ISSUE 88

OCTOBER 2023

Where do we come from? What are we? These are two of the questions from one of our hymns. Both speak to the gift of heritage, which is our theme in October. Heritage points to family line and ethnic origins.

Ralph Ellison, a white American author and critic, offered an interest insight into heritage: “Some people are your relatives, but others are your ancestors, and you choose the ones you want to have as ancestors. You create yourself out of [their] values.”

Clearly, there’s a big difference between relatives and ancestors. Starkly put, our relatives get us here, but our ancestors tell us why we are here. Relatives give us our physical qualities, but our ancestors offer us a legacy. Scott Tayler phrased it this way: “Relatives are those we tell stories about; ancestors call us to carry stories forward. Relatives live on in our DNA; ancestors live in the whispers of our hearts. The difference comes down to values. Values we use to construct not just our stories but ourselves.”

So who are our ancestors? Who are they individually? Who are they collectively? What stories do we tell?

Heritage reminds us that we are part of a larger and longer story. That we did not create ourselves. That we were blessed in small and large ways by those who went before. We are invited into humility. The gifts we received were always meant to be passed on. Heritage is not solely about being the heirs of the ancestors, it is also the reality that we are each ancestors of a future we cannot know.

Wendell Berry put it like this: “We clasp the hands of those who go before us, and the hands who come after us. We enter the little circle of each other’s arms and the larger circle of lovers whose hands are joined in a dance, and the larger circle of all creatures, passing in and out of life who move also in a dance, to a music so subtle and vast that no ear can hear it except in fragments.”

And in the end, maybe that’s what this heritage thing is all about: seeing ourselves as part of a sacred chain. We are not small. Our lives are not insignificant. Our lives aren’t even entirely our own. Every choice we make has consequences for others. Every word we write with our lives twists and propels a plot line that began before we got here and will continue after we are gone. Wow!! Now that’s worth exploring for a month.

October Theme: The Gift of Heritage

Many of us have a favorite family memento that holds something important about our family heritage and history. Most of the time, these mementos also keep us grounded in a value or offer us comfort or inspiration when we need it most. Sometimes those mementos have been with us so long, we no longer see them or think about them. This month, the invitation is to see them afresh. Then, pick one of your favorite family mementos and figure out why it has such a hold on you? What story does it hold? Who needs to know that story?

New and Improved Giving Site

Check out our new online giving site! This is a much-improved online giving experience (though it's the same company we have been using for a long time). We can customize this easily so your donations go to the right place. We will be using QR codes to direct you to particular funds (like Special Plate, Abundant Harvest or Guatemala Scholarships). You can also make a pledge payment from here if you wish.

Be sure to check the tile you are using when you make a donation so the money will be categorized correctly. You can choose one-time or recurring giving in multiple categories. You can also choose to help offset the fees that we pay too!

Be sure to let us know if you have any problems or questions about the new site.

Transitions

Phyllis Bunting passed away September 5. A memorial service will be held at JUC Saturday, October 21 at 10 am.

Mary Margaret Coates passed away September 6.

Board of Trustees September Meeting Summary

Following a practice our JUC staff adopted over a year ago, the board has taken on the practice of beginning meetings with a check in on how our JUC values are showing up in their lives. We discussed encouraging all small church gatherings begin this way.

Carol Wilsey presented the Financial and Budget report and the Pledging and Membership Report. Membership and pledges dropped during the pandemic. JUC is using COVID relief funds where there is a budget deficit.

A Congregational Meeting will be held on Sunday, October 29. Our bylaws call for two meetings annually, one in the Spring and one in the Fall.

The Gift of Welcome and Planned Giving

A gift is something given freely, with no expectation of anything in return. A gift is given with the simple idea that the receiver should have it, and deserves to have it.

Welcoming is the threshold of belonging and community is the practice of belonging. Community provides the power to create positive change in ourselves and the world. Our intention at JUC is to live that narrative. A legacy gift to the JUC community helps ensure that the community we value will continue to be here for us and the generations to come. We invite you to include a gift to JUC in your estate plan.

