The UUMA will be closed December 23 – January 3. Your UUMA staff looks forward to coming back to work refreshed and ready to take on what 2025 brings.
As we launch into 2025, the UUMA is planning opportunities for a virtual day of prayer/reflection and care on January 20, 2025. These will be drop in experiences of spiritual practice and conversation led by colleagues. If you wish to lead a time of collegial care email Michelle Favreault. A full calendar will be published in mid-January.
The UUA sent an email out this week about Creating a Safe Foundation for Community Care. We wanted to make sure you had a chance to read it. You can access the email here.
Something for the Journey
Marlene Walker, UUMA Board of Trustees Trustee-At-Large: Ethics & Collegiality
This season of the year is so often full of so many things. Way too many things. This year especially brings so much uncertainty, fear, and unknown. We don’t know what exactly will happen after Jan 20th, but we have some good ideas. And it’s more than a bit scary.
I think we can use this time of Solstice, of the growing dark, to prepare. That’s what this time is all about anyway, Preparing. And being Present to what is happening in our hearts and to just be. To stop and find ways to our own hearts so we can be ready when the time comes to take the actions we will need to take.
It’s a time to slow down, go outside if you can, turn off the news, listen. To our hearts. To find the stillness. In whatever ways work for us.
Bishop Stephen Charleston, an indigenous Episcopal Bishop says this, “The stillness will come. After all the noise and confusion. After the shouts and alarms. When you are away from the crowd, when you can be alone with yourself, then the stillness will come, rising up gently like a spring of fresh water, enfolding you in the peace of the deep forest, sheltered and serene, a place only you know, a place of stillness and healing.”
And our colleague Robbie Walsh says in his piece Fault Line, when the plates slip and everything becomes unknown to “Trust more, the tensile strands of love that bend and stretch to hold you in the web of life that’s often torn but always healing. There’s your strength. The shifting plates, the restive earth, your room, your precious life, they all proceed from love, the ground on which we walk together.”
We have just experienced and are about to experience even more shifting of plates. And we will need to trust more the tensile strands of love to get us through.
That which is waited for in this season, and in our hearts, is none other than possibility that love really is the force that holds the world together. That peace is a possibility, that love really is stronger than death. That’s what the whole story is all about. It’s an expectation, an impossible expectation, that we hold to in the face of overwhelming odds in the world – so often full of hate and violence and war – that we live in today.
In this particular season of waiting, of expecting, of preparing, of hope, of being present, may we all hold each other tight in love. The love that holds the world together.
Searching for Something
Colleagues,
If you haven’t been exploring opportunities for a congregational ministry in recent years, you may not be aware that there are really significant changes unfolding. Please watch the recording of this webinar about the 2025 ministry search cycle, even if you are not considering a ministry search in the coming months.
In addition to framing from UUA Transitions Team staff members, the webinar features reflections from ministers who have recently been in search, many of which reflect the changing nature of ministry. This includes contract-to-call becoming a more common path to an open-ended ministry partnership than the settled search process. The UUA’s ministry search process is shifting in response to ministers’ and congregations’ emerging needs in a rapidly-changing ministry landscape and world. The lessons and encouragement from those who have been in search recently are so valuable for prospective searchers and informative for all of us who may be curious about the shifting search landscape.
And for all of you who will be in search this year, please know that the UUA Transitions Team and your UUMA colleagues are with you in this moment of possibility.
UUA Transitions Team and UUMA Staff
Something Extra
While things are quiet around here for the next couple of weeks please check our calendar for some engaging programming!
You can view our calendar events here. Please make sure you are logged into uuma.org to see our full calendar as some events are available for members only.
Way too many things. This year especially brings so much uncertainty, fear, and unknown. We don’t know what exactly will happen after Jan 20th, but we have some good ideas. And it’s more than a bit scary.
