Dear WUU Community,
This Sunday we celebrate Charter Sunday—the 33rd anniversary of WUU’s founding. Happy birthday to this wonderful congregation!
Many years ago, sculptor and WUU member Pat Winter created an extraordinary sculpture to symbolize the shared journey of the congregation—a spiral, crafted out of metal, with a series of holes in it. Each year on Charter Sunday, members of the congregation fasten a metal rivet to the next hole, representing another year in the life of WUU.
Why a spiral? It’s one of the strongest, most beautiful forms in nature, found everywhere from galaxies billions of miles away from us to the shells of sea creatures, from the trajectories of circling hawks to the DNA of every living thing.
As archetype, the spiral reminds us that we’re never completely done with the work of growth and transformation. As artist Kenetha Stanton puts it, “Rather than visiting each lesson once and being done with it for all time, I keep cycling back through various lessons as I come around the spiral again. Each time I come back to a lesson, I find that I see it from a slightly different vantage point and in slightly greater depth.” 1
I believe that’s as true for organizations as it is for individuals. I’m so excited to learn more about the feedback coming out of the Visioning Circles project here at WUU, as the spiral journey of this congregation leads us again into a season of reflecting on why we’re here and what we care about most. (Look for a report on the feedback soon!)
In the broader Unitarian Universalist community, the spiral journey of our faith around racial justice has led us into an intense season of leaning hard into the work of equity, diversity, and inclusion in new ways. Have you seen the Widening the Circle UUA report from 2020? It’s such a powerful read, full of testimony from UUs of color about their experiences in this faith and their advice about what would make our congregations more fully welcoming—“widening the circle” to more fully include everyone drawn to the message of our faith. Indeed, Widening the Circle is the congregational theme we’ll be exploring this month in worship and small groups.
If you’d like to learn more, I encourage you to check out the Widening the Circle report, as well as the Eighth Principle Project. For decades, UUs have cherished the Seven Principles as moral and ethical guides. About five years ago, BLUU (Black Lives of UU) began to put out the call for a new Eighth Principle on dismantling racism. You can learn more at the Eighth Principle website and/or by joining the 8th Principle UU Learning Community on Facebook. Will you take up the challenge to learn something new, stretch your understanding, and help make your community better and stronger? Let’s make this a month of “widening the spiral” here at WUU and in the communities we serve!
In faith,
Rev. Laura