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| Wednesday, April 16, 2008 |
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| Support Women and Choice! | During the last few days of March I was in Washington, D.C. for the annual meeting of Planned Parenthood, and while I was there, I went to the offices of our Congressional Representatives to express this congregation's stand on women's reproductive rights. Our congregation voted about 20 years ago to support reproductive rights, and that vote remains significant for our elected representatives.
Two of our New York State legislators, Antoine Thompson and Sam Hoyt, have been important supporters of reproductive rights, and both support a change in New York state laws that would protect reproductive rights in New York if the U.S. Supreme Court were to rescind its 1973 ruling protecting those rights. Antoine Thompson, because he is one of our local State Senators, has had a steady stream of extreme conservatives going through his office in Albany, demanding that he withdraw his sponsorship of the Senate bill that would retain reproductive rights in the laws of the State of New York.
I have written to Senator Thompson on our behalf, thanking him for his courageous stand. Our church does not advocate on behalf of candidates for election (it's illegal and it's immoral), but I am hearing that clergy in many Buffalo churches are preaching against Thompson during their worship services! If we want to support those legislators with the courage to support the rights that we, as a congregation, have voted to support, they need to hear from us. They need to hear from us as individuals - because right now they are hearing daily from extremists who will misuse their church-services or even support the murder of health-care workers.
The legislation that Senator Thompson and Assemblyman Hoyt support is the Reproductive Health and Privacy Protection Act. If you personally support reproductive rights, I urge you to contact Senator Thompson at his office here in Buffalo: Senator Antoine M. Thompson, 65 Court Street, Room 213, Buffalo, New York 14202 (or just make a phone call: 854-8705 or contact him through his website at http://www.nyssenate60.com). Assemblyman Sam Hoyt can be emailed at: hoyts@ assembly.state.ny.us -- or you can send a short note to 936 Delaware Avenue, Suite 005, Buffalo, NY 14209 (or call 885-9630).
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| Thursday, March 6, 2008 |
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| The Spirit of Welcome | Our congregation welcomes so many wonderful and different people through the week and on Sunday. It’s impossible for us, as a Welcoming Congregation, to predict the gifts and needs that newcomers to our community will bring to us – the world has a way of defying our forecasts and surprising us with the unexpected.
Would we truly want life to be any other way? Myself, I would not. If the universe already had its definitive plan, I’m not sure what the purpose our consciousness and thoughts would have. If there really were a definitive cosmic plan, it seems to me it would be quite obvious. Perhaps the cosmic plan is grow our ability to be creative and hospitable with one another?
One of the wonderful surprises in recent months has been the Sunday morning attendance of folks who use wheelchairs to get around. Our church, as a Welcoming Congregation, has committed to providing access to our folks who use wheelchairs (we installed an elevator 7 years ago, for example). But suddenly I see that we lack a space in the sanctuary for folks who use wheelchairs as well as a place for their friends and family-members who attend with them.
This means changes to the arrangement of the pews in our sanctuary. I think the ultimate arrangement in the long-term will need a lot of thought and congregational conversation. But because our spiritual obligation to welcome one another is one of our greatest values, an initial change has to happen now. So in the next couple of weeks I will be making initial changes in the sanctuary to provide a safe and comfortable place for folks who use wheelchairs.
I encourage everyone to share their thoughts and observations about these changes in the sanctuary with me and with our Accessibility Committee. The Committee can be contacted either by email (smanndolce"@"gmail.com -- be sure to take the quotes out, which prevent spamming thieves from bothering us) or through a note left in their mailbox in the Community Office at the church.
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| Saturday, June 23, 2007 |
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| Becoming a Green Sanctuary | It happened when the Church Council heard the Social Justice Task Force's report: the other committees represented at the Council meeting said: "let's go green."
Let me explain for newcomers to the church: The church is governed by its people through meetings of the congregation, but because no one wants to have weekly meetings of 500 people to discuss classroom assignments and bathroom repairs, the congregation meets about two times a year to elect our Board of Trustees, which oversees the church staff, and the staff and works with the Board to take care of the day-to-day operations of the church (like getting the bathrooms repaired). The Board also creates committees and other working groups which run the weekly and monthly programs of the church - programs like RE classes for our kids, discussions groups, Small Groups, Folk Dancing, our Sunday Bookstore, our Library, the Women's Society - these are some of the groups that bring our church to life, and all of these groups coordinate their programs through the Church Council (the Council oversees, for example, the building calendar so we all have somewhere to meet).
So when Nancy Thayer, chair of the Social Justice Task Force, described the "Green Sanctuary" program to the Church Council, active members representing programs throughout the church were excited and supportive.
Being a Green Sanctuary church means many small changes to how we are as a church. The heart of this program is its spiritual practice: recycling more effectively, using energy more efficiently, and changing our own lifestyles away from a culture of consumption to a culture of relationship and interdependence. Like most spiritual practices, it will take time and attention to integrate the countless small changes that come with such a profound change, and our Social Justice Task Force is organizing the many conversations we will have about energy, ranging from which light bulbs the church uses to how we take this spiritual practice into our homes.
Our short-term goal is to become a "Green Sanctuary." Our long-term goal is to create a sustainable way of life that integrates our spiritual traditions - including that old Unitarian standard of "Progress."
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