Contact our Planned Giving team: Bud & B.J. Meadows or Carol Wilsey

I once participated in a workshop about teaching social justice through the arts led by Stephen Brackett of the Flobots. Stephen led us through an exercise in which we were asked to locate “our Mama’s Mama” on a world map. His aim was to help everyone in the room - mostly white educators, with a few educators of color - locate themselves in the story of their own heritage. It was clear during the discussion that followed the activity that many of the white educators were not comfortable or accustomed to thinking about their heritage. Some were worried that a discussion of their own ancestors would de-center the discussion of the people of color in the room. Others simply believed that, as white people, we have no culture and that heritage was not something we talk about. Brackett slowly led the group to think about the problems with those beliefs. A belief that you have no culture, and that your heritage is not important, stems from the fact that you are so immersed in your own culture that you can’t see it! For the white folks among us, talking about our family heritage is a way to begin to step out of the assumption of a lack of culture, which inadvertently centers white culture as the “norm” and all other cultures as the “other,” and helps us locate ourselves among our siblings of many cultures.

My Mama’s Mama was named Vera Maude (Vanbuskirk) Pressel. She was born in Minnesota but grew up in Iowa. She taught school in a one-room schoolhouse before getting married to my Grandfather, Merle Claude Pressel. She moved to Colorado in 1950, when my Mom was five years old. Her husband passed away in 1962 and left my grandma to raise six kids on her own. She supported her kids by working for the US Postal Service. Her life was not easy - being a single Mom in the 1960s was tough. She was feisty, though, and even after she had a stroke in her 60s, she lived with a fierce determination. My mom certainly inherited that feisty determination from my Grandma and I think I have been able to survive some hard times in my life partly due to those traits. It can be easy to feel unattached to your ancestors but when I think about my Grandma growing up as an Iowa farm girl and then teaching for ten years, then struggling to keep six kids housed and fed, I feel a strong desire to honor her and thank her for the ways that her life led to mine.

In her poem, “Remember,” Joy Harjo writes:

“Remember your birth, how your mother struggled,

to give you form and breath. You are evidence of

her life, and her mother’s, and hers.”

Who is your Mama’s Mama? What is her story and how has that story helped to shape your life? As we explore this month of heritage, keep this question in mind and see where the answer might take you!

I keep several of my grandmother’s Bibles with me. Grammy passed in 1996, and three of these Bibles have accompanied me through countless moves (though if I do try to count, it’s around 26). I’ve shared with you from the pulpit a bit about my Grammy - a Jamaican woman born in Costa Rica, with a penchant for do-it-yourself theology.

The Bibles themselves are all very different. There's a bigger leather-bound one, illustrated and very delicate, edged in gold. This one I know at least the immediate origin of: it was her father’s. And then there’s a tiny leather bound new testament, all in Hebrew. The sparse bit of Roman lettering it contains offers up the information, “Vienna, 1967.” And the last is slightly larger than the new testament, about the size of a 3x5 card. It is bound in a solid metal case, of a gold-ish hue, with decorative Hebrew inscription - very ornate, and rather mysterious.

This, along with some of my uncle’s old language study flashcards c. 1950, is the bulk of my physical “inheritance” from my Grammy. I have little information about the Bibles besides what my dad knew about them, which wasn’t much. To my knowledge, Grammy never went to Israel, or to Austria. I have no idea how the two smaller Bibles came to be in her possession.

I’ve come to view heritage as being a lot like these Bibles: bits of our ancestors’ lives and memories - sometimes delightful, sometimes mysterious, sometimes painful, and sometimes baffling - passed down to us often without a lot of explanation or forethought; though if we’re lucky, sometimes the best bits are lovingly and painstakingly bestowed, with intention and explanation.

For me, the Bibles are a mixed bag. On the one hand, scripture is how my Grammy, and doubtless many of my more distant ancestors on both sides of my family, made sense of the world. It gave them solace. It encouraged some of the best parts of them to bloom and grow. The teachings of Jesus are still, 2000 years later, revolutionary and counter-cultural. And…scripture was also wielded as a whip to enslave my Black and Indigenous ancestors. It has been used in the service of Empire ever since the Romans discovered how useful a tool it could be in this regard. It has been used to colonize and to subjugate. In this sense, what an odd gift to receive from my Caribbean grandmother.

