders are also happy to share any joys, sorrows, or milestones in your life with the community.. To request confidential pastoral support or share any news with the congregation please email us at pastoralcare@uusm.org.
Yours in ministry and love,
Jeremiah
Rev. Jeremiah Lal Shahbaz Kalendae
Developmental Minister
Developmental Minister
Renewing Faith
I love the recklessness of faith. First you leap, then you grow wings.
-Rev. William Sloane Coffin
My heart is breaking as I witness the violence, terror, and devastation being unleashed on the people of Ukraine. Flashbacks to the powerlessness I felt when our country invaded Iraq and Afghanistan two decades ago haunt me. As a person of liberal faith, I am still called to witness to the good, the true, and the beautiful in the world in times like these. War is almost never any of these. I am moved by the bravery and courage of the Ukrainian people and others resisting oppression and violence in places like Palestine, Yemen, and Afghanistan.
I am reflecting upon the words of the 14th Dalai Lama: “Of course, war and the large military establishments are the greatest sources of violence in the world. Whether their purpose is defensive or offensive, these vast powerful organizations exist solely to kill human beings… Since armies are legal, we feel that war is acceptable; in general, nobody feels that war is criminal or that accepting it is criminal attitude. In fact, we have been brainwashed. War is neither glamorous nor attractive. It is monstrous. Its very nature is one of tragedy and suffering.”
I pray for an end to this war and the establishment of peace and happiness in hearts of all and I pray we begin to transform our global society such that we will neither accept war nor the mentalities and machinery that make it possible as anything other than monstrous. Let us have faith in a future secured by peace.
Our Soul Matters theme this month is “Renewing Faith.” Each month we reflect together as a congregation on a spiritual theme in some of our meetings, publications, and worship services. We are people of “liberal faith” who place our trust in our open-minded and open-hearted approach to life and in our hope for a brighter future for humanity with greater freedom, justice, and love for all. We renew our faith by stretching our beings through participation in community life and by inspiration from courageous people like President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine.
Our friends at Soul Matters invite us to deepen our consideration of the theme with the following questions: What have you trusted since childhood? What have you never lost faith in? Has your faith in humanity increased or decreased as you’ve grown older? How is your faith in democracy doing? Has age allowed you to be more or less faithful to your true self? Despite its losses and challenges, Covid has clarified priorities for many of us. So, because of covid, what are you now more faithful to? Is it time to take that leap of faith?
Our pastoral care leaders would like to encourage you to reach out for support if you are having a difficult time and would benefit from confidential spiritual support from our trained team of pastoral caregivers. We would also like to celebrate life’s accomplishments and joys and hold you in your times of grief, so if you have a joy, sorrow, or milestone to share with our larger community, please let us know. You can request confidential support or share news with the congregation by emailing pastoralcare@uusm.org.
Yours in ministry and love,
Jeremiah
Rev. Jeremiah Lal Shahbaz Kalendae
Developmental Minister
Developmental Minister
Widening the Circle
It’s the community’s job to figure out how we can stretch into the so-called margins to broaden our understanding and the ability to be inclusive. Inclusivity is not ‘how do we make you a part of what we are?’ but ‘how do we become more of what you are?
-Sensei angel Kyodo williams
Blessings of the Lunar New Year, Black History Month, and the sacred Islamic month of Rajab [to be in awe]! I am meditating on the powerful words of Sensei Kyodo williams. She is the trailblazing author of Being Black: Zen and the Art of Living with Fearlessness and is the second Black woman to be ordained in the Zen tradition. She invites us to consider inclusion from the perspective of “how do we become more of what you are?” This highlights a common mistake that is often made in the work of countering oppressions and striving to create a multicultural beloved community. Often we define inclusion by the capacity for an oppressed person to be assimilated to the values, assumptions, embodiments, and cultures of the dominant group(s).
