Photos of UUCWI's growing building

We were so pleased to have members of both the Woodinville UU Congregation and the Quimper UU Fellowship come over to help us with this exciting project. Thanks to our friends across the water!

The sign was designed and created by John, a member of the congregation, and handpainted by him and his wife Camille.



The painting is just about done, outside, and the white truck belongs to the guys who are painting the inside for us, professionally.

An "Unread Book" meme snitched from Earthbound Spirit

The bolded titles are books I have read. As I clicked my way down the list and thought about how some of these books changed or didn't change my thinking, I realized that it depends on what kind of openness we have to new ideas at the time we read the book.

I was fortunate to do much of my youthful reading in a very open environment (college) where I had been given permission to think about things I wasn't supposed to think about in my conservative, though loving, home. I was hungry for new perspectives and my reading gave me the opportunity to consider new ideas without feeling guilty that I would betray my parents.

I am surprised by the combination of books on this list. I'll have to go to the site where it came from and see if I can find out why these books appear on the list. I didn't mark any book I wasn't sure about, so I may have missed some. If I didn't remember it, it probably didn't do much to change my thinking, I guess!


Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi : a novel
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
The Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveler’s Wife
The Iliad
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations
American Gods
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
The Canterbury Tales
The Historian : a novel
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave New World
The Fountainhead
Foucault’s Pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible : a novel
1984
Angels & Demons
The Inferno (and Purgatory and Paradise)
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
Gulliver’s Travels
Les Misérables
The Corrections
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Dune
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury
Angela’s Ashes : a memoir
The God of Small Things
A People’s History of the United States : 1492-present
Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-five
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake : a novel
Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics : a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance : an inquiry into values
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit
In Cold Blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers

UPDATE: This meme came from LibraryThing and is a list of books most often clicked as "unread". Okay.

Grieving for Ted Kennedy

He isn't dead yet, he may well postpone the inevitable far beyond what the prognosticators and his enemies predict, and I admire the indomitable courage that propels men like him. But I am grieving for Ted Kennedy today.

He's a deeply flawed man who betrayed a wife and a companion by his misdeeds and lack of courage, when what he did mattered immensely and cost a young woman her life. There is no excusing that behavior nor glossing over it.

And yet, if reconciliation and redemption are truly the salvific events of life that we as religious people proclaim them to be, Ted Kennedy has done what he can to redeem himself and to make amends, however inadequate those amends might be for a loss of life. I suspect he has experienced the deep regret and shame of that loss of life ever since that fateful day. In fact, it may be the driving force behind his political career as a progressive Senator.

From that deeply flawed, party animal of a young man, emerged a lion of social justice. He continued to be flawed, yet his newfound courage gave him the impetus to stick his neck out for causes of equality, of justice, of safety and health. He saw that there was a higher power than "the Church" and he chose that higher power, though he did not leave his family faith.

He has been roundly condemned by those who disagree with his political and social views, yet nobody, I suspect, would wish this kind of challenge upon him. It's a shame that others who can't forget his youthful behavior do not see that all the rest of his life he has atoned for that youthful behavior by championing difficult and contentious causes, in order that others might have life and might have it more abundantly.

He was born into wealth and privilege; he used that wealth and privilege in bad ways and good. May he have the strength and courage that wealth and privilege do not provide but which come from within, and when he dies, may he have the peace of mind that comes from knowing that he chose a path of justice and compassion.

Reflections on the Creative Experience and Spirituality

The following is an "homilito" which wrapped up our service this afternoon, coming after three artists in the congregation had shared their experiences as a folk artist, a writer/poet, and a musician. This is my reflection on creativity and spirituality.

REFLECTIONS ON THE CREATIVE EXPERIENCE AND SPIRITUALITY
Rev. Kit Ketcham, May 18, 2008

I have never thought of myself as artistic. I’m one of those people who has always figured if I couldn’t draw a straight line, I wasn’t artistic. My sister and mother, now, they could draw pretty well. They were artistic. I wasn’t.

I did like to sing and play the piano but I was mostly a workhorse, able to do a decent job but not particularly talented, just adequate. Oh sure, once in awhile I’d get a chance to sing by myself, mostly because I knew all the words to the old folk songs, especially the raunchy ones, and sometimes people said I sounded pretty good.

But there were moments when something happened to me, in the music. Maybe it would be feeling myself caught up in the harmonies of the choir around me. Maybe it would be the experience of improvising harmonies as I sang.

Maybe it would be a particularly tuneful day for my vocal chords. Maybe it would be singing an old lullaby to my child. But it didn’t really mean anything, wasn’t very important.

