HUU Community Cafe

Harrisonburg Unitarian Universalists - Announcements & Dialog

Questions from the Children

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Presented by Julie Caran
August 30, 2009

Adapted from a 2001 service by Rev. Enid Virago and Julie Goldman Caran presented at First Unitarian Church of Richmond.

Good morning. I’m Julie Caran, and I’ll be directing the Children’s Religious Education program at HUU this year.  Those of you who are new to HUU and even some of the current members might be curious about what we teach the children in our church, being that we are a non-creedal congregation and do not require people to subscribe to a specific statement of faith.  If you take a look at the yellow paper in your hymnal, you’ll see the list of seven principles that the Unitarian Universalist Association espouses, as well as the sources from which our tradition draws its lessons and principles.

This year our youngest members, ages 0 to 4, will be in the nursery with Pax Helferstay and parent volunteers.  The older nursery kids will be using a curriculum called Celebrating Me and My World.  The curriculum does not tackle major theological stories or debates, but rather speaks to the children where they are at this age.  As psychologist David Hay explains in the book The Children’s God, “All children are interested in the fundamental questions of meaning: ‘Who am I?’ ‘Where have I come from?’ ‘Where am I going?’ ‘What am I meant to do?’” (Crompton 51).  Celebrating Me and My World helps to address these questions.  Its lessons emphasize our first principle, the inherent worth and dignity of all people, and lead the children through activities that teach them to appreciate their own unique abilities.  As the year progresses, they will gain understanding of how their actions impact the world around them, and begin to figure out what kinds of choices make a positive impact.

Children ages 5 and up will begin an imaginative exploration of “God.” Tabatha LaFreniere, Robin McNallie, Angelina Gonzales, Kevin Caran, Jenn Spiller, and I will be leading them on this journey.  As UUs are particularly aware, “God” can be a hot button word because it can mean so many different things, depending on who is saying it, claiming it, and using it.  The curriculum Stories About God will give our children the context they need to have meaningful dialogues about God with people of diverse views.  They will gain some idea of what “God” means to people of different faiths, and participate in exploratory exercises that allow them to express their own thoughts and feelings concerning God.  The curriculum recognizes that one perspective is an atheistic view of God, and thus introduces each perspective on God in the context of a story that some people believe, but not as one ultimate truth that we should all agree upon. [Read more…]

Dale Enterprise School

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Dale Enterprise School
A talk presented to the Harrisonburg Unitarian-Universalist Church
on the Occasion of the 100th Anniversary of the Schoolhouse.

Dale MacAllister
July 19, 2009

Fifty-seven years ago last month, another centennial celebration was held in this very building. In June 1952 a large celebration was organized to mark 100 years since Walnut Grove School opened down the hill from here, just on the other side of  Cooks Creek. The event was organized to celebrate all the schools that had served children in the Dale Enterprise community.  Former teacher Annie L. Heatwole gave an address about the history of education in the community. She was a daughter of Lewis J. Heatwole, who also taught for a number of years in these schools. Miss Heatwole also mentioned that the earliest schools were often held in “unused shops and other private buildings.” She added that the teachers were usually men who were known as “schoolmasters.”Because teaching was considered a “soft job,” teachers were often those who were not physically fit for hard manual labor.

Let’s take a brief look at the three schools operated closest to this community: Walnut Grove, Pine Grove, and finally this Dale Enterprise building.  The name Dale Enterprise, by the way, was chosen for the post office name of the village in 1872. The previous name had been Millersville, named for the Miller family that ran an early store here. After the Civil War, Mr. J. W. Minnick started a new mercantile “enterprise” at the crossroads of Silver Lake Road and Route 33. Minnick’s store was located near a “dale,” so the chosen name became Dale Enterprise.

Walnut Grove

Walnut Grove was a log schoolhouse located in a grove of walnut trees at Dale Enterprise in the 1850s. It was opened about 1852 as a neighborhood school 18 years before public education became a reality in Virginia.  Since it opened before public education had begun it operated during the time that most local schools were part of Virginia’s “Common School” system. This system was designed to allow poor children to get a basic education paid for by money from the State Literary Fund. Walnut Grove Schoolhouse was located just east of Cooks Creek along the old roadbed of the Harrisonburg & Rawley Springs Turnpike. The school lasted only about seven years. When it closed, the building was sold to Albert Fishback in 1859 or 1860. Fishback, the village blacksmith, used it for his dwelling. A report about the log building, written by Jim Duncan in 1979, told that the old structure was later used as a repair shop and garage and even as the community post office for a short time. The building eventually formed the nucleus of the Raymond Burkholder house here at Dale Enterprise.

Pine Grove School

Pine Grove School, sometimes called Piney Grove, was located here at this location. In 1877, Peter S. and Nancy Reiff Heatwole deeded 80 square poles of land for the Pine Grove School along the “Harrisonburg and Rawley Springs Turnpike” to the Central District School Board. Abraham Swartz, who was also a trustee of the school, built the schoolhouse.

The school was called Pine Grove because of the many yellow pine trees surrounding it. The schoolhouse was constructed from the salvaged lumber of the earlier Fairview School, which was located where Belmont is now. Foundation stones from the old Weaver’s Schoolhouse were also used in the construction of Pine Grove.

Pine Grove School was intended for those children in the community who lived west of Cooks Creek, while those east of the creek were assigned to Weaver’s School. By the 1908–09 school year, the year it closed, Pine Grove was very crowded with 42 pupils in its single room, but amazingly two teachers, Lewis J. Heatwole, mentioned earlier,  and his daughter Elizabeth (Lizzie M. Heatwole), were both teaching in the building. In a report that year, Mr. Heatwole described the building as “an old, weather-beaten school house, with rattling windows, leaking roof and old-fashioned furniture.”

