From the President: A Flame We All Carry

I spent a beautiful first half of this congregational year traveling to be with many of you at conferences and in Sunday worship services; I was even blessed to journey to Prague to be in conversation with our Unitarian, Unitarian Universalist, and Free Church community members from around the globe.

It is a profound privilege to connect with Unitarian Universalists in many places and to learn alongside the national staff of your UUA. In that time, what I have felt from all corners of our movement is your renewed commitment to engage in the work of this liberal and liberating faith together.

Today’s Unitarian Universalism asks profound questions about our shared values, how we engage one another in accountable and justice-seeking ways, how to best steward our theological inheritance, and how to continue the practices of communal care that expanded with such a wonderful embrace in the quarantine stages of the pandemic. How are we called to set aside much of what we have known for long enough to not only imagine new ways of being, but to catalyze the work that such inventiveness requires? How do we best live into our role as carriers of a flame that burns with conviction? A flame that strengthens us to carry forward opportunities whose hopeful possibilities give us courage for the days ahead?

Living faithfully when the path forward is unknown asks something of us that I don’t fully know how to put into words. I know what it feels like. I hear it in the echoes of my beloved’s voice when he tells me that no one is going to rob us of our joy. I felt it in the quietude of worship with you, in our deepest expressions of the human spirit, and in our yearning for community and the world we imagine. And I know that the movement is easier when we are moving together.

Thank you for all that you do in service to this faith. May this faith, in turn, nourish in you a joy and sense of purpose that can never be taken away.