Summer greetings UUSS!

This past weekend your Board of Trustees, which includes us as ex-officio members, had a retreat to prepare ourselves for the coming church year. Your Co-ministers read a very important book this summer as part of our Study Leave called “How to Lead When You Don’t Know Where You Are Going: Leading in a Liminal Season” by the Rev. Susan Beaumont and we shared some of the insights as part of our facilitation.

We will be speaking more about this text with you in various forms over the coming months as so much of it applies to congregational life and this time of liminality. One of the skills Beaumont invites us into is broadening our awareness to wider reality. She reminds us that sometimes the voices of judgment, cynicism, and/or fear can get in our way of being fully Present with one another. So, we started practicing noticing when those voices were showing up in our work together during the retreat. When these voices show up, they close our minds, hearts, and wills, Beaumont says. And you can probably think of times when this has been true for yourself or someone you’ve observed.

There is plenty to judge, to feel cynical about, and to be afraid of right now. Those responses are relatively common and normal, especially in liminal times. A spiritual practice is to begin to recognize when they are happening and name it. Then engage in the antidotes. We often need one another’s help and support to do this at first.

The voice of judgment wants to reduce complexity into simple terms and interpret the present based on the past, it makes the mind seem so certain but actually it’s just closed. To quiet the voice of judgment, engage in self-reflection to distinguish between what is real and what is imagined. Get curious about your thoughts, conclusions, and judgments. Are they real? And like the breath during meditation, come back to what is really happening, not just what’s in your head. And engage in both/and thinking rather than either/or thinking (which is also an antidote to white supremacy culture so win-win!).

The voice of cynicism is skeptical, mistrusting, snarky and closes our hearts. To challenge the voice of cynicism, we engage in vulnerability (see Brené Brown’s Ted Talk!) rather than trying to protect our egos or succumbing to mistrust or assuming someone is motivated only by self-interest. We approach ourselves and one another with tenderheartedness instead.

The voice of fear is excellent at scaring up all the worst-case scenarios and wants to go back to the status quo, not into the uncertain emerging future and thus shuts down our will. To suspend the voice of fear, we recognize that there is opportunity in experimenting, in trying and failing, and that we can’t control everyone and everything. We yield to what will occur, leaning in to what may come, knowing we will learn something, trusting in the goodness of God/Love/Mystery/Spirit of Life/Essence of Humanity.

First, we have to begin to recognize when those voices are speaking. This takes practice and with intention, attention, and repetition, it becomes a spiritual practice that can make a real different in our families, communities, and in our congregation. It can be easier to notice it in other people first, like on the news.

As the delta variant keeps wreaking havoc, we are leaning into the wisdom and expertise of Dr. Kim Kilby and Dr. David Pratt, members of UU Schenectady. They are advising us to proceed with caution and with our UU values firmly centered. We are interdependent and the virus has made that abundantly clear. Our care for one another is our primary focus. We are approaching this fall slowly, taking in the various recommendations, and cautious about what folks going back to school will do to the county numbers of infections, transmissions, hospitalizations, and deaths

To quiet the voice of fear, we will be exploring and inviting you to consider the reality of what is, notice how you speak about all we are experiencing and return to what we are actually facing.

To challenge the voice of cynicism that keeps coming up regarding the variant(s), we are leaning into vulnerability. We don’t know how best to proceed into the fall or what the right decisions are regarding gathering together in-person. And we want to know. We have all been taught that leaders should know things. But in liminal seasons, Susan Beaumont reminds us, we don’t know-we don’t know what we need to know because we are all disoriented. We do know that we miss one another. We do know that spiritual, mental, emotional health is just as important as physical health for our well-being. None of us knows what the right way forward is AND we are willing to be with you in this hard, unknowing place.

And we will also be addressing our fears by being willing to try things and to likely fail at some of them; to try some things and then have to dial back mid-stream because the virus numbers are too dangerous. We will continue to engage in both/and thinking in our experimenting too!

We invite you into this spiritual practice with us. Begin to recognize when those voices show up. Then practice getting curious, vulnerable, experimental, flexible, and patient as we move into a new church year together. We will need one another’s tenderheartedness to nourish and sustain this religious community.

We will need volunteers, a lot of them, for whatever ways we ‘do church’ in the fall. See below.

With much care,

Rev. Wendy and Rev. Lynn