Click here for our Advent Calendar! You'll be able to click on each date as it happens.
“Expect the unexpected,” my mother always said. She meant that as a fair warning, as a reminder to be careful because life isn’t easy or fair. My mother wasn’t wrong. But could expecting the unexpected also be a call to mindfulness and a deeper awareness of what can happen when we pay attention?
Join us for a contemplative yet refreshing service about what the Christmas story can mean for us today. We will hear sacred scripture, modern poetry, special music by our fabulous choir, a Christmas sermon, sing lots of carols and light our beautiful candles. All are invited to stay and enjoy the candlelight after the service has ended.
In this shorter service geared toward children and families, we will hear the Christmas story, sing carols, pray, and light hand-held candles together. Everyone is invited to bring cookies to share after the service!
This time of year we remember and celebrate holidays about miraculous light shining in time of darkness. Join us this week as we worship in new and unexpected ways and consider how to hold onto hope before the miracle. This is a service for all ages.
The Winter Solstice is a time to journey inward and reflect on the lessons, joys, and sorrows from the past year. It is also a time to celebrate the light and darkness that is in each of us. Join us for a time of readings, reflection, songs, stillness, and ritual in honor of the Solstice.
There’s an old line that religion isn’t just fire insurance — that is, it’s more than just a way to avoid eternal flames in hell. A deep, healthy spiritual foundation can help us be ready for things we could never have seen coming, good and bad. Our community aims to teach skills, foster resilience, and create relationships that strengthen us all.
This week we will hear the story of how two people with different perspectives listened deeply to one another, and how the experience empowered them in different ways. We will celebrate as our Board President changes her name and consider deeply how we are all called to listen and respond when love makes a change or a boundary.
For many, the season of Advent is about waiting—in a period of holy discontent—for something greater than our imaginings to pull the world out of confusion and suffering. Often that power is discerned only by listening through the din of the holidays to the quiet message of hope coming to the world.
Rev. Bret Lortie currently serves as an Air Force chaplain at Travis AFB. He has served two Unitarian Universalist congregations as Senior Minister—in Evanston, Illinois, and San Antonio, Texas—and prior to ministry was a magazine editor for the Chicago Sun Times and the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists. Rev. Lortie is married to Cindy Lortie and in his spare time plays trombone in the Solano Winds.
