1.    Green Sanctuary Council

2.    Worship Council    

3.    Caring Council

4.    Membership Council

5.    CRE Council

 

COUNCIL INFORMATION
Note: Meeting Dates Changes

1st Sunday – January 4
Worship - after service
Contact: Coleen Renee 509-925-3429

2nd Sunday – January 11
Board - 12:30 p.m. after church
Contact: Cynthia Murray

Green Sanctuary - 6:00 p.m.
Contact: Jim Schwing

3rd Sunday - January 18
Membership - after service
Contact: Cynthia Murray

4th Sunday - January 25
CRE - after service
Contact: Lita Malone

RELIGIOUS EXPLORATION
Lita Malone is now our Minister of Religious Education. Her ordination was held on Sunday, February 1, in the evening. The trio, Fleur de Lys and our own SongWeavers contributed beautiful music. Rand Gillen, Dorothy Mae Sheldon and Carol Gilliom, and the teachers of the children, Wendy Williams, Jim Schwing, and Cynthia Murray (reading a written contribution from John Fahey) all took part in the ceremony. We are all delighted that the celebration was so meaningful and celebratory.

OWL (Our Whole Lives)
Our Whole Lives: Sexuality Education for Grades 5 & 6 will be offered to a small group of students this Spring. Jen Estroff, the Planned Parenthood Community Health Educator, will be leading the group for the parent/child orientation and the eight-session curriculum ~ April 11th - May 10th. This curriculum covers a broad range of topics: health and safety, love and family, puberty and growing up, sex and gender, communication and decision-making – in an age-appropriate and medically accurate way.
For more information you may email Kami Hutchins
 

Adult:
Building Your Own Theology – the present class will finish up in February – and present highlights in the service on February 22. If you would like to be on the waiting list for the next BYOT class, please contact Cynthia Murray.

CARING COUNCIL
The Caring Council provides support at times when a little (or a lot) of help is needed. If you or someone you know needs a bit of caring, please give a call. Coleen Renee 509-925-3429

MUSIC
We have a choir! Okay, the beginnings of one. Dan Shissler and Coleen Renee, co-directors, have gathered fun and easy music to do, and we'll see what that grows into. It's not too late to join in the musical fun. We rehearse the 2nd and 4th Thursday from 5:15 - 6:30 PM. Location to be determined. Call Dan, 509-899-2955 or Coleen, 509-925-3429 for questions.
 

MEMBERSHIP
Membership Council viewed a DVD provided by UUA regarding actions taken by other UU congregations and their work on growth. It was decided that a member of the Membership Council will serve as the special greeter each Sunday to welcome visitors and to answer questions, to introduce them to others, and to show them where they might sit in the sanctuary. The next meeting will be on the 3rd Sunday – February 15 - after the service. All are welcome.

Membership Orientation & Sunday
We attempt to provide an orientation to UU principles, polity, and organization just before we hold a Membership Sunday. If you are thinking about learning more about membership, please contact Cynthia Murray. We will then determine the most convenient time for the Orientation.

WORSHIP COUNCIL
If you have topics you would like to learn more about during our worship services, please let anyone on the council know of your ideas. We are booked through June, at this point, with interesting and varied services.
 

UU BLOGS – a recent jewel

This is a new section of our monthly newsletter. There are some fabulous blogs on the web and here is one that you may enjoy visiting. http://revrose.com.

The Rev. Rosemary Bray McNatt is minister of The Fourth Universalist Society in the City of New York, a 169-year old Unitarian Universalist congregation on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Born and raised in Chicago, Illinois, she is a graduate of Yale Uni-versity and Drew Theological Seminary. An editor and widely anthologized writer for more than 20 years before answering the call to ordained ministry, The Rev. Ms. McNatt is a former editor at the New York Times Book Review; author of three books, including her memoir, “Unafraid of the Dark;” author of the UUA pamphlet: “The Faith of a Theist: There Must be a God Somewhere;” a contributing editor to UU World. Her years of service to the UUA have included work as a member of the Committee on Urban Concerns and Ministry; the Task Force for Strategic Options for Beacon Press; chair of the Board of Trustees of Starr King School for the Ministry, and the Panel on Theological Education. Currently she serves as the Metro New York District Trustee to the UUA Board, is a founder of the Unitarian Universalist Trauma Response Ministry, created to provide culturally sensitive liberal religious responses to mass disaster and other significant trauma; she is also on the board of Disaster Chaplaincy Services, a New York City based multi-faith group providing disaster spiritual care in the Metro New York area. Rosemary lives in New York City with her husband, Robert, and their two sons, Allen and Daniel.