Yet, all of these things are true. And so it falls to me to uncover the mysteries of my heritage - to accept the whole ball of yarn, if you will, and to do the work of teasing out what has been passed to me that is life giving and sustaining, and to recognize and discard what has been harmful and oppressive in my family’s history.

Maybe you’ve been bequeathed similar complicated histories? I know that as a community of faith, we certainly have. I know that our Unitarian and Universalist ancestors have left us a legacy of love and of independence, of divinity and of compassion. We inherit our faith from a long line of people who have fought for justice and worked tirelessly for liberation. And we also inherit this faith from people who sometimes owned other people, who have had a negative impact on the Indigenous peoples of this nation, and who at one time published works supporting the theory of eugenics. All of these things are true, and we as a community of faith hold them all. This month, I invite you to come and take a deeper look at the gift of our UU heritage.

In preparation for October's theme, which is the Gift of Heritage, I have been wondering: what is it that we inherit in our lifetimes?

We can inherit names, genetics, and physical heirlooms. We can inherit wealth, language, and trauma. Some of our heritage we don’t have much choice about, like illnesses and physical attributes. Sometimes it is a “gift” we never wanted and can’t rid ourselves of. But there are other times, like in our church, for example, that we do get to choose our heritage, and it becomes all the more powerful because it is chosen.

At our most recent New Here class, Rev. Jen lit the chalice and recited: "We hallow our time together, by kindling the lamp of our heritage."

I love this quotation by Albert Thelander. I love its simple profundity. I love the idea that people who have only just arrived at our church–and who often grew up with very different religious experiences that they are still processing–can join in the chalice lighting and become a part of a shared heritage. It doesn’t matter that they did not grow up in the UU church, nor does it matter how long they have attended ours. To access that heritage of our tradition, and to connect with all the UUs that come before, all they need to do is show up as they are and light a candle together.

Of course, no heritage is uncomplicated. Alongside the traditions and values that drew us to Unitarian Universalism in the first place, we also inherit a heritage of white flight, the privileging of white perspectives, and the “spiritual malpractice” historically experienced by BIPOC folx in UU spaces. What we inherit from society at large – racism, misogyny, the culture of white supremacy – accompanies us to church as well. The gift of heritage, in this case, is that we are allowed a choice in what we ultimately keep and what we work to let go of.

What pieces of UU heritage most speak to you? Which ones initially drew you to Unitarian Universalism, and what ones were you slower to adopt? What are some aspects of your heritage (whether that be religious, personal, or otherwise) that you wish to leave behind?

I’ll leave you with a quotation from minister James Luther Adams: “A living tradition is not bequeathed through some law of inheritance; it must be earned, not without dust and heat, and not without humbling grace.”

Being a musician is a massive privilege. My partner likes to remind the students in his middle school general music class that the world would not crumble if there were no musicians.

And yet, music is considered a universal human trait, one that goes back at least 35,000 years. Though I should point out that humans didn’t begin writing music down until the last 3,400 years or so, and I’m just going to say it: I wish we hadn’t.

Yes, the person with a literal degree in music composition wishes that humans hadn’t started writing music down. Why? Because it has altered the way that we interact with music. It has created the expectation that only people with a certain skill set can participate in music and invented the categories of “musician” and “non-musician.”

Don’t get me wrong, I love my career. I love directing and singing in choirs, writing music and having that music performed, attending concerts and conferences, and connecting with other professionals in this field. I am grateful for this path I’ve found myself on. And yet, I find myself mourning what we as humans might have lost along the way.

It hurts my heart whenever I hear someone say, “I can’t possibly come to choir because I can’t read music,” or “I love to sing, but my voice isn’t good enough for choir,” because I know that Eurocentric music traditions (which are, unsurprisingly steeped in white supremacy culture) are the reason why people feel that way. The field that I have dedicated so much of my time, energy, and care into is famously not welcoming. I’ll tell you firsthand that this is not a fun realization to come to.

