If you would like to have the packet in full for this month, please join one of our small groups. Contact Rev. John T. Crestwell, Jr. at:

jcrestwell@uuannapolis.org 

 November 2020 Ideas for Groups

(compilation of Deep Listening, Healing, and Renewal)

Option A: Renew Your Understanding of History (Renewal 2020)

The Movement for Black Lives and the spring/summer protests against police violence have left us with a renewed sense of urgency about moving into a new and more just future. At the same time, leaders from these efforts remind us that a new future isn’t possible without a truthful telling of the past. So this month, alongside your other efforts to support the Black and BIPoc communities, make some time for the spiritual practice of revisiting, correcting, enriching, and renewing your understanding of our country’s history.

Option B: Wrestle with the Call of Reparations (Healing 2020)

Reparations: Some argue racial healing requires it; others declare it unrealistic. But no matter where one stands, all of us can at least admit that the refusal to make space for the discussion drives us even farther from healing.

Option C: Listening Anew to the “Violence” of Today’s Protests (Deep Listening 2020)

It’s striking how conversations about racial justice protests quickly move from the pain and moral demands that sit at the center of those protests to the violence that sometimes lives at the edges of them. Deep listening helps us notice how certain “narratives” and “frames” about the violence actually work to remove the protests’ moral demands and pain from the center of the discussion, how they distract and in many cases seek to undermine that work for justice. And these frames don’t just live “out there”; they live inside many of us as well.

Option D: Harvest the Power

From UU ministry for Earth
Harvest the Power of Community for Climate Justice & Decolonization

The United States election in November is a major fork in the road and decision point for the future of humanity and Life on Earth. Are you ready?

Option E: Whose Land is it Anyway?

Do you know which First Nations/Indigenous People’s lived on this land before European Invaders arrived? This language is intentional. The American Continent has been inhabited in some places for more than 30,000 years. It only took a few 100 years to completely change the population. This is sadly through a legacy of genocide, slavery, and forced migration. Indigenous faiths often have sacred practices that guide them to recognizing the earth as sacred. What rituals, prayers, or practices might elevate the sacredness of the Chesapeake? What other specific places in our area would you want to be known as sacred lands?

Wise Words

Today, psychologists have a favorite word, and that word is maladjusted. I tell you today that there are some things in our social system to which I am proud to be maladjusted. I shall never be adjusted to lynch mobs, segregation, economic in equalities, “The madness of militarism,” and self-defeating physical violence. The salvation of the world lies in the maladjusted.
Martin Luther King Jr.