Breathe, my friends, breathe. Our Soul Matters theme this month is Embodying Resilience, following up on last month's Practicing Resistance. And we’ve had quite a month of resistance. I don’t need to tell you what you already know and have seen with your own eyes. The systems we relied on to follow the rule of law have broken down and communities are being intimidated and terrorized; there’s no other way to put it. People are afraid, but they are also practicing resistance ev

When we ask ourselves to “Reimagine Thriving”, what does that mean?  Why reimagine?   Can’t we just imagine and get on with it? Here’s why it’s important to reimagine: most of us already imagine thriving, and that usually means imagining what it means for me and people like me to thrive: for people of privilege, that means imagining thriving for people of privilege; white people for white people, Americans for Americans, global majority for global majority, and so forth.  

"The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion." Albert Camus

The New Year has arrived, and I think many of us are glad to wrap-up 2025. The anxiety and chaos that has become our daily bread in this country won’t stop because it’s a new year, of course, but the beginning of something always gives us a little boost of hope that change happens, no matter what. How it changes is largely up to us and how bad we want it. Ask 80% of people who made a resolution this week how they’re doing with that in March. 

This is the last newsletter of 2025! Inside you will find a message from Karen & Jess....amongst other cool things.

What is hope? It is a hunch that the overwhelming brutality of facts that oppress and repress is not the last word. It is a suspicion that reality is more complex than realism wants us to believe and that the frontiers of the possible are not determined by the limits of the actual. -Rubem A. Alves

The Hospitality Committee wants to thank everyone who contributed to the successful Thanksgiving potluck luncheon on Sunday. People brought food, washed dishes, and the Sunday School kids decorated tables with place settings and flowers! We all created a festive, warm, and welcoming meal.

Thank you to all those who attended Saturday's concert with Eddie Dillon, Mike Laureano, and Seamus Galligan. It was a small gathering, but we made almost $300 for the Tryworks restoration.

THE BURIAL OF THE OLD by Wendell Berry The old, whose bodies encrust their lives, die, and that is well. They unhinder what has struggled in them. The light, painfully loved, that narrowed and darkened in their minds becomes again the sky. The young, who have looked on dying, turn back to the world, grown strangely alert to each other's bodies.