On July 21 the Sierra Club will show two films on the Gulf Oil Spill and what we can do about it. Movie will be shown here at the church. Stan has agreed to contribute the filing fee for obtaining the needed IRS tax exempt status. We need the status to apply for the Kroger companies grant. Jan is spearheading this effort.
Our refrigerator has started using very high amounts of electricity. A recycling grant of $50 is available to the church if we replace it with an efficient model.
PotLuck was last night. (Come the third Saturday of every month for dinner and a movie.
We lit a candle for Betty, who is still sick, one for Marco who is moving to California and a candle for the earth.
Mark Waite came to talk to us about Sustainable Reynoldsburg. It is a new community group started by just six residents in Reynoldsburg in 2009. Mark said it was a pair of long words that, even taken together are not terribly grand. Yet, they are making changes.
The planning and development of suburbs such as Reynoldsburg Ohio was based on the belief that there were no serious limits to cheap fossil fuels and other natural resources. The planners believed that our world will take all the greenhouse gas and pollution we throw at it. They believed that national chains are an adequate substitute for locally-owned businesses with a stake in the community.
Sustainable Reynoldsburg sees things differently and want to nurture a sense of community and take better care of our local and global environment. The vision for the group is to foster a way for people to connect with each other to do good things. They are trying to create a way for local residents to connect for practical action, positive discussion, and information to help make our community and homes resilient, liveable, and healthful into the future.
The “sustainable” movement is a wide variety of local groups. Mark has worked in other countries and he said members of communities have common circumstances the world over. Being a citizen is
In Candide by Voltaire, the hero travels the world over looking for perfection and ends up believing that working at home, as an individual, is important work. What does it mean to be a member of the Reynoldsburg community? This was the question also raised by David Soliday last week. According to Mark, it is partly to extend love to those around us and to be politically engaged to achieve wider change. What do we do in Reynoldsburg to affect climate change? For one thing, every time we tromp on the gas pedal we use finite resources.
Being a citizen is inextricable from being a good environmental citizen. Being a good citizen is being a good neighbor. Being a good neighbor involves sharing resources.
Sustainable Reynoldsburg is a very small active group of local residents who asked what can be done to help the community be resilient. As residents of Reynoldsburg (if only by church affiliation) “they” becomes “we.” We meet every 3 to 4 months. We use the group to combine energies but have not done anything to cause great publicity to come upon us.
Safe routes to schools: Anew initiate to help students walk and bike safely to school. Each school has a transportation plan, bike safety training, safety enforcement. Some schools start ‘walking schoolbuses.” We hope to leverage this beyond children to get people to ask why is the community question always framed in terms of cost instead of value.
Livingston Community garden: We are the motivating force behind this aspect of the city initiative to revitalize the Brice Livingston neighborhood. In taking responsibility to lay out plots when the snow was still on the ground, we find that others enthusiastically follow.
http:/groups.google.com/group/sustainable-reynoldsburg/
Posted 1 month, 2 weeks ago at 3:51 pm. Add a comment
Betty led our service honoring those who contributed to our lives on Father’s Day. She gave a short history of Father’s Day. It is a worldwide holiday that was invented (if one can use that term for a holiday) in the modern age here in America. Notwithstanding our claim to the holiday, around 4,000 years ago some children wrote a message in Sanskrit on a clay tablet addressed to their father on the occasion that would look a lot like a Father’s Day. Sonora Smart Dodd of Spokane Washington felt that father’s needed recognition after hearing a sermon about Mother’s Day in her church in 1909. She engineered the first father’s day in June of 1910, a local event. It took a lot to get the word spread. It was not until Lyndon Johnson was president before the first Father’s Day proclamation was made nationwide. The third Sunday in June was made the permanent home of Father’s Day in 1972 when Richard Nixon signed it into law. Even with the force of law, Presidents still issue Proclaimations. (this year’s Father’s Day proclamation.)
There is a long list of official fathers. It is amusing to look at all the “Fathers” in the lists in wikipedia. The Father of the Constitution is James Madision. The first President, George Washington, gets recognition as the Father of the Country. The third President, Jefferson, has become rather famous for more traditional fathering. Within our own community, fathers were remembered for a variety of things. For singing in a barbershop quartet and for working in the workshop. Father’s were remembered for long drives in the country. Fathers were remembered for hard work… for working a day job and for running a farm in the evening and on weekends. For some, the most memorable thing was that he supplied the freedom and notariaty that comes with the gift of a unicycle. Fathers were remembered for their hyjinks, for their sensibility, for their ability to worry, and for their generosity. The most universal thing remembered was that fathers were watched when they didn’t know they were being watched, and that fathers had influence more astounding than what they ever knew about.
