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 Growing up in the Christian tradition, I experienced the word blessing in two different ways. The first, "I am blessed," meaning that God was showing favor on me. The second was expressed as, "What a blessing!" used to describe something beneficial - an expression of gratitude for something that brings well-being. An exclamation of appreciation for something that isn't necessarily earned or deserved.
Years later, when I met my husband's Colombian family, I learned more about blessing in the form of bendicion. It was the most tender parent/child interaction I had ever witnessed and foreign territory for a heart that had grown up in an emotionally distant home.
It happened the first time we left my in-laws' presence. Before leaving, Fernando dropped down on one knee in front of his mother. She immediately kissed her own hand, and with that hand, she touched Fernando's forehead, lower chest, and both shoulders, saying, "En el Nombre del Padre, y del Hijo, y del Espíritu Santo. Amén." Then, she gently held his face and said, "Que Dios favorezca tu empresa," meaning, May God favor your company. I stood there with tears welling up in my eyes, unsure if I even believed in God, but confident, in the core of my being... I believed in this.
The concept of blessing may feel complicated for Unitarian Universalists. Its roots are embedded in religious infusions of holiness, spiritual redemption, and divine will and are not always applicable in our faith. Our aspirations are not of holiness but of wholeness. Our redemption is not based in original sin but in saving one another in this life. Divine will is not predestined - we find our way in our Unitarian Universalist principles, values, and theology that guides us. These are the blessings of our faith.
My invitation in July is to open our hearts and minds to connect with the blessings around us. -
Where do you experience blessings in your life?
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Where is life saying, Yes!, You got this!, Look over here at this!, Surprise!, This is for you!?
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How can you be a blessing to the people and world around you?
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How are you connecting to the blessings of our faith?
As we enter July, I reach out my own loving hand and tenderly offer you this blessing.
May you be blessed. May you be a blessing. May your life be full of tenderness like I saw in the loving touch from my mother-in-law's hands. May your company be favored. May you favor the company you keep. May you find wholeness. May you save. May you be saved over and over - every day. May your life be guided by our faith - Unitarian Universalism. May it be so.
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Board of Trustees Report
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The Board is saying goodbye to members Heather Hagemann and Pam Bond, and welcoming new members Craig Williamson and Chris Sealy for the new fiscal year beginning July 1.
The Board is discussing initial steps for revisiting the Making Room Project.
The results of the Spirit Map survey are being reviewed as we re-examine our ends and means in the coming year.
The Board met in a special session on Saturday, June 12 to discuss the COIC Report Widening the Circle. This document will be an important source of inspiration and guidance as we establish goals and make plans going forward.
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Play and Planned Giving
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Play comes naturally with babies and young children. Play is far from the first thing we think of when it comes to estate and end of life planning. Given a little thought, we may recall some situation where a little silliness, light-hearted bantering or genuine deep-down laughter has brought a sparkle to a suffering or grieving eye. Some of our most special memorial services may be ones that are sprinkled with joyful and humorous stories about the loved one's life.
So why not look for creative ways to bring a little spice and playfulness to estate planning? The Planned Giving Team would love to hear your thoughts on how to do this. You may email them to Carol Wilsey and we will share some of them in future issues of IGNITE.
Remembering JUC in your estate plan is always a way to add joyfulness to your life and the lives of current and future members of JUC. Contact JUC's planned giving coordinators: Bud & B.J. Meadows, Mike Kramer or Carol Wilsey
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Board of Trustees 2020-2021 Year in Review
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 Case Collard, Trustee
The pandemic loomed large over our Board work this past year. We conducted all our meetings virtually, including monthly meetings, our retreat, and our special session to discuss the inclusion and equity principles in the Widening the Circle report. The board looks forward to returning to in-person interaction next year, but also hopes to maintain some of the flexibility and convenience of remote meetings. The Board also checked in frequently with the JUC Safety Team to ensure the board, staff, and Safety Team were aligned on JUC's safety and re-opening plan.
