You can schedule an appointment with Rev. Alison at https://calendly.com/minister-swuuc

SoulMatters Theme for April 2025: Living Love Through the Practice of Joy

This month, I’m going to offer you an invitation to practice joy. My invitation is not for you to wait for joy to come find you, but to actually practice joy, work to bring joy into your life this month. Does it feel possible to practice joy? If not, here’s one idea: Think about moments, things, people, places that have brought you joy in your life. Then find a way to bring back a piece of that moment–a color, a smell, a song–into your life now, to help you recall that moment of joy and give yourself a chance to experience it again. You can find other ideas about how you can actively cultivate a practice of joy in this months’ SoulMatters Packet. If you dig into the resources in that packet, or if you come to church this month, you’ll also hear about why this practice of joy isn’t just a light and fluffy invitation, it’s essential for our survival to cultivate and experience joy even in the most challenging times. As Cole Arthur Riley says, “We must reclaim joy outside of the artificial ‘cheer’ it is often reduced to. There is a joy that is defiant. A portal to survival for our ancestors. A way to say, we will not be captive to despair nor abandon our belief in beauty. Joy with teeth.” Let’s cultivate joy with teeth this month, my friends.

In Faith,
Rev. Alison

What does it mean that We Are Welcome Here?

My Dear Salties,

We are down to the last week of our Annual Giving Drive, and this year our theme is WE ARE WELCOME HERE! This is the time of year when we ask you to make a Pledge of the financial support think you can provide the church between July 1, 2025 and June 30, 2026. A Pledge is separate from the money we raise from the undesignated Share-the-Plate offerings folks make on Sunday morning, and it’s also separate from our Minister’s Discretionary Fund that allows me to provide material, financial support to folks who are struggling to meet their basic needs in our community. A Pledge is your commitment to sustain the church in the next fiscal year. Your Pledge pays the salaries of the staff that partner with the congregation to make the Welcome of our church and it is the responsibility of all members to make a Pledge, even if they simply get in touch to let us know that they don’t have the resources to offer any financial support over the next year. If you haven’t yet, PLEASE CLICK HERE to make your Pledge online. There’s about 100 individuals or families still waiting to put in their Pledge, and we have about $105,000 more to raise to meet our Treasurer’s anticipated needs for our budget. To the 40 folks who’ve already offered your support, pledging $135,000 and getting us more than half way to our goal, THANK YOU! And to those still waiting, remember, it takes every one of us to build the Welcome of Saltwater Church.

Back in November, I told you that I wasn’t sure what we could do about the problems of the world, or the nation, but that I believed we could build our own version of Sesame Street — a local community grounded in shared values where we draw the circle of love and are wide and wider still. I still believe we can do all that just by being ourselves: a covenantal Unitarian Universalist congregation, living our mission to Practice Love, Foster Connection, Nurture Spiritual Growth and Act for Justice. Together, we are more than a group of individuals, more even than a beloved community; we are an institution of civil society. Our voice matters, our street matters, it matters so much right now that we proclaim loudly that WE ARE WELCOME HERE.

We are Welcome on Sunday morning when seekers of all ages, stages and belief systems come together to uplift our shared values, with Love at the center. But we are also Welcome on Saturday afternoons when we bring communities together across faith traditions to make the moral case for welcoming the migrants, visitors and sojourners among us. We are Welcome when we call on our local leaders to make room for those without homes as we did at a Federal Way City Council meeting in January, or for the LGBTQ+ and immigrant families in our community as we did at a meeting of the Federal Way School Board earlier this month. We are called to be Welcome because we declare that every person is inherently worthy and has the right to flourish with dignity, love, and compassion. When fear and scapegoating are running rampant, our street, our congregation, we are an island of Welcome in midst of the chaos, and that’s why it’s so important that every one of us shows up to do what it takes to make this a community that survives and thrives in the months, years and decades to come.

In Faith,
Rev. Alison

March 2025 SoulMatters Theme: Living Love Through the Practice of Trust

Some of us place our trust in the practices that ground us: prayer, meditation, singing. Some of us place our trust in community, in the bonds of Love that bind a family or a congregation together. Some of us place our trust in the universal cycles, the turning Wheel of the Year, and we try to learn the lesson of our ‘plantcestors’ (a term I learned from Karen Culpepper). Our plant kindred remind us that change is constant, all that falls will rise again. Some of us place our trust in a Higher Power, one or many Gods, Goddesses &/or Goddexxes (a gender-neutral term for a Divine Being I first heard from my colleague Rev. Lane-Mairead Campbell). Some of us place our trust in the bend of the arc of the moral universe toward justice, because we are actively working to bend it. Some of us will struggle to feel like we can trust, because we have put our faith in things in the past that let us down. With all the different things we trust, with all the ways we may struggle to trust, Unitarian Universalism invites us to trust in the shared values that under-gird our faith — Justice, Equity, Transformation, Generosity, Pluralism, and Interdependence, with Love at the center. Saltwater Church members commit to trust in the mutual promises we make to our Covenant of Right Relations and our mission to Practice Love, Foster Connection, Nurture Spiritual Growth, and Act for Justice. Whatever you trust, whether you find it difficult to trust, I hope that this community, our values, and mission can offer us a North Star that we can trust to guide us on even the longest of nights.

If you want to dive more deeply into our March theme, Living Love Through the Practice of Trust, check out the SoulMatters Packet for March and consider joining a drop-in Chalice Circle on the 4th Sunday of the month after Sunday service to share your insights into the monthly theme with a small group.

February 2025 SoulMatters Monthly Theme:
Living Love Through the Practice of Inclusion

Inclusion is the act of making space for someone to belong, and belonging is a core need for social animals like humans. Having evolved to survive in social groups, a primal part of ourselves experiences exclusion as a threat to survival. Part of being a sanctuary people, as our UUA President Rev. Dr. Sofia Betancourt has called us to be, is offering a safe harbor of inclusion for those who are threatened by the storms of exclusion that rage around us.

Alongside the values flower image and the enumeration of the six values with love at the center in the Purpose statement (Article II) of the Bylaws of the Unitarian Universalist Association, there is a section titled “Inclusion,” which reads:

Systems of power, privilege, and oppression have traditionally created barriers for persons and groups with particular identities, ages, abilities, and histories. We pledge to replace such barriers with ever-widening circles of solidarity and mutual respect. We strive to be an Association of congregations that truly welcome all persons who share our values. We commit to being an Association of congregations that empowers and enhances everyone’s participation, especially those with historically marginalized identities

Inclusion is part of our purpose as Unitarian Universalists…and it is not easy. When I make space for difference, I might not get to have everything just the way that I like it anymore. Some people may be different in ways I don’t understand. Practicing inclusion means I have to live our values of Pluralism, learning from difference, and Transformation, continuing to change and grow, to include more as I learn more. And, even as we seek to be an ever more inclusive community, we must remember that our congregation’s Covenant of Right Relations provides a framework for how we will be together in inclusive, beloved community. Our inclusion need not, and indeed should not extend to including those who will not join us in the work of our Covenant and the pursuit of our shared values.

This month, in pursuit of our shared values, I encourage you to check out 30 Days of Love (already in progress). Between Dr. King’s birthday and Valentines Day, Side with Love (the Social Justice arm of the UUA), offers four weeks of content to ground us in the way our commitment to put Love at the center calls us into action for Justice. Through stories, rituals, songs, and videos, 30 Days of Love is a way to ground your inclusion practice in the justice-seeking Love that is the flame of our chalice, the heart of our faith.

If you want to engage more deeply with our monthly theme on your own, check out the SoulMatters monthly packet HERE and consider joining our drop-in Chalice Circle after church on the 4th Sunday of the month to reflect on the theme in a small-group setting.

In Faith,
Rev. Alison

Our congregation, along with our partners at Sound Alliance, was instrumental in the opening of the Federal Way Day Center in 2016. The center, which is a Share-the-Plate recipient for one month each year at our church, provides services for our unhoused neighbors in Federal Way, where there are no overnight shelters.

We were shocked when we learned this fall that the Federal Way City Council was delaying funding for the Day Center, and when the council took up the issue again this past week, Saltwater showed up along with our partners from Bet Chaverim, Sound Alliance, medical and mental health care providers, social workers, and the city’s own Human Services Commission to support funding the Day Center. But once again, the City Council postponed funding because of complaints from neighbors about what happens on Day Center property after hours, when desperate folks sleep in the parking lot because they have nowhere else to go, sometimes using drugs trying to keep cold, pain, and mental illness at bay. Many of the folks who opposed Day Center funding expressed a desire to see the unhoused jailed, a much more expensive solution than providing housing. From supporters of the Day Center, we heard over and over again at the council meeting that housing is necessary for people to heal from the physical and mental illnesses that often put them out on the streets.

While the City’s funding cuts won’t close the Day Center’s doors yet, it’s important to ask, How would our neighbors who have no where to sleep be better off with NO services available, without the limited services the Day Center is able to offer? Of course, they would not be better off. We must confront the fact that many of our leaders are more concerned about upper and middle-class people having to see evidence of the horrors of the housing crisis than about solving the housing crisis or helping those it has impacted. A new report confirms what we have seen all around us: a shameful number of people in Washington State are allowed to live outdoors.

That this happens in our communities is evidence of the contrast between our Unitarian Universalist values of Justice, Equity, Interdependence, and Generosity, and the values of the systems we live within. Stay tuned for updates in our newsletter from our Sound Alliance team on how you can help live those values by advocating for shelters and services for our unhoused neighbors, including funding of the Day Center. The Federal Way City Council will consider the Day Center’s funding request again in three months. Let us say our spells, prayers, and affirmations that they will do the right thing and fund the Day Center…and let us get to work organizing to make sure that they do. If you want to get involved with Sound Alliance at Saltwater, get in touch with Diane Dobrowolski or Lucia Faithfull, or join us on Zoom on the second Saturdays of the month at 10am.

In Faith,
Rev. Alison

January 2025 SoulMatters Theme: Living Love Through the Practice of Story

Happy New Year, Salties! We’re starting 2025 by considering how the stories we tell shape us, and how we shape the world with the stories we choose to tell. As Unitarian Universalists, “We draw upon, and are inspired by, sacred, secular, and scientific understandings that help us make meaning and live into our values… [E]nlivened by the diversity which enriches our faith, we are called to ever deepen and expand our wisdom” (from Article II of the UU Association Bylaws). This means that we listen to all sorts of stories, to broaden our perspective as we engage in our free and responsible search for truth and meaning. At Saltwater, we nurture spiritual growth by exposing ourselves to lots of stories on Sunday mornings, in our book studies, and in our religious explorations classes. In our congregation’s Covenant of Right Relations we promise to “Consider asking questions about each other’s personal stories and spiritual sources and keep [ourselves] open to deep reflection and an understanding of alternative perspectives.” Telling and listening to stories is part of the our faith, just as it has been part of the faiths of our ancestors since time immemorial.

If you want to dive more deeply into our monthly theme of Story, check out the SoulMatters packet for January HERE, and consider joining our drop-in Chalice Circle after church in the Lighthouse on the 4th Sunday of the month, where we’ll explore these themes in a small group.

This week our Administrator Bubba, Director of Faith Formation Jessica & I used our weekly team meeting to decorate a (human-made) tree with glittery balls and stars, dreidels and menorahs, pomanders and Lego ornaments. Bubba made snowy mountains for Lego skiers and sledders, a gingerbread house, train and fire station, and more. We laid one of Sally’s beautiful quilted tapestries out over the table and played festive music. All of us are reclaiming the pagan roots of the Christmas traditions we grew up with, and we’re making new traditions with our spiral of darkness and light that will be available to walk at Saturday our solstice gathering on Saturday the 21st at 4pm. We’ll leave it up for those who’d like to visit it on Sunday morning and into next week.

All around the world and across traditions, people have celebrated holidays of light in times of darkness, as our worship team has so beautifully reminded us each of the these past two Decembers. Before they were Christmas traditions, decorating trees, decking the halls with evergreen boughs, lighting candles and Yule logs, these were practices that honored the winter solstice. Today, these practices can connect us across religious traditions, and to the earth. At Sunday’s Winter Solstice Celebration, we’ll also honor the pluralism in our congregation that allows Christians and Pagans to come to church and worship side by side. I’m grateful to be part of a faith that encourages us all to find the practices and beliefs that are meaningful to us, accepting ourselves and each other in all our differences.

Yuletide Blessings, Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah and New Year!

Every year, congregations like ours who are members of the Unitarian Universalist Association send delegates to our UUA General Assembly to vote on the business of our denomination and to connect with and learn from each other. People who aren’t delegates also attend GA for the worship services, the workshops, the Ware Lecture, and how inspiring it feels to be around so many other folks who share our faith.

Our next GA will be both in-person in Baltimore, Maryland AND accessible online from June 18th-22nd, 2025. Based on our size, Saltwater is able to send three delegates, plus me and our Director of Faith Formation to vote on GA business. I’ll be attending online from Des Moines, and our administrator Bubba is planning to be in person in Baltimore. I hope there’ll be lots of other Salties participating in Baltimore and from home. And, with the pace of our lives, I know if we don’t start planning for GA now, it will be hard to fit it in.

GA Registration is open now at this link: https://www.uua.org/ga/registration and you’ll notice that it’s possible to attend only the business sessions (the ones where delegates hear discussion of issues before taking votes) for free. We also have some money in our budget to offer scholarships to GA if our delegates want to participate in more than just the business. If you want to be a delegate for Saltwater Church, please fill out our application form here: https://saltwaterchurch.org/about-us/our-governance/gadelegate-application/ While the stated deadline to apply is April 7th, the business of the UUA happens year round, so I’m hoping we can identify Saltwater delegates early this year, to allow us to work together to get informed about what we’ll be voting on at GA in June. If you have any questions, I hope you’ll reach out to me or check out the information on the GA website linked above. Being a delegate at GA is one of just a few things that only folks who have become members of the congregation can do. If you’re interested in participating in GA and you’re not yet a member, mark your calendars for the next Saltwater UU 101 Class on January 5th — there’s still time to become a member before we select our GA delegates. But remember, anyone can attend in GA, whether they’re a member or not.