For those that attended Celebration Sunday on September 10, you might have noticed that there were a lot of musical elements, including some that may have been unexpected. We had ten members of church staff up front for a musical Call to Worship, as well as Sarah and Laura teaching a new song while I, Jude, and the band improvised the accompaniment. I expressed to the staff my immense gratitude for this experience, because it was the first time in a while that I got to experience music in a way that didn’t feel like I needed to perform something perfectly, and I really felt connected to the church and the other members of the staff in this experience. The more distance I have from my college music program, the more I realize that I have much less of an interest in creating “perfect” music, and instead, I hope to make music that impacts people and invites them to participate without fear.

In this month of exploring The Gift of Heritage, I hope that we might use music-making as a way to connect with others and the world around us, just as our ancestors did 35,000 years ago.

Telling Our Story

Chris Sealy, Board of Trustees President

So, what does JUC’s Board of Trustees do, anyway? You know that for the last few years, we’ve worked on the possibilities of moving to a larger campus – which the congregation has now voted NOT to pursue. And in the last year or so, the Board held approximately a zillion meetings with JUC members to discover our current values, mission and goals (ends). You see the refreshed mission on those big, striking banners every time you’re in the sanctuary: Deepen Spiritually, Connect Authentically, Serve Respectfully and Love Radically. And those mission statements are for JUC wherever we are. As we firmly established during COVID, our church is not a building. Our church is us.

So what is the Board doing now? More than you might imagine! We do our fiduciary duty and help keep an eye on our financial security, which is very strong. We connect with the staff and ministers to observe the church’s ever-stronger programming and ministries. And, as governance wonks would say, we take the “balcony view” of our congregation. If that sounds like we’re up there – disconnected – that’s not what we mean at all. Our Board conversations are informed by our Board Member conversations with you. Our conversations will continue in a Board retreat next month led by consultant Julica Hermann de la Fuente. And they’ll keep on keeping on as we ALL imagine where JUC keeps growing and going from here – from here. That undoubtedly means a zillion more church conversations. And the way we see it, that’s a very good thing.

Habitat for Humanity Update

Bruce and Cathy Martin

It’s already October! You can tell because the aspens are dropping their leaves, the heater is coming on in the morning, football is in full swing and pumpkin spice latte is back at Starbucks. That means it is time for our biggest fundraiser for Jeffco Interfaith Partners (JIP): the pumpkin patches in Lakewood and Arvada! This is where we support both the Navajo nation of New Mexico (who grow our pumpkins for us) and Metro Denver Habitat for Humanity (MDH4H) which receives the donation of all our proceeds. We will be “turning pumpkins into houses."

This is the 24th year of running our pumpkin patches. You can support the patches in one of three ways:

First, you can help unload a semi-truck full of pumpkins on the delivery dates.
Second, you can sign up for a shift selling pumpkins at the patch.
Third, you can buy your pumpkins and carving/decorating supplies at one of the patches.

Volunteers must be 16 years old to participate individually but adults can bring younger children along for shifts (though the parent/adult will be responsible for the child’s supervision).

The Lakewood pumpkin patch is hosted by Mile High Church at Alameda and Garrison. The truck deliveries there are Wednesday, October 4 from 4 to 8 pm and Sunday, October 14 from 11 am to 3 pm. The sales will run from October 5 to 31 and shifts are 10 am to 2 pm and 2 pm to 6 pm.

Lakewood Unloading Sign Up Link

Lakewood Pumpkin Sales Sign Up Link

The Arvada pumpkin patch is hosted by the Presbyterian Church (recently renamed) at 78th and Wadsworth. The first truck delivery there is scheduled for Wednesday, October 11 from 4 to 8 pm. And the sales will run from October 12 to 31 with the same shifts as above.

Arvada Sign Up Link (unloading and sales)

Please help out as you can. We hope to see you out at the patches!