The Board finalized updates to JUC's governance that modernized our congregation voting procedures. The congregation adopted these modernized procedures at the fall congregational meeting. This voting system will improve access to the ballot for JUC members and no longer require in-person attendance to vote. These changes align with our fifth principle: "The right of conscience and the use of the democratic process within our congregations and in society at large."
The Board also engaged with staff to develop the 2021-22 budget, which the board and congregation approved. The Board is thankful for the strong support of JUC members throughout the pandemic that has put JUC in a solid financial position.
The Board engaged in anti-racist work this year. In addition to reading and discussing Widening the Circle, the Board discussed and ultimately adopted two resolutions intended to lead JUC in more anti-racist direction, both will ultimately require a congregational vote. Both items will be discussed and implemented on a timeline to be determined by Rev. Wendy and staff.
First, the Board adopted a resolution recommending that JUC adopt the 8th Principal:
"We, the member congregations of the Unitarian Universalist Association, covenant to affirm and promote: journeying toward spiritual wholeness by working to build a diverse multicultural Beloved Community by our actions that accountably dismantle racism and other oppressions in ourselves and our institutions."
Second, the Board adopted a resolution recommending that JUC consider adopting a new name that no longer refers to Thomas Jefferson (who enslaved more than 600 people during his life) and adds Universalism (the foundation of our faith that affirms human goodness and inherent lovability). The name Jefferson Unitarian Church has served our congregation for decades, but this process gives JUC an opportunity to consider names that reflect our theology, geography, or a historical figure with whom we affirmatively wish to identify.
Finally, the Board monitored the Making Room process, which was largely dormant during the last year in light of the pandemic and our virtual status. However, the Board has discussed how and when Making Room will return and this will likely be a focus of the upcoming year.
The Board is excited to share the next church year with you all and we hope to be together in person again soon.
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Be a Blessing
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 David Fleck, Trustee
"Be a Blessing;" one of my favorite closings that frequents our services. Over the past 14 months our direct contact with humans has been so minimized we may have gotten out of practice in Being a Blessing to others. But as immunization rates rise and masks drop, let us leverage this opportunity to build the beloved community. A return to normal, while it sounds great, is perhaps a low bar. Why not return to better? Many business that previously could not fathom folks successfully working from home have found more agility than anticipated. Be it professional, social, or spiritual interaction, we can invest our attention and intention of our time grounded in being a blessing to each other. Be the listener that makes others feel heard. Look for opportunities to express gratitude and appreciation. Offer assistance as for some it is difficult to ask. Ask for assistance as it's an honor to be asked. A favorite I've gotten out of practice with; mail thank you letters for reasons beyond receiving a gift. To be accountable I've created a weekly reminder for this practice. Give it a try with me! I can't wait to see you all back in person soon!
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Co-Purchase Colorado - Justice Using Our $
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JUC has joined a purchasing collective along with 11 (so far) other faith communities. The goal of Co-Purchase Colorado (CPC) is to leverage congregational buying power for local economic impact. This is a project of the Center for Community Wealth Building (CCWB). This is just getting off the ground and we jumped on at the beginning. Here's how it works:
- CCWB finds businesses that are local, BIPOC, immigrant, women, LGTBQ, and veteran owned. Anyone can refer a business to them and CCWB will connect to see if they are a fit.
- CCWB evaluates the businesses' capacity and interest in working with faith communities as well as making sure that they are providing good working conditions, pay, and benefits to their employees.
- CCWB asks faith communities about their needs and the areas of spending where they are interested in using one of the vendors.
- CCWB manages the bid and contracting processes and makes sure that faith communities are getting what they need from vendors.
Congregants can use these businesses too! Check out the list here (and it is growing)! There are caterers, HVAC companies, food trucks and more. A new example is Accountable Hands. They can do yard projects, assemble furniture, help you move... You can trust them because CCWB has checked them out for you. Send me an email if you connect with one of these businesses so that CCWB will know! I'm pleased to be working with the CCWB team and I'll keep you informed as we support our local economy.
