ISSUE 84

JUNE 2023

Goodbye to May! Most of my conversations this past month reflected the exhaustion among us. Parents overwhelmed by the multitude of extras in May. Gardeners who were working with and around the plentiful rain to get their planting in. Grandparents traveling to attend graduations. May is a month of transition. As a whole, we are weary from marking the thresholds and preparing for the next season. We are ready for a new month.

In June, we engage the path of delight. While that speaks to the revelry of summer, it also may seem like a tall task. Delight? Any of us might wonder, knowing how effortful it is to simply get through a day. It might seem frivolous or silly. Hardly worthy of a month’s exploration.

Yet, delight has come to be a part of a budding practice for me. I wonder if it might be for others.

Delight requires attention and celebration. It is both noting a moment with particularity and grasping its joy. It is worthy and weighty enough to balance the worries of our days. To embrace delight is to retrain our gaze to something more than the terrors and troubles that clamor atop our news feeds.

Ross Gay is writer and professor at the University of Indiana. In 2019, he published a book called “The Book of Delights.” Here is a brief excerpt:

So I settled into a coffee shop, took my notebooks out. And I was reading over these delights, transcribing them into my computer. And while I was working, headphones on, swaying to the new De La Soul record - delight which deserves its own entry - I noticed a white girl. She looked 15 but could have been, I suppose, a college student, standing next to me with her hand raised. I looked up, confused, pulled my headphones back. And she said, like a coach or something, working on your paper? Good job to you - high-five.

You better believe I high-fived that child in her pre-ripped Def Leppard shirt and her itty-bitty Doc Martens, for I love - I delight in - unequivocally pleasant public physical interactions with strangers. What constitutes pleasant, it's no secret, is informed by my largish, male and cisgender body, a body that is also largish, male, cisgender and not white. In other words, the pleasant, the delightful, are not universal. We should all understand this by now.

What would it be, I wonder, if we gave as much attention to these random moments that surprise and delight us, as the aggravations we all too willingly recount to our friends, family and co-workers? What would happen to us if we celebrated the moments that tickle us with surprise and hope?

I would love to find out. Wouldn’t you?

May - The Path of Creativity

The poet, Ross Gay, challenged himself to write daily for a year about the delight he encountered. The result is his best-selling book, The Book of Delights. You can hear Gay interviewed about the book and his experience of writing it or listen to him read from the book. And if you want more, there’s a great essay inspired by the book.

So… if Ross Gay can find and write about a delight every day for a year, we certainly can do it for a week! So, give it a try! (And, of course, part of this exercise is figuring out why exactly you - and your deepest self - wants, and maybe even needs, to give it a try!)

I like to think of the word “delight” as the whipped cream on top of the strawberry shortcake. The strawberries and cake alone would be delicious but the whipped cream adds that special something that makes me smile with my eyebrows. Unlike joy, which I tend to feel in the middle part of my body, delight is definitely located in my forehead. When I think of something being “delightful” I feel levity and space and surprise.

I love that children are so easily able to express delight. The sighting of a bunny, the first snowflake, the story of the lost tooth, each of these evoke that wonderful, light and free feeling of delight. I remember when I was in third grade, a student startled the whole class by exclaiming, “It’s snowing!” My teacher, rather than embracing this spontaneous moment of delight, reprimanded the student for yelling out of turn. I remember the feeling in our classroom at that moment - we all felt stepped on and squashed and we definitely received the message that there was no room for delight in our classroom. I have held that memory close for these many years and I always try to embrace the way that children so naturally experience and express their delight, even when it shows up at a less than ideal time. I hope that this month you will take the opportunity to experience delight! May your strawberry shortcake be covered with extra whipped cream!

In other news…

May marked the official end of our “church year.” Thank you to all of the Faith Exploration (FE) teachers who brought so much care and love to our children and youth! I also want to thank the parents who brought their kids to church. I know it is no easy task to get kids out the door!! I hope congregants of all ages will come to church on Sunday, June 4, where we will be celebrating our teachers and recognizing the transition of our kids as they move from one grade to the next. We will have a special recognition for our COA and High School seniors. This is a multi-generational, participatory service that I hope will feed every member of our congregation so please plan to be at church on June 4!

Looking ahead to summer, our programming will continue! Our 3-11 year olds will participate in lessons around Pride in June and in July and August we will host a fun Sunday camp on Sunday mornings. I invite our middle and high school youth to volunteer to help out in the FE classes over the summer. Volunteering gives our youth the chance to be in a leadership role and to help them share their UU values with the children in our church. This is a great way for our youth to get volunteer hours if they need them! Also we will have several activities planned for Middle and High School students to experience together over the summer. Look for a summer calendar soon!

