January 22, 2023
By Bill Faw

My outline is quite simple: An emotional episode begins as we make snap, gut-feeling or rational judgments that a person, thing, or situation is threatening or rewarding in some way. Our emotions then change as our judgments change. Our judgments change when the external situation changes, or when we clarify an ambiguous situation, or when we place the current situation into the context of past experiences, present concepts, or future expectations. As we look at some of these ways that we do this in our daily life, notice how several familiar proverbs are designed to moderate emotional responses.

First: Changing or Leaving a Situation Changes our Judgments, which Changes our Emotions

We are constantly changing situations to make them better and to decrease our negative emotional responses: everything from cleaning the house, to trying new work procedures, to apologizing for our thoughtless comments.

Of course, many changes are out of our control: especially the death of a loved one, which brings dramatic changes to our mood and emotional responses. In ‘grief work’ we change back our mood a bit, by reminding ourselves of pleasant and humorous episodes involving the loved one, by finding new activities, and by establishing new relationships which somewhat replace the loss.

In addition, adopting Tennyson’s perspective that, “’Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all” can temper our grief by the consolation that we grieve so deeply – why? — because we loved deeply, and that deep love and grief somehow give meaning to life and  deepen our character.        

More generally, being able to affirm that “what I have gone through has made me who I am”places our sorrows, disappointments, and guilts within a wider ‘judgment’ which mellows the emotional pain of those sorrows, disappointments, and guilts.

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By Linda A. Dove
November 13, 2022

Last time, I traced our UU origin story through the long centuries of the Holy Roman Empire with leaders like Athanasius, Arius, Scotus, Wycliff, Servetus, Ference, and the Socinuses. Their efforts planted the seed of UUism’s tree within Christianity. In the 1500s and 1600s, many Protestant sects, fleeing persecution, migrated back and forth between the Netherlands and England. I ended by noting how UUs, among others, fled to America, again largely to avoid persecution by other Protestants as well as Catholics. You’ll find both talks on HUU’S website.

Today, I trace how the UU tree evolved first in England and then North America through the 17th. and 18th.^. centuries, a period when the age of faith faded a little and the age of science and reason unfolded. Then, in the first half of the 19th. century, theological disputes weakened both the Unitarians and the Universalists while some entertained secularism. Our Principles and Sources today reflect both the religious and the secular influences.

Last time I covered about 1,500 years. This time I cover only 300 but those years cover a complicated UU story. Again, I hope I don’t mischaracterize it or lose you by summarizing so much in so few minutes.

In the late-1600s, the Dutch William III of Orange took over as the British king and Parliament passed the Toleration Act of 1689. This ended 150 years of persecution from when Henry VIII broke away from Rome and established the Church of England (CofE) into those turbulent Tudor and Stuart decades when successive monarchs, depending on whether they were Catholic or Protestant, brutally persecuted dissidents. UUism evolved in part through its opposition to the rigid domination of the CofE and its sibling in America, Episcopalianism and Anglicanism.

In the mid-1600s, among other dissenters, the Englishman, the Reverend John Biddle and the Irishman, the Reverend Thomas Emlyn stand out notable. Both wrote books that inspired the Unitarian cause. In A Two-fold Catechism, Biddle argued against the CofE catechism, claimed there was only one God, not Three-in-One, and, outrageously, like Calvin and Wycliff before him, urged people to read the scriptures for themselves. Puritan Cromwell banished him to the remote Scilly Isles. Emlyn, ordained as a Presbyterian, wrote A Humble Inquiry, arguing for one God. He was imprisoned for blasphemy.

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September 25, 2022
by Linda A. Dove

In my talk today, we’ll discover some roots of our many-branched Unitarian-Universalist tree, mainly in Europe. Later, we’ll climb some of our younger branches reaching into the western world. This way, I hope all of us will come to share an appreciation of how our roots and branches spread, and how we must now stand tall as a mature, life-sustaining tree. I hope this will help fertilize seedlings for the future of HUU.

UU-ism has a history of over 2,000 years and here I can only condense rich details into broad summary for the first 1,500 years, centered on Europe. I’ll emphasize events which proved turning points on our ancestors’ path and how those events point to themes relevant for us today.

I came to live here in 2009. If anything, I was spiritual agnostic/humanist. My only knowledge of UUs was from a visit to the Arlington, Virginia congregation. I found that uncomfortable; the congregation was too large for me, the worship too formal and uninspiring, and no one welcomed me, even in coffee time. Of course, it wasn’t fair to make judgements in a single visit; but I did so out of spiritual longing. After I settled here, I discovered HUU. All I remember is loving the old school-house, observing how the congregational personality was outspoken, and then, in the potluck, being wooed by the membership chair. Though protesting I was not a joiner, I came back and became a member before too long. I felt comfortable with you friendly folk also traveling your various spiritual paths. And, importantly, my soul resonates with our Principles. As I talk, you can refer to them, just after the preface in “Singing the Living Tradition.”

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August 7, 2002
A service to celebrate our “Grand Reopening. Merle Wenger will present the message on what it means to “come home to our physical space” after more than two years when we met on Sunday morning through Zoom. Linda Dove will present an original poem to mark the occasion and several members will offer their reflections on coming home.

Opening Reading: “So are we bound together” By Elizabeth Lerner Maclay

As drops of rain that find each other and build to become a track, a rivulet, a stream, a river, a sea, so are we drawn together; so are we fortunate to find each other; so are we bound together, on this shared passage toward an unknown ocean and eternity.

