Woven Faith – Asking the Questions
Sunday Services for October
October 4 – Annual Animal Blessing – Please join us Sunday, October 4th for our annual Animal Blessing Sunday when we honor our animal friends and the love and companionship they bring to our lives. All well-behaved animals are welcome, although leashes, crates or other appropriate forms of containment are required. If you are unable to bring your pet for the blessing, feel free to bring a picture or submit one on the Facebook event post and we will try to work it into the slide show.UUFA member Jeff wunderly will lead the service. All are welcome!
October 11 – Coming Out Day – “We live in a culture that often celebrates independence and self-sufficiency. We are taught to admire those who “make it on their own” and “pull themselves up.” Yet, our lives tell a different story. Every one of us is shaped by relationships, communities, ecosystems, histories, and countless acts of care. None of us arrives here alone.
For LGBTQ+ people, this truth is especially visible. Across generations, chosen families, mutual aid networks, congregations, advocacy organizations, neighbors, friends, and loved ones have helped create pathways toward safety, joy, and flourishing. The story of LGBTQ+ liberation and survival is also a story of interdependence.
This service invites congregations to reflect on the many ways our lives are connected and to consider what those connections ask of us today.” Roberta Roberson will be our service leader.
October 18 – What are Words Worth – Nellie James – description TBA
October 25 – Asking the Questions – We will further explore the Woven Faith theme for this month – Asking the Questions. As humans we naturally have questons about our place in the world and what the meaning of life on this planet means. What questionns do you have ? This will be a participatory service as we will pose the questions and spend a bit of time generating responses to our big questnos. Barb Harrison , service leader
Gratitude from the Whealeys
Alice and David Whealey would like to thank the Fellowship for helping with their father’s memorial September 20. An excerpt from Alice’s reminiscences: “My father, despite growing up in New York, ended up, somewhat by accident, attending Bates College in Maine his freshman and sophomore year. For his first academic job, he was hired by the University of Maine, partly, in the opinion of my father, because he already had experience in a small Maine college town through Bates. It was in Maine that my father, who had been raised by a theologically conservative Methodist mother, convinced my mother, who had been involved in liberal Episcopal churches since college, to attend a Unitarian church. New England is the stronghold of American Unitarianism, as some of you know. After my father moved to Athens in 1964, he and his wife Lois became founding members of this institution, the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Athens. I remember when the walls of this building were only a foot high; later, we children were even corralled into painting the deck with creosote—no worries about legal liability in those days! Also, my father requested that his ashes be placed in the columbarium outside this building. Once, when he was in the throes of high school senioritis, my older brother asked to be excused from coming to the Fellowship with us—my father, mother, other brother and me. My father told him that when he left home for college he was free to do whatever he wanted on Sundays but for now….In retrospect, since coming here on Sundays was one of the few activities that my father did with the rest of our family–(he was a typical father of baby boomer kids, very much involved in career), it seemed to be good advice, advice which I used on my children before they left home.”