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In preparation for JUC's upcoming worship service on Sunday, July 11, which will be an airing of the 2019 recorded performance of Wendy's and my cantata Awakening to Blessing, this article is a bit of the history and background of how that work came to be.
Jefferson Unitarian Church is a member of the "Soul Matters Sharing Circle." In fall 2015, when thinking about a scheduled Choir Sunday in May 2016 on the Soul Matters theme of "Blessing," I had searched for but not located a multi-movement choral work with a particularly Unitarian Universalist approach to the topic of "Blessing." When I shared this with our Senior Minister, Wendy Williams, she suggested, "Why don't we write one ourselves?" After blinking a few times, and without further consideration, I agreed with her that this would be a good project for us to undertake, with Wendy writing the words and me crafting the music. I had previously composed anthems for the choir and I had written a 12-minute piece for a community choir and orchestra, but I had never set out to create a work of this scope, with six or seven movements, 40-45 minutes, for choir and orchestra.
To begin, we set the significant formal elements: length and number of individual formal movements. Wendy developed a framework of six movements that explored various aspects of the idea of "Blessing." The fourth movement included an interactive ritual element of worship: a "Blessing of the hands" in which congregants/audience members would approach water stations, where officiants would pour water on the hands and say "Blessed be the work of these hands."
The process of creating the music for this cantata was one of the most difficult and rewarding experiences I have undertaken in my music ministry. As a UU choir director I have been challenged to locate multi-movement, thematically unified, neither too-difficult nor too-easy music for choir and small orchestra whose duration could fit inside a Sunday morning worship service. In particular, I have been interested in finding such music that speaks in the language of my faith, with text that was not written in another religion's point of view. In other words, I was involved in this creation, writing exactly to my congregation's particular needs, with a hope that the work would be of sufficient caliber and interest to appeal to the needs and desires of other Unitarian Universalists who sought after similar works.
The cantata as musical form is hundreds of years old, with defining characteristics being: a religious text, a number of distinct musical movements, contrasting instrumental and vocal forces, and varying musical styles or tempi between movements. While aiming to create music that recognized these considerations, I was influenced by two successful contemporary models of the form: Christopher Tin's 12-movement song cycle, Calling all Dawns, and the explicitly Unitarian Universalist Sources cantata by Rev. Jason Shelton. In each case, each of the movements had its own character, quality, or musical style, and they both had overall unifying narratives.
In most of the movements for Awakening to Blessing, Wendy's text was written first, followed by my composing music to the given words. The blessing of the hands movement (#4) was first. Knowing that congregants would be moving about the space and that words would be spoken to them over a blessing station, I had musical goals of writing music that would have a beat that would facilitate movement, but that would begin at a volume level that would not overpower the individual blessings. I determined that a gospel style musical form that began at a moderate dynamic but built to a great crescendo at the end would help the flow that was being envisioned. In order to write in this style, I relied on a number of sources and teachers, including UUMN member Theodore (Ted) Johnson, Music Director and Organist at the Harvard Unitarian Universalist Church who had offered teachings on gospel harmony, voicing, progressions and chord substitutions with the encouragement to compose in the style. Ted also directed the class to the work of Debbie Hess Introduction to Black Gospel Piano. I relied on these materials extensively, as well as listening to a great deal of music in the style. The choir's gospel style was augmented by a soloist and led by a strong piano accompaniment, along with strings, bass, and drum set.
Next to be composed was movement #1, a movement entitled "Original Blessing" with a refrain "Called into this world, chosen for these days, we are blessed by this life." The text begins, "In the beginning the infinite silence..." and invited me to imagine a gentle inception of the music describing the inky blackness of space and points of stars. It was while I was exercising on an elliptical machine that one of the gentle melodic elements of the movement came to me. Mid-movement, there is an extended repetition of the word "dreaming" with the introduction of a children's choir. Regarding instruments and timbre, the piano element and color was important in this movement, with some repetitive elements echoing the film music piano style of Ola Gjeilo and some of the string and bell elements of the composer Alexandre Desplat.
