Yet Another Unitarian Universalist
A postmodern heretic's spiritual journey
We went for a hike in Henry W. Coe State Park today. There were still quite a few flowers in bloom, of which my favorite was the Butterfly Mariposa Lily:
The terrain was the usual steep hillsides of the Coastal Ranges:
The weather was ideal: 65-75 degrees, with a steady northerly breeze. We walked about 8-3/4 miles with 1360 total elevation gain, enough of a workout to make it seem worth while, but we took it slow so we didn’t get burned out. Just about a perfect day.
The highlight of a trip to Ano Nuevo State Park is supposed to be the sight of hundreds of Elephant Seals. But when Carol and I visited the park today, what I enjoyed most was seeing Bank Swallows building nests in a bluff high above the beach. I watched through binoculars as the swallows whizzed around the bluff, and in and out of their nesting holes. Every once in a while, a small shower of sand would come out of one of the next holes, presumably because one of the birds was doing some excavation work inside the hole.
On my way home from a ministers’ retreat this afternoon, I stopped at Ano Nuevo State Park. The reason most people visit the park is to view the Elephant Seals that live there. And what’s not to like about these charismatic megafauna?
Today’s visit was too short. I’ve already convinced Carol to accompany back to the park tomorrow. (Although, to be completely honest, my primary motivation is seeing the nesting Bank Swallows I didn’t have time for today. Don’t tell Carol.)
A fairly major revision of a gr. 8-9 Coming of Age program is now online. From the course description: “The goal of our Coming of Age program is to help young people sort out their ethical and religious identity (recognizing that some young people do not feel religious at all), so that they may make rational decisions about the kind of person they want to become.”
This Coming of Age program assumes that Unitarian Universalist religious identity is primarily concerned with what we do in the world. Second, the program does not take Christianity as the paradigm of all religion, which means that belief and doctrine are de-emphasized, while ethics is emphasized. Third, the course includes many hands-on activities, as well as discussions, to reach different learning styles. Fourth, the course is outcome-driven, with everything in the course designed to prepare participants to write and deliver statements of religious identity in a culminating worship service.
I wrote the curriculum, but it’s based on the real-world course we’ve offered at the UU Church of Palo Alto for the past decade. Many other teachers, and many participants, have contributed to the program.
There are still known issues with the curriculum. The session plan for Session Seven, “Western Religious Practices,” is teachable, but needs revision. Session Ten, “Football Is Religion,” was taught for the first time in 2021, and the session plan is still rough. Session Eight is designed as a field trip to a specific art museum in San Francisco, but could be adapted to other museums in other locales. The social justice project is very specific to the Palo Alto congregation, but with careful attention to the criteria for what constitutes a good social justice project, other congregations can find suitable projects.
The curriculum does make use of copyrighted material. However, the online curriculum provides to online sources for all copyrighted material.
Overall, the curriculum is quite sound and produces excellent outcomes. While written for the Palo Alto congregation, it should be fairly easy to adapt to most UU congregations.
Coming of Age program at Yet Another UU Curriculum Site.
Carol is a local bike activist, and she’s been working with MoveSanMateo to promote bike lanes in North Central, our old neighborhood in San Mateo (which we got priced out of when our landlord sold the building we lived in).
So when she heard that bo2focused was organizing a bike ride in North Central, the neighborhood where he grew up, she got other MoveSanMateo bicyclists to go and join their ride.
It wasn’t just a bike ride, it was Bike life. What is Bike life? It’s a subculture. It’s a bunch of young bike riders popping wheelies on city streets. Bike life sometimes puts together big rides, not unlike Critical Mass or Bike Party put together big rides. Just like Critical Mass, Bike life sometimes annoys motorists by filling up the public right of way with so many bicycles that cars and trucks have to slow down.
bo2focused posted some videos of Saturday’s ride, and Carol appears at the beginning of one of the videos, talking to one of the vendors who showed up.
Carol says she was probably the only bicyclist there who was over 40. She was also one of the few women, and one of the few white people. The Bike life people drifted in over next next couple of hours, and at last they started riding through North Central. Wheelies that last five or ten minutes, and bicyclists weaving around one another, are characteristic of Bike life. Carol decided to drop to the back of the pack, and then at a traffic light she lost the Bike life group. So she rode over to Wursthaus, where some of her MoveSanMateo bicyclist friends were hanging out and eating lunch to celebrate City Council approving the North Central bike lanes.
Bike life is not known for being cautious. After Carol left the ride, Bike life kind of took over the intersection at Delaware and Fourth. The police were called out, including a motorcycle cop who attempted to follow one of the bicyclists….
Embarrassingly for the police officer, his motorcycle fell down. The Bike life group rode off down Delaware.
Continue reading “Carol encounters Bike life”This morning, I went for a walk up in the Santa Cruz Mountains. I was expecting showers, and forecast warned me there might even be thunderstorms. But I was not expecting hail.
In places, the tiny hailstones covered the ground, looking so much like snow that I decided it was a white Christmas — just like the ones we used to have at home.
I was wary of driving down winding, twisty mountain roads covered with a quarter of an inch of hail stones. But I watched other cars drive by without any trouble, and decided to try. The driving wasn’t that bad — after about five minutes I got below 1500 feet elevation, and the roads were clear of hail.