Another important and very needed way to volunteer this summer is helping with Family Promise. Families are highly encouraged to volunteer together and the program needs your help! There are many ways to volunteer, from helping with set up and take down to making and sharing a meal with the families. Sign Up Link

I hope that your summer starts out delightfully!

Transitions

Lynnea Gwenyth Johns-McAliley was born to Emily Johns-O'Leary and Andy McAliley on May 13.

Jack Killough passed away May 14. Read his obituary here.

Dave Beato passed away May 21.

Board of Trustees May Meeting Summary

Making Room Update. The vote occurring now through May 31 is to gauge the congregation’s interest regarding the potential swap/move to Lakewood. The board discussed the importance of anchoring our decision—to move or stay—in JUC's recently updated mission.

If fewer than 60% vote “yes” regarding pursuing the move, we will stay at our Golden campus. If 60% (or more) vote “yes,” the following will occur: we will investigate the financial considerations, we will conduct a capital campaign, and the BOT will make a recommendation to the congregation. Then, there will be a final vote regarding if the swap/move will occur or not.

Please visit the Making Room webpage for more information. Send questions about the potential move to makingroom@jeffersonunitarian.org.

Spring Congregational Vote Is LIVE - Vote NOW through May 31. Visit the vote webpage for all information.

Budget. The Board discussed the proposed budget, including staff salaries, for the 2023-2024 church year. Congregants will cast ballots on the proposed budget as part of the Spring Congregational vote. Voting ends May 31, 2023.

Family Promise Concerns. The Board talked about concerns regarding the Family Promise program. Staff plans to meet soon with the team’s leaders to determine how the church may offer more support.

The next Family Promise week is June 11-17. A 15-minute orientation will be held on June 4, at 10:15 am and 12:15 pm, in the Mills Building. Volunteer Sign Up Link

Creativity and Planned Giving

JUC, a spiritual place, is the result of a living creative force that began with those who came before us. It grows with our current engagement and we will pass it on to those who follow. May we create together, acting on what love is asking of us. One way to keep this creativity moving through the generations is to share our resources with JUC, as a part of our estate planning. Naming JUC as a beneficiary of your retirement plan, IRA, life insurance policy, bank or brokerage account, will, or living trust are great ways to include JUC in your estate plan. Contact our Planned Giving team: Bud & B.J. Meadows or Carol Wilsey

Introducing:

Katia Diamond-Sagias, Membership Coordinator

Katia came to Denver from Florida, where they worked in the publishing and book world for many years. They received their BA in Literature from New College of Florida, and are pursuing their Masters in Public Policy at the University of Denver. While they are new to the UU community, they are enamored by its mission and the shared values of its staff and congregation. They are so excited to be a part of an organization that values justice, equity, and inclusivity, and welcomes people just as they are. Katia's role mainly entails making church "sticky", increasing membership, interacting with and recruiting volunteers, and helping visitors and members explore ways to deepen their experience at JUC. Please reach out to them if you have any questions about programming, the path to membership, and volunteering (or if you just want to chat)!

Katia lives in Denver with their partner and various pets. They spend their free time learning modern Greek, cooking, cycling, reading, and enjoying the Colorado sunshine.

Delight… My first thoughts? What a strange word for Soul Matters to choose. I mean, it’s a serviceable enough word, sure, but… it’s one that doesn’t get used nearly as often as it used to, if my knowledge of 19th century literature is anything to go by!

These days? We speak of joy, certainly. Happiness, yes. Sometimes we even employ delight’s weightier, connotation-laden cousin, pleasure.

But delight? For me, the word evokes an unbridled, unqualified thrill - often over life’s smaller pleasures. Delight for me brings to mind a toddler’s discovery of her toes… or an adult’s childlike excitement at spotting the first spring flowers. A sudden lightness where moments before, there had only existed the mundane.

And is there spiritual value in being whimsical? In being light? Friends, I think you know there is. And the thing about this knowing is that it isn’t the type that we as Unitarian Universalists often rely on - the head knowing. Rather, we know that delight has spiritual value because of the way it transforms us - the way we can have the weight of the world on our shoulders one moment, and then feel that weight melt away as we track the erratic fluttering of butterfly wings, or create a new dish we’ve never tried before or sing along with the radio with friends.

Has a momentous event occurred? Not by most people’s standards. And yet, we find afterwards that our outlook can be totally transformed. Those few minutes singing an unqualifiedly silly song with your preschooler on the way to daycare has turned the day’s slog through metro traffic into a small celebration, and the weight of the day that had seemed to take permanent residence on our shoulders has disappeared - like magic.

