Happy National Standing on the Side of Love Day!

It was a grand experiment: 30 Days of Love. And we have arrived!

Starting with Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, we embarked on a journey to discover our Story of Self, Story of Us, and Story of Now. Today — National Standing on the Side of Love Day, where we re-imagine Valentine’s Day as a social justice holiday of love and acceptance for all people – we are taking action for equality across the country. Stay tuned later this week to see all the ways in which we honored courageous love, examined our stories of us and now, and engaged in public witness.

On behalf of all of us at the Standing on the Side of Love Campaign, please accept a hearty Thank You!

(via Day 30: Happy National Standing on the Side of Love Day « Standing On The Side Of Love)

Welcome to THIRTY DAYS OF LOVE, beginning Martin Luther King, Jr. Day and culminating with Valentine’s Day! THIRTY DAYS OF LOVE is a collective visioning process about making sense of the present moment, and what we are called to do. We aim to accomplish this through self-reflection, active listening, sharing personal and community stories, and celebrating our lives and our heroes for their courageous love.

THIRTY DAYS OF LOVE offers daily, direct actions for love, and the calendar is a template to guide you through a meaningful THIRTY DAYS. But your participation is envisioned as a process, not an event.

While there is great power in collective action, the beauty of Standing on the Side of Love is its “open source” spirit, so bring your own ideas, actions, and traditions with you for this journey.

(via National Standing on the Side of Love Month: The Story of Us, The Story of Now « Standing On The Side Of Love)

Stand for the “Beloved Community.”

Speaking of love, I love being a UU.

I’m so looking forward to this event this weekend.

Enjoy an evening with friends and wonderful music – Saturday, November 12 at 7pm. The featured band is “Day For Night” with Patty Brayden on vocals and John Finbury on keyboard.

Light refreshments will be available. Suggested donation $10.00 – proceeds to benefit UUCiA.

(via Unitarian Universalist Congregation in Andover » Blog Archive » Live Jazz: Day For Night)

Calling all UUs.

Thu, 06/02/2011

Violent storms that included massive tornadoes hit Central and Western Massachusetts the evening of June 1, affecting four Unitarian Universalist congregations. The Clara Barton District has already advanced funds to meet immediate needs in these congregations and established a fund to support further relief efforts.

Funds will be used first toward direct and long term relief for UU congregations, members and staff directly impacted by the storms and then toward wider needs in those communities. Contributions toward this fund can be made by accessing this link:http://www.uua.kintera.org/matornado. If you would prefer to send a check, please make your check payable to the UUA and write in the memo line “Massachusetts Tornado Relief Fund”. Gifts can be mailed to:

Unitarian Universalist Association
Stewardship and Development
Attn: Gift Processing
25 Beacon Street
Boston, MA 02108

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I’m just back from Sunday Service with Joe Zahka. I enjoyed hearing his account of his Earthwatch trip to Ecuador (Respect for the interdependent web of existence of which we are a part.)

Joe Zahka in the cloud forest near the equator.

Earthwatch is a non-profit with an interesting charter – to connect people to issues about their environment. It is Ecotourism with a scientific slant. Joe Zahka, physics and engineering teacher and a UUCiA member, journeyed to Ecuador’s “cloud forest” last month to work with a team of researchers for the nonprofit conservation organization Earthwatch. Joe will describe Earthwatch and its mission Sunday, August 1 at 9:30am at 6 Locke Street.  Come and share your stories of connecting with the environment. How has it changed the way you live your life in the USA.

Posted by UUCiA on July 28th, 2010

In particular, Joe talked about biological and economic diversity, “the common is rare, and the rare is common.” It made me think that in the West, or the Global North, we typically think of “one right solution” to problems related to the survival of our species and the planet. Really, we might think that there is a great diversity of ways to work on these problems. How can we know in advance what will work? Fortunately, that seems to me also to make the entry points abundant. I have hope because it is therefore easy for someone to get involved somewhere in something that will help.

Another member’s comment that the earth contains the materials of both destructive and healing properties reminded me of what George Perkins Marsh said, that if humanity has the capacity to break Nature, then it has the capacity to fix it as well. Having seen the practical expression of this in the work of Frederick Billings that was inspired by Marsh also gives me hope.

My ancestors just showed up at Ellis Island. How about yours? Plymouth Rock? And your point would be…?

Tip ‘o’ the hat to Standing on the Side of Love.

[excerpt from “They Take Our Jobs!” and 20 Other Myths About Immigration by Aviva Chomsky]

What the people (generally of European origin) who point to “the rules” ignore, moreover, is that when their parents and grandparents came to the United States, they in fact did exactly what so-called “illegal” immigrants are doing today. They decided to make the journey, and they made it. All they had to do was get together the boat fare. The rules were different then. U.S. law explicitly limited citizenship and naturalization to white people. Nonwhites, however, were denied both entry and citizenship. Through a complex process of omission and commission, the law dictated open immigration for white people and restricted immigration for people of color. Immigration and naturalization law created, in the words of Aristide Zolberg, “a nation by design.”

Between 1880 and World War I, about 25 million Europeans immigrated to the United States. They did not have visas or passports. A very small number of them—about 1 percent—were turned back at Ellis Island because they were deemed to be criminals, prostitutes, diseased, anarchists, or paupers. There were no illegal immigrants from Europe because there was no law making immigration illegal for Europeans.

It wasn’t until 1924 that numerical restrictions were placed on white European immigration, creating a situation in some ways similar to today’s, in which would-be immigrants had to compete, before they left home, for the few available visas to come to the United States. The restrictions placed on Europeans, though, pale in the face of those that the 1924 legislation placed on non-Europeans: as “aliens ineligible to citizenship” because they belonged to the “colored races,” they were excluded altogether. Although the 1924 quotas did not apply to the Western Hemisphere— Congress couldn’t figure out what “race” Mexicans actually belonged to—the legislation also invented the concept of the “illegal immigrant” and created the Border Patrol to keep Mexicans out. (I describe these restrictions in more detail in the section on immigration and race in my book.)

The last major immigration reform, in 1965, finally removed the racially defined quota system, and replaced it with a uniform quota system for all countries. But the new laws of 1965 were only one factor leading to the huge increase in immigration from Latin America and Asia.

Even more important has been the acceleration of what we now call “globalization.” Today’s globalization builds on structures developed during the centuries of colonialism that preceded it. One aspect of globalization in the second half of the twentieth century has been a huge population movement from the former colonies into the lands of their former colonial masters. In order to comprehend this global phenomenon, we have to look at the socioeconomic and cultural legacy of colonialism.

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Oh, I do so love Speaking of Faith and the fact that it runs its blog on Tumblr, which allows me to do this (reblog):

speakingoffaith:

What Is a Unitarian Universalist?
Nancy Rosenbaum, associate producer

Thousands of Unitarian Universalists recently descended upon Minneapolis for their General Assembly, an annual event where “UUs” tend to a mix of congregational business, learning, worship, and fun.

On the first evening of festivities, we put several questions to about a dozen attendees:

1. What’s a Unitarian Universalist, based on your lived experience?
2. How did you come to this tradition?
3. Why are you here?

We thought we’d change up our usual, straight-forward approach to video editing for this two-minute segment featured here. We’ll be posting a longer version of this footage next week, including a procession of UUs carrying stunning, hand-crafted banners representing their home congregations — from Bismarck/Mandan, North Dakota to Brooklyn, New York.