Making music, making peace

Today was an annual tradition in the Unitarian Universalist Church of Kent called "Music Sunday" wherein the musical talent of the congregation is called upon to provide music as a form of worship. These annual affairs attract a wide variety of talents (and some not-so-talented but well meaning musicians) to perform an entire service of music ranging from the improvisational to classical. It's always entertaining even when the music being performed isn't so good. It's nice to see people being brave enough to put themselves forward and offer some kind of music that comes from their hearts, even if it's not that well done. I've always balked at the idea of public performance, as music has long been a very private pursuit of mine. Our music director is an incredibly talented singer-songwriter who has been performing in and around the Kent area for many long years, and frankly, he's so good that it rather intimidates me at times. Only once so far have I ever performed music for the church, and that was during a service called "This I Believe", which was the culmination of two intense terms of the study of personal theology as a part of our adult religious exploration series. Since music is so much a part of who I am, it was decided that I'd sing a song I wrote several years ago at a music camp in West Virginia that I go to each and every year. Our music director was in the audience and I was thoroughly intimidated putting out something I wrote for the entire congregation to hear. It's one thing when you perform a piece of someone else's music; it's yet another thing to perform your own work. This is a part of you that is being put out there for all to hear, and it's deeply personal. That our music director does this on a regular basis awes me, because it seems like he can write a song for an upcoming service in a mere one week's time and it's always excellent. I struggle sometimes just to write something that at times can take years to craft. Oh, if I pressure myself enough, I can write a song in one week's time, but then I have to go back and do a bit of editing and tweaking before I am actually happy with it. And even then, I'm never fully satisfied that it's good enough. So that is why I've so far never volunteered to perform at Music Sunday. I prefer to see other people submit themselves to the pressure and I can sit back and enjoy the spectacle of it all.

During the first service, I went, as I usually do, to the Adult Religious Exploration class. Today and last week, we worked on the next Study/Action issue put forth by the Commission on Social Witness, the social justice arm of the Unitarian Universalist Association. Study/Action issues are worked on by congregations around the nation, then brought to our annual General Assembly, where further work is done on them until a resolution is crafted, then voted on. In years past, this process has taken two years, but there was a recent vote to extend that to four years as a way to encourage more congregations to participate in this process. The current Study/Action issue is on Peacemaking, and our congregation has the honor to have been chosen as one of the churches to lead this issue. We are known as an activist congregation, even as small as we are compared to some congregations around the nation. So last week, we looked at some of the proposed categories in the realm of Peacemaking and a description of what those categories involved and encompassed, and today we crafted our congregation's response to them that will be taken to this year's General Assembly in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida. What they will do with our responses is anybody's guess, but I think that we came up with some very good answers to what they were seeking from congregations. The thing that concerns me is the fact that this process was changed to four years in order to encourage more congregations to get involved, and Study/Action issues now need at least 25% participation from churches nationwide in order to be viable and to make it to the final vote at the end of four years. If this does not happen, the issue is dead. While this topic is rather broad and occasionally confusing, as a result of spending the past two Sundays discussing this with our District Leader for Denominational Affairs leading these discussions, I have a much greater handle on what the Commission on Social Witness is trying to say by this Study/Action issue. It's tremendously important for this thing to go the distance and to end up on a final vote at GA in 2010. If it doesn't make it, I, for one, will be terribly disappointed. As I am sure others who worked on this will be as well.