And maybe that’s the point of this choice for this month: that delight as we often experience it isn’t quantifiable. It isn’t explicable. The spontaneous, innocent way we experience delight is just different from the way we experience deep joy. We cannot produce delight by ruminating on the theme, and we can’t explain its effect on us through deep, quantitative analysis.

Delight places us squarely in the moment. It doesn’t demand intellectual profundity. We become aware of it through deep, bone knowing. We know we’ve experienced it because we feel ourselves renewed.

I think sometimes I confuse a lack of depth - or maybe just a lack of analysis? - with a lack of value. Maybe you do, too. And so this month, I invite you to pay attention to those small moments of delight. See if you can spot them as they happen, and revel in them! Notice the lightness in your body and the change in your outlook. We don’t often get to plan when we will experience delight, but we can cultivate our willingness to give ourselves over to the moment, and to truly value the experience.

As we enter this Pride month, friends, I wish you many unexpected delights!

Delight at UUA General Assembly

Have you ever been to an event where hundreds or thousands of people were chanting the same thing? Football game? Protest parade? Rock concert?

At the annual gathering of Unitarian Universalists, known as General Assembly, thousands of Unitarian Universalists meet to govern the association, to advance ideas about where our denomination is headed, and to be in spaces to experience the delight of singing with one another. It is overwhelming to be in a crowd where everyone knows “The Fire of Commitment” or “Blue boat home,” and to feel the depth of emotion when all are singing together.

General Assembly (GA) had been a solely in-person event for decades, when in 2020 it became a completely virtual experience. The GA in 2021 was also exclusively virtual GA, but the Assembly reopened to a both in-person and virtual experience based in Portland, OR in June 2022. This year, the UUA General Assembly is meeting in-person in Pittsburgh, and also virtually.

In January, the GA Planning Committee put out the call for congregations or groups to submit original worship services to be presented either in-person, or online. The in-person services would be streamed from the main GA stage, and the virtual services would be available on-demand. Jefferson Unitarian Church submitted the idea of sharing an adaptation of the church’s in-person worship from September 4, 2022, All things are connected, which employed music, poetry, and images to evoke a felt sense of the ways in which humans were related to the universe.

The GA Planning Committee accepted this worship service proposal, and this video service will be available to all GA attendees. Rev. Wendy and I re-crafted part of the service for an online format, and with the help of Steve and Chris Sealy, recorded the spoken portions of the service.

From the Opening Words: "We’re going to be exploring the question of who we are, where we belong in the universe. In this service there will be poetry, images, and music. We’ll encounter the great fathoms of distant galaxies, the migration of Monarch butterflies, and the summer wildflowers. In all of this, the invitation is to let go of expectation, to settle into the time together, and to be right here, right now. You are invited to listen, to sing along, to move your body, to lie down upon the earth, to draw,, to journal, however it might help you to be fully present.”

Many JUCers can be found in the service through the musical portions, which include:

"Be here now" by Ray LaMontagne, recorded in 2021 by Adam Revell, Laura Lizut, Paula Menten, and David Burrows
“Mariposa” from the Ruach Song Cycle, recorded live on May 20, 2022 at the Lakewood Church of the Nazarene, sung by the JUC Choir and One World Singers, plus orchestra
“All things are connected,” both sung as a virtual choir with Laura Lizut providing the musical accompaniment, and a recording of the in-person choir singing in the JUC Sanctuary on September 4, 2022.

In addition, the service features beautiful photos of Colorado wildflowers taken by JUC’s Rex Nelson.

For a moment of delight, perhaps wonder, and maybe the feeling of being uplifted, you are welcome to experience the service - whether or not you are attending General Assembly - by watching the service here . And may you know how you are related to the starry universe, to the migration of butterflies, and how your presence is intertwined with the Colorado wildflowers that will soon be bursting out of their wintry covers.

Noticing Delight

Brooke Maddaford, Trustee

As a busy, business-owning mom of a sweet and spunky third-grade boy, the end of every school year feels, well, chaotic. The hours required to wrap up work projects competes with approximately two thousand end-of-year celebrations, last-day-of-school preparations, final sports games, procuring of thank-you gifts for numerous teachers and coaches—and all the daily responsibilities of regular parenthood. Because of the crunch, I feel time passing more acutely every spring: I recognize that these special moments are fleeting and want to be fully present for them, but I also feel stretched uncomfortably thin and under pressure to get everything done. Balls are dangerously close to dropping amid this intentional memory making.

The path of delight feels like a mirage when we are juggling too much. Chasing pleasure or joy seems like yet another item on our “to do” list, and I struggle with the notion that doing so is a selfish, frivolous pursuit.

