All Posts

By Rev. Janet Onnie May 12, 2024 Among other events on the May calendar is Mother’s Day. This holiday is celebrated in the U.S. and in several other countries around the world today. This is a day when many of my colleagues flee their pulpits. To address the complexity of the individual experiences with their birth mother – or lack thereof – regardless of nationality -- is to guarantee push-back from almost everyone. It also ignores the men who have nurtured c

By Sandy Greene May 6, 2024 Wow, what a perfect topic for this pollen palooza spring! And for the flower communion. (Pollen and nectar are like the sacraments!) Wind Pollination is the oldest and most obvious. Oaks, hickories, grasses, willow, pines. The bulk of our entire ecosystem here in the Shenandoah Valley! So much pollen just taking a chance that it might land on the right kind of dangly flower racemes so that an acorn or hickory nut can develop. It has to be the

March 17, 2024 Presenters: April Moore, Barbara Moore, Lee Anna Farrall, Andrew Henry, Pete Rapp, Linda Dove With the coming of light after long winter darkness, it’s a good time for us to look forward to the turning of our seasons. With this service, if a little prematurely, we contemplate Spring Meeting Summer. Poetry is an ideal medium for us to contemplate the various responses of human beings to seasonal changes, especially for us in the Shenandoah Valley blessed with al

By Tom Hook March 3, 2024 One of the Article II Revision’s Shared Values is: Transformation . We adapt to the changing world. We covenant to collectively transform and grow spiritually and ethically. Openness to change is fundamental to our Unitarian and Universalist heritages, never complete and never perfect. (article II Revisions Shared Values) __________________________________________________________________ It doesn't matter how old we are. We all need stories

February 4, 2024 By Rev. Kirk Ballin READINGS FOR LOVE AND ONLY LOVE 1.” Soberingly, despite all our advances in technology and material resources, we are not much more advanced in the art of delivering emotionally healthy childhoods than generations before us. The number of breakdowns, inauthentic lives, and broken souls shows no marked signs of decline… We are failing to offer one another tolerable childhoods not because we are sinful or indifferent, but because we still ha