In Community,
Rev. Alison

December 2024 SoulMatters Theme: Living Love Through the Practice of Presence

I’ve had so many conversations about how quickly the fall has gone by, and now the busyness of the winter holiday season is upon us. December’s theme encourages us to be present in the midst of all that is busy, and also to find the deeper Presence within the season. Whether the presence you find is Divine presence; the presence of joy, hope and tradition; or the presence of this beloved community, Saltwater Church invites you to join us for a Yuletide that honors the presence of light in the darkest of nights. If you want to engage more deeply with the SoulMatters monthly theme, check out the SoulMatters monthly packet HERE and consider being part of one of our chalice circles where we deepen our engagement with our theme in small groups each month. One resource for practicing presence from SoulMatters that I’d like to share is this meditation from Rev. Laura Hutton Ludwig, How to take care of yourself when it feels like the world is out of control:

For our Faith Formation Sunday this month, we’ll slow down and practice presence with all-ages meditations including Zen Kinhin led by Jean of our Tuesday meditation group. Our Lay Ministry Team is planning an online Blue Holiday service to make space honor the presence of grief and sadness in the midst of all the winter holiday cheer. The Covenant of UU Pagans will host a fire circle for the longest night, and we’ll have a traditional service of song and candlelight on Christmas Eve. After that, our office will be closed to allow our staff to be present with their families until the new year. Meanwhile, our sibling congregation Bet Chaverim will host a Hanukkah celebration on the evening of December 28th. As Unitarian Universalist who hold Pluralism as one of our core values, we can be present for it all.

Whatever you celebrate this holiday season, we hope you’ll find a way to celebrate with us.

On this Transgender Day of Remembrance, I encourage you watch this short TDOR message from the Unitarian Universalist Association, where UUA staff honor the dead, and love the hell out of the living.

I echo their message that trans people are sacred and enrich our communities. It was a trans minister who first believed in my call to ministry, and trans beloveds have accompanied me along every phase of my journey of ministerial formation and practice. In June, delegates from congregations including ours passed a business resolution at UU General Assembly that declares that embracing transgender, nonbinary and intersex people is a fundamental expression of UU religious values. Taking up that call is more important now than ever. As we begin to imagine ourselves as a place of sanctuary for trans families fleeing harmful policy elsewhere in the country, I encourage us to take up the UUA Common Read for this church year, Authentic Selves: Celebrating Trans and Nonbinary People and Their Families as part of an ongoing to commitment to the LGBTQ community as a Welcoming Congregation. And even as we imagine ourselves as a sanctuary state, I notice that two of the dead whose memory we honor this TDOR were killed right here in the Puget Sound area. Our work to make the world a safer place for trans beloveds begins right here at home. Let’s all commit to interrupting transphobia when we hear it, to respecting and using correct names and pronouns for everyone we encounter, and to proclaim loudly for all to hear that our faith embraces trans people as a blessing, made in the Divine image, integral threads in the fabric of this beloved community.

Pray for the dead and fight like hell for the living –Mother Jones

In Faith,
Rev. Alison

I have a beautiful vintage dress from the 1970’s that was my mom’s, and I wore it too, but the zipper is broken and I don’t know how to fix it. I have t-shirts from all my high school theater productions that don’t fit anybody anymore, but I don’t want to throw them away. I left a bike in my garage in Southern Oregon because there was something wrong with the chain and the handlebars too, but I didn’t know what to do about it. Only one of my favorite pairs of earrings has the technology to hang from my ear anymore. In life, things break, and if we don’t have the skills to repair them, we end up throwing them away or carrying them around with us because we’re attached to them, even though they don’t work any more.

This Sunday at church, we’re going to mobilize the power of community: People who know how to fix things will be there to help you with any issues like the ones I’ve described above. Our repair experts will bring some of their tools along with their skills and smarts, and they’ll answer questions you have about how to fix things. Vicki and the folks from the Creative Hands Ministry will help you with clothes repairs, Sally’s planning to bring her jewelry tools, and if you’ve got a bike question, go ahead and toss the bike in the trunk on the way to church and Fernando will help you figure out what’s wrong and how to fix it. We’ll only have time for basic repairs, but these skilled members or our community will be in the Welcome Room from 11:30am till noon as part of our Faith Formation Sunday activities to help get you started on fixing what’s broken instead of throwing it away. If you’re on Zoom with me on Sunday morning, you can bring an old t-shirt and with only a pair of scissors, we’re going to turn them into cute tote bags. The idea is that here in our community, we can teach each other how to repair instead of throwing away.

While we’re learning from each other how to do practical repairs to physical objects this Sunday, there’s a deeper message here that is so, SO important in our lives right now: What we may not be able to accomplish alone, we can accomplish in community. Together, we have more skills, more knowledge, more perspectives and thus greater understanding than any one of us has alone. Whether you want to learn how to sew on a button, patch a bike tire, advocate for change with your elected officials, or provide compassionate listening to someone who is struggling, there are people in our community who know how to do those things, and they can be your allies in learning how.

In Faith,
Rev. Alison

Election Day in the United States is a day of watchful waiting, if not outright anxiety, for many of us. Folks have made plans to be together, plans to be on retreat, plans to work to get out every last vote, plans for what comes next. I want to encourage you to also make plans to care for yourself today, too. Drink water, eat food, & rest. Practice Tai Chi. Go outside if you can. Watch videos of cute animals. Sew, color, paint, cook, do anything creative. Drop in on Saltwater’s Meditation Group in our Zoom room tonight at 7pm to breathe and ground in community. Use the tools at your fingertips to soothe your spirit in a time of unknowing and uncertainty.

In the USA, close electoral races are made closer by disenfranchisement, gerrymandering and the undue influence of money on the political system. It’s important to remember that when we gather together tomorrow, Wednesday the 6th, from noon to 2pm to sing in the Welcome Room, we may not know the outcome of the presidential and many other elections. We may not even know the outcome of some elections when we gather to walk the Saltwater chalice labyrinth on Saturday the 9th from 3-5pm. We need to find ways to live through uncertain, heartbreaking, or joyful times, and community is key. No matter what happens with today’s election, and in the days, weeks, and months ahead, Saltwater UU Church is part of strong coalitions including SoundAlliance, the Unitarian Universalist Association, Side with Love, and UU the Vote who are also making plans for what comes next. It gives me hope to know that whatever is coming, we’re going to be facing it together, in all our brokenness and beauty, one beloved community, committed to practicing Love and acting for justice.

In Faith,
Rev. Alison

SoulMatters Theme for November 2024: Living Love Through the Practice of Repair

The most valuable thing I’ve learned on my parenting journey is that relationships are stronger when there’s been a rupture and a repair than they would have been if nothing had ever been broken. This podcast explains that phenomenon, and gives us some tools to bring to relationship repair. Here at Saltwater, we’ve made the practice of repair part of our Covenant of Right Relations which says, “We acknowledge that we will make mistakes and fail one another. When we do, we commit to return to right relationship.” It is only human to make mistakes and fail, and it is through the return to right relationship that repair happens.

As we consider the practice of repair this month, I invite folks to notice what in your life could use some repair. Does your relationship with your own body need repair? How about your relationship with the land you live on? Is there something you were taught that you need to unlearn to repair your own well-being? What about the physical things in your life? Do you have clothes or a bike or something around the house that needs mending? At our November Faith Formation Sunday on the 17th, we encourage you to bring with you to church your worn and torn clothes that you don’t want to throw out, or your bike with a flat tire or a loose chain. There’ll be folks from our Saltwater family there who can help you learn how to fix these broken physical items. For our folks online, if you bring a t-shirt that you can’t wear any more, we’ll repair and repurpose it into a shoulder bag.

Universalism reminds us that Love is for everyone. We are all beloved. No one who is willing to engage in the practice of repair is so broken that they deserve to be thrown away. Our insistence on repairing rather than throwing away in the context of our human relationships is a practice of our Universalism — and of our commitment to repairing things instead of throwing them away is a practice of our environmentalism, our commitment to caring for the more-than-human world.

Dive more deeply into our monthly theme by exploring the SoulMatters packet that our small group Chalice Circles draw from in our monthly meetings. Anyone can join our drop-in Chalice Circle after service on the fourth Sunday of the month in the Lighthouse, and we have a separate Chalice Circle open to parents of children under 18 in the Conference Room at the same time.

Bayo Akomolafe shares a saying from Africa, the continent of his birth: “The times are urgent; let us slow down.” In these urgent times we live in, times of climate crisis, election anxiety, and crumbling systems that are not meeting human needs, I am working to take up the invitation into a way of being that runs counter to so much of what I’ve learned about responding to crises. The other day, I took the time to walk our chalice labyrinth, and as I was walking, a whisper of pink caught my eye. When I finished the labyrinth, I walked over to investigate and found these sweetly blooming cyclamen under a tree nearby.

The slow pace of my labyrinth walk allowed me to notice something I might otherwise have missed. The same is true when I go out to walk the trails behind the church. When I slow down and make space to notice, there are mushrooms of all shapes, colors and sizes everywhere these days.

This is the wisdom of the saying Akomolafe shared: When we slow down, we open space for discoveries we couldn’t have made if we were moving at break-neck speed. While the discoveries I’ve shared above aren’t going to solve the urgent crises of these times, my experience of making those discoveries will, I hope, make me more open to the wisdom that is found when approaching challenges at a slower pace.

At least once each week, I try to walk on foot to pick up my youngest daughter from elementary school. There mostly aren’t sidewalks, so it’s certainly easier and faster to drive, but the time it takes me to make the walk is time well spent. Last week along the way, I found a stand of gorgeous purple clover, a weed to some, but a healer to me. These clovers are rich in minerals, as I learned in my midwifery education. I picked a handful, took them home with me, and made them into tea, creating an opportunity for the land that I live on to nourish my body. If I had driven my car to get to the school faster, I would have missed this gift from the land.

So, this week, I want to invite you to slow down and see what treasures reveal themselves to you. And, the first full week of November, I’ve created some time for us to slow down together, time to stop what we’re doing and sing together on Wednesday the 6th from noon till 2pm, and time to walk the labyrinth and connect over a fire pit on Saturday the 9th from 3-5pm. Perhaps those days may feel full of urgency. If so, let us come together to slow down, and see what beauty and nourishment we might discover when we do.

In Faith,
Rev. Alison

Last Wednesday night, I joined our sibling congregation Bet Chaverim in the Saltwater sanctuary to celebrate Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish new year. That afternoon, I picked apples from the little tree by the big parking lot that is in danger of being swallowed by blackberries, but is making small, sweet, ruddy-cheeked apples anyway, and I brought them in a bowl to share with the “House of Friends,” which is the English translation of “Bet Chaverim.” Rabbi Jim invited me up to address the congregation, and I told them how much I love that name, and how I hope we can continue to deepen the friendships between the partners that share our home here at Saltwater UU Church in the next year — Bet Chaverim, Haitian Christians United, and our new preschool partner Pathways Enrichment Academy.

Offering the apples to the community, I told them, “They aren’t perfect, but neither am I. Neither are we. Perfection isn’t possible. But even though they’re not perfect, they sure are sweet.” Being in community isn’t easy. As our Saltwater Covenant of Right Relations reminds us, “We acknowledge that we will make mistakes and fail one another. When we do, we commit to return to right relationship.” Being honest about this is part of acknowledging that perfection is a myth. Even though those apples weren’t perfect, or in a fancy bowl, Rabbi Jim asked me to place them on the altar table, right next to the candles. After the service, someone found a knife and honey and we had the traditional Rosh Hashanah snack of apples in honey, said to bring a sweet new year. It didn’t matter that the apples weren’t perfect. They were just right, and even better with the added sweetness the Bet Chaverim community contributed.
I’ve always appreciated celebrating the New Year in the fall, as our Jewish siblings do, even before I learned that Samhain or Halloween is understood by some as the Celtic New Year. Picking the apples from this land that we share and sharing them together feels to me like a powerful participation in turning the Wheel of the Year that transcends our religious differences, and I was grateful to share this ritual with the people of Bet Chaverim.

This year’s celebration of the High Holy Days, the Days of Awe, from Rosh Hashanah to Yom Kippur is deeply bitter with the sweet, however, coming alongside the one year anniversary of the devastating October 7th Hamas attacks on the state of Israel that began a period violence that continues to unfold in Gaza, the West Bank, and now Lebanon. I appreciated Rabbi Jim’s reminder last week that the people of Israel, the Jewish people, and the land of Israel are different things. I can celebrate a sweet new year with my friends and loved ones among the people of Israel, the Jewish people, while also decrying the violence of the government of the state of Israel, and the way my own US government supports that violence with money and weapons of war. As a Unitarian Universalist, I’m called to put Love at the center, and in a world with love at the center, I don’t believe we would turn to violence to solve human conflict. In fact, both Islam and Judaism point to this truth when they say, “To destroy one life is to destroy the whole world, and to save one life is to save the whole world,” words found in both Jewish Mishnah Sanhedrin 4:5 and Muslim Qur’an 5:32, recently brought to my attention by our Congregational Life Staff for the Pacific Western Region of the UUA Rev. Sarah Gibb Millspaugh. At Bet Chaverim, the celebration of Rosh Hashanah included traditional prayers for peace for people of all lands. I add my prayers to theirs:

Peace, Salaam, Shalom.
May it be so.