After the expansiveness and introspection of the first movement, I knew that the second movement needed to be underscored by a strong beat. "Awaken to this day. Doorway to all yet to be. Your life is unfolding on the altar of now." The words "awaken" and "now" immediately jumped out to me when I read this text, and I began to hear treble voices beginning in unison and unfolding to a vibrating chord cluster. Those voices in my head would often prove useful during the process of composing, and in this case they led me to the initial melodic motive and the specific rhythm of "Awaken to this day." I struggled to notate the particular rhythm that I heard, for although it consisted of equal and event beats, the beat of the melody was one sixteenth note shorter than the metrical beat:
This motive was easy to hear in my head, maddeningly difficult to determine the most appropriate way to notate, and surprisingly not too bad to teach to the choir.
The various movements were not composed one after the other, instead there was a great deal of overlap between the writing. Early on, I thought about the mood and spirit that I hoped to bring to Wendy's uplifting and universal words for the final movement, "We were born in love to a circle that's one, each to each, all to all." Although the words to this movement were initially not fully written, there was enough of a beginning for me to get started with conceiving of the music. It was in this mindset that I experienced a concert by Kutandara Marimba Ensemble of Boulder, CO, an ensemble that played on Zimbabwean marimbas. The music was complex, polyrhythmic, with layers of joy and depth.
With the knowledge of the potential infectious joy layered with the perspective of Zimbabwean cosmology that links music, dance, and religion together as one, I approached the directors of Kutandara with the idea of engaging marimba players and an mbira player to play in the final movement. I began taking lessons on the Zimbabwean marimba (even bringing an instrument to my home) in order to understand the mindset and musical language. A number of conceptual elements were important in constructing the macro and micro framework of the movement. The language "a circle that's one" resonated with the Zimbabwean idea of completeness or wholeness, and employing three Zimbabwean instruments (two marimbas and one mbira) was symbolically seen to reflect that oneness. The movement is in three sections (the number three is a complete whole) in ABA form, with the A sections in C major and a forthright 4/4 meter, and the B section in A minor and a typical 12/8 Zimbabwean meter. As mentioned earlier, the text was not completely written when I began on the music for this movement. When the form was being developed and it became apparent that there would be this middle, minor, more tumultuous, rhythmically complex middle section, Wendy took the opportunity to take the text in a more nuanced direction for this different musical moment: "Somehow we forgot the truth of our birth. We have lost our way. We stand afraid and apart of the oneness from which we were born." I worked on the sixth movement throughout many months, sometimes simultaneously with other movements, wanting to get the mood and the scope just right to conclude the work.
For the third movement, Wendy had initially proposed using a short John O'Donohue text:
I would love to live
Like a river flows,
Carried by the surprise
Of its own unfolding.
When I reached out to the O'Donohue estate to request permission to set the text musically, I received this reply:
Dear Keith,
Thank you for reaching out regarding the possibilities of integrating John's poem, 'Fluent,' into your own musical composition. As you might imagine, we receive numerous requests from composers to use John's work and in particular, this poem. We are not granting permission to any composer at this time as John's family contemplates the best approach to consider. I am certain this will come as a disappointment and send our very best wishes for your continued success composing.
Kind regards,
Ann Cahill, Director
John O'Donohue Literary Estate
Inspired by the O'Donohue poem, Wendy crafted a brief and evocative line: "Awakened to love, being is becoming." And taking a cue from the "river...carried by the surprise of its own unfolding" line, I combined Wendy's text for the choir with a depiction of a watery stream that splashes down rocks, taking twists and turns, ultimately opening up into a broad river. Instrumentally, this movement features handbells for color and interest; the piano makes a few rhapsodic entries as well. Unlike other movements, this one includes spoken poetry and explication of the words sung by the choir.