Many years passed in this way and then came a time when I was asked to sing one of those folk songs I knew by heart at the memorial service of a friend. It’s a kind of philosophical, metaphorical song entitled “River” by Bill Staines and it sings about life as a river. The last verse is particularly poignant, with these words: “one day when the flowers are blooming still, one day when the grass is still green, my rolling waters will round the bend and flow into the open sea…”

I was pretty sure that I would have a hard time singing that verse, that my voice would break, that I would not be able to continue. My friend Alan’s life had rounded a bend and had flowed into the open sea, unexpectedly, mingling there with all the other lives gone before him, leaving behind the lives of his wife and two teenage sons.

I almost turned down the request, afraid I couldn’t do it properly. But Alan’s wife persisted, saying he had learned the song from me and she knew he would want me to sing it.

The day of the memorial service, I went to the church, spent a few minutes practicing with the guitarist who would accompany me, and then it was time to begin the service.

It came time for me to sing and I stood next to the guitarist, my stomach clenched with anxiety, wanting to do well but afraid I would falter. I made it through the first verses and choruses just fine and then the guitarist took his musical break before the final verse.

Just as I opened my mouth to sing those most difficult words, my heart pounding, I looked out into the congregation gathered there and saw another friend, Mary, looking back at me. She smiled at me, with tears in her eyes, and all of a sudden, I felt the song begin to sing itself.

It flowed out of me, in notes and phrasings I didn’t even recognize as mine. My voice was strong and clear and true. There was something happening that was beyond me, that was beyond my control, that was expressing my love for my friend Alan, that was receiving the love of my friend Mary, and pouring out all that sense of relationship and connection with them.

A new understanding of my connection to others through music was born that day and left me shaken and humbled by that experience.

Our service today has been about “The Arts” as a source of spiritual inspiration for Unitarian Universalists. But I’m not sure we’re just talking about “Art”, per se.

The Arts, whether visual, aural, vocal, written, kinesthetic, are expressions of human creativity, a life force so powerful that we have evidence of it going back into pre-history. It is a primeval force, ecstatic and uncontrollable, and it has driven human beings beyond the requirements of daily survival as long as human memory has existed.

Unitarian Universalist theologian, Henry Nelson Wieman, has posited that the creative force in the universe is another name for God, that this divine power exists in all of us and in all of creation.

I find that image very meaningful. As we’ve heard each of our speakers this afternoon, have listened to our choir, listened to the poems, sung the songs, looked at the visual arts displayed, I think I’ve seen and heard a common thread---that there is something that pours out of us at those moments when we are caught up in creating or experiencing beauty or meaning or relationship or growth. It’s something beyond normal daily life, something so thrilling and engaging that it surely is a part of our spiritual nature.

Of course, we say “the Arts” and yet we know in our hearts that creativity is expressed in many ways, not all of them beautiful and comforting, some of them quite disturbing, some even dangerous.

The creativity in human beings has brought us as a species to a place of high technology, of great beauty, and fearsome understanding of what we have done.

Today we have considered the creative experience and its relationship to spirituality. I find the creative experience to be so foundational to my spiritual nature that I have become attuned to it in other parts of my daily life, hearing it in conversations, tending the plants in my garden, in cooking a meal, even in figuring out how to jerry-rig functional mechanisms to keep my cats confined on the deck.

My colleague, the Rev. Rick Davis, minister of our congregation in Salem, Oregon, has proposed that we consider recognizing formally the importance of the Arts as a Source of our Unitarian Universalist faith. He suggests this wording: “The living tradition that we share draws from many sources (including) the Creative arts, which reveal to us the face of life’s beauty and joy, its enduring truth and meaning and which opens our hearts to feelings of awe and gratitude.” He goes on to say that art and spirituality are so intertwined that they cannot be separated.

Whether or not this ever happens, we know how important the creative arts are in our own lives. I’m grateful to our artists today for speaking to us, and for bringing the creations of their hands and hearts for us to experience.

Let’s pause for a time of silent reflection and prayer.

BENEDICTION: Our worship service, our time of shaping worth together, is ended, but our service to the world begins again as we leave this place. Let us go in peace, remembering that within each of us there is a burning spark of creativity, the spark of life that has brought forth great beauty in the world and gives us the ability to connect with each other and with the divine as we experience that creative spark in others. May we find beauty and inspiration in all of life’s ventures and may we offer our own creativity freely and lovingly. Amen, Shalom, Salaam, and Blessed Be.

Sunday Quiz

After you die... Heaven After death, you will exist in heaven. Everything and everyone you love will constantly surround you for all of eternity. You lucky scoundrel.

Take this quiz at QuizGalaxy.com

Thanks to James at Monkey Mind for this quiz.

I wish I had a before and after picture to show you!