Patrons of the school were already well aware of the need for a new schoolhouse. During Pine Grove’s February 1908 Patrons’ Day gathering, plans were made to meet later in the month to discuss securing a new schoolhouse. Interested citizens from the Dale Enterprise community, who attended the meeting, decided that a larger, three-room graded school was needed and that it should be built on the same site as Pine Grove. George F. Senger, L. F. Ritchie, and E. W. Burkholder were appointed to help raise money for the new schoolhouse. Patrons at the meeting immediately pledged more than $400 toward the building. [Read more…]

Religion & Sports: Kissing Cousins or Fraternal Twins?

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Presented by Eric LaFreniere
6.21.09

Chalice Lighting: “Olympism [is] exalting and combining in a balanced whole the qualities of body, mind, and will”

Good Morning! And Happy Father’s Day. Father’s Day. I hope that a service on the relationship between sports and religion makes good sense on today in particular. Actually, I was inspired by an associate who, knowing that I’m not a huge fan of either popular religion or popular sports, sent me a youtube link to a commercial for a videogame called Blitz: The League II. In that ad, “football legend” Lawrence Taylor manhandles a pigskin while shouting these words from the center field of a CGI coliseum:

“Every Sunday, when America goes to church, we go to war!

While they pray for salvation, we play for survival.

This is our cathedral! The game is our religion!

And every religion has a judgment day.”

Which prompted me to ask myself: What does the coliseum have to do with the cathedral? Thinking about it, I realized that there are obvious major similarities between religion and sports: both excite our emotional core and mobilize masses of followers, both prescribe our thought and behavior and provide meaningful epics and exemplars, and both inspire us to create institutions dedicated to their orderly expression and perpetuation. Moreover, both religion and sports have been with us for as long as we can remember; they are beyond ancient – their beginnings are shrouded in the mists of prehistory.

Given the parallels between, and hidden origins of religion and sports, it’s tempting to treat them as if they’re actually the same thing, or as if one were a subset of the other. As it turns out that, some folks have espoused exactly those positions, but others have argued that the similarities between religion and sports are only superficial and that they’re essentially different.

But another approach is possible: using a broad evolutionary framework, we can say that religion and sports share a common ancestor – that is to say, they are simultaneously different but essentially related. Indeed, this service makes them out to be fraternal twins. [Read more…]

Mothering Others

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Rev. Emma Chattin
May 10, 2009

First Reading ~ from John 19:25-27

Near the cross of Jesus stood his mother, Mary, his mother’s sister, Mary the wife of Clopas, and Mary Magdalene. When Jesus saw his mother there, and the disciple whom he loved standing nearby, he said to his mother, “Dear woman, here is your son,” and to the disciple he said, “See, here is your mother.”  From that time on, the disciple took her into his home.

Second Reading ~ from Nancy Friday in

My Mother  My Self : The Daughter’s Search for Identity

Chapter 1         Mother Love

I have always lied to my mother.  And she to me.  How young was I when I learned her language, to call things by other names?  Five, four – younger?  Her denial of whatever she could not tell me, that her mother could not tell her, and about which society enjoined us both to keep silent, distorts our relationship still.

Sometimes I try to imagine a little scene that could have helped us both.  In her kind, warm, shy, and self-depreciating way, mother calls me into the bedroom where she sleeps alone.  She is no more than 25.  I am perhaps six.  Putting her hands (which her father told her always to keep hidden because they were “large and unattractive”) on  my shoulders, she looks me right through my steel rimmed spectacles: “Nancy, you know I’m not really good at this mothering business,” she says.  “You’re a lovely child, the fault is not with you.  But motherhood doesn’t come easily to me.  So when I don’t seem like other people’s mothers, try to understand that it isn’t because I don’t love you.  I do.  But I’m confused myself.  There are some things I know about.  I’ll teach them to you.  The other stuff– sex and all that – well, I just can’t discuss them with you because I’m not sure where they fit into my own life.  We’ll try to find other people, other women who can talk to you and fill the gaps.  You can’t expect me to be all the mother you need.  I feel closer to your age in some ways than I do my mother’s.  I don’t feel that serene, divine, earth-mother certainty that you’re supposed to that she felt.  I am unsure how to raise you.  But you are intelligent, and so am I.  Your aunt loves you, your teachers already feel the need in you.  With their help, with what I can give, we’ll see that you get the whole mother package-all the love in the world.  It’s just that you can’t expect to get it all from me.” [Read more…]

General Assembly, A Meeting of Congregations

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General Assembly (GA) is the annual meeting of the Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations. General Assemblies shall make overall policy for carrying out the purposes of the Association and shall direct and control its affairs. Voting at each regular and special General Assembly shall be by accredited delegates from certified member congregations, certified associate member organizations, and trustees.

Registration and Housing Reservations are now open.

The full Program Schedule is now available.

No News is Good for You

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by Cheryl Talley, Ph.D.
April 5, 2009

I began my 50 week negativity fast on Monday, November 26, 2007 as an act of desperation. The fast from all news media was an alternative plan from abstaining from all food for a year…which had been a very fleeting thought.  I remembered the benefit of fasting from food from back in my early thirties. Back then I had been in a church that advocated periodic fasting as part of a spiritual discipline. The longest period I had fasted was for 21 days. I knew the wonderful feeling of “after the fast” a clean feeling of having  detoxified myself physically and emotionally. It always worked. I felt more at peace after a fast…especially when it was coupled with a commitment to substitute spiritual readings instead of food…an emphasis on feeding my mind instead of my body. And I also noticed that I was less inclined to fight with people. I was much more sensitive during a fast of the impact of negative emotions. I also smiled more, especially at babies. Smelling fresh flowers or watching a sunset all seemed more intense in their pleasure. [Read more…]