White supremacy, cisheteropatriarchy, ableist culture, and other “powers and structures of evil” remain entrenched in our society because of this harmful dynamic. It makes me think of the ministry of Isa ibn Maryam (peace be upon )–better known as our dear brother Jesus in this cultural context–and the ways that he challenged this dynamic by eschewing allegiance to the political, economic, and religious powers of his day and going instead to live with and among those without shelter and food, the persecuted and oppressed, and others outcast by society. I wonder how Unitarian Universalism might be transformed if we behaved likewise and sought to change ourselves to be more like our siblings who are different from “us” in any number of ways. Might we actually become more of ourselves through a deeper encounter with “the other?”
Our Soul Matters theme this month is “Widening the Circle.” Each month we reflect together as a congregation on a spiritual theme through some of our publications, discussions, and worship services. The theme asks us to consider questions of inclusion and how commitments to intersectionality, anti-oppression, and anti-racism can expand our inclusivity as a religious movement. The UUA Commission on Institutional Change published Widening the Circle of Concern (June 2020) to support congregations with this work and you can find this excellent resource here.
Our friends at Soul Matters invite us to consider the following questions as we deepen our exploration of this important theme and work in our congregations: When were you “saved” by someone who widened a circle to let you in? Who needs you to widen the circle for them? Has an experience of being excluded permanently left a mark on you? How has your definition of racism widened or shifted since you were younger? Has your sense of self ever widened so much that you’ve felt “one with the universe”?
Our Pastoral Care teams are available to provide support over these difficult days. They can provide a listening ear, a loving heart, and spiritual companionship. We also welcome contributions from our members and friends to our joys and sorrows to be shared on Sunday morning. Help us stay informed as we mourn, celebrate, and honor special times in your life as a beloved community. To confidentiality request support or share pastoral news with the congregation, please email pastoralcare@uusm.org.
Yours in ministry and love,
Jeremiah
Rev. Jeremiah Lal Shahbaz Kalendae
Developmental Minister
From Our Minister: Living with Intention
Before you tell your life what you intend to do with it, listen for what it intends to do with you. Before you tell your life what truths and values you have decided to live up to, let your life tell you what truths you embody, what values you represent.
-Parker J. Palmer
Happy New Year! I hope this message finds you healthy and hopeful about the future. Thank you to everyone who sent good wishes or held us with healing thoughts as my mother was hospitalized and then COVID made its way to my household last week. I am happy to report that everyone is on the mend and I am feeling revitalized after a lot of rest. The intensity of this experience really brought home the reality of the pandemic and what it takes for us to restore ourselves after such trauma. While our society has focused on responding to the physical toll it is taking on all of us, much less attention has been given to its impact on the mental, emotional, and spiritual health of our communities. It is likely that the trauma of this experience will continue to reverberate throughout our society in predictable and unpredictable ways for months and years to come. I would like to challenge us all to think about these long term impacts and how we can respond compassionately and proactively as a beloved community by ministering to spiritual needs within and beyond our congregation. Our prophetic imagaining, radical love, and deep liberal religious wisdom can help to guide us through this new year with courage and grace.
Our Soul Matters theme for this month is “Living with Intention.” Each month, we are invited to reflect upon a theme of religious significance together through some of our church publications, worship services, and small group activities. Parker Palmer highlights that intention is different from goals or resolutions in that it is something that arises from deep within ourselves and connects us with our purpose in life. You are invited to sit with what intentions you are discovering, naming, and embracing within this month. Instead of asking yourself about your resolution for the new year, perhaps consider what intentions are motivating, propelling, and giving shape to your life’s course. Are they your own or those of others? Is the divine or your deepest humanity speaking to you through your intentions?
Soul Matters encourages us to reflect upon some additional questions as we explore this theme: What is your intention when you wake up? Some begin the day by asking, “What do I have to get done?” Others ask, “What do I want this day to be about?” Which are you? What if it’s not about what you intend to do with life, but about what life intends to do with you? They say intention arises from within. So, what do you do to stay in touch with the fire in your belly?
