Rev. Katie McQuage-Loukas
A community is always woven together of needs and gifts, care both given and received. Both sides are needed to build relationships and deepen our covenantal community. What gifts do you bring? What needs do you have? How can we bridge these gaps to cocreate our corner of the interdependent web? To watch the service live: https://www.youtube.com/live/MPHM4pvxqsg
On February 15th, we welcome guest speaker Nina Kuzniak to the pulpit. Nina is a fourth-year Unitarian Universalist seminarian at Starr King School for the Ministry and currently serves as the Ministerial Intern at First Unitarian Universalist Church of Houston. She also occasionally preaches at Bay Area Unitarian Universalist Church. When she’s not preparing for parish ministry, Nina enjoys experimenting with new vegetarian recipes and exploring Houston with her dogs.
Resilience and self-care are often presented as solitary and individualistic, but we are all embedded in networks of relationship and community. Building resilience and capacity is collective work we do for and with each other. What do you bring to our collective project of community?
These days our attention is for sale, a commodity worth a great deal to the sellers of ads and makers of media. How do we choose where to direct our attention? What practices allow us to engage the world with more intention and less distraction?
In 1996, Alok’s terminally ill sister asked him a question that launched him on a spiritual journey spanning three decades. Along the way, he discovered his dharma—his essence and purpose. He developed a deep meditation practice. He embraced two religions – Hinduism and Unitarian Universalism – and found that they complement each other. And yes, he did find an answer to his sister’s question. Alok Kalia, MD is a is a long-time member of the Bay Area Unitarian Universalist Church. After retiring as a professor from the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston, Dr. Kalia became a professional speaker on health issues for business executives. Alok’s beliefs come from Hinduism, and he puts them into action as a Unitarian Universalist.
We create the future we long for by nurturing it now, in this present moment. We build for tomorrow bit by bit, brick by brick, with our time, labor and resources. We may not yet have a full vision of the future we desire, but we know some pieces of it, and we – and we will – cherish and nurture those pieces until we grow with them into the future.
It seems at times that our world is getting narrower. Authoritarianism rises and the political horizons grow smaller and smaller. Yet those small gaps in which we can still labor for change are more significant than we know…and when we are willing to leverage those cracks we can achieve more than we ever thought possible.
The strange tale of resurrection and triumph of the Easter story has many layers and meanings. But beneath them all is the simple core of truth—that even amid the worst of human politics and behavior there is also goodness. The Easter story proclaims that goodness will triumph, in ways that are beyond our understanding. Millennia later, this story still offers us ways to imagine a new world.
