UU Living Mosaic

A Mystical Psalm

O Holy One

of  so many blessings,

the world cannot contain You,

the mind cannot comprehend You

nor the heart fully appreciate

all You are and have been

and will always be

for all Your cherished creation.

To know You

is to love You,

and to love You

is to know that You

will never be known

except through the filter

of our own experience.

I am here before You

needing You,

here within You

loving You,

feel You within me

filling me up,

lifting me up,

building me up

so that I can be

and become

like You

a lover of all Your people

and of all Your cherished creation,

now and forever,

Amen.

(WomanWitness: A Feminist Lectionary and Psalter

Woman of the Hebrew Scriptures: Part Two)

UU Youth and Interfaith Youth Core

Interested in interfaith work?  One such opportunity is a free leadership training and service event developed specifically for Unitarian Universalist (UU) youth and adults who work with youth. This training will equip teams with the skills needed to return to their congregations and districts and be leaders in the interfaith youth movement.

Please visit www.uua.org/interfaithyouth for an application.

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Included in this month’s Youth Ministries Updates you will find information about employment and training opportunities and much more.

In this month’s Young Adult News you will find information on internship and employment opportunities and much more.

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Tapestry of Faith Interfaith Youth Curriculum

The Lifespan Faith Development staff group of the UUA seeks an author for an interfaith leadership program for high school-age youth. This curriculum is part of a joint initiative of the UUA and the Interfaith Youth Core.  Additional information can found at

http://www.uua.org/documents/lfd/tapestry/091101_authors_interfaith_youth.pdf

For many of us the fall of the year is a time of sadness and the long memory.  All around us there are the evidences of fading, of withdrawal, of things coming to an end.  What was alive and growing only a few short days or weeks ago seems now to have fulfilled itself and fallen back into the shadows.  Vegetation withers but there is no agony of departure; there seems to be only death and stillness in the fall.

Those who have been ill all summer seem to get a deepening sense of foreboding in the fall.  It is the time of the changing of the guard.  It is the season of the retreat of energy.  It is a time of letting go.  It is a period of the first exhaustion.  It is the period of the storms, as if the wind itself becomes the Avenging Angel too impatient to wait for the coming of death and the quiet fading of bud and flower and leaf.  The rain is not gentle in the fall, it is feverish, truculent, and vicious.  All the fury of wind and rain are undertoned by a vast lull in tempo and the running down of all things.  There is a chill in the air in the fall.  It is not cold; it is chilly, as if the temperature cannot quite make up its mind.  The chill is ominous, the forerunner of the vital coldness of winter.

But the fall of the year is more than all this; much, much more. It marks an important change in the cycle of the year.  This change means that summer is passed.  One season ends by blending into another.  Here is a change of pace accenting a rhythm in the passing of time.  How important this is!  The particular mood inspires recollection and reflection.  There is something very steadying and secure in the awareness that there is an underlying dependability in life–that change is part of the experience of living.  It is a reminder of the meaning of pause and plateau.

But the fall provides something more.  There is harvest, a time of ingathering, of storing up in nature; there is harvest, a time of ingathering, of storing up in the heart.  There is the time when there must be a separation of that which has said its say and passes–that which repens and finds its meaning in sustaining life in other forms. Nothing is lost, nothing disappears; all things belong, each in its way, to a harmony and an order which envelops all, which infuses all.

Fall accentuates the goodness of life and finds its truest meaning in the strength of winter and the breath of spring.  Thank God for the fall.

by Howard Thurman