Celebrate!
September brings the Jewish New Year, Rosh Hashana, and also the new school year for many of us. That new year for school is our theme this month, but the holidays below include the Muslim time of fasting and reflection during Ramadan, and the pagan celebration of the second harvest at the autumn equinox.
Click on a link below for information, stories, recipes and more related to the different holidays
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We Honor… |
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| In honor of the start of the school year for many of us, this month we honor Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, an educator who opened the first English-language kindergarten in the United States. Long before most educators, Peabody understood that playing is an important part of how children learn and grow.
Peabody was a teacher, writer, and an important person in the Transcendental movement, which reshaped Unitarianism in the 1800s. She edited The Dial , the main literary publication of the movement, for two years. During 1834-1835, she worked as assistant teacher to Bronson Alcott, another famous Transcendentalist Unitarian, at his famous experimental Temple School in Boston.
After the school closed, Peabody published Record of a School , outlining the plan of the school and Alcott's ideas of early childhood education, which had learned from on German models. When she opened her kindergarten in 1860, the idea of providing formal schooling for children younger than six was practiced only in Germany. Through her own kindergarten, and as editor of the Kindergarten Messenger (1873-77), Peabody helped establish kindergarten as an accepted practice in U.S. education. She also wrote many books in support of the cause.
Elizabeth Peabody's sisters, Mary and Sophia, were also important Transcendentalist Unitarians, who worked in a variety of ways, especially education, to make the world a better place. Find out more about all three sisters. |
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Act!
This month, as we celebrate education and learning, might be a good time to look into ways that you can be an educator yourself. If you have a topic you're really good at in school or a special skill, maybe you want to share some of that learning or those skills with someone who might need a little help. Maybe your school or local library has a tutoring program you could volunteer for, to help other kids with math or language, or to help with homework. Maybe you have a friend who struggles with a subject your really enjoy, and you can share some tips about what works for you. Maybe you're really good at soccer or dance or gymnastics or baseball and you could help out with a class or team for younger kids. Maybe you have a younger brother or sister who would love to learn to jump rope or throw a ball or read the way you do, and you could help them learn.
Just remember, often people feel awkward about getting helped, or they may feel like you're acting like you're smarter than they are. So before you try teaching someone, you have to make sure they want to learn what you have to teach. And it's important to encourage their efforts, even if they can't do something perfectly. |
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Nurturing Your Spirit
"Hospitality" is a spiritual practice that belongs to all religions. Hospitality is about welcoming people, making friends and strangers feel included and taken care of. Judaism talks about being kind to strangers as Jews remember their own religious history of being "strangers in the land of Egypt." Sikh temples have four doors, one on each side of the building, signaling that anyone who wishes to enter is welcome. Muslims regard hospitality to strangers as being at the heart of who they are.
Hospitality is an especially important spiritual practice to remember at the beginning of the school year, when there may be people who are new to your school, or unfamiliar with those in your class. You can practice hospitality by making a point of talking with someone you don't know, or inviting them to join you in a game on the playground. You can keep an eye out at lunchtime for someone who is sitting by themselves, and ask if they'd like to join you. You can introduce your friends to someone they might not know, and work on making the circle of friendship bigger. Not only do our hearts and spirits grow as we make the effort to meet new people and make new friends, we also get the opportunity to have a lot more fun! |
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Practicing the Principles
Unitarian Universalists tend to be very big on learning. One way you can tell is that our third Unitarian Universalist principle is a "Free and responsible search for truth and meaning." This means that we think each person needs be constantly trying to learn and grow. We believe that each person needs to work out for themselves what they believe about the big questions of life. We learn from the beliefs of others, and respect opinions that might be different than our own, but we know that throughout our whole lives we need to keep figuring out what we believe for ourselves, and why.
To practice this principle at home you might want to choose one thing that you really want to learn about, or a big question that you want to give some time to thinking about. For instance, our second "Ask CLiF" question below comes from someone who is wondering "What is spirit?"
Your "search for truth and meaning" might involve writing about or drawing a picture about what you think God is, or what you think happens after people die, or why you think that people need to be here on this planet to begin with. Or you could use the internet to find out more about what other UUs or people from other religions believe about a topic that interests you. You might find our RE Index of Resources a useful tool in looking for what stuff the CLF website might have on your topic. Or just get a parent's permission to go online and try typing words related to your subject into a search engine such as Google, and see what you come up with. But remember—what you read online is just expressing somebody's point of view. Once you read it, you have to decide for yourself whether you think it makes sense. |
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Ask CLiF
Ask CLiF any questions you have about religion or living
a good life.
Dear CLiF,
My friends want to know what my religion is but I don't know what to say. I barely know what it is either. If I could ever even get to tell them exactly what it is, I need it in kid language so fourth graders could understand. Could you please help me with this?
Thanks,
—Emma
Dear Emma,
Believe me, there are a lot of people with this question, including a lot of adult UUs. Here are a couple of answers you can try. Of course, what works best is your own answer, but I know it's good to have help.
One thing I like to say is:
Most religions are designed to give people answers to the big questions like "What am I here for?" and "What happens when you die?" But Unitarian Universalists think that there is no single, guaranteed right answer for any of these big questions, so we have a church that is a community of people who are searching together for the best answers they can find. We're willing to listen to answers from all of the world's religions, as well as to what each other person thinks, but in the end each of us has to make up our own mind.
Or a different take might be to say:
Some religions worry a lot about what happens after you die, and whether you are "saved." But Unitarian Universalists worry more about what we do while we are living, and so our religion focuses more on things like respecting all people, working for a just world and remembering that our lives are connected to all of nature.
Or you might want to take a look at this summer's issue of uu&me!, (http://www.uua.org/clf/uume/0606/) which is all about just your question.
—CLiF
Dear CLiF,
I was reading about Nurturing the Spirit today on here. What is the "spirit"?
Dear Inquiring Mind,
Your question is definitely one of those big religious questions that nobody has one, clear, right answer for. But let me do my best. When I talk about nurturing the spirit, I mean paying attention to that part of yourself which understands that you are connected in some mysterious way to all the other beings of the earth. It is the part of you that you feel when you see something really wonderful and amazing, like a double rainbow or a brand-new baby. It is the part of you that somehow feels bigger when you do something really nice for another person or for our planet. Mostly the ways that religions around the world have found to get in touch with that sense of "spirit" have to do with getting quiet and paying attention—although there are some spiritual practices like singing and drumming that might involve being kind of loud, but still paying attention.
—CLiF
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