Starr King Unitarian Universalist Church

Presente! We Remember Them

In the Mexican tradition, the dead are honored with beautiful altars, music, dancing, and offerings of their favorite foods. We are grateful for rituals that encourage us to open our hearts and express our love for our dearly departed. Join us in commemorating the Days of the Dead by bringing a photo of your beloveds, flowers, or significant object to add to our community altar.

Exploring Our Guiding Light

Focusing on the UU chalice: the meaning of it and how it fits into our daily lives.

The Other Side of Anger

Anger rises in the mind and spreads through our body triggering scenarios filled with blaming, shaming, and hurting others. Tibetan Buddhism recognized hat the slip side of anger is wisdom. It is the signal that tells us when something is wrong, when something needs to be addressed, and helps us move forward towards change and transformation.

Voices of the Turtle: From Resistance to Power

Join us as we gather to honor International Indigenous People’s Day through poetry, song, and storytelling.

International Indigenous People’s Day reaffirms native people’s decisions to defend our culture, education, and religion as fundamental to our Identity as Peoples, reclaiming and maintaining our own forms of spiritual life and communal coexistence, in an intimate relationship with our Mother Earth.

Salsa, Soul and Spirit

Salsa, Soul, and Spirit: Based on the book by Juana Bordas, we are invited to reflect on multicultural leadership approaches. We will consider how incorporating many cultural perspectives offers us an opportunity to appreciate differences, value the unique contributions of diverse groups, and promote learning from many orientations. Multicultural leadership is uniquely suited to our mosaic world because it incorporates the influences, practices and values of a variety of cultures in a respectful and productive manner.

Spiritual Food

How do we feed our spiritual practice? Many of us find the practice of food preparation to be a way of practicing our spirituality. Come listen to perspectives on how filling mouths and stomachs brings connection, provides healing and often is someone’s greatest gift.

Finding Home

Led my Rev. Maria Cristina -   Where are we on our spiritual journeys? What new avenues have we explored in our search for a spiritual practice that brings us home to our best selves? Join us as we reflect on the many meanings of home and the various roads we’ve traveled so far.

New Beginnings: Time for Planting

Sunday, September 11, 2016, 10:30 AM

This Sunday marks the official welcome of Rev. Maria Cristina as our called Minister. We are beginning a new journey together as a community of faith. As we gather to nurture and celebrate our interconnectedness, we recognize and honor the need to be in right relationship with ourselves and each other in order to continue doing good in the world. Just as a young seedling needs water and light to grow, we need to nourish ourselves and our community in order to flourish spiritually. If you are willing and able, we invite you to participate in the greening of our sanctuary by bringing a plant that will do well indoors.

Healing Waters

Rev. Maria Cristina preaches for the first time and ushers in a new church year with a beloved UU tradition: The Water Ceremony.

The first UU Water Communion was held in the mid-1970s at the first Women & Religion Convocation held at a retreat center in Grailville, Michigan. The organizers of the conference asked that the participants – UU women from all over the continent – bring with them a small amount of water from their homes, to be poured together into a common bowl at the opening worship service. The water symbolized that although the women came from many different places, were of different backgrounds and life experiences and social situations, they were Unitarian Universalist sisters, of one liberal heritage. 

The Water Communion’s true and continuing purpose is not to report on “What I Did During My Summer Vacation” which not everyone gets, but instead “How I Felt This Summer,” to highlight our congregation’s connection and closeness and to celebrate our diversity. 

Water Communion is a Powerful metaphor of unity in diversity, of a community united across all the usual lines and categories, that serve to separate and divide, and the women who were there were greatly moved by it. Many of them returned from Grailville and shared a version of the ceremony with their congregations.

The Purpose of Poetry

What is the purpose of poetry? What is the purpose of religion? How do the two purposes overlap? Our speaker, Rev. Dr. Lynn Ungar, is both a minister and a published poet, and will share some of both her theology and her poetry.