A mindfulness practice of noticing delight in our lives—where it occurs organically—offers a simple, quick way to experience this important emotion. Recently, I found satisfaction after pruning my beloved lavender bush. I felt joyful while refilling jars with clean water for my spider-plant babies, and seeing their new roots. As my husband, Kevin, brushed our dog Ruby with his hands, striving to rid her of her winter coat, I giggled in delight at how she happily let her tongue hang out of her mouth while wriggling on her back in our grass.

Although these were all tasks that needed to be done, by noticing the joy they brought I was able to revel in delight—and check something off my list. Efficiency? Now that is just delightful.

Housing at the State Legislature

The 2023 Colorado legislative session ended on May 8 after legislators considered a total of 617 bills over a 120-day period. Housing was promised to be one of the priorities this year, and several bills were introduced that addressed affordable housing and landlord-tenant topics.

What are the housing issues?

Colorado is experiencing a severe housing crisis partly because we have not built enough homes to keep pace with population and job growth. After the Great Recession, construction of new housing in Colorado fell by an annual average of 46% even as population growth accelerated by an annual average of 3%. As a result, we’re 175,000 homes short of a stable housing market.

But housing isn’t just a supply and demand problem, it’s also about where we build the housing and who can afford to live in the housing. The housing crisis hit low-income families the hardest, and the majority of low-income households are “housing-cost burdened” and have less to spend on other life necessities such as food, medicine, childcare, and transportation. The Colorado Coalition for the Homeless recently released a comprehensive report, “Colorado’s Affordable Housing Crisis: It’s Time for Strategic Investments.” In this report they state that: “Public investments and policy solutions for affordable housing must be proportional to communities’ needs, with specific focus on those with the greatest historical barriers to housing, the lowest incomes, and the greatest risk of homelessness.”

2023 Colorado Housing Legislation

Some affordable housing bills that passed include:

Encouraging affordable housing development on state-owned property through public-private partnerships (SB23-001)
Allowing local governments to match offers from for-profit developers to purchase certain multifamily housing to preserve as affordable housing (HB23-1190)
Extending and expanding property tax exemptions for nonprofit organizations that build and sell affordable housing (HB23-1184)
Preventing local governments from enacting and enforcing growth caps (HB23-1255)
Creating a task force to study the impacts of corporate ownership of housing and to make recommendations for mitigation of negative impacts (HB23-1253)

The high-profile Land Use Bill (SB23-213) failed to pass after legislators were unable to find a compromise between the Senate and House versions of the bill. This bill aimed to address Colorado’s housing and climate crises by creating housing needs assessments and planning at the state, regional, and local levels, and by incentivizing statewide smart growth policies that allow more housing options near transit, jobs, and other services. These policies help preserve our open spaces, disincentivize development in the wildfire urban interface (WUI), prevent sprawl, reduce traffic, and reduce greenhouse gas emissions from vehicles.

Several landlord-tenant bills were introduced in the 2023 legislative session. The principal issues behind these bills are that protections for tenants lead to greater housing stability, particularly for lowest income households. Affordable housing and housing stability are important ways to prevent homelessness.

Some bills that passed under the topic of landlord-tenant legislation include:

Allowing tenants and landlords to participate in eviction proceedings remotely (HB23-1186)
Allowing prospective tenants to reuse a credit report for up to 30 days without paying additional fees (HB23-1099)
Requiring mediation prior to an eviction being filed for lower-income tenants and those living with disabilities who receive public financial assistance (HB23-1120)
Limiting the minimum income requirement for a prospective tenant to 2 times the cost of the rent and capping security deposits at 2 times the monthly rent to reduce barriers to housing eligibility (SB23-184)
Setting caps on security deposits for pets at $300, limiting monthly pet rent to $35 or 1.5% of monthly rent, creating protections for pets during evictions, and prohibiting insurance companies from refusing to issue a policy or increasing a premium based on the breed or mixture of breed of a dog kept at the dwelling (HB23-1068)
Protecting renters from signing leases with hidden language that negate legal protections for excessive fees, legal rights, and housing instability (HB23-1095)
Creating habitability standards for rental units following environmental events such as a wildfire (HB23-1254)
Creating a water testing program for mobile home parks and establishing the Mobile Home Water Quality Grant Program to help park owners, nonprofits, and local governments address water quality and wastewater issues in mobile home parks (HB23-1257)

Two high-profile landlord-tenant bills did not pass, including a bill that would have repealed the state prohibition on local governments to enact rent control (HB23-1115) and another bill that would have defined when a landlord would have “just cause” for an eviction (HB23-1171).

If you have questions and/or would like to be added to the JUC CAN Action Alert list to receive occasional important alerts and updates about housing issues and legislation, please send an email to communityaction@jeffersonunitarian.org.