In Faith,
Rev. Alison

For further reading, as passed by vote of the delegates at the Unitarian Universalist Association General Assembly June 2024:
Responsive Resolution in Support of October 7 Hostages: https://discuss.uua.org/t/responsive-resolution-uua-general-assembly-support-for-october-7-hostages/1787
Action of Immediate Witness Solidarity with Palestinians: https://discuss.uua.org/t/amended-proposed-aiw-solidarity-with-palestinians/1510

SoulMatters Theme for October 2024:
Living Love Through the Practice of Deep Listening

“Listening is the first step and the last step.” –Cantus Fraggle (written and performed by Jim Henson)

Our October Soul Matters theme reminds us that sometimes the best way to show someone our love and care is to listen deeply to them. When we listen deeply, we aren’t planning out what we’ll say next or constructing counterarguments to what we’ve just heard, we aren’t dividing our attention by multitasking. Instead, when we’re listening deeply, we’re focusing on the speaker, really trying to understand what we’re hearing from them.

Here at Saltwater, our Covenant of Right Relations offers some touchstones for our deep listening practices: we commit to “Speak honestly about my own experiences and invite others to do the same,” to “Practice active listening and allow room for silence,” to “Consider asking questions about each other’s personal stories and spiritual sources and keep myself open to deep reflection and understanding of alternative perspectives,” and to, “Listen to ways I have impacted another person when a concern arises.” In our congregation, where the first words of our mission statement urge us to “Practice Love,” our Covenant offers a framework for practicing love through listening deeply to each other. For, as David Augsburger reminds us, “Being heard is so close to being loved that for the average person they are almost indistinguishable.”

So, as we practice deep listening this October, let us remember that this practice shouldn’t just fall away when we turn the calendar over to November. Rather, the practice of deep listening is integral to living our Mission and our Covenant. This month’s theme offers us a reminder to practice really listening, and as we do, we deepen our commitment to being who we say we are as a congregation.

In Faith,
Rev. Alision

During last week’s Faith Formation Sunday service, we engaged with the practice of Chalice Circles, meditating on a question related to our monthly theme of Invitation: “What is inviting to you about Unitarian Universalism and Saltwater Church?” Folks in the sanctuary were able to write their answers on colorful paper strips, which we turned into a paper mache chalice afterwards. All of the ways that this community and faith invite folks in are contained in this chalice, symbol of Unitarian Universalism, created by many minds and many hands.

I staffed the paper mache table after the service. One of our visitors commented that I’m very ‘hands on’ as a minister, and they were right. As someone who believes in the power of ritual action, I loved the opportunity to take the things that make you feel welcome at our church and make them into one powerful symbol of our faith and the way we invite each other in to this beloved community. In many ways, that’s my job as your minister: working with you, I help mold what is meaningful to this community into something whole and beautiful and Unitarian Universalist, that holds each one of you and acts as a lamp to guide to those who are searching for a place just like this one, with music and care, acceptance and spirituality, and at the center, Love. We make the chalice, beloveds, the beacon beckoning others to our free, liberal faith, and it is beautiful.

In Faith,
Rev. Alison

I believe in the power of imagination and storytelling in shaping our present and our future, and I’m so excited to invite you to participate in opportunities to imagine this community and share stories of us at our best. On September 28th, we’ll gather at 11am to imagine a just future on a livable planet at Day 1 of the UU Climate Justice Revival. We’ll tap in to our creativity to help open up possibilities for doing the work of climate justice in ways we may not have considered before. Then, the following Saturday, on October 5th, we’ll gather at 1pm for our Community Engagement Roundtable (previously known as the “Leadership Convening”) to tell stories of Saltwater at its best, and figure out how we’ll work together to continue bring those stories to life for our whole community, now and in the years to come. These are opportunities for anyone in the Saltwater community, members, friends and even newcomers, to participate in the co-creation of Saltwater UU Church. If you are a part of this community and you want to be part of shaping our collective future with your ideas, dreams and work, then you won’t want to miss these sessions. I’m so excited to see what we will dream, tell, and build together. Please feel free to contact me with any questions, and I look forward to seeing you there.

In Faith,
Rev. Alison

September SoulMatters Theme: Living Love Through the Practice of Invitation

Each month from September through June, Saltwater UU Church engages with a theme offered by SoulMatters. These themes show up in Sunday worship, in our Chalice Circle small-group ministries, and in our Lighthouse religious explorations for children and youth. Our theme for September is Invitation. In the SoulMatters Packet designed for a small group exploration, practices, words, and other ways to engage the material are offered each month. This month, I’m particularly drawn to a 20 minute video offering from Bayo Akomolafe, whose work I studied in seminary, that uses the wisdom of science to encourage us to answer the invitations of the moment we live in, including the invitation of grief to transform a broken world.

Practicing invitation can look like sitting with cupped hands waiting to receive life’s invitation to you. It can look like inviting someone to church because you want to share the connection and meaning you’ve found here with those you love. It can look like noticing what catches your eye in the world around you, what invitations your senses receive from the environment that holds you. And it can look like these words, asking you to consider engaging with the practice of invitation in the month ahead.

In Faith,
Rev. Alison

Sometimes, as we talked about on Sunday, we avoid our uncomfortable feelings. I didn’t know how many of you would make Time & Space for Grief & Lament. It’s easy to find something else to do on a beautiful August morning when someone asks you to be present with your own pain. So I’m deeply grateful to everyone who showed up for our service, who let their feelings out of a jar, who cried in church because it’s all right to cry, who ritually shared their grief in community by adding drops of food-coloring to our vase of water, knowing that releasing this grief could allow room for beauty. And is has:

We also made beautiful painted rocks to hold our grief, and we’ve begun to find homes for them in a new Grief Garden we’re creating out by the bench near the labyrinth. During the month of September, you’ll have more opportunities after services on Sunday to make a rock with a name, word or image that represents a grief you carry, and then to lay that grief down in our garden with the griefs of our community. After our Fall Equinox service on September 22nd, our Covenant of UU Pagans (CUUPs) group and I will lead a ritual dedication of the garden, giving our griefs back to the Earth, our beloved Godexx (after Rev. Dr. Lane-Mairead Campbell) who can hold it all.

We’re doing all this because making time and space for grief and lament is not something that we can do one Sunday morning and be done. It is an essential and ongoing component of moving through the many griefs we all will experience throughout our lives. Each time you visit the grief garden, you can remember that in your grief, you are not alone, and as Rev. Dr. Elisabeth Stevens says, “Somehow, the things that are too much to bear alone are bearable together.”

I’m grateful to everyone who participated in last Sunday’s service Time & Space for Grief & Lament. I’m grateful to our staff: Julian and Bubba who ran the AV Desk, Tom’s beautiful musical offerings, Jessica’s real engagement with our young people around healthy expression of their feelings. I’m grateful to our volunteers: Rosie offering a welcoming face to our online congregation, Saphronia and Lucia who are so dedicated to welcoming everyone who comes through they physical doors on Sunday morning; Lynette sharing her gifts at the piano; Susan lending her voice to readings; Miriam who got rocks ready to be painted; Daniel stepping in to help collect the offering; not to mention all the different hands making the coffee — I think I saw Jim, Nancy, and David in there at different points in the morning, and I’m sure there was someone in the kitchen I missed. Your generous sharing of your time and talent creates the container that holds our beloved community each Sunday morning, like the vase that held the water for our ritual. Just as our ritual would have been impossible without that vase, our Sunday worship would be impossible without you. And there is always room for others in the community to get involved. Reach out to myself or Saphronia if you want to be part of creating the container that holds this beloved community.

During the 2023-24 church year, your Faith Formation Team created some new and innovative opportunities for our community to come together to deepen our learning about ourselves, each other, and our UU faith. We called these opportunities “Faith Formation Sundays” and we held them after church on the 3rd Sunday of each month. After a community lunch, we explored a topic relevant to our faith formation: meditation, the history of Article II of the UUA bylaws, the experiences of neurodiverse community members, the work of our justice teams, setting and maintaining healthy boundaries, and more. Our Faith Formation Sundays created learning opportunities for community members of all ages, but they created some challenges too. For some of us, a church service, lunch, and a learning program made for too long a day at church. For others, special dietary needs made our community meals a source of stress rather than joy. And some of us didn’t even realize that Faith Formation Sundays were happening!

This year we want to build on the successes of Faith Formation Sundays and our July Joyful Connection Sundays, while addressing some of the challenges identified above that were raised on the Faith Formation Sunday feedback survey we sent out at the end of last church year. To that end, the Faith Formation and Worship Teams are working together to create Faith Formation Sundays that are integrated with worship. One third Sundays starting in October, our Sunday morning services will run for 90 minutes, from 10:30am till noon, with multigenerational learning opportunities and activities like the ones we created last year integrated into our worship time. We’re separating Faith Formation Sundays from community meals or potlucks, and look forward to finding ways to work those in to our monthly or quarterly rhythms on a different Sunday of the month. If you’re passionate about creating opportunities to share food in community here at Saltwater, please get in touch with me, as we could really use a potluck coordinator.

Even though we aren’t starting up our Faith Formation Sundays just yet, we’ll be offering some tastes of what these might be like beginning this coming Sunday the 18th, the third Sunday of August. Our service format will be a little different than usual, including ritual, embodiment, and lots of music! Folks are invited to stay after the service to work on creating painted rocks for a Saltwater Church Grief & Memorial Garden that we’ll be setting up near the bench by the Labyrinth. Then in September as we explore the theme of “Invitation,” our 3rd Sunday service will be an invitation to experience Chalice Circles and will include the chance to make a chalice. On the third Sunday in October, we’ll launch our longer format multigenerational Faith Formation Sundays, including music from the Saltwater Choir. We hope you’ll start planing your schedule to allow you to stay a little later on the 3rd Sundays this year, so we can continue our free and responsible search for truth and meaning in UU community together.

In Faith,
Rev. Alison

Churches are associated with generosity (which is why we’re so often targeted by scams!), and the revised purpose statement recently passed by delegates at the Unitarian Universalist Association General Assembly names generosity as one of our foundational shared UU values, saying, “We cultivate a spirit of gratitude and hope. We covenant to freely and compassionately share our faith, presence, and resources. Our generosity connects us to one another in relationships of interdependence and mutuality.” I’m writing today to remind you of one way that we practice generosity here at Saltwater Church that might not be visible to most of the folks in the congregation, even as this program impacts our members, friends, and broader South King County community. I’m talking about the Minister’s Discretionary Fund, which pools money from the congregation that is then used to provide for basic needs that folks would not be able to afford without assistance from the fund.

Since I began working as your minister last fall, in consultation with your Board and the volunteers who administered the fund before I arrived, I’ve expanded the reach of the MDF to include not only folks who are members or friends of the church, but also folks in need in the wider community. I wanted to see this money doing good for people, not sitting in our bank account. Since then, as a result of your generosity, I’ve had the chance to make a real difference in the lives of around a dozen individuals and families with this fund. Here are some of the ways your generosity has impacted our community:

• We’ve helped four families maintain their housing by providing partial payments toward past due rent, including for a family who lost transportation to work while their car was in the shop after an accident, a mom who had to quit work to care for an adult child experiencing a health crisis, and folks who were between jobs with nothing to fall back on.
• When folks weren’t able to work because of illness or family emergency, we’ve covered the cost of utilities, food and other essentials till they could get back to work.
• To help folks continue to be able to get to work, we’ve covered the cost of car repairs.
• We helped someone maintain access to their belongs in a storage unit that they would otherwise have lost access to.
• To prevent them falling further into debt, we’ve helped folks keep current on payment plans.
• We’ve covered the cost of essential healthcare when patients’ insurance refused to provide that coverage.

The last person I was able to help through the fund sent me this message, and I want to share it with you, because their gratitude is really for you all who contribute to the fund, not for me alone. They write, “I am very grateful for your help. Thanks for all that you do for us and all families in need.”

As we put our money in service of families in need, the balance of the MDF dwindles. On Christmas Eve and on the 5th Sunday of any month that has one, your offering is shared, not with an outside organization, but with the Discretionary Fund. And, you don’t have to wait till a 5th Sunday or Christmas to donate. You can make a donation to the MDF by writing “MDF”or “discretionary fund” in the memo line of a check you mail or drop in the offering basket, or you can make an online donation and note in the comment box that it’s for MDF or discretionary fund. I describe this fund to people as a way that those in our community who have more than they need can pool our resources to support those who’s needs would otherwise go unmet. I hope if you have more than enough, you’ll consider sharing some in this way. And if you don’t have enough, if you’re needs are going unmet because of financial hardship, please reach out to me. I’ll do my best to help.

In Faith,
Rev. Alison

Today is the first day in weeks I’ve been able to sit outside in my yard. That’s because down here in Southern Oregon, most of July has included unhealthy air caused by nearby wildfires and temperatures in the triple digits or very nearly. In the ten years I’ve spent in this home, I’ve watched the temperatures rise and both the growing season and the fire season extend. In Jackson County where I live, we see at least a month of bad-quality air every year these days. The impacts of climate change are not far away for me; I am watching them unfold in my own backyard.

This is part of why I’m so excited to be moving up to Washington with my family. And it’s also part of why that move isn’t completed yet. Although I’m back to work as of this week, I’m working remotely from Southern Oregon where we’re wrapping up the final pieces of this moving process that we have had to take more slowly because of the smoke and the heat. We plan to make our final trip up on August 1, and I’ll be off work that day as a result.

I want to say thank you to our Congregational Administrator Bubba, who reminded me that in fact it makes sense that dangerous weather has slowed down our move. And I’ve been reminding them that it makes sense that the neck injury that they’ve been dealing with since April is slowing them down as well. In tough times like these, it is so important to have this grace and gentleness with ourselves and with each other, and I’m so grateful for the grace so many of you have offered me as I navigate this time of transition. Climate change, wars raging around the globe,

I’m looking forward to August, when I’ll be fully planted in Des Moines with my family, and Bubba will be recovered from their recent neck surgery. I’m also dreaming of the church year to come, when we’ll see new ways to keep in touch with our Realm Connect online platform, new ways to learn and worship together as we grow our Faith Formation Sunday program, new offerings from the church (weekly singing circle, anyone?), and new opportunities to be of service in our community including participating in the Community Garden program with the Federal Way Community Caregiving Network. What do you want to create together in the church year ahead? Feel free to reach out and let me know! I’ll see you back in the Saltwater sanctuary on Sunday August 4th to celebrate as the wheel of the year turns toward the season of harvest.

