Each month we feature a spiritual theme (see below) which we weave into Sunday worship, Religious Exploration and many of our small groups and gatherings. Each month’s theme is also highlighted in the aesthetic elements of the sanctuary. We send out the theme resources found here (eadings, spiritual exercises, and reflection questions) in an monthly worship email so you can explore the theme on your own or with your family members and friends. These theme resources come from the Soul Matters Sharing Circle,  a UU theme-based program with more than 140 UU subscribers.

Social Justice Monthly Plate Partners

Each month we introduce our Plate Partner , an organization whose work and mission are connected with our UU social justice mission and values. Rev. Sara and the Social Justice Council often explore additional opportunities through collaborative programming (ex: book discussion, arts opportunity, issue forum, workshop etc). For more information about the plate partners below, please visit our plate partner webpage.

March 2026 Spiritual Theme:

Welcome to Paying Attention   

Alice Walker famously wrote, “I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don’t notice it.”

Walker’s words are a beautiful reminder that attention and gratitude go hand in hand. Indeed they are a perfect embodiment of the dominant understanding of attention: that it’s here to wake us up to life’s many gifts.

But dig a little deeper and you discover that attention has a few additional and ulterior motives up its sleeve. So, friends, we want to give fair warning right here at the start. We want you to be ready for all that attention has in store for you. You see, the truth is, attention won’t just make you grateful, it will make you fall in love. And it won’t just enable you to notice life’s gifts, it also will make it impossible to ignore life’s pain.

So, first, the part about falling in love.

Mary Oliver wrote, “Attention is the beginning of devotion.” It’s an essential reminder that we cannot love someone or something that we do not fully see. Glances and self-interested attention never get to the real person or thing. They keep us on the surface of things and treat the other as a mirror. What we fall in love with, in such cases, is what we want from them and how we want them to make us feel. Which means that all we’ve really done is fall in love with ourselves and our own longings.

Attention wants more for us than this. It wants us to learn that truly loving someone or something requires the difficult work of noticing our wants and then putting them down. This kind of love asks us to look without expectation of who or what we hope the other will be, an act that mystic and philosopher, Simone Weil, calls self-emptying. It’s a type of looking that keeps on looking until we discover something entirely new, entirely other, entirely unique. And once we notice that stunning uniqueness, we’re in trouble, because it will completely reshuffle our desires and devotions. It will knock us to our knees. Nothing will seem as important or precious as the particularity of the other. We will want nothing more than to ensure that the other feels seen.  And we will come to know this as love.

Now, what about attention and pain? What does attention want from us in this regard?

Well, this time it’s a UU minister, Rev. Sean Dennison, that best guides us on our way. Rev. Sean writes “The ability to see beauty is the beginning of our moral sensibility. What we believe is beautiful we will not wantonly destroy.” In other words, seeing the beauty of something comes with a commitment. You don’t just think to yourself “Oh, that’s pretty,” you think “My God, I must protect it.” Its survival becomes your survival. Its pain becomes your pain.

All of which is to say, yes, you can expect to leave this month feeling grateful, but you should also be prepared to feel altered. To understand attention as a doorway into love and pain, is to understand that the work of attention is not just about realizing all we’ve been given; It’s also a reminder that to look, to really look, is to risk being re-ordered. And made larger, as devotion to others and the pain of others displace the smallness of love of self.

And maybe in the end, that’s what we should be most grateful for: the way looking, almost always, leaves us larger.

Plate Partner: Jesse Tree

Jesse Tree provides financial assistance and case management to households at risk of eviction. Case management includes landlord mediation, budgeting help, and housing stability planning, while financial assistance catches people up on the rent that they owe.

Jesse Tree’s History

Jesse Tree was created in 1999 out of direct conversations with people experiencing homelessness. Our founders asked members of the homeless community how they ended up there, and they heard the same story over and over again: people had a difficult, unexpected circumstance come up and got to a place where they couldn’t pay their rent, got evicted, and became homeless. Our founders pooled together funding to give it to people when they needed it most, to keep them in their homes.

When our founders came up with the idea to prevent homelessness, they did national research to see if anyone else was already doing the work. They found an organization called Jesse Tree in Galveston, Texas, visited them, and brought their programs back to Boise, Idaho. Although Jesse Tree is a secular organization, “Jesse Tree” is originally known as the genealogical tree of Jesus in the Bible.

Over 20 years later, Jesse Tree remains true to our original mission: to prevent eviction and homelessness by supporting our neighbors at risk of housing loss, empowering them to stay in their homes.