The Compass, March 19, 2025
- Mar 19
- 7 min read
6
Saturday, March 15, we celebrated St. Patrick's Day with an amazing concert with Aoife Clancy & Eddie Dillon! About 150 people filed into the church to hear enchanting traditional Celtic music.
Recording of the Aoife Clancy & Eddie Dillon Concert
Save The Date For Our Next Congregational Date!
The congregation is invited to participate in a clean-up at Fort Taber with our guest speaker for the April 13th Sunday service, Mary Lou Nicholson, from Be the Solution to Pollution.
Meet in the parking lot near the Military Museum, 1000 S. Rodney French Blvd., New Bedford.
Please wear closed-toe shoes and bring a reusable water bottle.
Cookies and brownies are provided.
SPRING GARDEN CLEAN-UP
Your Church Garden Committee wants you to wear your old clothes to church on Sunday, March 23, and join our spring garden clean-up! Let us spruce things up just in time for spring flowers right after coffee hour on Sunday, March 23. Bring rakes if you have them!
March Services: The Soul Matter Theme is Trust
Offer your feedback on the proposed Congregational Study/Action Issues!
The three proposed Congregational Study/Action Issues:
all received the required “yes” votes in the Congregational Poll to be admitted to the agenda for UUA General Assembly 2025 (where one will be selected for three years of study, reflection, and action).
Join the UUA's upcoming feedback sessions to learn more about each CSAI, offer comments and feedback, and connect with others working on the same issue!
April 10 at 5 pm PT / 8 pm ET : Housing: Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Feedback Session. Register.
April 17 at 5 pm PT / 8 pm ET: Fat Liberation: Building Justice and Inclusion for Larger Bodies Feedback Session. Register.
April 22 at 5 pm PT / 8 pm ET: Abolition is Faith Formation Feedback Session. Register.
Learn more about CSAIs, the social witness process, and the Commission on Social Witness at uua.org/socialwitness.
Lessons in Layers
by wren bellavance-grace
These rocks. They have seen some stuff. Three million years ago, give or take a millennium, these rocks were buried - like the rest of what we now call Connecticut - beneath 1800-or-so feet of ice. As the ice slowly and steadily receded, these glacier carved rocks emerged into the sunlight along New England’s coastline. After working recently with the leadership of one of our Connecticut congregations I paused by the ocean and spent time in quiet reflection among the boulders pictured above. I followed the striations on this rock, wondering at the weight of one layer pressed upon the next. I traced the whorls on the boulder below it, like an ancient fingerprint pressed into clay. These rocks, clearly comprised of what were once separate and distinct layers, appear today as a single immutable object. I thought about the weight of millions of tons of ice carving scars into stone, and about the sustained pressure over eons that fused layers of sediment, one atop another, again and again until there is no way to extricate one layer from another. The individual layers have become a single, unique, beautiful rock. In my work with that congregation, we had been talking about Covenant. That which we call Covenant in our non-creedal faith tradition is more than the words we recite or print on our orders of service. The practice of covenanting is an essential spiritual practice for Unitarian Universalists. How will we commit to be with one another - in times of ease as well as times of anguish? What promises are we called to make to our congregational community? How will we act in alignment with our highest values? How does our shared covenant hold us in times of conflict, harm, and repair? When we create our covenants, we often think about its horizontal dimension - how you and I will agree to be with one another in this place. There is also a vertical dimension - what are our covenantal promises rooted in, if not something larger than ourselves? Some call it Spirit of Love, others call it God, the Universe, Transcendence. But the dimension I was thinking of as I walked among and gave my attention to these glacier-carved rocks was the dimension of time. Our covenants, our covenantal promises and practices, are handed down to us from our ancestors in faith, the founders of the congregations that became Unitarian Universalist. Here in New England, some of those ancestors date back four centuries - which is not quite an ice age, but still, imagine all the layers of love and loss and lessons our ancestors in faith lived and worked through. Each of those moments of celebration and each of those struggles that threatened to drive them apart might be traced in your congregation's history as distinctly as the layers in these massive stones. In the rock I visited, the wide grey base provided a sturdy foundation. Perhaps this represents a congregation’s foundation, laid by founding families with faith enough and hope that their Love of God and neighbor would