Albany, Montgomery, and Fulton Counties are in medium while Schenectady County is holding steady in low. This is good news as school has started and so far, even with a bit of a bump in cases, it hasn’t been huge. May this continue for all our schools and our wider community!

In our Religious Education (RE) classes here at UUSS, many of which will start on Sep 25, each class will create a covenant, a set of promises about how each person is willing to be together and something about how one can come back into right relationship if we make a mistake or break the covenant.

For this year, each class’s covenant will also include shared agreements about wearing masks. As we know, masks help prevent spreading of germs, especially airborne germs, like Covid. For now, our congregation is asking everyone to wear masks in worship, so that we can welcome anyone who may attend regardless of vaccination status or health situation and also to sing together more safely. This also allows some people who aren’t ready to be in spaces where other people are unmasked, to attend.

And, once inside each classroom (there are air filters in all of them now), which is a smaller group, their covenant will include if everyone will wear masks, or if each person can choose if they want to wear one that day or not. We want to encourage each person to think about their own needs and also the needs of others in the class. This is part of religious education for all ages-learning to be more self-aware as well as aware of the needs of those around us.

RE teachers who were at the training shared lovely stories about how considerate kids were last year about masking and respecting one another’s bodies and spaces. We trust that these open-hearted conversations will enable students and teachers to feel more connected and caring about one another.

We hope that after RE classes begin, if we don’t see any spikes in cases here, that other small groups can start having those covenantal conversations as well, allowing a sense of growing compassion for this strange time in which some of us have been ready to unmask for months and others won’t be ready for sometime yet.

We each have been impacted by the pandemic in different ways and we each have our own journeys and we are doing them alongside one another. We have compassion for those who are beyond fed up with Covid and masking and we have compassion for those whose lives are at risk who have done very little out in the world that is quickly leaving them out and we have compassion for those somewhere in between those places which means we have compassion for All.Of.Us because folks in the congregation are all over the spectrum of readiness.

We are struggling right alongside you. We could use your compassion as well, as none of us have ever done what we are all doing before. And we can tell you that ministers, rabbis, imams, priests, pastors, chaplains, and other clergy leaders are all just trying to make the best decisions we can with the information and expertise available to us, in a landscape that keeps changing.

– Rev. Wendy and Rev. Lynn