As June winds down, I am turning my focus to my big move with my family from Southern Oregon to join you in Des Moines full-time starting at the end of July. I will be out of the office between July 1 & July 21, 2024. I will not be checking email or voicemail during this time.

While I’m away, you can get your needs met in the following ways:

Pastoral Care Needs: Please contact one of our Lay Ministers, Debra Valpey, Jean Spohn & Toska Rodriguez

Community Conflict or Out-of-Covenant Behavior: Please contact our Healthy Congregations Team Bev Ross, Amanda Radak & Jim Lovellford

High-Level Decision-Making: Please contact the Saltwater UU Church Board, Diane Schairer, President

Administrative Support (or to be connected with any of the folks above for whom you do not have contact information): Congregational Administrator Bubba at administrator@saltwaterchurch.org

Rev. Alison’s Report Back from General Assembly 2024

As our 2024 Unitarian Universalist Association (UUA) General Assembly (GA) draws to a close, I want to share with you some of the facts and feelings of these past few days. First, the facts:

The voting body of delegates from member congregations of the UUA voted during General Assembly to PASS all of the following:

• an amended version of the proposed revision to Article II of the UUA Bylaws (80.2% Yes) Commentary from the UUA’s legal council found HERE outlines what this change at the Associational level means for congregations like Saltwater who are members of the UUA
• a Business Resolution that declares our faith’s unwavering support for trans*, non-binary, intersex, and other gender diverse people in all that we do (91.8%YES)
• Action of Immediate Witness statements that call us to act on climate change (95.6% YES), prevent the spread of COVID-19 in our communities (86.1% YES), and support Palestinians (73.5% YES)
• a Responsive Resolution calling for immediate release of all hostages taken by Hamas on October 7th (77.0% YES)
• a slate of candidates for UUA leadership positions including the Board and Nominating Committee (like we did for Saltwater at our Annual Meeting on June 9)
• a small Bylaws revision to allow the structure of the Religious Educators Credentialing Committee to mirror the structure of the body that credentials ministers, the Ministerial Fellowshipping Committee

Special thanks to David, Rosie, & Mona, the delegates who represented Saltwater UU Church at General Assembly this year for the many hours they dedicated to being a part of these important decisions.

I’m already looking forward to next year’s General Assembly — June 18-22, 2025 in Baltimore, MD and online — where we’ve been told we’ll see resolutions for fossil fuel divestment and carbon neutrality, as well as proposed changes to the UUA Bylaws beyond Article II that will hopefully make the denomination’s Bylaws more understandable and user-friendly. Draft language of these Bylaws revisions will be available in the fall, and there will be discussion sessions, forums, and surveys for folks who want to weigh in.

Now for some feelings: We had a lot of challenging conversations at General Assembly, where we didn’t all agree, where we had different levels of understanding and experience with the topics being discussed, where people were hurt by the ways in which others contributed to the conversations. But there was attention paid to naming harm, to pausing to recenter love, to offering apologies, and to choosing methods of communication that honor multiple truths and acknowledge that we are each speaking only from our own experience. I was so grateful for the way the Moderators and Process Observers held the conversations. My experience of General Assembly is that I always come away feeling inspired by our faith, and that’s true this year as well. One of my practices at GA is to make art instead of taking notes, to explicitly bring that inspiration and creativity to bear on the business of our faith. Below I’ll share some of my art/notes that express some, though not all, of what GA felt like to me. I’m also offering a space for folks in our congregation to share their feelings about all that transpired at General Assembly on Thursday the 27th from 6-8pm in the church Zoom room.

My next week will be full of meetings and getting loose ends tied up so I can take the first three weeks of July off to move my family from Southern Oregon up there to Des Moines. I’m looking forward to building a new way together with you, guided by our Saltwater Mission to Practice Love, Foster Connection, Nurture Spiritual Growth, and Act for Justice, which dovetails beautifully with our UU values of Love, Gratitude, Interdependence, Pluralism, Transformation, Justice, and Equity named in the UUA’s new Article II. And even as we build the new way, the Seven Principles and Six Sources that brought many of us to this faith will continue to act as part of the foundation on which we build the future.

In Community,
Rev. Alison

This week, I’m using my Minister’s Message to share the Annual Report I presented at our Congregational Meeting last Sunday, and to direct you to the annual report from our Affiliated Community Minister, Rev. Jennifer Alviar. An Annual Report helps us understand where we’ve been, where we are, and where we’re heading. This year, I hope my report will help answer the question, “How do things work around here?” I’ve been learning the answers to those questions over the past eight months I’ve been with you, and I wanted to share the answers that I’ve learned along the way. So, here it is, my Annual Report to the congregation:

We also have an Affiliated Community Minister, who is not an employee or a member of Saltwater Church, but whose ministry we have claimed as a part of our congregation’s ministry. Rev. Jennifer Alviar works out in the wider community, but she needed an anchor in Unitarian Universalist congregational life, and found that anchor with us when your Board agreed to affiliate with her. Affiliation with a congregation is required for community ministers, and I’m so happy to have Rev. Jennifer onnected to Saltwater in this way. You can read her annual report HERE which talks more about her relationship with this congregation, the focus of her ministry, and her hopes for the future. I’m excited for the year ahead and grateful to everyone who shares the work of the ministry of Saltwater Church, from the Board, to the Worship team, to the folks who make coffee on Sunday mornings, to Rev. Jennifer, and to YOU!

In Community,
Rev. Alison

My dear Saltys, I’d like to invite you to my ordination…a year ago. One of the beautiful pieces of adopting hybrid/remote technology when our churches were closed to prevent the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic is all that technology has made possible since then. This includes not only my hybrid/remote ministry with Saltwater Church these last eight months, but also the preservation of my ordination at Rogue Valley UU Fellowship in Ashland, OR on June 11th of last year for posterity on YouTube:

Every congregation adapted to the challenges of remote worship in their own way. Saltwater embraced Zoom, and RVUUF opted for creating, and later livestreaming, services on YouTube. Both of those adaptations have brought gifts to my life. This is a reminder that there is no one right way; rather, we can make good arise in many ways, even in the most challenging times, specific to the needs and gifts of the communities we are a part of. I’m grateful to RVUUF that called me from among them into the ministry, and I’m grateful to Saltwater that affirmed my ministry by hiring me to serve as minister to this beloved community. You have embraced, welcomed, and accompanied me through a year a firsts, and I’m excited to have had my contracted renewed by the Board for the next two years. If you have an extra 90 minutes, you’re welcome to travel back in time to attend my ordination last summer. And, please know that I’m so excited for all that our future has in store! I’ll be taking most of July off this summer to move my family up to the shore of the Salish sea to be closer to the land that is also a part of the Saltwater community. Even as I’ll be spending more time on site at the church, know that I remain committed co-creating a ministry that serves our congregation in-person and online.

In Faith,
Rev. Alison

The Gift of Renewal: SoulMatters Monthly Theme for June 2024

Dead plant matter becomes the soil in which new plants grow. Renewal is a practice we can learn from observing the cycles of the more-than-human world, and it offers a hopefulness that we can always choose to start over, to recommit to what we believe in, to allow parts of us that have died away to become the compost out of which our future selves will grow. The gift of renewal is a promise that no matter how bleak things get, something new and better is possible. When we choose to believe in renewal instead of to despair, we make room for what is possible and help bring it into being. Renewal promises that things won’t always be “good as new” but that we can get back to that place if we choose to. Beloved UU minister who joined the ancestors in 2022 Rev. Rob Eller-Isaacs wrote in his Litany of Atonement: “We forgive ourselves and each other. We begin again in love.” Reconciliation and repair offer renewal in human relationships just as surely as the water cycle offers ongoing renewal of the lifeblood of our earthly home. What is ready for renewal in you?

In Faith,
Rev. Alison

Many folks have asked if there’s any way for us to record Sunday services for those who aren’t able to be there in person or online, for those who are volunteering in the Lighthouse with our children during worship, or to share with those outside our Saltwater UU community who might be inspired by the reflections shared on Sunday morning. With gratitude to our AudioVisual & Sound staff Nina and Robert, I want to offer you our first attempt at recording my Sunday reflection. We may not record every Sunday, but when we do, these recordings will be posted to my YouTube channel, found HERE. Please feel free to watch and share.

In Faith,
Rev. Alison

Each season has a different rhythm, and it can feel challenging to me sometimes to shift between them. Where I live on Takelma land, the warmer days have come on strong this past week, a stark contrast to the cool, wet early spring we had as recently as a week ago. On Mother’s Day I rescued some of the scruffy-looking veggie starts from the Grocery Outlet and I’ve been getting them planted. getting weeds pulled and grass cut and trees trimmed. It was hard for me to say goodbye to some of that lush growth, but I know it’s making room for new, healthier things to grow. Now that I’ve got starts and seeds in the ground, my daily routine changes to include time spent in the morning or evening in the back yard with the hose, watering. It’s been a slow learning curve coming to understand just how much water plants need down here in the summer. Today I showed my 16 year old all the places she’ll need to water when I’m in Washington with you folks next week, and I can only hope she’ll keep things alive till I return.

This garden that I’m tending this year probably isn’t even for me. The tomatoes won’t get ripe till late in the summer when I hope to be moved up with my family to Des Moines, Kent, Auburn or Federal Way, somewhere up by you folks at the south end of the Salish Sea. I wasn’t even sure if I would put in a garden this year. But I realized it’s not the produce that I’m tending the garden for; it’s the practice: watching growth unfold, keeping harmful growth and pests at bay, going outside every day (or at least. 80% of the days) in the coolest part of the day to co-create life with the more-than-human world. Water is life, after all. My summer watering is an important part of my spiritual practice this time of year, and even if I don’t get to eat the tomatoes, tending them matters to me. Plus, if I tend them now, they will be waiting for a friend of mine who is scheduled to move in some time in August. The plants, the soil, my spirit, my friend, all will feel the benefit of my watering, my practice of tending.

Even though it required me to shift my rhythm from the more indoor-oriented patterns of winter and early spring, I’m grateful that now that Beltane’s past, I brought myself outside, not only to garden, but to set up my home office at the picnic table under the plum tree. Surrounded by birdsong and the smell of roses, I’m having my Zoom meetings and answering emails. I encourage you to join me in answering as the more-than-human world beckons us to come out and play, if only by opening your window to let in the breeze.

In Faith,
Rev. Alison

A Faithful Practice of Democracy: General Assembly & Congregational Polity

The Unitarian Universalist Association (UUA) is governed by votes of congregational representatives (“delegates”) at General Assembly, coming up this year June 20-23, as well as by votes of the UUA Board, who are elected by delegates at General Assembly. It used to be that to be a delegate to GA, you had to have time and money to travel and find food and lodging wherever the assembly was being held. One of the gifts of the pandemic was that it forced us to make everything we do more accessible to folks who can’t travel for whatever reason, and as a result the UUA has transitioned to doing GA entirely online every other year, including this year. This means that you can join in from anywhere with an internet connection. And, delegates can now register to participate in the business sessions of GA at no cost. I’m grateful for the ways these changes have expanded access to participation in governance of our association for folks who might have been excluded in the past by cost and travel requirements, because I believe our Association will make better decisions when more perspectives are included. Your Saltwater Board is currently seeking applicants to serve as General Assembly delegates from Saltwater next month. Just like we don’t have the same Board every year so that more people get a chance to share the ministry of leadership, we hope to see different folks representing us at General Assembly each year too. So, if you’re a member who’s never been a delegate, consider applying if you want to be part of making the decisions that will shape the future of our UU faith. You can apply here: https://saltwaterchurch.org/about-us/our-governance/gadelegate-application/

An important piece of our Unitarian heritage is something called “congregational polity.” In my notes on the polity course I took in seminary from Rev. Dr. Meg Richardson, I wrote, “Congregational polity is a structure designed for churches wherein the local congregation is the primary autonomous unit of organization and decision-making.” This is actually one of the ways in which we’re kind of radical in comparison to other denominations in the US. We don’t have bishops who tells the church how to operate or who our minister will be. Instead, operating decisions are made right here at Saltwater, by votes of congregation members at our annual meeting (coming up on June 9), and by our Board (elected at that annual meeting). The Board then uses consensus decision-making to conduct the business of the church on behalf of the congregation at their monthly meetings. We’ve been talking a lot about Article 2 of the Unitarian Universalist Association bylaws lately because next month at General Assembly delegates from UU congregations including ours will vote on a proposed revision of that piece of the bylaws. Article 3 of those same UUA bylaws is NOT being revised this year, so this language in Section 2 of Article III will remain the same: “Nothing in these Bylaws shall be construed as infringing upon the congregational polity or internal self-government of member congregations…” Self-governance at the congregational level is an essential piece of Unitarian Universalism, and when your Board representatives vote on who to send as voting delegates to General Assembly, we will all be participating in that Unitarian tradition of self-governance: members who elect the Board, the Board empowering members to represent us as delegates, and the members who become delegates voting on behalf of our congregation at GA.