Our Pastoral Care teams are available to be with you on your journey if you are in need. They are also available to help our congregation celebrate, mourn, and mark special occasions with you through our weekly newsletter and joys and sorrows shared on Sunday morning. If you are in need of confidential pastoral support or would like to share news with the congregation, please email pastoralcare@uusm.org.
Wishing you and yours a New Year of wellness, joy, and living with intention!
Yours in ministry and love,
Jeremiah
Rev. Jeremiah Lal Shahbaz Kalendae
Developmental Minister
From Our Minister: Opening to Joy - DECEMBER 2021
I slept and dreamt that life was joy
I awoke and saw that life was service
I awoke and saw that life was service
I acted and behold, service was joy!
-Rabindranath Tagore
The lights of the menorah are burning brightly. Beautiful evergreens are being brought indoors. And the days are growing darker and colder. The holidays are upon us, and this is a time for gratitude, beloved community, and rejoicing!
We are moving towards the completion of another year of surviving in the midst of a pandemic and turning with hopefulness to what the New Year may bring. The persistence of our faith has carried us this far, and it will continue to guide us through this season and through whatever the future may bring. The winter months are a time for slowing down, moving inward, recharging, and reflecting upon the deeper meanings and purposes of our lives. They are also a time for connecting with families and friends, gift giving, shared meals, and reaching out to those who may be isolated, depressed, or alone. It is through the beloved community that we approach the holiday season knowing we are all held by something greater than ourselves.
I am reminded and comforted in this holiday time by the words of the meditation “There Is a Love” written by the Rev. Dr. Rebecca Parker and set to music by Elizabeth Norton: “There is a love holding us. There is a love holding all we love. There is a love holding all. We rest in this love.” May we find the time to rest in this love as we restore ourselves, celebrate, and rejoice this holiday season.
Our Souls Matters theme for reflection this month is “Opening to Joy.” Every month we focus on a single theme of spiritual significance in some of our publications, church activities, and worship services. “Opening to Joy” invites us to consider the joy that is already present in our lives but perhaps goes unnoticed. The holidays are a time when the world seems to be filled with opportunities to slow down and appreciate the small miracles of our lives. Each month, we provide theme-based reflection questions which you can contemplate or bring to your church groups and families and friends beyond the church to practice spiritual deepening through sharing and reflection. A few questions to meditate upon this month include: Who helps you see the joy in front of you? How has your definition of joy changed as you’ve grown older? Are you mostly a creator of joy, receiver of joy, notice-er of joy, or spreader of joy? What needs removed from your life in order for joy to expand, or to return? Is it time to choose joy?
If you are having a difficult time this winter and would like to be spiritually companioned by one of our Pastoral Associates, or have a need our Care Ring members might be able to assist you with, you can confidentiality reach out for support at pastoralcare@uusm.org. You can use this same email if there’s a joy, sorrow, or important milestone you’d like us to share on a Sunday morning.
May you have a Bright Hanukkah, a Peaceful Winter Solstice, a Merry Yule, a Warm Christmas, a Happy Kwanzaa, and a Joyous New Year!
Yours in ministry and love,
Jeremiah
Rev. Jeremiah Lal Shahbaz Kalendae
Developmental Minister
Developmental Minister
From Our Minister: Our History
It brought me great joy to spend a week visiting my grandmother, family, and friends in Ohio as the scarlet oak, sugar maple, and flowering dogwood trees transitioned to their autumnal splendor. I went for many long walks on the beaches of Lake Erie and through the deep and beautiful forests that were my childhood haunts. Family and friends gathered together for meals at some of my favorite restaurants, and we even found time for roller coasters! It was a relaxing and restorative visit after so many months of partnering with our many congregational leaders to lead our beloved community through such a challenging period of history.