Jim and Sue celebrate their 40th anniversary this week.
Hands across the Sand is being observed next Saturday. It is a movement dedicated to protecting oceans, shores, and the ocean’s environment. See www.handsacrossthesand.com for more information. Someone is speaking at First Church Tuesday June 29th at 7:30. I didn’t catch the name, but someone will let me know who it is and then I’ll fix this notice.
Dont forget the Pot luck at the church July 17. Also you can help out by volunteering to bring refreshments to the services on Sunday.
–Rick
Posted 2 months, 2 weeks ago at 1:15 pm. Add a comment
Rick spoke to us about the American Dream. Rick used the Vince Lombardy quote “Winning isn’t everything but wanting to win is” juxtaposed with the Red Saunders quote “Winning isn’t everything, its the only thing” to illustrate the point that we have changed from a society that values fair play above all else to a society that values winning above all else.
Our belief in our “meritocracy” where merit gets you to the top has caused us to form a national myth that winners got to the top because their hard work has caused them to deserve to win. Losers are at the bottom because their lack of hard work caused them to be at the bottom. There is enough truth in this to make this national myth believable. However, things are not always as they seem. People suffered through the horrors of the 1930’s who did everything in their power to prosper. People enjoyed prosperity in the 1950s and 1960s despite the fact that some of them did not do everything in their power to prosper. Believing in the myth without examining the facts will sometimes lead you to the wrong conclusion. The problem with our national myths is that we never examine them.
We hold as our national myth that America has the greatest government in the world, the greatest health care system in the world, the greatest (fill in the blank) in the world. The myths are held to be true without examination. Therefore, when we have the greatest government in the world, it is only a short step away from believing that it is acceptable to impose that form of government on other countries. When we have the greatest health care system in the world, it is only short step to the belief that changing anything about the health care system would be a terrible thing.
It is blind belief in the unexamined myth that gets us into trouble.
Next week, Betty is going to talk about Fathers. Please bring a memory of either your father or a male role model in your life.
Candles were lit for Appalachian mountains, flood victims in Arkansas, Barb Wade’s brother. Becca announced that David Cobb of Ohio’s Green party was going to be speaking at First Unitarian Church..
Sue reported that the yard sale made $142 in receipts for the church. Later she revised that figure to $152 because somebody who made off with something without paying, paid.
The new website: CentralohioUU.info is up and running. First church has places spots on the local NPR stations.
Posted 2 months, 3 weeks ago at 9:44 pm. Add a comment
David Soliday spoke to us about Liberation Theology. The basic tenant is that the essence of sin is when the religious body turns its back on the poor. Sin is when god is evoked to oppress the poor and to harm the ecology of the earth. Its practitioners tried to show people that liberation theology was simply a new interpretation of the same biblical themes that already exist in the bible. They placed emphasis on the risen Christ instead of the Crucifix for example. They tried to remind people that Jesus was a servant of the poor and had concern for the poor. (Ed.Note: This idea of the people being paramount and the church be the servant of the people is the opposite of traditional Roman Catholic theology wherein the church is paramount and people are to be put to the service of the church. Traditionally, any individual (particularly a poor person) acting in any way that is contradictory to the needs of the church is declared a heretic and condemned to death.)
Liberation Theology rose out of the oppressed societies of South America and Central America in the 1960’s. Organization of the poor into ecclesiastical communities lead to new forms of theological expression. These new ways of thinking threatened the governments of the countries in which it was taking hold and it threatened the Roman Catholic hierarchy. Governments and the Catholic church persecuted the priests that taught liberation theology. Today it is condemned as “Marxist” which is a code word for anything that is assumed to be bad and does not warrant further investigation. Political leaders have managed to characterize it as “outdated” which is thought to be a sure way of getting the young people to ignore it.
Strictly interpreted, liberation theology is problematic for Unitarian Universalists because theology presupposes a theos… that is to say arguing which side god is on presupposes a god. But we UU’s honor each other’s perspective, we have concern for justice, we have concern for the earth. A liberation vision is within the grasp of every UU congregation.
Posted 2 months, 3 weeks ago at 9:13 pm. Add a comment