Scrooge famously said: “If I could work my will, every idiot who goes about with ‘Merry Christmas’ on his lips, should be boiled with his own pudding, and buried with a stake of holly through his heart!”
The omicron strain of COVID-19 is acting like Scrooge. If you go wish your family ‘Merry Christmas’ in person, you could wind up with omicron in your lungs. Bah humbug.
A month ago, we started planning in-person services for Christmas Eve. But as of today, it looks like we’re going to be moving to online-only for Christmas Eve. Omicron is present here in Santa Clara County. Omicron doubles every 2-4 days (depending on who you listen to). Vaccinated and boostered people are getting omicron. Everyone is expecting a major surge by mid-January. So in-person indoors meetings are most definitely Not A Good Idea. Bah humbug indeed.
I had been looking forward to seeing people in person on Christmas Eve — especially college students, many of whom come home for winter breaks. But honestly I’m relieved that we’re not going to have in-person services. I admit it — I don’t like the looks of omicron.
So — see you online….
Part Five of a history I’m writing, telling the story of Unitarians in Palo Alto from the founding of the town in 1891 up to the dissolution of the old Unitarian Church of Palo Alto in 1934. If you want the footnotes, you’ll have to wait until the print version of this history comes out in the spring of 2022.
Part One — Part Two — Part Three — Part Four
In November, 1921, Elmo Arnold Robinson, known as “Robbie,” arrived at the Unitarian Church of Palo Alto with his wife Olga and sons Kelsey, who was 9 months old, and Arnold, almost 5 years old. Robbie, ordained as a Universalist minister, had lots of experience in small congregations, plus he had just finished a two-year stint as the Director of Religious Education at a church in southern California. Olga was also licensed as a Universalist minister, although her time was taken up with her small children. It’s hard to imagine that the Unitarian Church of Palo Alto could have found a better match for their needs.
Not much happened in Robinson’s first year, except that Sunday school enrollment dropped still further. Emma Rendtorff had been the superintendent of the Sunday school in the 1920-1921 school year, and Sunday school enrollment crept back up to 31 children, but that was Emma’s last year as superintendent; her daughter Gertrude entered Stanford University in the fall of 1921, so Emma was no longer quite so invested in the Sunday school. In 1921-1922, Elmo Robinson’s first year, the church went through three Sunday school superintendents: Jessie Morton, who was William H. Carruth’s mother-in-law; William Ewert, a student at Stanford University; and Frank Gonzales, another Stanford student who served the longest of the three. With all that turnover, it’s not surprising that enrollment in the Sunday school dropped to 20, probably the lowest enrollment since 1908.
But Elmo Robinson had already turned his thoughts to religious education. In the summer of 1922, his essay “The Place of the Child in the Religious Education Community” was published in the Pacific Unitarian. This essay outlined a progressive philosophy of religious education that was tied to social reform:
“Every religious community believes that the future can be made better than the present. Every church, while cherishing certain ideals and methods of the past, must fire its young people with a vision of the future which will encourage them to devise new ways and means to realize it. Do you want world peace? World justice? The cooperative commonwealth?… All these things can be accomplished only by admitting children and young people to the full fellowship of the religious community as friends….”
Presumably, this essay repeated what had already been going on in the Palo Alto church. Bertha Chapman Cady was one of the teachers in the Sunday school in 1921-1922, and she involved the children in helping to run the class; one of her daughters, for example, became the class secretary. Children were becoming fully involved into the religious community of the church. The lay leaders seem to have found his vision a compelling one. The next school year, 1922-1923, the charismatic William Carruth agreed to be the superintendent of the Sunday school, and enrollment immediately shot up to 33 children.
Continue reading “Unitarians in Palo Alto, 1921-1925”The seventy-fifth anniversary of the organization of the Unitarian Universalist Church of Palo Alto is in 2022. So I’ve been working on the history of the congregation, starting with a basic timeline.
Sources for this timeline: Rae Bell’s timeline for the 60th anniversary of the congregation; Annual Reports from 2009-2020; documents in the UUCPA archives; personal reminiscences; denominational sources.
Continue reading “Timeline of the Unitarian Universalist Church of Palo Alto”A timeline that give institutional chronology of the Unity Society and the Unitarian Church of Palo Alto — and also introduces you to some of the interesting Unitarians who lived in Palo Alto from 1891 to 1950. The links mostly go to Wikipedia or other online encyclopedia pages, or to local history websites.
1891-1894 — A few Unitarians move to Palo Alto, including Emma Rendtorff
March, 1895 — Rev. Eliza Tupper Wilkes, a Universalist, is hired by Pacific Women’s Unitarian Conference to do “missionary work”
May 1-5, 1895 — Palo Alto Unitarians Luna and Minnie Hoskins attend Pacific Unitarian Conference in San Jose
May 5, 1895 — Eliza Wilkes preaches at Memorial Church, Stanford University; first woman to preach at Stanford
Autumn, 1895 — Eliza Wilkes leads Unitarian services in Palo Alto
Jan. 12, 1896 — Unity Society of Palo Alto formally organized, Executive Committee includes both men and women; members include Anna Probst Zschokke, John and Isabel Butler, and George Blakesley, Palo Alto’s first dentist
March, 1897 — Unity Society has supply preachers
Spring, 1897 — Unity Society ceases activity