Connecting with one’s roots can be a grounding experience that provides perspective and it can help one connect with one’s deepest self. Ordinarily, we can get so caught up in the immediacy of our lives that we forget our beings stretch through time and we leave pieces of ourselves everywhere we’ve been. Strolling on my college campus, exploring the natural world, and spending time with beloveds helped me to remember the richness of my life and the many important people, places, events, and communities that formed me into the person I am today.
Our Soul Matters theme for spiritual reflection this month is “Holding History.” Each month, our congregation aspires to reflect together on themes of religious significance through our publications, small groups, and Sunday worship services. November is always a month for me to reflect on the blessings of my life even as I remember and grieve the pain and suffering of my Indigenous siblings that is so often erased in this season of giving thanks.
Holding History asks us to reflect on our roots and to remember all that brought us into being, and that holds us in our living, and to offer thanks for it all. Some of the great guiding questions you’re invited to reflect upon in exploring this month’s theme include: What memory holds your truest self? What memories help you hold on to yourself? What memory will die with you if you don’t pass it on? What memory has been with you the longest? What does it want from you so badly that it has held onto you for so long? Have you figured out the story you want to be remembered by?
Let’s continue to prioritize sustainability, regenerativity, and spaciousness in our lives as we move towards the winter months. The stresses, anxieties, and fatigue are all realities for many of us, so we must center the life-giving activities, spaces, practices, and people that are helping us to weather this pandemic. This would be a good time to have a holistic check-in and consider how you’re doing in heart (emotionally), mind (mentally), body (physically), and soul (spiritually).
Remember to ask for help if you need it, to remain hopeful, and to practice good boundaries to manage the challenges of life. Our Pastoral Associates are available to support you if you’re in a difficult space and they can be confidentiality contacted at pastoralcare@uusm.org. We also want to acknowledge life’s triumphs and sorrows so please do let us know if there’s anything you’d like shared on a Sunday morning by using the same email address.
Yours in love and ministry,
Jeremiah
Rev. Jeremiah Lal Shahbaz Kalendae
Developmental Minister
From Our Minister: Cultivating Relationship
Our beautiful Ingathering and Water Communion Service inaugurated the new church year and we are busy with preparations for returning to our sanctuary and our buildings in the coming months. We hope to soon be able to raffle a few seats each week to members and friends who are vaccinated and would like to attend worship in person. We are proceeding cautiously, because although the LA County health data is trending in a good direction, we know that’s partly because of the measures that organizations like ours have taken to protect community health.
With our young people back in school and many young adults returning to their college campuses, life is starting to regain some sense of normalcy for many in our congregation. We’ve not only begun to livestream from our sanctuary at 10:30 am on Sunday mornings with a small worship team, but we’ve also resumed renting to a few community groups and have opened our space for outdoor meetings of church groups. We are presently restricting participation in activities at the church to those who are vaccinated. So, we are in the liminal time of transitioning to what will hopefully be a new normal. It isn’t possible to know exactly when the transition will be over, but we are thankful to everyone who is making it possible and for the graciousness and understanding of the larger community in the midst of these many changes and new routines.
Our spiritual theme for community reflection this month is Cultivating Relationship. Each month, our theme-based ministry invites the whole congregation to reflect together on an important theme in liberal religious life to help deepen our spiritual lives and build greater community. Cultivating Relationship asks us to explore how we nurture the complex and sometimes messy bonds that are the lifeblood of any gathered community. Religion is all about relationship as it attempts to comprehend and promote how people should relate to each other, to the larger world, and to ultimacy or the divine. We are a covenantal tradition, which means we aren’t defined by creeds or dogmas but we are defined by the mutual promises we make to each other about the kind and quality of relationships we aspire to model in our church and in our larger society. Our 7 Unitarian Universalist Principles define what we consider to be the bedrock of our covenantal promises and these promises are further delineated in our congregational covenant — ”Love is the doctrine…” — and healthy congregations covenant.
In my reading of the Buddhist monk Thich Naht Hahn this past month, I am reminded that it is our deep interbeing with each other which is the real substance of our existences. He reminds us that if we deeply perceive a flower, we will see that it also holds the rocks and soil, the oxygen and sunlight, the planets and the stars. So in cultivating relationship, we should be ever more mindful of the preciousness of the interconnectedness of all things.