be enough. And to be clear, our ancestors in faith - almost exclusively European merchants, colonizers, and religious refugees - had a much more limited definition of their ‘neighbor’ than we hope to claim today. They committed to one another and with their first called minister to strive to serve their congregational community. An orange pebbly layer might represent a time the congregation and their minister lost trust in one another, and the minister left mid-year, with an empty pulpit and no small amount of chaos. The cool green layer fused above this represents the recommitment and recovery the congregation enjoyed with a new minister, and new families that joined. The subsequent layers, some wider, some narrow, represent more years, decades, generations. All the stories of ministries and members coming and going. Layers of hard times when budgets were slim fused fast to bountiful years of growth and possibility. We have congregations in New England that are older than the nation itself. We have Covenanting Communities birthed in this 21st century. We are a living tradition, which means the promises, the commitments, the lessons our ancestors in faith learned, their essence lives still today in our communities, our theology, our covenantal commitments to each other and to the vision of Beloved Community (which our ancestors might have called Heaven). The foundational rock we have built our faith on is strong enough to withstand the challenges of these days. Together we weave strife and joy together into the next layer of our continuing story. It has always been so. We build on what we have inherited, and we strengthen our commitment to bequeath a strong, hope-full, unwavering faith to a future we dream into being together. So may it be. |
Our Sunday school is a collaborative effort.
Everyone works together to share their skills, time, and energy to enrich our programs. We use the “Spirit Play” curriculum to share goals and objectives for the younger children. Children spend the first fifteen minutes in the sanctuary, and then we head upstairs to the classroom space. You are welcome to accompany your child.
The RE (Religious Education) Team meets monthly to determine the programs, policies, and events for the children, youth, and adults. Parents are encouraged to join the RE Team.
Don't hesitate to get in touch with the Director of Religious Education, Yasmin Flefleh-Vincent, for further information, questions, or comments about our Sunday School.
March 23: Fixing Broken Trust, Climate Justice REvisit
RE Team Meeting
March 30: Trusting Our Inherent Worth, Viola Liuzzo
Please share these events with your family and friends and attend yourself. We would love to see you!
FREE Events Happening at UUNB
Being Human takes place every Friday at 11 AM. Please use the parking lot door.
Open Mic is FREE and open to the public. Doors open at 3:30 PM for a 4:00 PM start. Open Mic will occur on the first Sunday of each month through June. All donations from this event will benefit the church, so please tell your family and friends.
Ticketed Events
Tickets are $20 in advance or $25 at the door.
Tickets are $20; no one is turned away for lack of funds. Follow the link in the event to the Bread & Puppet website to reserve your seats.
Save the Date! Tickets are $25 in advance or $30 at the door.
Order forms are available in the sanctuary and the Parish House for those wishing to buy concert tickets with a check. Please place the order form and your check in an envelope and either mail it to the office, drop it in the mail slot on 8th Street, or stop by the office during office hours.
The calendar on our website shows everything happening at UUNB. Updates are displayed immediately, so you will always know what is planned
Our Mission is to encourage diversity and mutual acceptance and work for positive change in ourselves and our community.
"We envision a congregation in which we practice the principles of our faith. We seek to enjoy peaceful reflection and inspiration in intellectually and spiritually satisfying church services. We aim to embrace the people and efforts of our church community by supporting our children and their programs, our committees and their goals, our staff and their efforts on our behalf, and each other."
Our Promises
Each person is important.
Be kind in all you do.
We help each other learn.
We search for what is true.
Each person has a say.
Work for a peaceful world.
The web of life’s the way.
Build the beloved community, free from racism and oppression.
First Unitarian Church in New Bedford
71 8th Street, New Bedford, MA 02740
(508) 994-9686
Administrator ext. 10
Minister ext. 13
Karen cell: (508) 441-9344
Thrift Shop ext. 12
Board Members & Officers
Steve Carmel, President
Charles Morgan, Vice President
Deborah Carmel, Treasurer
Cora Peirce, Clerk
Trustees
Committee Chairs
Staff
The Thrift Shop is open Tuesdays and Saturdays from 10 AM to 1 PM
(508)994-9686 ext.12
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