The final movement written was #5, which would be second to last. The overall form of the cantata was turning out to be altering between more slow and reflective movements with faster, louder, and more active movements, which meant that #5 would be on the gentler side. Wendy and I spoke a lot about what the right mood would be or the right idea. I suggested that perhaps the movement could relate a story, which we hadn't had so far in the cantata. In one of our conversations, she began telling me about an evening during her Ministerial Chaplaincy at a hospital. There was a patient who was in the process of dying, and the family had called for a chaplain to come and be present. When Wendy walked into the room, the family had been surrounding the bedside, but observing her, they pulled back to make room for her to be at the bed. She noted their movement and paused, and reflected how she was unknown to their family, and said to them: "If there are words to be spoken, let your voice speak them."
As Wendy related this story to me, I became upright at these words, understanding that they would work exceptionally well in a choral setting. That sentence became the beginning of the poignant text of the movement:
If there are words to be spoken, let your voice speak them.
If there are hands to be touched, let your hands touch them.
If there is silence to be held, let your witness give it.
If there is hurt to be named, let your ears hear it.
If there are lonely ones, let your eyes meet them.
For where this movement was to be placed in the cantata, following a rousing gospel number and prior to the final joyous "We were born in love," I was interested in setting this text simply, with immediately understandable harmonic progressions and a straightforward, uncomplicated melody. The elements of slow tempo, solo violin, soprano solo, and rich choral sound helped to create this mood. Practically, I wanted to give the choir something that would be readable and learnable in a short time, since they had worked diligently and hard on more rhythmically and harmonically complex music in the cantata as we were learning it. It has ended up being one of the most moving parts of the entire cantata, with a strong match between text and music.
The learning of the cantata by the Jefferson Unitarian Church Choir happened over the spring of 2016, and was one of the most rewarding undertakings by our choir. There was such a sense of ownership and commitment by everyone. As I expressed to the choir, "We were all bringing it! Wendy was working to create relevant text, I was spending countless hours trying to get the music right, the choir would show up to Wednesday night rehearsal to receive a couple more pages of whatever movement was being worked on." The choir, bless them, was fully immersed in this process and supported the music as it was being handed to them. My preferred method of working with the choir is to be able to share with them a completed major work some months ahead of time, so that all can understand the scope of what will be needed to prepare the work for services. In this case, as they saying goes, we were "paving the road just before driving on it," and I thanked the Jefferson Unitarian Church Choir for being willing to go on the journey without knowing the exact destination. On the weekend when choir, orchestra, and clergy presented the cantata during three services, there was a great sense of pride and accomplishment from all.
The cantata has been performed a number of other times in UU communities: at the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Princeton, NJ; at Eliot Unitarian Chapel in Kirkwood, MO; at First Unitarian Society of Denver; and, as will be shared in JUC's July 11 service, by the combined choirs of the Front Range of Colorado. May the hearing of these texts and the music be received as a gift from all who gave voice to it on the day it was recorded in April 2019!
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Good News
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 Margie Robinson
Would you like to hear some good news? $187.2 million from the American Rescue Plan (ARP) is coming to Jefferson County over the next two years. Our JUC CAN team is asking you to write to your city and county leaders to ensure that funds from ARP are directed to housing needs, such as homelessness, supportive housing, housing vouchers, and emergency rental assistance to prevent a housing crisis from evictions and foreclosures. Click here for a sample letter.
Contact information for Jeffco's Commissioners: Click here find the leaders in your specific city. This survey will inform how the county will prioritize the use of federal funds from the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 to meet the needs of underserved community members and promote recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic. In particular, this survey will help identify housing and community needs and how those needs have been impacted by the pandemic. The survey is available to anyone living or working in Jefferson County and will run through July 12, 2021. DO YOU KNOW? - The average monthly rent in Jeffco is $1,488.
- The hourly wage needed to afford this average rent is about $28.
- According to Redfin: In May 2021, Jefferson County's median home sales price was $560,000, up 23.6% compared to last year.
- The annual salary needed to afford a $560,000 home (no down payment) is about $100,000 ($48/hr).
- A comprehensive Jefferson County 2019 survey found nearly 1,000 people experiencing homelessness or housing insecurity.
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