We know these times have been a traumatic challenge for most of us and we hope you will lean into your beloved community for support and care. You may confidentially request pastoral care or share a joy, milestone, or sorrow you’d like us to include in a Sunday morning service by emailing pastoralcare@uusm.org. We are all connected and we are committed to showing up for each other, both in times of difficulty and need and in times of joy and celebration.
With love and faith,
Jeremiah
Rev. Jeremiah Lal Shahbaz Kalendae
Developmental Minister
From Our Minister: Possibility
Dear Ones,
We gather each year in September as a beloved community and ask what hopes, intentions, and dreams you have for the new church year. With the tragedies of the pandemic, the chaotic withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan, and one the most significant attacks on women’s rights in a generation, the world can feel like a pretty gloomy place right now. We are all longing to be able to regather with each other and our larger families and friends as we once did without trepidation. How can we continue to kindle the flame of hope and faith and love? What intentions do you want to set for how you show up for and co-create beloved community? What new gifts of time, talent, wisdom, or resources might you bring to our congregation to help us thrive in this new church year?
Our worship life this month will include exploration of this month’s potent spiritual theme of Possibility, our traditional honoring of the High Holy Days of the Jewish tradition, our annual Ingathering and Water Communion service, and more! We had hoped to be able to worship together in our sanctuary this month but unfortunately the conditions of the pandemic don’t allow for it just yet. We are taking steps towards that goal by bringing our worship leaders back to the sanctuary and livestreaming while following all necessary safety precautions. This will help to relieve some of the pressure that has been upon our worship team as we produced digital content from our homes and then crafted them into our beautiful online services. We are once again breaking new ground and expanding the ways our community can reach our larger society by offering live worship at 10:30 am from our historic chancel.
We are now able to livestream from the sanctuary because we applied for and received a generous matching grant offer from the Spirit Level Foundation for technological infrastructure upgrades and staffing. To receive the grant, we need to raise $10,000 this year to have the same amount matched by the Foundation for a total of $20,000. This grant covers comprehensive audio and visual upgrades and onboarding a professional technician to produce the services. I hope you might consider donating and having your contribution matched dollar-for-dollar. This is an incredibly worthwhile investment in our congregation that will last long into the future and open so many doors of possibility!
Let us continue to be a community of open-heartedness, innovation, and liberal religious witness in the year before us. I am glad you are a part of this community and I am excited to journey with you into this new church year!
With love and faith,
Jeremiah
Rev. Jeremiah Lal Shahbaz Kalendae
Developmental Minister
Live Online Services Begin September 5
NEW TIME: 10:30 AM (PRELUDE BEGINS AT 10:20 AM)
Dear Ones,
We hope your summer was an enjoyable and restorative break. We were blessed as our GLAM Virtual Road Trip took us to Unitarian Universalist congregations all across Greater Los Angeles and many of us were able to visit distant family and friends for the first time since the beginning of the pandemic. Our staff has been busy preparing for us to regather and we wanted to write to you today to update you on our evolving plans for worship.
Starting Sunday, September 5th at 10:30 am (please note the time), our worship leaders will begin livestreaming from our sanctuary and courtyard. We’ve made significant investments to enhance our technological infrastructure and staffing to allow us to broadcast live on Sunday mornings! We had hoped to be able to reopen our sanctuary to everyone this weekend, but that is not possible at this time.
Our latest UUA Delta-Guidance asks us to refrain from holding any large indoor or outdoor gatherings until LA County is no longer designated as “Very High Risk.” When we are able to safely return to our sanctuary, we will likely do so masked and using a reservation system to ensure we can maintain adequate social distancing.
Our surveys and conversations indicate that most of our congregation is vaccinated and we will likely have to temporarily restrict in-person attendance to those who are vaccinated or have a medical exemption when we reopen. We encourage everyone to get vaccinated if possible!