Because we are a faith that values self-governance, I hope that most of us would agree that we want to see democratic institutions thrive in our congregation, our communities, and our nation. At our Earth Day service, I quoted from adrienne maree brown’s book Emergent Strategy on the fractal nature of ferns, self-similar at every level of magnification. brown offers this as a lesson in biomimicry, and she tells us “Small is all.” Following these lessons, I believe that how we do things right here at Saltwater shapes what happens in the larger world; we must create the world we want to see in our own small communities if we want to it manifest on a larger scale. So I invite Saltwater Church members into the faithful practice of self-governance as I ask you to consider applying to be a delegate for General Assembly, and to show up to our annual meeting on June 9th to use your voice and vote to help guide our congregation’s future. May the democracy we practice at church ripple out into the larger world.

In Faith,
Rev. Alison

The Gift of Pluralism: SoulMatters Monthly Theme for May 2024

Conversations about religion and spirituality are full of -isms: atheism, agnosticism, polytheism, monotheism, animism, humanism, paganism… In Unitarian Universalism, we embrace all these -isms, and many more. We welcome plural -isms, pluralism, as a gift. This means that in any one row of five folks sitting next to each other at church, you may find five different ideas about the big questions of Life, the Universe & Everything (as Douglas Adams so aptly put it). What brings us all together, with our plural -isms, is the desire to find meaning in community around shared values and principles, and take action to see those values manifest in our world.

But pluralism isn’t just about religious coexistence. It’s also about welcoming difference of all kinds, being part of diverse communities, making room for all sorts of identities, and listening to the stories that people with different identities tell. This month’s SoulMatters Materials include a link to this TED talk by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie about the danger of only hearing a single story. Our Unitarian Universalist pluralism embraces spiritual insights from across the spectrum of religious stories, and it makes us more welcoming, more inclusive, and stronger to truly weave together the -isms to build meaning in community. If we are to live the gift of pluralism as Unitarian Universalist, we need to go beyond drawing from many spiritual and religious sources, and make sure we truly listen to and make room for the stories of our neighbors and community members that are beyond our own experience.

Welcome Rev. Jennifer Alviar, Affiliated Community Minister with Saltwater Church!

It used to be that the only way to be a minister was to serve a congregation. That’s why Rev. Olympia Brown (1835-1926) is considered the first woman minister in North America: although there were other women who were ordained, she was the first who found a congregation that was willing to accept her as their leader. However, even before Rev. Brown’s time, ministers like Unitarian Rev. Joseph Tuckerman (1778-1840) were insisting that he was called to serve folks most in need, even those outside of congregations. Rev. Tuckerman was the “minister at large” to Boston, visiting the imprisoned and the impoverished, and advocating for these marginalized groups. He is thought of by many as the “father of American social work,” a profession which grew out of his vision of ministry-at-large.

Even today, Unitarian Universalist ministers who serve outside a congregational setting have a less clear path to being recognized as ministers by the Unitarian Universalist Association, especially when they aren’t working as hospital or military chaplains. Thankfully, UUA requirements are shifting to better acknowledge the essential ministry work that can and must be done outside our congregations. Even so, UU ministers who do their work in the community rather than in the congregation (“community ministers”) are required to maintain a relationship with a congregation. This relationship is called “affiliation.” An affiliated community minister is not an employee of a congregation like I am. Rather, their affiliation with a congregation is a way of showing that they are in relationship to Unitarian Universalism as a whole, and to a congregation specifically. By affiliating with a community minister, a congregation is saying, “We recognize that this person’s work is ministry, and it is connected to the ministry of our congregation and our faith.”

Today, I am so pleased to announce that your Board has voted to approve an affiliation agreement with my colleague, Rev. Jennifer Alviar. You may remember Rev. Jennifer from her participation in our Neurodiversity Panel in January, or from times when she’s served as a guest minister in the Saltwater pulpit. On her website, Rev. Jennifer writes, “In my ministry, I actively seek ways to plant seeds of social change, hope and healing. This is why gardens fascinate me. They offer a tangible source of promising growth through a deep connection with the Earth.” Her commitment to advocating for disability justice and building relationship between humans and the more-than-human world make her ministry a beautiful fit with us here at Saltwater Church. Expect to see Rev. Jennifer in our pulpit at least annually, and keep an eye out for news of what she’s up to in the community and ways you can participate in that work. Rev. Jennifer robustly welcomed me into the community of ministers in the South Sound area when I came to serve Saltwater, and it is my great joy to robustly welcome her as an affiliated community minister with our congregation.

In Faith,
Rev. Alison

This Sunday, April 14th, we’ll have a potluck after our service to celebrate the conclusion of our Joyful Community Pledge Drive, where members of this community make our promises of the financial support we’ll each provide for Saltwater UU Church between July 2024 and June 2025. You can make your pledge online right now by visiting https://saltwaterchurch.org/stewardship/pledge/

A church potluck and a church pledge drive are similar: Both provide nourishment and energy to the church community, with a potluck nourishing our bodies, energizing us for the rest of our day, and a pledge drive nourishing our budget so we can energize our staff, programs, buildings and grounds with the resources needed to thrive in the next church year. Both a potluck and a pledge drive rely on each community member to bring what they can. When my kids were little, it was sometimes a triumph to show up at a potluck with a bag of chips and tub of guacamole, but now my kids and I can bake together and offer something more nourishing and delicious that that bag of chips. When I was in grad school and unemployed during the pandemic, I didn’t pledge to my home church those years, but they loved and supported me anyway. Both a potluck and a pledge drive recognize that not everyone can contribute, but that everyone receives from the church’s bounty anyway: any member who can’t afford to make a pledge will be granted a pledge waiver, just like everyone at the potluck eats, whether you were able to bring a dish to share or not. And finally, both a potluck and a pledge drive require us to place our faith in each other. On my own, I can’t make a potluck happen. I rely on everyone who brings their own dish to share. I don’t know who’s going to bring a dish, and I don’t know what dishes we’ll have. I don’t even know if we’ll have enough to feed everyone who comes. But I have to tell you, I’m not all that worried that we won’t have enough food to go around, or that we won’t meet our pledge drive goal, because over the past six months, I’ve gotten to know and become a part of this joyful community, and I’ve seen how much we value our church and the people who make up our church family.

This Sunday, as our pledge drive comes to a close, I have faith in you to bring what you have to give to this Joyful Community to nourish our bodies and our budget for all that we have to do together, for each other, for our future.

In Community,
Rev. Alison

The Gift of Interdependence: SoulMatters Monthly Theme for April 2024

It’s good to be back to work after spending spring break with my family last week, and spring has truly sprung here on the lands of the Takelma, Shasta & Tolowa Dee’ni peoples. I write today from my outdoor office, alongside my co-workers, chard, kale, tulip and dandelion. When the weather allows me to come outside, my work and my being are more deeply grounded in the Earth and the interdependent web of life that this beloved planet supports. This month, as we wrap up our pledge drive on the 14th, and celebrate Earth Day and practice healthy boundaries at Faith Formation Sunday on the 21st, our place in the interdependent web is front and center.

Like fractals that maintain a similar form at any level of magnification, interdependent webs are part of every aspect of life — our families and communities are interdependent webs, embedded in ecosystems that are interdependent webs. Saltwater UU Church is an interdependent web, with the work of the church only accomplished through the community’s gifts of time, talent, and treasure. We each have a thread to weave in the web. By April 14th, I hope you’ll let us know what you plan to give financially in the 2024-25 church year that runs from July of this year to June of next. Saltwater leadership including myself, the Finance Team, and the Board will work together to weave a budget proposal from the threads of your pledge commitments. It isn’t only the people of our church that make up this community, however. We’re bound in webs of relationship with Bet Chaverim Synagogue, Haitian Christians United Church, and Planting Flowers Early Learning Center, along with the land we all share and the plants and animals with which we share that land. Even my own body is an interdependent web, home to more cells of healthy bacteria than my own human cells, bacteria that allow me to digest my food and fight off disease. Noticing the webs of relationship, from the microscopic to the galactic, including the human and more than human, leads me to wonder at the incredible complexity of life on this airy, watery rock. It is in that space of wonder that I find the presence of the Sacred.

Interdependence doesn’t just mean we are embedded in webs. It also reminds us that we are dependent on each other for our survival, quite literally, when we come into the world as newborns, but also throughout our lives. As a midwife, I witnessed families who desperately needed support from an extended family network as their children were born and grew for from grandparents and aunties, and I believe strongly that the epidemic of postpartum mood disorders in the US is related to the lack of community support we offer families in this country. US cultural messages of “rugged individualism” try to convince us that we can go it alone, but the truth of being a social animal is that we were designed to be embedded in community at every age and stage. Practicing interdependence by participating in congregational life here at Saltwater Church is one way to challenge wrong-headed notions that anyone can make it in this life alone. Thank you for welcoming me into this interdependent web with you, alongside our neighbors of many faiths, the cedars and the trillium, the birds and the waters of the Salish Sea.

It’s nearly pledge drive season at Saltwater Church, with our kick off coming up this Sunday, a community dinner and sing along on the 30th, Easter Egg hunt after service on the 31st, an Interplay-inspired community activity after service on April 7, and a potluck after service to close out the drive on April 14. We offer these activities during pledge drive month as a reminder of all the many gifts our community brings to us — the gifts of song, of play, of connection, of food, this community gives us so much that can enrich our lives beyond the gifts of spiritual nourishment we strive to provide each Sunday morning.

Another opportunity to enrich our lives and work together is coming up during pledge drive season, offered through Sound Alliance, the organizing coalition to which Saltwater Church belongs. As a member organization of Sound Alliance, this April Leadership Institute on the evening of Friday April 5th and all day Saturday April 6th, is free to Saltwater members and friends. Sound Alliance describes this training as “for those who share an interest in working together for the common good.” That sounds like us to me, and it says so right in our mission statement: at Saltwater Church, we Act for Justice. I’ve had several folks come to me and ask about getting involved with social justice work at Saltwater, and this training is a great way to up our social justice game, helping us understand how we can build and use our power to make real change in our community.

Just like during the pledge drive, when we ask you to help us plan for our future by telling us what you can contribute financially to the church between July 1, 2024 and June 30, 2025, the Leadership Institute lays the foundation for the future of our social justice work by allowing community members to gaining a deeper understanding of how we build and use power to make change as part of a coalition of faith, labor and other communities. The Leadership Institute isn’t a place where you take action right then, but rather a place where we gather the resources to take effective action in the future together.

So, in these next few weeks of pledge drive season, I want to encourage you to keep your eyes on the horizon, holding a vision of Saltwater’s future, even as we celebrate, learn and play right now. As spring flowers bloom that will become summer fruits, pledge drive season offers us an opportunity to set an intention (the flower) of what we want to become (the fruit). Let us blossom together, my friends, so that we may bless each other and the wider world with a rich harvest as the wheel turns into the future.

In Community,
Rev. Alison

I wanted to share with you here some words I spoke from the pulpit this past Sunday, based on conversations the congregation, the Board and I have been having for several months. I’ve heard some feedback from folks in the congregation about these topics, and as I say below, I encourage you to continue to be in touch with Board members and me about these and other issues of importance to our community. Because we are a community that values transformation, nothing is written in stone, and we know we will come up with more creative answers to the question of how we meet the needs of everyone in this beloved community by working together. Here’s that message I delivered on Sunday:

When we come to worship, we create sacred space together. I learned recently that a community with shared rituals and vision will last generations longer than a community that shares only labor. We want to honor the sacredness of our Sunday mornings, while also working to meet the needs of everyone attending. One way we hope we’re doing this is by making the Welcome Room a robust alternative to sitting in the sanctuary, with the Zoom service available via the screen, different seating options, toys for kiddos, and more room to move around. Folks are welcome to experience worship in the spaces and ways that works best for them. 

Because our services are available live online via Zoom, it’s important to remember that if you or your children are in the sanctuary, you may be seen by our Zoom participants. This is similar to participants in the sanctuary seeing each other here in the space. Services are not recorded or distributed in any way other than the Zoom livestream. However, if there’s discomfort with possibly being seen by the Zoom audience, the welcome room is a good alternative where you won’t be visible over Zoom.

And now I want to share the outcome of some conversations I’ve been having with the Board, also around accommodating the needs of everyone who comes to service on Sunday morning. If you hear what I’m about to say and think, “This is directed at me,” please know that we bring this to the whole community because it is not just you but many people who have brought these issues to our attention.  

First, photography: Many of us have pulled out our phones to take a picture of a beautiful moment in worship. But it’s critically important that we keep two things in mind with respect to photography in church. The first is consent. Those of us standing up in front of you have consented to our images being broadcast over Zoom, and so it’s reasonable to assume that we’ve consented to being photographed. However, our children are not able to give consent, and taking photos of children under 18, other than your own, is never appropriate at Saltwater unless explicit consent of the child’s responsible grown-ups is obtained before taking photos. Additionally, folks in the audience of the service haven’t given consent to be photographed, so please avoid taking photos of the gathered community. And remember that our electronic communications policy requires us to get consent of everyone in a picture taken of a Saltwater event before posting the picture on social media. Beyond consent, we need to return to that idea of creating sacred space together. If taking a photograph will distract you or those around you from the worshipful atmosphere, it isn’t appropriate in the service. We don’t want to say, “Never take a picture in church” but we do want to say, “Please be discerning with your photography, keeping in mind consent and our attempt to create and maintain sacred space.” We invite you to consider avoiding photography all together to practice staying present in the moment while you are at church. 

And now, on to our beloved animal companions. It can be such a joy to have our sweet pups participate on Sunday morning. And, there are many folks who have allergies, fears or trauma that make interacting with dogs or other animals in Sunday service unwelcome and even unsafe. Thus, we need to request that on Sunday morning, only registered service animals be present in the sanctuary, welcome room and Lighthouse. At other times, such as for smaller group meetings, participants can mutually decide if they will include animal friends in their in-person meetings. 

Finally, a word about nuts. In 2012, this congregation adopted a policy not to serve nuts because they can cause severe allergic reactions in certain people. That continues to be the policy, it is posted on the kitchen door, and we ask that folks respect it to make this place more welcoming to people with severe nut allergies. 

