REvoices June 2025

June 2025

With June come endings and beginnings.  Graduations. Last days of school.  Weddings.  Bar/Bat Mitzvahs. Garden plants springing up from seedlings.  Tadpoles sprouting legs and beginning their journey to froghood.  The same is true here at UUSGU as well.  In a few weeks we’ll be saying goodbye to all of you for the summer, knowing that the children that come back to RE in the fall will not be exactly the same as the children in our classrooms now.  Oh! Those summer growth spurts!

Our theme for the month is love.  Love is a very appropriate theme for the month of PRIDE, of weddings, and of Father’s Day.  And of course, love is the center of all we do here.

I was thinking this morning about PRIDE month and about just how much the world has changed since I was a little girl back in the 1970s--before AIDS--and early 1980s.  I was aware that there were gay men (my father worked with one) and lesbians, but was not really sure what it meant to be gay or lesbian.  Klinger cross-dressing on MASH was done for laughs, as was Jack pretending to be a gay man on Three’s Company and as was the entire premise of the sitcom Bosom Buddies.  I was completely unaware of the existence of transgender people, despite the fact there were, most likely, some living (closeted) in our community.   Words that I use regularly with my own children--aromantic, pan-sexual, ambi-curious--had yet to be coined (or maybe just yet to enter common usage).  A rainbow was just a sign of the promise from God not to destroy the earth by flood again or what you get when you shine white light through a prism.

Things are so different now.  The concept that people should be free to love who they love and be who they are is near universally accepted--despite the very verbal minority who would like us to go back to pretending certain people are wrong (or worse, shouldn’t exist).  I fly my rainbow flag proudly next to the US flag on my house (I have to admit the US flag is flown not quite as proudly as it once was, but I refuse to concede its use to the haters).  My eldest child has let us know she is our eldest daughter.  My youngest child is part of a scout troop and a friend group with young women and men who identify with any number of different sexual and romantic orientations and presentations.  And so many things we once thought were completely binary (or segmented) are seen as being different points on a vast spectrum of spectra where every individual is unique and can place themselves where they feel they belong.  We are called to love them all.

Coming up in RE

This Sunday (June 1st) is our LAST Sunday of regular RE classes.  We will be having Spirit Play class.  The Little Lights childcare room will also be open.  Because we have so many of our teachers with conflicts on Sunday, we won’t be able to offer Popcorn Theology this week even if there are enough older children, sorry about that.

Next Sunday (June 8th) is our annual Flower Communion Multi-gen service.  The children will participate in a special parade with flowers at the beginning of the service.

June 15th will be the last service of the program year.  It will be a whole family service celebrating fathers, commencement, and the summer solstice.  There will be a potluck picnic (BBQ-themed) to follow.  Weather-permitting it will be in our own play yard!

Family Game Night!

This Sunday evening is our last Family Game Night for the year.  Join us at 4:30 for board games and dinner.  Dinner will be a taco bar/taco salad bar with definite GF options and vegan options if requested.  Please RSVP to Cherilyn ASAP! at re@uusgu.org.

Last Sunday at UUSGU

I hope everyone who participated had an awesome time during our Improv Lay-led service this past Sunday.  I know I had a lot of fun.  Check out the community art project in the Fellowship space.  Yes, there is one square missing--it was sent to one of our remote online worship participants and should be returning for inclusion in the finished project shortly.  I hope to have that framed over the summer and once the elevator shaft has been completed we hope to be able to hang a number of pieces of community art around the meeting house.