Let Joy Ring Out
by Linda Ankrah-Dove

The sad tears of these strange years slide heavy
from my schoolhouse steeple. I’ve held our sanctuary
safe for you but it’s hollow with the silence
of your communal voice and song in worship.

My old wooden floors have not creaked,
felt no padding feet, heard no scraping chairs.
No hymns have vibrated on my walls,
no stories danced in children’s ears.

Be sure I’ve not at all forgotten you,
dear seekers after truth and love and justice.
I’ve kept our chalice glowing steadily
against the shadow of these vacant years.

Most of you, like me, have lost, suffered,
grieve for family, friends, familiar ways of life,
and all of you have shared the purple pain
that has so badly bruised the world.

But in the past few weeks, I’ve sensed a stirring—
new screens and mics, blossoms on the podium,
piano keys, bright black and white, and poised to play,
signposts of yet undiscovered paths along our UU journey.

The summer beauty of our gardens, nurtured
by your tender hands, promise us a vibrant life together.
And today I open wide my doors to welcome
your coming home to this, our holy space.

Today is not yesterday and not yet tomorrow.
Today, I celebrate with you right here and now.
That’s why my steeple bell rang out in joyful spirit
for tomorrow’s sacred possibilities.

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July 24, 2022
by Linda Dove

Good morning, my dear UU community and friends. Are you in love? Have you ever been in love? It’s a wonderful feeling, isn’t it? But today I share with you, my feelings of intense grief and loss. Love and loss, of course, are yin and yang and so grief stares at me in the mirror these days. Lately, grief, even horror, have worn down my resilience and sense of connectedness. So today connectedness is my theme.

I grieve about the contemporary absence of global connectedness, connecting with one another as humans and with all the natural world of which we’re a part. I love summer and I usually perk up once winter is over. But this year, grief interferes. I grieve at the harm humankind is doing to itself in conflict and war and our harm to all other life in our neglect of climate change. I also grieve for our precious HUU community and our own struggle for survival.

Living amidst a lot of house construction at Preston Lake, the destruction of life is on my doorstep. Daily, I witness the building industry’s lack of concern for nature in the materials it uses, its construction methods, and its polluting trash, waste, and noise.

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July 10, 2022
by Mwizenge Tembo, Ph. D
Emeritus Professor of Sociology

In my message this morning, I will discuss the relationship between Critical Race Theory (CRT), Power, Humility, and Happiness in Our Lives. I will first define and describe these terms and conclude with how they may be related to our happiness.

We may not appreciate the significance of CRT unless we understand its brief history. This may help dispel some of the myths and controversy that surrounds the term today.

In the early 1700s Europeans began the search for race as Europeans increased sea exploration of the world in Africa, Asia, North and South America. They encountered many peoples that looked different from Europeans in terms of skin color, facial and other body features.

Swedish biologist Carolus Linneus in 1758 was the founder of the modern system of biological taxonomy that categorized all living things. Linneus created 4 groups of all humans: 1. Homo sapiens Americanus (reddish, choleric, erect) 2. Homo Sapien Europeans (white, ruddy, muscular) 3. Homo Sapiens Asiaticus (yellow, melancholic, inflexible) 4. Homo Sapiens Afer (black, phlegmatic, indulgent).

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HUU – July 3, 2022
By Robin McNallie

I recall Forrest Church once asserting that Unitarian Universalism is the denomination that, in its principles, is the most representative of American democracy, and we can look retrospectively to find earlier evidence of this freedom tendency in our denomination, specifically at the era of Transcendentalism, extending roughly from the 1830s to 1850. The great guru of that avant garde Unitarian movement was, of course Ralph Waldo Emerson, who in a reminiscence published posthumously in the Atlantic Monthly in 1883, the year after his death, comments on the generation just coming of age in the 1830s decade. He characterizes that cohort in a memorably pungent sentence: “The young men were born with knives in their brains.” Pungent as it is, the sentence leaves out the young women of the time, predominantly Unitarian, who were also carrying inside their brains concealed cutlery – women all known in their own time if not ours: Lydia Maria Child, Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, Caroline Sturgis, Sophia Ripley, Julia Ward Howe, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lydian M. Emerson (Waldo’s wife), and Margaret Fuller.

In her rather short lifetime, Fuller was a much talked-about figure whose 1845 book, Woman in the 19^th Century, was a pioneering tract in describing women’s subordination to men and the benefits to both sexes of ending it. Here, she was reiterating what the English writer, Mary Woolstonecraft, Mary Shelley’s mother, was saying in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792). After her death in 1850, Fuller’s reputation faded. In a college course survey of American literature that I took as an undergraduate in the 1950s, she didn’t warrant the standard biographical sketch and sampling of her writings in the assigned text, nor was she better represented in the survey text I taught at JMU in the mid-‘60s. Only with the rising tide of the women’s movement in the ‘70s and ‘80s did she begin to acquire more standing. Finally, in 1994, the Viking Portable Margaret Fuller was published with the entire text of Woman included. It was, incidentally, the Viking Portable edition of William Faulkner in 1946 which brought him his late recognition and the Nobel Prize in 1949, and indeed, in 1995, the year after the Viking publication, Fuller was inducted into the Women’s Hall of Fame. Now, with Fuller’s place in the canon secure, we can see her forward-looking accomplishments more clearly.

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