"I learned that you can tell a lot about a
person by the way he [sic] handles these three things:
a rainy day, lost luggage, and tangled Christmas tree lights.”
~Maya Angelou

Dear ones,

Whatever holidays you are currently celebrating (and however you spell them: Hanukkah or Chanukah) or anticipating (Midwinter/Jule, Christmas, New Year’s, Epiphany), I hope you are taking time to breathe deeply and rest. Because the rain & luggage troubles & tangles will be happening.

Remember to breathe and rest–you are so worth a little extra attention in this season!

Yours in love and faith,
Rev. Denise
RevDenise@gnuuc.org

"Long gone are the days when we can just hang out with one another."
–Rev. Byron Tyler Coles
(UUA Southern Region staff)

Friends,

A few weeks ago I spent a Saturday afternoon at a gathering of Unitarian Universalists from across Tennessee and participated in a workshop on collaborative ministry offered by Tyler Coles and Cameron Young, both part of the UUA staff serving the Southern Region. (It was a joy to meet and talk with UUs from around the state!)

Cameron & Tyler (echoing ideas I’ve heard here and there over the last several years now) suggested that now is a quite new time for us, as UUs and as faith communities. We are still figuring out where we are, how things will work going forward, and how best to engage in our communal lives and projects right now. It may not be the best time for long-term strategic planning, we heard, but it is perhaps a time for prophetic imagination. I understand “prophetic imagination” to combine ways of thinking and planning that are prophetic in the sense of speaking to the current moment (not foretelling the future) and imaginative in the sense of creatively engaging with present and future possibilities. 

To me, this feels like an open-ended and inviting way to think about how to embody our congregational values going forward. What can we imagine doing within and beyond our walls to create the shared ministry imagined by GNUUC’s Board at the beginning of the fall for the 2023-24 church year? In case you haven’t thought of that “annual vision of ministry” recently, here it is:

Together, we will find a new way to be a smaller congregation that is loving and justice-seeking. 

We will do this by focusing our ministries around Radical Welcome, Kindness, and Empowerment.

We recognize that finding our way will require grace and courage to change, to encourage new ideas, and to share responsibilities across the entire congregation.

Perhaps we can’t discern the present (let alone the future!) well enough to picture clearly what lies ahead of us, but maybe prophetic imagination can inspire us to play with possibilities. As you read that vision of our year’s ministry, what do you imagine we could do or be? How can we build more connections, among ourselves perhaps, but especially with the wider communities surrounding us? What new ideas do we need to embrace in order to be radically welcoming, kind, and empowering? 

Send me or the Board (Board@gnuuc.org)  your thoughts, if you want…

Yours in prophecy and imagination, 
Rev. Denise
RevDenise@gnuuc.org

"It is delightful to come across a wild juniper in the winter months, with her sweet and pine-scented berries and her delightful sprigs that offer friendship and hope through the darkest times."
–TheDruidsGarden.com

Friends,

Today, I’m looking out my window at a juniper tree (often called “cedar”), whose clusters of dark purple-blue “berries” (botanically very small cones) I noticed several weeks ago. I wondered why I hadn’t noticed those berries last year or the year before and subsequently discovered that these trees produce berries every 2-3 years, so perhaps my spotting it only this fall does not indicate a lack of observational prowess.

As you may have noticed, I love my office window. (That view, by the way, is shared through the sanctuary windows–so you could look for those juniper berries next time you’re here.) When I sit in my office or our sanctuary, I feel held by the land that surrounds me/us and am inspired and intrigued by all the beings I see going about their lives just beyond the glass. On many days, it is a great comfort to know and to be reminded that the hawks circle, the berries ripen, the leaves bud/grow/change/drop, the birds take shelter under our eaves, and the sun passes in regular patterns over it all–no matter what havoc human beings create in the world, no matter what pains or griefs we suffer, no matter even what joys and accomplishments we celebrate.

After a bit of research, I now know much more (most of which I’ll spare you) about juniper trees, some of it botanical, some herbal or medical (do not, warns WebMD, consume more than 10 grams of the berries at once!), some magical/spiritual, and some historical. To summarize very broadly, I think it is a fine thing to have a juniper tree positioned on the north side of our sanctuary. Among many people around the world and across time, juniper has been associated with warmth and preparation for winter, with defining and defending boundaries, with healing and regeneration of both animals (it’s antibacterial and antiviral) and the land (it de-acidifies soil and heals damaged landscapes), and with hope in dark times. The smoke of burning juniper has been used in many spiritual traditions for protection and connection to wisdom and the holy.

So today I send you blessings of the Juniper!

Yours in well-boundaried connection, warmth, healing, and hope,
Rev. Denise
RevDenise@gnuuc.org

"I am grateful for what I am and have. My thanksgiving is perpetual."
–Henry David Thoreau

Beloveds,

I hope this week finds us all in moments of gratitude for who we are and what we have individually. I also hope that each of us, as members of our little congregation of Unitarian Universalists in the Greater Nashville area and as members of the many communities of which each and all of us are part, finds reason to reflect on how we are held firmly in webs of community fueled by generosity and gratitude and sustained by love and wonder.

Yours in perpetual thanksgiving,

Rev. Denise
RevDenise@gnuuc.org

Dear Ones,

As you read this, I am in the mountains of North Carolina at a UU retreat center with UU ministerial colleagues. I love the mountains (Little Scaly Mountain in particular is special), I love the drive up and back, and I always find a period of a few days away spent with colleagues to be some combination of nourishing, restful, and challenging.

