Dear Friends,
Thank you for your generous and thoughtful contribution to the Ministers’ Discretionary Fund. Thank you for the holiday cards and notes. Thank you for the gifts for the CATCH program in memory of Ed Bryce, and the memorial gifts in honor of Greg Fried.
Thank you for your thoughtful, sensitive comments to me — your caring concern.
While I’m at it, I want to thank you, too, for your pledge to our budget for year 2000, and your continued support of the Capital Fund which enabled us to convert the former parsonage to classrooms, a wonderful Youth Room and all-purpose meeting space. I often worry that you are not thanked enough — I want you to know how you are appreciated!
Our Youth Group and older children in the church school have been in the new space for a few weeks now. It’s wonderful! We had planned a dedication event but have had to postpone it until the new glass is put in the Walt Northup room, and the new roof is completed. Soon!
Now we’re ready to start planning the next project — the West Wing renovation.
I told you about Thandeka, who teaches at our seminary at Meadville with John Tolley. She will be with us for the weekend of February 12, preaching on Sunday morning, and meeting with those of us who want to talk with her about her insightful book, Becoming White in America, and those who are interested in her provocative ideas about racism in America and our own Unitarian Universalist work in the area of racial justice.
As I understand her book and her ideas about racism, Thandeka wants us to move beyond the notion of blame. She’s not into generalized guilt. She’s into thoughtful understanding, without which there is no real change for the better.
I hope you’ll plan to be here on Sunday, February 13. We’re arranging opportunities for folks to gather in less formal settings with her, and with one another. This is a very important issue for us as a nation, as Unitarian Universalists, and as people struggling with important issues of peace and justice.
Forty years ago Martin Luther King, Jr. said: “Modern psychology has a word that is probably used more than any other word. It is the word maladjusted. Now we all should seek to avoid neurotic personalities. But there are some things within our social order to which I am proud to be maladjusted and to which I call upon you to be maladjusted. I never intend to adjust myself to segregation and discrimination. I never intend to adjust myself to mob rule and violence. God grant that we will be so maladjusted that we will be able to go out and change our world and our civilization.”
I hope you are well. I hope the flu hasn’t hit you and your family — or, if it has, that you are doing okay now. Take care. I hope to see you soon.
Yours, Frank