Please feel free to be in touch with me if you have questions or concerns about anything I’ve shared just now, or use the accommodations box in the welcome room to request the accommodations that you need to feel safe and welcome at services on Sunday morning. Thank you all for working with us to balance the multiple needs of those present in our beloved community, in person and online, on Sunday mornings. 

In Community,
Rev. Alison

The Gift of Transformation: SoulMatters Monthly Theme for March 2024

This week I was asked to imagine a world where Unitarian Universalism didn’t exist any more because the vision of the movement had come to pass – the inherent worthiness and dignity of every person was realized, with love at the center, equity a reality, all in right relationship with each other and the more than human world. It was hard and beautiful to try to imagine. But I wonder if the UU movement would ever truly stop being needed, because as the world transforms, we transform with it. This is the beauty of being part of a living tradition that values transformation. We know that we are always learning more and as we learn we must revisit, reevaluate, reappraise and revise what we thought we knew. A transforming movement like ours has the potential to always be vital, no matter what conditions we find ourselves in.

I was involved in an early feedback session of revisions to to Article II (of the bylaws of the Unitarian Universalist Association) proposed by the Article II Study Commission where we considered what significant values would be named as foundational to our faith and presented in the graphical representation of those values that the Commission was proposing. At the time, the word “Evolution” was on the flower petal that is now held by “Transformation.” Both words evoke the idea of change over time. Folks in the feedback session noted that UU acceptance that the scientific concept of evolution as not in conflict with our faith is something that sets us apart from many other religious traditions in the US. Others shared that for them word evolution implied a hierarchy from less evolved to more evolved that puts humans at the pinnacle of evolution, though we are one of many creatures within the evolving systems of planet Earth. Still others warned the group against a word that led our religious ancestors into dangerous dalliances with social Darwinism and eugenics. I don’t think I would have thought of some of these perspectives myself, and I was grateful to be part of the conversation. When I saw the change of language from “Evolution” to “Transformation,” I understood why.

As we move toward the Spring Equinox, we witness the centrality of transformation as the more than human world makes the journey from Winter into Spring. But the journey is cyclical, always returning, no season the pinnacle, all necessary. Embracing transformation embraces the wisdom of the turning wheel of the year and acknowledges our place in it.

In Faith,
Rev. Alison

As I mentioned in my Imbolc post, one of my spiritual practices is simply noticing the more-than-human world around me. I use the term “more-than-human” after David Abram in his book Spell of the Sensuous, a text that was as life-changing for me as Resmaa Menakem’s My Grandmother’s Hands that was the focus of last Sunday’s service. In his book, Abram explores (among other things) the way that indigenous cultures across the globe understand the language of the landscape in which they are embedded and of the other living beings in that landscape. During his fieldwork in indigenous communities, Abram learned to listen to the more-than-human world, and when he came back home to the US, he lost that skill. But having come to know the speaking Earth, referring to it as “nature” or “non-human” communicated a separateness, and a less-than status that he could no longer abide. He had experienced being in communication with something more-than-human, from which he was not separate. The poet William Stafford put it this way in his poem Earth Dweller: “The world speaks everything to us. It is our only friend.”

Now, my indigenous ancestors are more than a thousand years in the past; I am too much a creature of the United States to be able to understand what the Earth is speaking to me most of the time. But my Earth-centered spirituality is an aspiration to re-learn the language of the more-than-human world, and this is where my spiritual practice of noticing comes in. It’s easy to walk through the world paying attention to our thoughts, our to-do lists, the people around us, so that we barely notice that we are embedded in the more-than-human world. Just like getting up early to meditate, noticing the beings, terrain, and climate around me takes effort and discipline, and just like meditation, noticing the more-than-human world is a powerful teacher. The more-than-human world is always changing. And, it is always returning, for even as the seasons change, they change in cycles that become familiar when we begin to notice. Maybe it seems simple or silly to pay so much attention to plants, animals, fungi, rocks and water, but if so, maybe that’s because you’ve been conditioned to think that these things matter less and have less to teach us than human things. So I encourage you to practice noticing. And I can’t think of a better place to take up this practice than on the land of Saltwater Church and Saltwater State Park.

When I first came to visit you in October, I took a walk from the church office down to the sound, and I did the same thing just a few days ago. I invite you to join me in noticing all that was different, and all that remained the same:

So consider yourself invited into the spiritual practice of noticing. What will you hear the more-than-human world speaking, if you commit to taking time to listen?

In Faith,
Rev. Alison

This Valentine’s Day, I want to share with you a little bit about my partner Jamie and our relationship over the years. I’ve known Jamie since we were six, and this year we’ll hit the milestone of having been partnered for half our lives. Even though he’s a man and I’m a woman and we’re legally married, I often refer to Jamie as my ‘partner’ because that’s what our relationship is and has been for almost 22 years: a partnership between two different and equal people who have sought to build a life together.

Getting legally married wasn’t ever a goal of ours or mine; ultimately we did it so that I could get in on Jamie’s employer-provided health insurance (so romantic!). But for years before we ‘made it legal’ we were building a partnership together grounded in love, friendship and mutual respect, and that partnership is much more significant to us than the legal recognition of marriage. In our first days together, we made commitments in the privacy of our own home that continue to define our partnership much more to than anything we said the day we got married. And for me, the gendered labels of ‘husband’ and ‘wife’ feel like something very far away from the partnership I know.

For Valentine’s Day this year, the Shortwave science podcast had a wonderful piece on queer love in our animal siblings:

Hearing this podcast today reminded and affirmed for me that my bisexuality is a part of my very nature. This remains true regardless of my 20+ years of monogamous marriage. The ways that Jamie and I challenge the gendered roles of ‘husband’ and ‘wife’ in our relationship, with me being a religious leader and him being a stay-at-home parent, are just one example of the ways I am “queering” heterosexual marriage.

Being bisexual for me is in part an acknowledgment that people are people, and gender matters less to me than the wholeness of the person in front of me. For me, gender doesn’t divide people into two separate camps, one of which is out of range of my love and attraction. I firmly believe that I would have loved my partner Jamie regardless of his gender. While I celebrate those who choose the labels of ‘husband’ and ‘wife,’ and while I’ll happily officiate weddings and celebrate wedding anniversaries, the primary relationship in my life is one defined by partnership, and to honor the truth of who Jamie is to me, I’m going to keep calling him my partner. And if that confuses some people, maybe that’s ok. The legal status of my partnership or the gender of the person I’m partnered with is less important than the fact that I’m supported, nurtured and sustained by the love that Jamie and I have cultivated and committed to over these past two decades.

On Valentine’s Day this year, as usual, we got treats and little gifts for our two daughters, but nothing for each other. We’re grounded in our love every day. As Joni Mitchell sang, “We don’t need no piece of paper from the City Hall keeping us tied and true,” nor do we need a holiday to remind us to focus on our love, because it is always at the center of our lives. No matter how you label, define or experience your primary relationships, I hope you too are grounded in a sustaining love like the one that is at the center of my own family, today and always.

I was surprised to learn that it was only recently that the UUA began requiring continuing education for ministers. In the health care field where I spent much of my professional life before ministry, all types of providers from doctors to massage therapists and everyone in between is required to have a certain number of hours of continuing ed on a regular basis. This practice helps newer providers continue building their knowledge and skills, and allows long-time providers to stay current as practice standards evolve. This is just as true for ministers as for health-care providers, and I’m truly excited for the opportunities to continue my education that I’ve embarked on this month. I’ll share more about that below.

For UUs, though, it’s not just ministers for whom continuing education is a necessary part of our spiritual practice. Rev. Dr. Sheri Prud’homme, who was my advisor and UU theology teacher at Starr King School for the Ministry writes, “Rev. Dr. Rebecca Parker, emerita professor of theology and former president of Starr King School for the Ministry, has asserted that the spiritual practice at the center of Unitarian Universalism is education.” The first North American minister to claim the label Unitarian, William Ellery Channing preached on what he called “self-culture,” the development of the self that enhances what Channing saw as humankind’s likeness to God. As a faith that believes that every human should have the ability to fulfill their potential, we encourage each other to keep learning so that we may each have the tools we need to fulfill our own potential. I’d like to offer each of you an opportunity to do some continuing UU education by reading Rev. Dr. Prud’homme’s piece on the theology behind the seven UU values identified in the proposed revision to the statement of purpose of the Unitarian Universalist Association of congregations (to which Saltwater Church belongs). Sheri’s writing is accessible and she has deep knowledge of our faith and theology throughout the ages, including the recognition that the whole idea of theology rubs some of us the wrong way. I hope you’ll take the time to read her nine pages and see how it informs your understanding of the proposed revisions.

For myself, in February I’ve embarked on a program offered by Sharing Sacred Spaces in partnership with the unRival Network, Religions for Peace USA and Hartford International University for Religion and Peace called Peacebuilding Amid Polarization: A Leader’s Toolkit for Constructive Engagement on the Israeli-Palestinian Crisis. So many of the conversations that I’ve seen taking place around the violence in Israel and Gaza over the last four months have put polarization and binary thinking (i.e. “If you’re not with us you’re against us”) front and center. But the reality is so much more complicated. In my life, the people who have called me most strongly to speak up for ceasefire are Jewish themselves, and yet I have also absorbed the message in the wider discourse that paints calls for peace or critiques of the response of the Israeli government to the horrific attacks of October 7^th as anti-Semitic. What’s a leader of a multireligious faith community to do? The answer I’ve come to for now is to take up the UU spiritual practice of educating myself, so that I can more fully live in to my potential to be a religious leader who can hold all the complexity with you in community, a community that is made stronger by including a diverse array of perspectives.

I’m also excited to have returned to Starr King this month for an online class in which I served as Teacher’s Assistant during the final semester of my Masters studies: Power, Organizations & Movements. Grounded in the Tao to Ching (the first religious text that spoke to me as an atheist young adult), this class explores the movement of power among groups of people, and encourages us to take up practices that help us use our power together to create the future we envision. I’m looking forward to sharing practices from this class with the Saltwater Church community as well. Here’s to being UUs learning together.

In Faith,
Rev. Alison

Imbolc Blessings, Saltwater Community! I’m looking forward to celebrating this Celtic pagan cross-quarter festival with you and Saltwater’s Covenant of UU Pagans (CUUPS) at Sunday worship this week. I’ve always felt spring in the air around my birthday at the end of January, even though it’s the middle of winter. When I was introduced to this “first spring” holiday of Imbolc, I began to understand why.

This year, I celebrated Imbolc by collaging, clearing the detritus off of my alter and burning the old flowers and food offerings in the fire pit, refreshing my altar with a Brigid’s Cross I made of long grass stems I found in an empty field nearby, and by paying attention to the world around me (the sunrise, the swelling daffodil buds, discovering the gift painted rock left on a fallen log ). The Goddess Brigid is the deity of Imbolc, a triple goddess of poetry, midwifery, and smithcraft. I offer this video as an opportunity for you to engage with my spiritual practices of altar craft, collage and engagement with the more-than-human world.

In Faith,
Rev. Alison

The Gifts of Justice & Equity: SoulMatters Monthly Theme for February 2024

Building off of last month’s theme of Liberating Love, in February we turn to Justice & Equity. At my first Unitarian Universalist General Assembly, I heard Rev. Dr. Cornell West speak the words, “Justice is what Love looks like in public,” and these words rang so true that they have become touchstones of my UU faith. In contemplating the difference between justice and equity, a picture is worth a thousand words, and I encourage you to take a look at this image and consider the actions we need to take to work toward equity, and to move the world past equity to justice. The words “justice” and “equity” have been central to our understanding of ourselves as Unitarian Universalists, with justice appearing in every version of the statement of purpose of the Unitarian Universalist Association since its beginning in 1961, “equity” since 1985, and both words included in the proposed revision of that statement of purpose that will be voted on this summer by the delegates at the UU General Assembly.

Like love, justice is part of our mission here at Saltwater UU Church, and we’re excited for the congregation to get to know the three teams that help us practice justice at this month’s Faith Formation Sunday: Saltwater Climate Action Now!, the Racial Justice Organizing Team, and Sound Alliance will all have tables where you can learn more, ask questions, and get involved after the service on February 18^th. Many of us, myself included, have come to this faith in part because we want to create a more just word. Together in community, with the benefit of multiple perspectives, we hope to gain a wider vision of justice and equity than any one of us could hold alone, along with more power to make the vision real. But please know that creating justice in an unjust world isn’t easy or comfortable, and that those of us, myself included, who benefit from systemic injustices will be called to examine our own participation in and complicity with systems of oppression, and to transform ourselves and our institutions to make room for justice to dwell among us.

In Faith,
Rev. Alison

In my reflection on New Year’s Eve, I talked about the importance of imagining the world we want to see, so that we can work to build it. But this isn’t an idea I came up with on my own. My favorite author, Ursula K. LeGuin talked about this in the speech she gave when she received the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters: “Hard times are coming, when we’ll be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine real grounds for hope. We’ll need writers who can remember freedom — poets, visionaries — realists of a larger reality.” This is why I read “speculative fiction” also called “sci-fi/fantasy” — these books exercise my imagination and help me see possibilities about what it means to be human that I may never have considered before. Speculative fiction isn’t just for kids or escapists. It can be a powerful force for re-imagining the way things are, imagining something better. I have found in my favorite works of speculative fiction “Words…of prophetic people which challenge us to confront powers and structures of evil with justice, compassion, and the transforming power of love,” which is one of the stated sources of our UU faith.