Today, in addition to being Syttende Mai, Norway's Constitution Day, was the day we welcomed worker bee guests from the Port Townsend and Woodinville congregations to help us with a huge blitz of work all day on the new building.

Both these congregations had offered to send crews to help us with our building project and we decided that today was the best day to organize it. We'd stored up several major efforts that were perfect for a large work party to undertake. And, luckily, the clouds parted and we had a beautiful warm day as well.

Several weeks ago, when Woodinville and Port Townsend agreed to come on May 17, our building committee reacted with a little alarm. Would we have enough work for them to do? Who had thought this up?

So since I was the one who had thought this up, I suggested that I organize a picnic as a hospitality gesture to our guests, and then I started worrying about it. But it all turned out beautifully!

We had a simple picnic with hot dogs, chips, salad, and dessert, plus soda, water, a little beer. People brought mountains of cookies and other sweets, plus salads. I provided the grill and the hot dogs (did you know they make vegan hot dogs? and some people were grateful that they were provided), chips, and drinks, plus the condiments for hot dogs and the tableware.

And we had a total of about 30 people, if you count the few who just wandered through, had a hot dog and left. All the cookie leftovers will have a second showing at social hour after church tomorrow, as will the leftover chips.

It has been a truly marvelous day. We got so much done on the building----painting, particularly----and on the grounds, removing blackberry bushes (did you know how well a front-loader rips those babies right out of the ground?). Our new sign out front is beautiful and now fully visible from the road. The earthy color of the building, with its dark green metal roof and dark red trim, is perfectly suited for the locale. It is really looking fabulous.

I'll post pictures when I get some more. But right now I think I'll go take a hot bath!

Wiser? Time will tell.

Maxie came home late last night, hungry and a bit spooked, but uninjured. He's just lucky I was still up and about, having decided late to watch TV for a few minutes to unwind before bedtime. I'm normally in the sack by 9:30 or so because I'm up so early.

Sitting in front of the TV, I can look out at the dark deck but I can't see anything much, just reflections in the glass of the room behind me. But something moved in my field of vision and at first I figured it was one of the other cats, moving around in the dining room. Just to make sure, I turned around and scanned it---no Loosy or Lily was prowling around there. So I decided to get up and check outside, and there he was.

He seems happy to be home and yet I'll bet this happens again. I still don't know how he gets off the deck and back on again. If I figure it out, I may take steps to seal off the opening, but I don't want to take a chance on making it impossible for him to get back on the deck, if his choice of exitway is a flying leap from above.

I may just have to live with this tension and make the best of it.

One nice thing was that the FS called yesterday afternoon to offer condolences, after reading my post about the Missing Member of the Family. So I called him back to let him know that Max had returned.

Thanks to yesterday's commenters for their comfort and concern.

California Supremes for Marriage Equality

Hallelujah! Just Hallelujah! I am so glad this has happened. Congratulations to all the men and women who have been hoping and praying for this day to come.

It's 6 a.m. and he's not home yet.

Max jumped off the deck yesterday afternoon about 3:30 and never came back. The other two times he jumped, he was back within a couple of hours. This time, he's not.

We are all feeling the loss of his presence. As aggressive and feisty toward Loosy and Lily as he was, he was also just a kitten, a teenage kitten to be sure, but with vestiges of kittenhood still---the ability to fall limply into a pile of sleeping catfur, to curl up on my bosom while I lie in bed reading my book, to experience the wonder of the bunnies and deer that inhabit the yard. Always eager to go out outside on the deck, he would haunt the door yowling or, if I was here at the computer, he'd watch me hawklike and if I made a move to get up, he was galloping down the hall toward the deck door, always hopeful that I intended to let him out.

Last night when it was time to go to bed, after I put a bowl of food and water out on the deck, just in case he came back in the night, after I stole one of the several catbeds around the house to put out for him, just in case, I sat on my bed and cried.

He's not coming back, I'm sure of it. He has been gone too long. He's either lost or hit by a car or killed by a predator. Of course I'll check with my neighbors, but it's most likely that his sense of adventure got the best of him and he went too far to find his way back, was too exposed by his white fur and spotted by a coyote or a raptor. He's still light enough to be lifted by a large bird, even though he'd put up quite a fight.

I haven't completely given up hope, of course. I'll keep the bowl of food out for awhile. I'll check the roads and the neighbors. But I think Maxie is gone.

I'm not at the point of being able to see that it means less stress for the other cats or that my cat food and vet bills will diminish or that I can put out one less litter box, that I can quit worrying about cat pee on the bed. These were reasons that I almost turned him over to the animal shelter a few months ago. Now they just seem like stupid reasons for wanting to give him away.

He brought immense joy and love into my life, got the older cats moving faster, and was a source of amusement and entertainment, all his short life. It's hard to say goodbye.