“We are stronger than we think and less alone than we imagine.
We are the answers to each other’s questions, and we are here to love and learn.”
–Call the Midwife, Season 13, Episode 6

Dear Ones,

Springtime energy is really picking up the pace! Going on these days at GNUUC:

• A New Leaf Preschool has taken weekday occupancy of our education building, and it is wonderful to see and hear the short people enjoying their days!

• Your Finance Team is busy preparing for the launch (this Sunday) of our annual Stewardship Drive. If you are able, please join us for worship in person this weekend to learn more about our finances and plans for next year. 

• The trees on the hillside are getting greener. (I particularly like this time of year, when there are so many, many shades of green wherever I look!)

• I am starting a series of (roughly) monthly Listening Circles, which will provide opportunities for us to practice being less alone by listening to each other and witnessing who we are when we sit together with our questions. The first circle will convene on Sunday, April 21, around 1 pm (or whenever we’re done eating) in the Wiggle Room or Sanctuary (depending on how many of us gather). Open to all!

Yours in love and learning,

Rev. Denise
RevDenise@gnuuc.org

“I am not frightened of change. I am frightened of things staying the same.”
–Victoria Smith

“There is no power for change greater than a
community discovering what it cares about.”
–Margaret Wheatley

Beloveds,

It feels to me as if spring has just blown in all of a sudden. Even though I’ve been tracking the budding and flowering of various plants for over a month now, suddenly, between leaves are appearing on tree branches (which always changes the landscape dramatically) and the strong storms and volatile temperatures of the last couple of days, it feels like spring is here! Change is upon us.  

Of course, spring isn’t a new thing, even if it feels all around me (to borrow from an e e cummings poem which is not about spring) like “something so quite new” is happening. Spring, and changes of all sorts, happen every year, all the time, whether or not I notice and think about it. 

All the many new (yet returning!) shades of green outside my window have me wondering about other changes, other opportunities for growth, for myself, for you, for us. Where are you encountering change? What is changing for us as a congregation? How might we find power for change in discovering what we care about as a community? What winds are blowing through our branches?

So much green, so much movement and potential…I am grateful to be able to share it with you, dear ones.

Yours in springtime and all the seasons of change,
Rev. Denise
RevDenise@gnuuc.org

“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