I saw a YouTube video once where a couple was explaining what Unitarian Universalism is all about, and they talked about how, rather than one single book (like the Bible in Christianity, the Torah in Judaism, or the Quran in Islam), UUs are people of So. Many. Books. I see that truth in action here at Saltwater. This year, the Racial Justice Organizing Team will host a book study of An Indigenous People’s History of the United States for Young People by Debbie Reese and Jean Mendoza, based on the original edition by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz; and the Health Congregations Team will host a book study of Set Boundaries, Find Peace by Nedra Tawwab. I’m looking forward to both of these reads, and I know these books have important things to teach me and us all. And, because we’re the people of ALL THE BOOKS, I wonder if there’s room for a speculative fiction book group at Saltwater too? I want and need to learn the truth about our country’s history, I want and need to practice healthy boundaries to improve my relationships…and I want and need to exercise my imagination, too. If the idea of reading speculative fiction together through a UU lens appeals to you, please email me at minister.swuuc@gmail.com and let’s see if we can find enough time and interest to read even more books in community.

In Faith,
Rev. Alison

I want to thank the folks who joined me on December 17^th in person and on January 3^rd online for our Adult Faith Formation program exploring the history of Article II of the Unitarian Universalist Association bylaws, and reflecting on the words that our community would want to see included in a description of Unitarian Universalism. We had so many good words, I’m having trouble finding a word-cloud program that can hold them all! This is the best I’ve made so far (remember, bigger words came up more often), with this visual only missing the word “creativity:”

The handout from our sessions can be found HERE, and it includes: our Saltwater Church Covenant of Right Relations (which provides a framework for all our interactions together as a community here at our church); the text of Article II, the Purposes section of the UUA Bylaws, as passed in 1961 and 1985 (with amendments passed in 1995 and 2018); proposed revisions to Article II from 2009 that were not adopted by vote of the General Assembly; the text of the proposed 8^th Principle which has been passed by 200+ congregations but not by the UUA as a whole; and the current proposed revision to Article II which will be voted on by delegates to UU General Assembly in June of this year.

At Saltwater Church, we expect our GA delegates to vote their conscience on the issues before them at GA, including the Article II proposal, but we also ask that folks serving as delegates do the work both before and during General Assembly to keep themselves informed on the issues they will participate in deciding. Keep watching the newsletter for more information on how to become a delegate from Saltwater Church to the 2024 GA.

In the meantime, the amendment process to the Article II proposal is underway as outlined on the UUA website:

“The Article II proposal is subject to amendment in 2024 only by a three-fourths vote in favor of an amendment submitted to the General Assembly in writing by the Board of Trustees or a minimum of fifteen (15) certified congregations by action of their governing boards or their congregations; such proposed amendments must be received by the Board of Trustees by February 1, 2024.

Final approval of the Article II proposal requires a two-thirds (2/3) vote of the 2024 General Assembly to adopted the revision as the new Article II of the UUA bylaws. If either 2023 or 2024 General Assembly votes fails, the process ends and a similar proposal cannot be considered for two years.”

An article in last month’s UU World magazine shares: “The Board [of the UUA] is now receiving amendments to the version submitted by the Commission, and it has created an online process to make it easier to propose and endorse amendments. Any proposed amendment needs fifteen certified congregations to formally endorse it, and this process ends on February 1, 2024.” There’s an area on the UUA Discussion Boards where proposed amendments are being discussed, as well as two Facebook groups having these conversations, HERE and HERE.

Rev. Cheryl Walker, a member of the Article II Study Commission who helped draft the current proposal, says in the UU World article mentioned above, “We are hearing so many congregations are engaging the question we posed in this, which is: ‘What does it mean to be a Unitarian Universalist?’ That conversation is happening in ways that I’ve never, ever seen us engage before.” In some ways, engaging with this question is the whole point of the review of Article II that is required by the UUA bylaws every 15 years, and that’s what our last Adult Faith Formation offerings have been all about. Again, I’m grateful for all those who joined me, in person and online, to explore that question together.

In Faith,
Rev. Alison

The Gift of Liberating Love: SoulMatters Monthly Theme for January 2024

Liberating love is our heritage as Unitarian Universalists, and practicing that love is part of our mission here at Saltwater Church. Our Universalist ancestors in the Christian tradition believed that God was too loving and just to condemn any human soul to eternal damnation; this meant that the salvation promised through Jesus’ resurrection was for everyone, not just those who believed in Jesus, not just those who had repented for their sins. As our living tradition has grown and changed over time, our Universalism has become less grounded in Christianity, but no less grounded in liberating love. Liberating love inspires our affirmation of the inherent worth and dignity of every person, and leads us to declare that every person has the right to flourish. Liberating love inspires us to open our arms to include all comers who share our values, affirm our principles, and wish to dwell in covenant with us, regardless of their backgrounds or particular spiritual beliefs.

The social justice arm of the Unitarian Universalist Association is called “Side with Love,” because that is how we understand our social justice advocacy work: we choose the side of greater love. In the US, most of our society is structured around profit. Making profit for our employers is typically the goal of our jobs, and making enough money so our families can survive and thrive is the goal of being employed. Can you imagine how different society would be if every organization shared Saltwater’s mission of practicing love, and asked as every decision was made, “Does this decision have love at the center?” It is hard for me to even imagine this, which is part of why it’s so important to try.

Each year, Side with Love offers 30 Days of Love between Martin Luther King, Jr. Day on January 15^th and Valentine’s Day on February 14^th. I encourage you to check out their offerings as a way to deepen your connection to both the liberating love at the center of our faith, the ways that love inspires us to act for justice, and the greater community of Unitarian Universalists around the country and the world. At Saltwater Church during the month of January, we’ll be focusing on how liberating love is a part of the history and present of our UU tradition, as well as how we can practice liberating love more effectively right here at home. This month for Faith Formation Sunday, we’ll be exploring how to make neurodivergent people in our community feel more at welcome at Saltwater Church. I encourage you to attend our Neurodivergence in Congregational Life video screening online or in-person on January 17^th from 6-7pm, and join us for a panel discussion with neurodivergent folks who are part of our community on Faith Formation Sunday, January 21^st, after worship and our community meal.

In Community,
Rev. Alison

It’s already been a week since we gathered together to celebrate the Winter Solstice at Saltwater UU Church. I brought the last of the pumpkins from my garden to make into pie for the celebration. In the spring, when I planted the seeds that became those pumpkins, I couldn’t have guessed that I’d be sharing them with you. Though I was dreaming of what my ministry had in store for me, I hadn’t yet been granted ministerial fellowship by the Unitarian Universalist Association or been ordained. As those seeds grew into vines, flowers, and fruit, I grew into your minister. Observing the changing seasons helps me also honor the growth and change that I experience as the Wheel of the Year turns.

Because of the miracle of modern technology, some of our Saltwater community celebrated the Summer Solstice last week. As the northern hemisphere tilts away from the sun in winter, the southern hemisphere leans in for its summer. Our commitment to making the ministry of Saltwater accessible remotely means that we have members and friends all over the world. Would we have guessed four years ago that this was our community’s future? We don’t always weave our remote community seamlessly into our in-person gatherings, but we are committed to continuing to lean into the potential of technology to connect us beyond geography.

For those who participate in the life of our community from a distance, I wanted to offer you an opportunity to experience some of our Winter Solstice ritual even if you weren’t able to be there in person. One piece of our celebration was walking the spiral of darkness and light: With an unlit candle, we entered a spiral made of evergreen boughs. As we journeyed through the shortening days of fall, so we journeyed to the center of the spiral in darkness. But at the center, a flaming chalice waited, symbolizing the Winter Solstice where, on the longest night, the light is reborn as the days begin to lengthen. After lighting our candles from the flaming chalice, we then journeyed out of the spiral, carrying the flame that will become the light of spring and summer out from the darkest night. By embodying this journey, we are reminded that we are partners in creation. We participate in turning the wheel of the year, changing ourselves as the seasons change. I invite you to walk the spiral with me by playing the video below.

I invite you to imagine what will wax with the daylight as we journey from winter to spring, and what will wane with the darkness, in your life and in the life of our community. Our informational congregational meeting on Sunday offers us all — online or in-person — an opportunity to reflect on what this congregation has accomplished this year, and look ahead to what we are excited to create together in the year ahead. I hope to see you there, whether you’re joining on Zoom as I will be, or in-person in the sanctuary. And just as the spiral of light and darkness is only a powerful embodiment of the changing seasons if we take the journey into and out of the spiral, so our congregation will only create the future we dream about if we commit to journeying together, to working together, to co-create this beloved community.

I’m grateful to everyone who helped make our Winter Solstice ritual happen — Serena for suggesting it and leading our indoor ritual, Mayda for leading us in song and dance, Bubba for putting all the pieces into place to allow it all to unfold, and everyone who came and participated. May we continue the spiral dance of our lives together as the wheel turns and we change with the seasons.

In Community,
Rev. Alison

Can you imagined having to write down the key elements of our Unitarian Universalist faith in a way that all UUs could agree on? That’s exactly what the Unitarian Universalist Association’s Article II Study Commission has been working on for the past two years. And even though they’ve had all that time, and a team to work together, and the benefit of all sorts of feedback from UUs all over the country and the world, it still seems like an enormous task. Is it even possible?

The UUA is the association of Unitarian Universalist congregations; just like Saltwater UU Church has members who are individual people, the UUA has members that are UU congregations, including ours. And just like our church, the UUA is a non-profit organization that is required to have bylaws describing what the organization is and how it is run. And Article II of almost all non-profit bylaws is the statement of purpose, that answers the question, “Why does this organization exist?” Since it came into being in 1961, Article II of the UUA Bylaws has included not only the purpose of the UUA, but also our guiding principles, the key elements of Unitarian Universalism Those 1961 principles got a big overhaul in 1985, and right now the UUA is considering another big revision undertaken by the Article II study commission. Their proposed revision of Article II was amended by a vote of delegates representing member congregations at the UU General Assembly this past June. A final version of the proposal including those amendments was released in early November, and it will be up for a final vote at the 2024 General Assembly.

So this past Faith Formation Sunday, our adult group spent some time learning the history of Article II and trying our own hands at summing up the key elements of Unitarian Universalism. We broke up into groups and went around several times giving short one or two word answers to the question, “What words would you have to use if you were describing Unitarian Universalism?” This exercise can help us better understand our own faith as individuals and as a community, and it can give us some perspective on the challenging task that the Article II Study Commission had before them, summing up all these diverse ideas about who and what we are into one statement.

My favorite thing about our time together on Faith Formation Sunday was getting to hear those key words and phrases that the gathered Saltys used to describe our faith. Each group had a recorder who generously shared the recorded words with me, and I used them to create the following image. The more frequently a word came up, the bigger it appears in the word cloud below:

What I love about our word cloud is that it’s clear that we understand that being together in community is one of the most important things that we do, and that our community is liberal, inclusive, justice-seeking, caring and loving. Yes! Whatever the General Assembly voters decide about Article II in June, Saltwater Church will continue to live into the vision of Unitarian Universalism we hold together.

If you weren’t able to participate on Sunday, you have another chance! There will be a repeat of Sunday’s adult Faith Formation program offered on the evening of January 3rd over Zoom, so you can join in from home. I’m excited to see what our second round will add to the collective understanding of our UU faith represented by this word cloud. Keep an eye on our newsletter and list serve to find the January 3rd Zoom link for the repeat program. If you weren’t able to join us last Sunday, I hope to see you there.

In Community,
Rev. Alison

As a little girl growing up in the church now known as Community of Christ, Christmas felt like the peak religious experience of the year to me. I got two whole weeks off school that were filled with choir practice, Christmas tree farm, decorations, cookie baking, special music services and pageants at church, electric lights and candles, angels, stars, the baby Jesus, story books that we only brought out once a year, tree lighting and caroling in downtown Portland. When harmful anti-gay rhetoric couched in Christian theology broke my faith, celebrating Christmas felt false. It was a ritual that no longer held meaning for me, and it felt disrespectful to my own beliefs and to Christianity for me to continue go through the motions of the Christmas celebration.

My partner, however, was raised without religious faith. As a little boy, though he might go to church with his grandparents on Christmas, to him it was more about the decorations, good food, being together with family, and (of course) the presents. It wasn’t a religious practice or a statement of belief. When we began living together, he wanted to put up a tree, to exchange gifts, to do Christmas, and he didn’t quite understand why I was uncomfortable. Eventually, we started putting up a tree, which I reconciled as a pagan holdover anyway, and we went for it with the presents once we became parents.

I’m at a different place with Christmas these days. When family separations at the US/Mexico border were ripping asylum-seeking parents and children apart, my activism around immigrant and refugee issues helped me to see the Christmas story from a new perspective. In one biblical story, Jesus, Mary and Joseph flee their country soon after Jesus’ birth because the king is after baby Jesus and wants to kill him. That year, my little daughter wanted to go up to be the angels in the the no-rehearsal Christmas pageant at our UU church. So we went. As I stood with my child in my arms, sheltering the holy family in our home-made halos and angel wings, I realized that baby Jesus is that refugee child I was trying to protect with my activism, whose family has all the odds stacked against them, even the power of the state. Baby Jesus is the “least of these” that grown-up Jesus tells his people to care for. I don’t have to believe that Jesus is God, nor do I have to accept any particular Christian theology, to be inspired by stories of the birth of a baby who defied the odds and grew up to share a message of love and care with the world.

Unitarianism and Universalism both began as Christian traditions and we have many Christian UUs in our congregations and throughout our association. So yes, we celebrate Christmas. But we also acknowledge the many other holidays and holydays around this time of year, as the Worship Team did so beautifully in last Sunday’s service. We also recognize that folks in our congregations may be in many different place on their journey with Christmas, just as I have been at different points in my own life, and we offer spaces to express the mixed feelings that this season brings up for so many of us, and the grief we often feel at the holidays for those beloveds who are no longer with us in life. There are many ways to participate in this magical and complicated time of year at Saltwater Church:

Blue Christmas Online Vespers Service: December 15, 7pm, on Zoom

This is our opportunity to make space for any difficult feelings that come along with the Christmas holiday, or that we are feeling at Christmastime this year. We’ll sing songs, name our griefs, and seek causes for hope in the midst of our sadnesses.

