2025-26 President Kim Wade

Dear UU folks,

I have been pulping wild persimmons and adding pints of the pulp to our freezer. It’s a fall ritual I began after being ushered through a Persimmon Portal five years ago.

It began like this. Sitting on a dock one morning, I hear something fall onto the wooden planking with a soft thunk. The sound satisfies the way thick broth landing in a hungry belly satisfies: with a calming weightedness. I look up. A persimmon tree arcs overhead, branches drooping, heavy with fruit. Persimmons lay scattered across the dock; I’d stepped over them when I’d arrived without really seeing them.

It occurs to me that a persimmon needs to be a sturdy thing in order to fall five feet, or thirty feet, and still be whole when it lands.

I collect a dozen of the fleshy fruit from the dock, pulling out the bottom edge of my shirt to deposit them into a well of fabric. I walk home gently, fruit cradled against my belly. I rinse their skins, divide them in quarters with a knife, and scrape out the seeds. The persimmon pieces are thick and earthy in my oatmeal. A wild, foraged breakfast.

An unearned breakfast, I think.

In a society obsessed with privatization and profit –- where exacting, often unattainable prices are placed even on what our bodies need, like clean drinking water and medicinal care –- picking and eating fruit off the ground that no one is selling and no one is buying feels a bit . . . wild!

Like grace. And then, because it’s Sunday and I’m eating this persimmon oatmeal before heading to church, I also think: UUCC feels like this. UUCC is a place of foraging. A place where we receive unearned gifts.

Are we enacting an alternate gift economy at UUCC? I don’t mean to say that money isn’t present. Or that it’s not needed. We pass the collection plate every Sunday. We make decisions about allocating money at each board meeting. We exist in a market-based economy; our staff, our programs and projects, our building and grounds, our Faith-to-Action recipients, are all deeply deserving of the financial resources we commit to them.

And yet. Interwoven day-to-day throughout our church are acts of mutuality, of unearned giving and receiving that are not tracked and yet are ever present. We give one another gifts of attention each time an adult attends to another’s child, each time we listen deeply to one another in Chalice Circle. Chancel art, new playground equipment, and meal trains coordinated by our Care Team are just a few examples of the material as well as spiritual gifts that we bestow upon one another.

Each of these gift-giving and gift-receiving acts is also a way of moving differently through the world — a way that is counter-cultural because it is counter-transactional. And at heart, these gift-dealing acts are acts of imagination. Acts of creation. As we imagine and act otherwise, we are co-creating an alternate economy and an alternate space here at UUCC. A space where we do not have to earn our welcome. A space where belonging is an unearned gift that we each can pass along.

What would my Persimmon Teacher say to all this? Welcome to Persimmon Church? I don’t know. But I’ll be listening.

Kim Wade
2025-26 President

Rev. Dr. Molly Housh Gordon, Minister

This month’s worship theme is: “Survival is not a sprint. It is a breath.”

Dear UU Churchers,

Sometimes I find myself thinking that if the fascists win, it will be because they exhausted us. Sometimes I think that is their strategy. We have been living under a shock-and-awe campaign of cruelty for almost a year now, sending our nervous systems into perpetual overdrive. Are you feeling tired or burned out?

Striving for the world we dream about, where everyone can survive and thrive, is long-haul work, and it is not served by charred husks of our former selves. It is strategic, wise, and necessary for us to slow up, ground down into the earth and our lives, and take a deep breath — or ten.

Below all the frenetic pace of human lives under empire and capital, the rhythmic movements of the seasons and the earth’s cycles persist. This particular season, deepening into longer nights leading to the winter solstice, invites us to slow down like the sap in the trees. Sometimes that slower pace will bring us in touch with hard things. We breathe through it all.

In her book Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times, Katherine May writes:

“When I started feeling the drag of winter, I began to treat myself like a favoured child: with kindness and love. I assumed my needs were reasonable and that my feelings were signals of something important. I kept myself well fed and made sure I was getting enough sleep. I took myself for walks in the fresh air and spent time doing things that soothed me. I asked myself: What is this winter all about? I asked myself: What change is coming?”

In winter, our need for rest is in sync with the bare branches, the hibernating animals, and the long nights. This winter, particularly, in a most difficult time, we treat ourselves and each other tenderly. We ask, what is this winter all about? What change is coming?

We breathe.

See you in church!
Rev. Molly

Intern Minister Monica Clark-Robinson

Dear UUCC:

The “holly jolly” time of year has officially arrived, and sometimes it feels like we are expected to be a specific kind of merry — whether we actually feel it or not. Some days, that holiday cheer can feel hard to find. Even though my family’s celebrations center more on Solstice than Christmas, I still feel pressure from the carols and the lights and the holiday parties and gift exchanges. If your “fa-la-la” is falling a little flat this year (and who would blame you, considering our current situation in the US?), I offer you this poem written to honor the sacredness of whatever you have to bring to this season.

EVEN THIS

This heavy blanket that hangs like night,
Weighted but not comforting,
Its tangled threads impossible to unravel:
Even this is you.

The often inaccessible
Deep Blue of the soul,
Obscured and fathomless:
Even this is love.

The sharp pains of childbirth,
The bitter cold of the stable,
The fear and trepidation Mary must’ve felt,
The plight of the immigrant:
Even this is Christmas.

You are a tapestry of all your thoughts
And feeling and dreams,
The sweet and the bitter,
The shadow and the light.
Each part just as beautiful as the next,
Each strand relying on the other.
The indigo blues of you are
As worthy as the sunniest golds.

Some years are hard.
Some holidays won’t feel jolly.
Some days are best kept
In quiet contemplation.

But none of that
Makes this time less holy.
None of that
Makes you less worthy,
None of that
Makes this any less Christmas.
We have always retreated
In the darkness,
Across faiths and cultures,
Taking time to remember
What is important,
What is true,
What is worthy.
Now, more than ever,
We can see that clearly.
We know, as we didn’t before,
The beauty of our own inner world.

Even in this longest night,
Which we experience
Both together and alone,
We are still love.
We are still holy.
We are still Christmas.

Jamila Batchelder, Director of Religious Education

For parents, no time of the year is busier than December. And perhaps no time of the year is more overstimulating than December. Throw in an expectation that everything should be perfect and that we as parents are responsible for making it so, and this time of year can feel, well, not as jolly as we hoped.

I often think this time of year of church member Michael Byrne, who died several years ago and who absolutely loved the holidays. I have this memory of him on a Christmas Eve, overflowing with joy. He asked me how my holidays were going, and I had to confess that the kids were acting up, nothing we had planned was quite going right, I was stressed out and in a bad mood. He laughed and said, same for his family.

And we laughed together about this wild adventure of being parents at this wild time of year.

Michael taught me to let go of expecting the holidays to be anything other than a bit of a mess, and to instead find the joy interwoven in all that mess. So I invite you to take a breath, have a good laugh at all the chaos, and ease into imperfection and joy where you can find it.

Two red ball ornaments on a white Christmas tree with one white ball ornament on which the word “joy” is written in red