Saying Goodbye to Mac
I was 19 when I first met Isaac McNatt. It was a Saturday night in the fall of 1974, my junior year at Yale, and I was the production manager for “The Amen Corner,” by James Baldwin. The play was directed by my buddy, Charles, and the assistant director was Bob McNatt, with whom I had fallen madly in love while we worked together. Bob told me his dad was coming to the opening night, and asked me to look for him since he would be backstage. I was terrified; how would I know him? Did he know about me? Would he hate me? Bob did what he’s always done—smiled at me, told me to relax, and said everything would be fine. I do remember that he blew me a kiss as he left.
 

About 20 minutes later, I saw a tall distinguished man walk through the door and my first thought was: “Oh, this is what Bob will look like when we’re older,” because he looked so much like Bob, and because when you’re 19, anything older than 30 seems very old indeed. So I walked up to him and introduced myself, and said that Bob had asked me to look out for him.

He took my hand, and smiled this warm, open smile that made you feel like the sun had come out and was shining all over you. “I’m Isaac McNatt; I’m so glad to meet you,” he said, and I knew he really was. I took him to his seat, and sat right next to him. In between acts we chatted, and I talked about wanting to be a writer, and how much fun it was to work on the play, and how talented I thought his son was.
That was the first of our many conversations over many years, as I learned to love “Mac,” as much as everyone else did. I came to care for him first as the antithesis of my own angry and violent father. He was elegant, and smart, and kind, and he and his wife, Gladys, adored each other. They talked and laughed and held hands whenever they were together; I had never seen anything like that before. I kept asking Bob if his parents were really like that—he kept telling me they’d always been that way. For a lot of Americans, Barack and Michelle Obama were a big surprise, but I’d been looking at their forerunners for decades—Isaac and Gladys McNatt, and their 62-year marriage, was the real deal.
 

Mac and I were kindred spirits around tech-nology. We always loved gadgets, and could talk about them endlessly. Bob and his mom only rolled their eyes at us while we talked about computers and tried to write our own batch files (he was better at it than I was!) But he was also a keen political thinker, and what he knew of politics came from his long activist history. I’ll always remember his talking about being in the Seabees during the Second World War; they refused to admit him to Officer Candidate School because he was black. When the black Seabees were expected to eat after the white enlisted men, Mac helped to lead a protest on the base that led to his expulsion from the Navy, along with 17 of his brothers. This dishonorable discharge was especially hurtful to Mac’s future; he’d enlisted after taking a leave of absence from St. John’s Law School in NYC. Without an honorable discharge, he would never have been able to practice law. So he and several of his brother Seabees decided to fight, and they enlisted the help of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund: their lawyer was a young man named Thurgood Marshall. The future Supreme Court justice eventually won for them the honorable discharges that would allow Mac admission to the New York and New Jersey bar, and a distinguished career would follow.

In addition to his political and social activism, Mac was a serious churchman, and loved the Unitarian Universalist faith we eventually shared.  I learned half of what I know about doing church from watching him and Gladys in their leadership roles at Community Church of NY, the church in which they were married, and in which I was ordained decades later.

The symptoms of Mac’s Alzheimer’s disease became clear to me while I was living with them in the summer of 1998, working on my ministerial requirement for clinical pastoral education.  He would be fine for long stretches, and then he would forget things or misplace them in a way that was completely unlike him. By then, I had seen enough people at the hospital to figure out what was happening, and his eventual diagnosis sent us all into a long time of grieving, as we began to say good-bye to this man who had been the light of all our lives.

Mac died quietly last Monday at a hospice in North Carolina. Knowing it was time didn’t make it any easier to let him go, and we are heartbroken.  But I so glad he lived, so grateful to see his face in the faces of my husband and sons, and to hear so many stories of his dedication to his country, to his liberal religious faith, and to his people.  He was a treasure, and I loved him.  Take care, Mac.