Let’s reclaim Boxing Day! Let’s yank it back from shouting adverts and the glaring lights of consumer frenzy! The true meaning of Boxing Day is generosity. In particular, a day to give generously to people outside your family. This year as part of the Boxing Day Service, we will create ‘boxes’ for the Unitarian Shelter … Continue reading Boxing It Up & Reclaiming This Day
Charles Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol in 1843*, as he struggled with the meaning of his life and its reflection in the state church. He was looking for a new perspective, one freer of thought and more rooted in the realities of his day. The drama of Dickens struggle is brought to life in the … Continue reading A Christmas Carol Eve
In the dark of winter, deep in our collective psyches, hides the divine dance between our masculine and feminine self. It is the drama of the winter solstice that enacts the awakening of the divine feminine. Beckoned, kissed and honoured, the divine feminine emerges and takes her place of wisdom. To join any of our … Continue reading The Divine Drama in Winter Solstice
What is it like to live “below” middle class? What is it like to be at a church with a middle class culture for those “below” middle class? Socioeconomic class identity is about both culture and finances and is a topic we rarely talk openly and directly about. Let’s start a conversation. Anna Isaacs is … Continue reading Class and Money
There is no better way to understand the emotions and feelings of another person than to walk in their shoes. A close second is to portray a character that walks in their shoes. This is where drama comes in. Through imagining, we experience situations and lives not our own. Those experiences can be vividly real … Continue reading Drama and the Art of Empathy
Where do creative ideas come from? How do you get in touch with that source? For someone who is not a “natural” and must work to develop artistic inspiration, this will be a reflection on my personal journey toward artistic expression, and how I learned to “see” what mattered. Rev Frances Deverell is a … Continue reading Painting and the Art of Observation
The art of Indigenous painter Ken Monkman has shaken and shocked both the Canadian art world and the political world. Monkman is a visual disrupter at the intersection of art, history, sexuality and politics. To be a creative disrupter is to take familiar images and insert the unfamiliar. In so doing the observer is shocked … Continue reading Artist as Disruptor
Summer 2020 was a moment of racial reckoning. However, with those months of intense activism behind us, those committed to social justice must ask “What do we do now?”. As Unitarians committed to this struggle, it is important that we continue to engage and support anti-racism work through spiritual practice. Donovan Hayden is a Black activist, … Continue reading Anti-racism Work as Spiritual Practice
How we observe changes us. He said, ‘See my wife’. And then sensing that wasn’t enough, he said, ‘Behold my wife.’ If you slow down and read that last line again, you’ll likely feel a difference between seeing and beholding. They are not the same thing. When we behold another, we shift our relationship from … Continue reading Behold and Be Seen
Our Unitarian Universalist ancestors live again on this All Hallows Eve. Showing up are some admirable spiritual siblings who made their mark in the advancement of science, the arts and humanitarian endeavours. Meet the British nurse Florence Nightingale, and the Czechoslovakian/Canadian humanitarian Lotta Hitchmanova. They are joined by scientist and mathematician Sir Isaac Newton, transcendentalist … Continue reading Meet the Ancestors Part 2