Our staff has done an amazing job ministering to our sometimes weary spirits over the past year and a half and we realize livestreaming and new protocols will require them to once again learn a new media platform for our services. We thank you in advance for your understanding and graciousness as we learn these new skills.
In summary, our worship leaders will begin live streaming from the sanctuary this Sunday at 10:30 am, but we ask all of our members and friends to remain home and join us online. The live video stream will be available on Facebook and on YouTube.
We hope to be able to regather with each other soon! Until that time comes, let’s keep ourselves and others safe by washing our hands, masking when indoors, and practicing social distancing. We may be physically separated, but we remain united in love and spirit.
Yours in ministry,
Jeremiah
Rev. Jeremiah Lal Shahbaz Kalendae
Developmental Minister
Beth
Beth Brownlie
President
Important Summer Worship Information
A MESSAGE FROM OUR MINISTER
I hope this finds you enjoying the beauty of summer. For over a year, we’ve gathered in our online sanctuary together. We got used to our pandemic routines, so I want to make sure you’re aware of some important changes.
This Sunday, June 27, we will gather online to participate in the Unitarian Universalist Association’s General Assembly Worship Service — “Until Love Wins” — at 10 am and this will be followed by our regular coffee hour at 11 am, and then our UUSM Annual Meeting at noon. You can find the link for the coffee hour in our private Facebook group. The Annual Meeting will be streamed on our Facebook page.
The following Sunday, and for all of July and August, we will be participating in GLAM’s* Virtual SUUmer Road Trip which will take us to worship in congregations across Greater Los Angeles. These services will occur at 10:30 am (please note the new time) and can be accessed through Zoom each week.
Following each service, we will gather with all of the other UUs present for a common coffee hour with breakout rooms that will allow us to get to know our neighbors better. You can still make financial contributions each Sunday morning to support our congregation and good work in the world.
Our GLAM Virtual SUUmmer Road Trip will not only give our staff and worship leaders a much needed break, but it will also allow us to learn from our sibling congregations, and forge relationships across our congregations.
We plan to return to our sanctuary on Sunday, September 5th.
May your summer be filled with an abundance of joy, hope, and love!
Yours in ministry,
Jeremiah
Rev. Jeremiah Lal Shahbaz Kalendae, M.Div., M.S.S.A.
Developmental Minister, Unitarian Universalist Community Church of Santa Monica
*Greater Los Angeles (UU) Ministry
NOTE: GLAM’s Virtual Road Trip Zoom link has been emailed to all members. It will also be available in our private Facebook UUSM Group (you must be a member of the group), or contact the office, or email ZoomCoffee@uusm.org.
This Sunday, June 27:
Our UUSantaMonica Facebook page, our UUSantaMonica YouTube channel, and uusm.org will provide a Sunday Worship livestream at 10 to 11 am as has been done for the past 15 months, but it will be a stream of the recorded UUA General Assembly Sunday Worship Service from the First Universalist Church of Minnesota. See our June 2021 Worship Services article and the uua.org/ga website for more information.
The worship service will be followed by the regular UUSM Zoom Coffee Hour at 11 am to 12 noon. The link can be found in our Facebook UUSM Group (you must be a member of the group) or email ZoomCoffee@uusm.org.
The Zoom Coffee Hour will be followed at 12 noon to 2 pm by a Facebook, YouTube, and uusm.org livestream of the UUSM Annual Church Meeting. Agenda highlights —
- President’s, Treasurer’s, and Minister’s reports
-
Results of the election of officers and board members, nominating committee members, and voting on three ballot issues:
- Approval of 2020 Annual Meeting minutes
- Approval of 2021-2022 Budget
- Approval of spending for foundation repair of the Arizona Ave. entrance to Forbes Hall
- Remembrance of church members and friends who have passed during the past year
- Acknowledgements of church members who have helped carry us through the past difficult year.