“We are so good at imagining dystopia.”
–Laurel Schneider

“May your choices reflect your hopes, not your fears.”
–Nelson Mandela

Dear Ones,

At GNUUC, we’ve been focused on Transformation this month, and we will soon dive into our usual springtime activities of preparing for the next church year (July 1, 2024 through June 30, 2025): creating a budget, asking for your pledges of support for the work of the congregation, recruiting and discerning leadership roles, and the annual meeting (May 19) at which members vote to affirm choices which I hope will reflect our hopes for the life and work we share. 

My friend Laurel Schneider (a religion professor at Vanderbilt) points out our fluency at thinking about dystopia not to discourage, but to steer us toward exercising our capacities to notice and nourish human thriving. 

Throughout the thirty-year (30 years, really!) history of our congregation, the vision of our shared ministry has been to embody love and connection in a world that often seems determined to move in opposite directions. I wonder how we will choose, in this coming year–which we might consider the first year of the next three decades of our shared history–to live into new possibilities that nurture our connections with each other and with all that we love.

Yours in fear (because we are human) but also, oh so much, in love and hope ,
Rev. Denise
RevDenise@gnuuc.org

P.S. Don’t forget: Palmer Lecture by Councilwoman Olivia Hill at First UU Church (on Woodmont Blvd) at 7 pm on Saturday evening! 

P.P.S. Notes from the most recent Board meeting are published in this Eblast on the 4th Wednesday of each month–which is today. Scroll down for a peek into our last meeting. (Catch up on previous meetings on our website, if you wish.)

Hello, Friends!

I had lots of odds and ends to take care of this morning, so I have nothing planned to share with you. I am, however, as always, thinking of you and …

Yours in faith and love,

Rev. Denise
RevDenise@gnuuc.org

“The noblest art is that of making others happy.”

–P.T. Barnum

Dear Ones,

This week I’m thinking about happiness–probably because I promised you a sermon addressing happiness and transformation, drawing on the legacy of American Universalism. I’m pretty sure that Phineas Taylor Barnum (whose legacy is complicated) will be mentioned on Sunday, and there might be some familiar music from a movie of a few years back, but I’m not sure what else. 

Although we’re not accustomed to regarding happiness as one of the highest virtues (love, truth, justice, anyone?), I wonder about Barnum’s “noblest art” and whether it might be useful guidance toward the good life, especially when oriented outward. And I realize that making others happy is probably inseparable from one’s own happiness in some way. And, of course, happiness is notoriously difficult to define clearly or enact definitively. Or is it? I’m still thinking about it…

Meanwhile, what makes you happy? How do you know that you contribute to the happiness of others? What place does happiness have in your life and your commitments? 

Yours in happiness and contemplation,
Rev. Denise
RevDenise@gnuuc.org

“I’m moved to tenderness by what we cannot bare, 
Humbled by the things we can and do and learn to share.”
–Carrie Newcomer, “Angels Unawares”

Friends,

I have just returned from spending a few days with a couple of friends who have known me over the course of more than forty years. I probably could not overstate the deep comfort I feel in their company, and yet we are in some ways mysteries to each other. Our conversations veer between shared history and well-developed knowledge of each other and moments of realization that we each hold experiences and tender spots that are individually ours alone and may or may not be shareable. 

This is just the way it is to be human together, I think–even, or perhaps especially, in communities like Greater Nashville UU. We know and love and support and hold each other; we are also in significant ways our own interior selves, never fully known. I am in awe both of what we learn to share with each other and of the unexpressed depths and varieties of experience that make each of us our own whole and holy selves.

Yours in tenderness and humility,

Rev. Denise
RevDenise@gnuuc.org

P.S. Did you know that our Board posts notes from its monthly meeting? You can find them in this weekly email on the 4th Wednesday of every month. If you missed them last week, you can read them here.

“You may do this, I tell you, it is permitted.
Begin again the story of your life.”
–Jane Hirschfield, “Da Capo”

Beloveds,

I puzzle over these (not infrequently quoted) lines of poetry every time I see them. Or rather, I puzzle over my reaction to them. As a historian, I know our efforts to ignore the past are futile at best and harmful at worst. And yet, I just saw my first daffodil blooms of the season on my way to church Sunday morning, and I watch every year for redbuds budding, knowing that spring begins again the unfolding of our landscape and the story of life every year. And spring always and only begins from roots and seeds and bulbs grown in earlier seasons. So these lines evoke, for me, both a lovely sense of freedom and permission to begin again and a certain tension between the starting again and what has gone before.

