Hi friends, It’s time for me to take a vacation from Looking for Faith for a few weeks. This winter and spring have been very exciting; I’ve had the chance to work on a number of rewarding and worthwhile professional and volunteer projects, including this blog. But I’m starting to feel like a candle burning at many ends, and unlike St. Vincent Millay’s famous poem, I would like to actually last the night! So I’ll be taking a few weeks off for from blogging, and will be reflecting, resting and renewing.

I’ll be back in full swing at the start of June! In the meantime, best wishes to you all for a happy and healthy rest of May.

I saw this short film recently and found it to be a sweet reverse-creation story: 

tracks the discussion among Unitarian Universalist bloggers about whether and how our movement should engage with popular culture, highlights a post about the difficulty of teaching the hymns in our current UU hymnals, and points to an analysis of the Youth and Young Adult Empowerment Resolution on this summer’s General Assembly agenda. Check it out at the UU World!

Hi UU readers and bloggers, please excuse the dreadful pun (I swear, it was an accident!) and share your Twitter-related wisdom.

Do you use Twitter to promote your Unitarian Universalist blog and/or to follow other Unitarian Universalist blogs or tweets? What tips do you have for UU’s about making the most of Twitter?

There are a number of Unitarian Universalists on Twitter. Here’s a list of those I’ve found so far, with the names of their blogs in parenthesis:

AliCF
Anna Belle Leiserson (of “Happy Web Diva”)
Daniel Harper (of “Yet Another Unitarian Universalist”)
Dubhlainn (of “Druuid”)
Hafidha Sofia (of “Never Say Never to Your Traveling Self”)
Jacqueline Wolven (of “Moxie Life”)
Jcadow
Jeff /Psyprof
Kaleigh (of “The Musings of Yet Another Working Mom”)
KerryBerry
Michael Carnell (of “Postcards from Myself”)
Otenth Paderborn (of “Tenth Life”)
Pamela (of “UUSoul”)
Radioactive Fox (of “Quiet, knave…”)
Rosemary Bray McNatt (of “Rev Rose” and “Trustee Talk”)
Scott Wells (of “Boy in the Bands”)
Southeast Unitarian Universalist Summer Institute
Please comment or e-mail if there are others to add to the list!

My own experience has been somewhat lackluster: I hopped on to Twitter in late January, after reading this article by Darren Rowse about how Twitter would bring rainbows, sunshine, and everything good into my life. But so far those things have not come to pass (at least not due to Twitter). I send out updates about new blog posts and it’s nice to reach a few more readers through Twitter, but I’m eager to learn more creative ways of using Twitter to promote Unitarian Universalism and UU blogs.

As you might have guessed from the glowing description of my church’s ministerial candidate and of our first worship experience with him, we voted last Sunday to call our new minister!

I was antsy the whole morning. After the morning worship, followed by a short coffee hour, followed by about an hour and a half of pre-vote discussion, part of me wanted to jump out of my seat and cry out, “Are we ever going to have a new and permanent minister?! C’mon, people!”

Not the holiest thoughts, but there you have it. Of course the antsy-ness had little to do with my wonderful fellow congregants and it wasn’t just the product of an afternoon of waiting around church. It was the result of two years of transition.

Some part of those two years has been exciting. New interim staff members, new lay leaders, new programs and a new sense of collective identity have breathed fresh life into an already vibrant congregation.

But no change is without cost — the costs of saying goodbye to beloved ministers, treasured familiarities, and of course, the valuable sense of simply knowing how things are done. There’s such a thing as too much change, too quickly.

Religious life is as much about ritual as it is about the new insights and fresh experience; over the last two years I’ve come to value those rituals more. To answer the question above, I don’t want a religion without ritual. When I return on a Sunday morning to our sanctuary, I remember the first time I sat there, and felt the presence of the sacred pervading the room like the light shining in through the windows. And I remember all the times since when, in a moment of prayer or music or silence, I’ve felt again the sacred enveloping me.

When I hear our congregation recite together our call to prayer (”What does God require of thee, but to do justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?”), I remember what a beacon of hope those words were to me in my first months at church. And the song, “Come, Come, Whoever You Are” will always remind me of one of my earliest small group worship experiences.

These rituals also have collective power, to join Unitarian Universalists across time and space. When I go to a new congregation and see the worship leader light the chalice, I feel connected to that community, and we are all together acknowledging our connection to a larger tradition. When I sing “Spirit of Life” (a hymn widely used in UU worship), I have a sense of peace and fellowship with my fellow singers, whether or not we know each other well.

Even though Unitarian Universalism is a religion sometimes associated with throwing off tradition, I believe our religion is at its best when we have both innovation and continuity – when we have the wisdom and power to throw off those traditions that are oppressive or stultifying, and to maintain those traditions that give us continuity and open our hearts to sacred.