Dear Friends, I’ve been carefully un-wrapping a wonderful gift.

Dear Friends, We ease into the Christmas-Hannukah season with some sense of caution. We need to avoid putting too much pressure on ourselves and one another – to avoid setting too high a standard for the holidays.

Dear Friends, Thanksgiving is a religious holiday – it’s where the secular meets the sacred and merges into something more than either can be alone. It’s pure poetry.

Dear Friends, The staff has been meeting regularly to talk together about ways we can create a more caring community within the congregation. One of our newest members, Jim Francek, has been helping us to develop a program that will help deliver on our affirmation’s promise ‘to help one another.’

Dear Friends, Our Partner Church delegation of ten arrived ten days ago, on Friday the 9th, and were greeted at a pot luck supper at the church on Saturday night as they began their adjustment to the change of time zones – jet lag – and some dramatic changes in environment – culture shock!

Dear Friends, Monday, October 12, marks the first anniversary of the death of my companion and colleague, Dick Drinon; it’s also the 13th anniversary of my marriage to Lory, at which Dick co-officiated.

Dear Friends, We had spectacular September weather for our Homecoming Sunday, and a wonderful, positive, sunny human climate – there was a great energy and sense of enthusiasm as we gathered on the front lawn, welcomed everyone, introduced our staff and distributed symbols of our religious heritage, then processed together into the sanctuary, nearly 400 […]

Dear Friends, Sunday we will celebrate our homecoming service, beginning outside on the lawn and processing in together.  There are lots of famous homecoming stories. Homer’s Odyssey is one of the oldest and most well-known – the Iliad, Homer’s first, is the leaving-home story; the Odyssey is the story of Odysseus’s journey home after the […]

Dear Friends, The Reverend Arnold Farrow Westwood died on Sunday, August 16 at age 88.

Dear Friends, One of the things I appreciate about the summer break from sermon preparation is the opportunity to read things that have nothing to do with work. Of course everything connects and even a fiction book brings ideas worth pulpit time.