The Very Best Time of Year: December 17, 10:30am, Saltwater Church Sanctuary

Come celebrate the season and explore the meaning of Christmas in our Unitarian Universalist faith. Hear the Saltwater Choir share the music of John Rutter and enjoy a feast of traditional Christmas carols at our December Music Service.

Solstice Celebration: December 21, 5-6:30pm, Saltwater Church Welcome Room

During this multigenerational, family-friendly celebration, we’ll connect over snacks and songs, and we’ll walk the spiral of light and darkness, symbolizing the return of lengthening days after the longest night.

Christmas Eve Eve Candlelight Service: December 23, 7pm, Saltwater Church Sanctuary

We’ll gather on a dark winter night to tell stories, sing carols, and light candles honoring the promise of peace and love that was born with one little baby over two thousand years ago. To accommodate the regular Sunday evening worship service of the Haitian Christian United community with whom we share our space, our candlelight service will be held on Saturday December 23rd.

I’ll be participating in all these ways of honoring this time of year, and I hope to see you there at the offerings that speak to you.

The Gift of Mystery ~ SoulMatters Monthly Theme for December 2023

Once when I was a girl, my father (an avid amateur astronomer who had been captivated by the space shuttle missions as a youth) said to me something along the lines of, “We have to go to space, Alison. We’ve learned all there is to learn down here.” Something about that didn’t seem quite right to me, and as I’ve grown and continued to learn throughout my life, I can confidently say that my dad was wrong on this one. Whether we’re talking about the sub-atomic particles that make up all matter, the intricate workings of our bodies, life under the depths of the ocean, or even whether or not it will rain this afternoon, life on earth is filled with mysteries that we have yet to even discover, let alone understand. Have you heard that a whole body system previously unknown to biomedical science was discovered in the last ten years? What about those “extinct” animals that keep turning up alive in the forests and oceans? We’re even discovering mysteries hidden in what we thought we already knew. Our ability to extract DNA from bone reveals that many ancient hunters buried with weapons and other signs of prestige had XX chromosomes rather than XY as the scientific establishment had expected, turning anthropological discourse about gender norms on its head. Mystery is all around us, even in the places where we think we have certainty. Unitarian Universalism affirms that our own experience of mystery is a primary source for our religious understanding. So this month, as we explore the gift of mystery, I want to encourage us to hold what we think we know lightly, and leave space to encounter the mystery all around us.

In Faith,
Rev. Alison

My time in Des Moines this month unfolded as a powerful lesson in the pluralism that is a core value of Unitarian Universalism.

On Tuesday, I headed over to the Federal Way Community Caregiving Network board meeting at the urging of Betty, a member of Saltwater Church who is on the FWCCN board. We met in the basement of Good Shepherd Lutheran Church, which partners with St. Vincent du Paul Catholic Church to offer one of the two monthly meals for neighbors in need that FWCCN provides. The other meal is offered by Christian Faith Center. Did you hear the one about the UU, the Catholic, the protestant, and the evangelical who all walked in to a room? They all fed the hungry together. In the history of Christianity, such meetings have been fraught. Factions with different flavors of Christian belief fought deadly wars over theology for many of the last two millennia, but in the 21^st century, with all our different ideas about who Jesus was and what his life meant, the leaders of FWCCN can still come together to follow Jesus’ example and provide hungry people with food, serving it at community meals and growing it in community gardens. I’m proud to partner with these folks from different traditions in this important work.

Then on Thursday, I had the opportunity to gather with Saltwater Church’s Covenant of UU Pagans (CUUPS) group to bless, purify and ritually protect our buildings and the energy they contain. After a series of challenges with broken windows, malfunctioning technology, and even accessing basic utilities, Saltwater Church’s office staff decided we needed to put some intention into the well being of our community’s physical home. GG, also a member of our congregation’s board, wrote our our ritual, revising the classic pagan chant The earth, the air, the fire, the water, return, return, return, return into our ritual words:

Sadness, Danger, Stressful Days – Away, Away, Away
Safety, Clarity, Joyful Days – Return, Return, Return

We circled our buildings, ringing bells, burning herbs, and sweeping all negativity away with brooms as we sang. The love of our church home was palpable, and while I know not everyone in our community might understand or agree, I feel the intention of our ritual actions enduring as a protective bubble surrounding the buildings and grounds of Saltwater Unitarian Universalist Church. So mote it be.

On Saturday I had the pleasure of attending morning shabbat service with Rabbi Jim and the Bet Chaverim congregation, with whom we have shared our sanctuary for over twenty years. Also in attendance was Rev. Dr. Carl Livingston of Kingdom Christian Center in Tacoma, who is part of a coalition of Black pastors and Rabbis with Rabbi Jim. Pastor Carl and I were both invited to share our wisdom with the congregation during the service and in the community discussion of the Torah portion read that day after the service was over. I shared with the community my first multi-religious experience, attending and being deeply moved by High Holy Days services with my friend Emily’s family as a child. It was Emily, my friend of thirty-seven years, who placed the ordination stole around my neck for the first time at my ordination service in June (pictured below). As I said to the good people of Bet Chaverim, I’m looking forward to deepening my engagement with Judaism along side them as the minister here at Saltwater UU Church.

Then on Sunday, I got to experience the wise, funny, and deeply centered presence of Abbot Koshin Cain of the Puget Sound Zen Center, and share in the wisdom of our community members who practice there. Though I spent morning worship time with the youth making rice crispy treats, I still had the opportunity to connect with the Abbot as part of the panel on meditation that was the focus of Faith Formation Sunday for the adults. Many of us came away from the panel with new understandings of meditation, the ways we might have already been doing it without realizing, and how we can turn the things that make it hard for us to meditate into a deepening of our meditation practice. Since our day was so full, we didn’t get the chance to practice meditation together, but stay tuned for a chance to try out a metta meditation with me in a video I’ll be posting soon.

During my eight days in Des Moines, I had a chance to live my Unitarian Universalist commitment to drawing from multiple sources by engaging with partners from four different religious traditions. We didn’t argue about what was true, we didn’t try to change each other’s beliefs, we came together because we recognize that we are all part of the interdependent web of existence that Unitarian Universalism affirms. I’m thankful this week that I get to be a part of the Saltwater UU Church community where living our faith in this way is not only possible, it’s just another week at church.

In Community,
Rev. Alison

***

The more-than-human world is so generous with its gifts – the smell of damp earth, tiny mushrooms that surprise me among the moss on the side of a tree, birdsong in the branches above, cool drops of rain on my skin. At Saltwater Church, we’re so blessed to be able to go outside and receive these gifts if we only pay attention. How wonderful then to give back to our more-than-human community, as we were able to do last Sunday as part of the ivy pull led by Jean. I learned so much from Jean: to roll the invasive ivy I’d pulled in to balls to prevent it from re-rooting itself into the ground; that the ivy will not only climb and kill the trees if we leave it be, but that it will also prevent other native plants and seedlings from growing as it carpets the ground and smothers new growth; that a Western red cedar sapling must be planted in a spot that will stay moist and not too hot. It was a perfect Pacific Northwest fall afternoon, not too cold, but with a light rain to loosen the soil and make the ivy easy to pull. After clearing away the ivy, we planted two red cedar saplings, which (at Jean’s urging) we named: Austin and Alma (pictured below with human friends). If we named all the trees we know, would it change our relationship with the forests?

Receiving from the more than human world is, as they say, as easy as falling off a log. But do we remember to give back? Sometimes it can feel like we are too small to matter, like our efforts alone won’t make much difference. There is still ivy in our woods, and even if every one of us went out to pull ivy every Sunday after church, there probably still would be at least some. But for Alma and Austin, and the grown up trees whose trunks are no longer choked with invasive ivy, what we did last Sunday mattered, and what those trees bring to the larger community of the woods will reshape that community for the better. Even as we are aware of our tininess compared to towering trees, ocean, Earth and beyond, the hill of balled up ivy we left to compost is proof that our work made a difference. We can give back to the more-than-human world. I’m reminded of the words of our religious ancestor, 19^th century Unitarian Rev. Edward Everett Hale:

I cannot do everything,
But still I can do something;
And because I cannot do everything,
I will not refuse to do the something that I can do.

When I pull the ivy, I am doing the something that I can do. When we pull the ivy together, we are doing more than any one of us could alone. We are being good neighbors to the community of trees, fungi, plants and animals that share our home. We area giving back to the world that gives so generously to us each day.

In Faith,

Rev. Alison

***

Beloved Saltwater Church Community,

I’m looking forward to sharing my first Sunday morning message with you this weekend on November 12, the first day of my monthly visit to Des Moines, which runs through the November 19 (and I still have in-person meetings available, sign up HERE). I hope you’ll come to Sunday’s From You I Receive, To You I Give: The Generosity of Beloved Community service (whether in person or via Zoom) prepared to give and receive gifts, both spiritual and tangible. One gift that I hope to both give and receive on Sunday morning is the gift of covenant.

20^th century Unitarian Universalist theologian Rev. Dr. James Luther Adams, whose birthday is this Sunday, wrote in From Cage to Covenant, “Human beings, individually and collectively, become human by making commitments, by making promises. The human being as such, as Martin Buber says, is the promise-making, promise-keeping, promisebreaking, promise-renewing creature.” Covenants are the mutual promises we make to each other about how we will be together in this human community, and these promises that we give and receive are more important to us as Unitarian Universalists than the particulars of our individual beliefs about the nature of Divinity or what happens after we die. And, because our faith is free, we each get to choose if we want to make those promises or not.

I’m writing today to offer you the words of the covenant I’ll ask you to share with me on Sunday, so that you can freely choose if you want to join in. One of the reasons I am a Unitarian Universalist is because there is no expectation in this faith for me to speak words that don’t ring true to me, and the same is true for you. I’m grateful for Board President Aida and lay minister Debra, who helped me craft these promises that we will speak on Sunday, and that will shape our journey together this church year. These words borrow a phrase I learned from Rev. Dr. Cornell West at the first UU General Assembly I ever attended, words that have become central to the practice of my UU faith: “Justice is what love looks like in public.” You don’t need to memorize this covenant for Sunday, but I encourage you to read it over before the service, so you’ll be ready to give and receive these promises in Beloved Community, as you choose.

In Faith,

Rev. Alison

Covenant Between Saltwater Church and Rev. Alison, November, 2023

Rev. Alison:

As your minister, I have all this and more to give to our shared ministry:

Leadership grounded in our Unitarian Universalist faith, Saltwater’s mission, the priorities established by the board, and the creativity and inspiration that flow from the Spirit of Life.

Partnership with staff, lay leaders, community partners, members and friends of the congregation to co-create our vision of Saltwater Church’s vibrant present and resilient future, and to live them into being.

Accountability to our covenant of right relations, the contract I signed with your Board, the guidelines of the UU Minister’s Association, our UU principles and values, and my own conscience that is the voice of the Spirit of Life within.

And at the center of these is Love, Love for this community and the people in it, Love that is the Spirit of Life that flows through me, Love that leads me join you in your good work for justice, because justice is what Love looks like in public.

Congregation:

As the Saltwater Church community, we have all this and more to give to our shared ministry:

Sustenance in the form of time, talent and treasure devoted to the mission, work, and future of Saltwater Church.

Openness to learning new things, to trying new ways, to making new connections, and to our spiritual growth as individuals and as a congregation.

Accountability to our covenant of right relations, our UU principles and values, the commitments I’ve made to this community, and my own conscience.

And at the center of these is Love, Love for this community and the people in it, Love that is the Spirit of Life that flows through us all, Love that leads us as we work together for justice, because justice is what Love looks like in public.

ALL:

I give my gifts and receive yours. Together we join in this covenant in the spirit of Beloved Community.

***

Dear Saltwater Community,

I am so very honored to greet you today as your new Minister. I am Rev. Alison Cole Duren-Sutherland, Duren from my mother, Sutherland from my father, and Cole for the street in San Francisco that we lived on when I was born. My father loved the Puget Sound, and some of his ashes were returned to the earth of the apple orchard in Tukwila where he made his home for thirty years. I gave birth to my first child in Renton, and I learned midwifery at the Puget Sound Birth Center in Kirkland. This new ministry truly feels like a homecoming for me.

As I shared during worship this morning, I currently make my home in Southern Oregon, near the California border, on the traditional lands of the Cow Creek Umpqua, Takelma, Shasta and Tolowa Dee-ni’ peoples. Through June, I will travel once a month to Des Moines to preach twice in person, and I’ll be present on-site at Saltwater during the week in between. My first visit is coming up October 14th through 22nd (though I won’t begin preaching until November), so mark your calendars and look for information coming in the weeks ahead about how to connect with me when I’m there in person.

I also believe that there’s nothing “virtual” about online community. During the pandemic, I served a partnership of three Southern Oregon UU churches operating entirely remotely, and most of my seminary education through Starr King School for the Ministry was also completed online. These experiences were ones of deep relationship building and spiritual growth that were very real, though it took place largely in Zoom rooms and online forums. In the same way, I will be your minister when I am here in Southern Oregon just as much as when I’m there in Des Moines, always just a phone call or an email away.

My family includes my spouse and childhood friend Jamie, our two daughters Ramona (15) and Frances (8), plus Cat Ballou. This is part of why I will be remaining in Southern Oregon for now, as my children have already begun their school year. Jamie and I met at Irvington Elementary in Portland, Oregon, where I grew up with my mother and maternal grandmother. I look forward to being able to visit family all along the I5 corridor and around the Puget Sound as I travel to be in-person with you. If you’d like to learn more about me, you’re welcome to visit my website (linked below), schedule a one-on-one meeting, and please keep your eye on your emails for future opportunities to connect.

Thank you for helping me find my place in the story of Saltwater Church.

In Faith,

Rev. Alison