I find myself wondering, in this 30th anniversary year of the founding of our congregation, how we might lean into the permission to begin our story again, knowing that doing so, in the natural order of things, never means severing our connections with all the seasons behind us.

Yours in rootedness and new bloomings,

Rev. Denise
RevDenise@gnuuc.org

“Remember you are dust, and to dust you will return..”
–Roman Catholic liturgy for Ash Wednesday

“We are stardust.”
–Joni Mitchell, Back to the Garden

Dear ones,

Today is both Ash Wednesday (the beginning of Lent in many Christian calendars, celebrated in Catholic congregations by the imposition of ashes on the foreheads of the faithful to the words above) and Valentine’s Day. Maybe listen to Joni Mitchell or your favorite love songs, remember that we come from dust and will return to it, and be sure to love on all the beings you love in all the ways you know how. (Maybe not all in one day!)

Yours in love, ashes, and all the sparkly dust,

Rev. Denise
RevDenise@gnuuc.org

“Sometimes the way we behave acts as an invitation for others to do the same. 
Let your actions be an invitation to others to be themselves in all of their glory.”

–Susie Wise, “Design for Belonging”

Friends,

The service we shared last Sunday introduced our theme for February, which is the twin-but-not-identical values of Justice and Equity. We engaged in an exercise which invited us to reflect on and share with each other some of our identities and to consider the impact of intersectionality on our experiences and shared life. Intersectionality as a concept acknowledges that each of us is different and may have very different experiences of oppression, discrimination, and privilege and varying needs, depending on the various identities (race, gender, sexuality, social, etc.) we are assigned, claim, or inhabit.

It was lovely to see how many different identities are represented in our small congregation, and indeed, within each one of us. Sunday’s service (created by Kristin Reveal, whose gifts in religious education and worship design we call on every month to introduce our Soul Matters themes, and to whom I am very grateful) was an invitation to each of us to be ourselves in all our glory. I left our gathering feeling grateful for the glory that is each of you and for the glory that we are together. 

Yours in the justice & equity that will bloom as we make space for all to be themselves,

Rev. Denise
RevDenise@gnuuc.org

Jan 31, 2024

“Connection is why we’re here.
We are hardwired to connect with others,
it’s what gives purpose and meaning to our lives,
and without it there is suffering.”
–Brené Brown, “Daring Greatly”

Beloveds,

In case you have lost track of the pagan calendar, this evening is the eve of Imbolc, the halfway point between the winter solstice and the spring equinox. Traditionally, it celebrates light, as sunlight steadily increases, and new beginnings, as in the first signs of spring. You might choose to mark it by lighting candles or a fire, baking, thinking about seeds (try this Carrie Newcomer song) or starting them, learning about Brigid–either the pagan goddess or the christian saint, or re/committing to the work of justice and equity (our Soul Matters theme for February).

Yours in the justice and equity undergirding true connection,

Rev. Denise
RevDenise@gnuuc.org

“I sing beautiful in the winter woods, and the trees agree.”
–Peter Mayer, “Winter Woods”

Dear Ones,

To understand my week, you have to know a few things about me:

I like snow, especially when it accumulates in inches (and very especially when those inches are not mixed with ice!). I spent most of my childhood years in places with more (some significantly more) snow than we get here in the mid-South, so when we have enough snow in Nashville to pile up combined with enough cold to let it stick around for a few days, I’m not upset.

I live quite near the middle of Nashville. From our house, at certain times of year, we can see vehicles on one of the major interstate exchanges just outside downtown, and we can almost always hear them. (One of the best things about a good snow is the silence!) And due to the hilliness of Nashville’s terrain, we have a surprisingly large-ish, steeply-sloped backyard, full of a variety of very tall trees.

I love trees: all kinds, everywhere I go. Always have.

So this week I’ve been looking out the back window of my house & singing to the trees in my backyard, which are stunning with snow weighing down evergreen branches and outlining dark deciduous trunks and branches. Beautiful.

I know winter weather is a mixed blessing (I see windshield scraping in my near future), but I hope you remember to look for beauty in your winter days, and I hope you find it in whatever forms delight you most.

Yours in faith and beauty,

Rev. Denise
RevDenise@gnuuc.org

P.S. First UU Nashville has invited us once again to the annual Palmer Lecture this coming Saturday (details below), featuring Nashville Councilwoman Olivia Hill, who is also our Bellevue neighbor and will be our guest speaker on Sunday, April 14. I hope some of us will attend the lecture in anticipation of our conversations with her!