Though I’m not taking time to write you much of a message (it’s last Thursday right now!), I am 92% certain that I will be thinking about the congregation as you read this. (Unless you’re reading after 10 pm–too late for me to think.) I will be looking forward to seeing you on Sunday. Who knows, maybe I’m learning something new right now (as you’re reading) that you’ll hear then...

Yours in faith and the need for periodic renewal,
Rev. Denise
RevDenise@gnuuc.org

“There is no chance we will fall apart.
There is no chance.
There are no parts”
– June Jordan

Beloveds,

Sometimes, I think we allow ourselves to be swept along in a certain arrogance that we ourselves create connection and hold the world together by sheer force of our own wills and efforts. Oftentimes, I am certain that there are less than benevolent societal forces that want us to be sucked up in various projects and perfectionist patterns, so that we stay distracted from our own power and freedom–and from our connection. (I strongly suspect someone makes money whenever this is happening.)

Sure, it takes a lot of attention and work to nurture community: egg salad sandwiches to prepare, dishes to wash, trash to be taken out, electric and water and heating bills to pay and equipment to maintain and get inspected. And building and enjoying community is absolutely worth the effort: Ross Gay (in my current favorite book, Inciting Joy) suggests that laughing together (which surely happens most easily on a full stomach!) reminds us of the breath (and by extension the ending of breath that is death) that we share not just with each other, but with all living things. 

Here’s the thing I’m thinking today: Yes, we do need (and want!) to work hard to nurture community, to keep our congregation healthy and vibrant and contributing generously to the increase of love and justice in the wider webs in which we are held. And no, the very basic connections that sustain us are not easily destroyed or lost; they do not depend on our unceasing attention and effort. Indeed, at their most basic they are like–no, they are the exchange of gasses in which living things and galaxies are born and live and die. We are connected–in our living, our breathing, our laughing, and our dying. (The universe is so generous with us!) Although Ross Gay suggests that we sometimes individually “fall apart”, in that falling apart, we inevitably fall into each other and the experiences we share and the fact of our human connections to each other and to the rest of existence. 

There is no chance we will fall apart.

Yours in love and faith (and parentheticals), 

Rev. Denise
RevDenise@gnuuc.org

“Hope is holding in creative tension all that is, with everything that could and should be, and each day taking some action to narrow the distance between the two.”
– Parker J. Palmer

Friends,

Welcome to our month of Generosity! (As you probably know, we participate in Soul Matters, a program run by and for UU congregations, which suggests a theme and provides resources on that theme for each month of the year.) 

Today, I’m wondering whether and how we might be generous with our hope. Some of this is “inside work”, very personal and inwardly focused: How can I hold and act on the tension between who I am and who I could be, as well as my personal perceptions of the world around me and what it is and what I wish it were or think it really should be? But I think really generous hope requires community: How do WE assess what really is and cherish it, while also being alert to opportunities to move ourselves and others in direction of more love, more freedom, more justice? 

No answers today, just questions. How about you?

Yours in hope and generosity, 
Rev. Denise
RevDenise@gnuuc.org

“Leaves don’t drop; they just let go and
make a space for seeds to grow.”
– Carrie Newcomer

(listen here)

Dear ones,

Though it’s a bit on the warm side this week, it also is visibly clear that fall is upon us. I’m seeing more leaves on my back deck and more color alongside the streets and across the hills as I drive between work and home. Outside my office, enough leaves have fallen from the highest branches that I’m starting to be able to see more of the sky over our hill. Soon, I’ll be enjoying an almost unimpeded view of the circling hawks (of whom, in the summertime, I can only see shadows cast upon the bank of leaves outside my window).

Carrie Newcomer’s gentle song (quoted from & linked above) has me wondering what in my life (or perhaps in our shared life as a congregation) is ready to let go (or for me/us to let go of) and what new seeds are waiting to grow, given enough space and sunlight and perhaps insulation and fertilization, courtesy of a blanket of fallen leaves. I don’t know yet, but I hope watching the hawks will give me a little space to think about it!

I hope you’ll find space in this season of release to sit with your own thoughts and discover some intimation of the growth to come.

Yours in release and the patient expectation of new growth,
Rev. Denise
RevDenise@gnuuc.org

“There really is nothing more
interesting about us than that we die.
I really think that.”
– Ross Gay, Inciting Joy

Beloveds,

I was recently surprised to find the above tucked into the middle of poet Ross Gay’s book of essays exploring joy. It struck me as one of those statements I encounter from time to time that are simultaneously surprising and immediately recognizable as true, in the sense of breaking open some bit of truth that was previously (by me) unexplored. (I really like reading–and highly recommend–Gay’s essays because they contain a rather high proportion of such sentences.)

Gay suggests that death is one of the most significant things we human beings share with each other and with all living things. The knowledge that we die, along with the shared experience of grief, writes Gay, provides some of the most potent experiences of  connection, which are also sources of joy and delight. 

I sometimes wonder if you get tired of hearing me talk about connection, but I am unlikely to stop anytime soon. In the midst of everything (by which I mean community and global warming and politics and fear and joy and beautiful weather and war and capitalism and hope and corruption and generosity and love), connection is just about the only thing I am sure of. It seems to be what I believe in, rather like others believe in God. 

I also wonder what you believe in, what you find most interesting about being human…drop me a line, if you’d like! 

Yours in faith and in joy, 

Rev. Denise
RevDenise@gnuuc.org