This week, we have a special guest, ministerial intern Brigitta Vieyra, writing this week’s Notes From Your Dance Partner column.
It is a delight to be written into the dance card for this week’s edition of Notes from Your Dance Partner.
As a new teaching congregation, all of us will be learning, growing, and “humaning” together in this new adventure of what it means to nourish the next generation of faith leaders in our tradition. As a seminarian finishing the last stretch of my theological education, the notes I desire to share with all of you are of the field note kind. Field notes inviting you into my observations, curiosities and shared learnings along the way.
We’ll start with my first field note –– my first in-person impression of UUCP! Last Tuesday, I started to get acclimated as your Ministerial Intern. Before any formal meetings or tours of the church, I found myself standing outside the building and being enraptured by the presence of its grounds.
UUCP is on the traditional lands of the Akimel O’odham and Hohokam people. It is a landscape that captured the full body of my attention, bringing me into the here and now. I inhaled. I exhaled. An alluring scent from a purple-blossomed plant settled the anxious nerves in my temples. The gravel stones lovingly massaged the stress stored in the soles in my shoes. The radiating sun gently washed away the tension in my shoulders. My rib cage expanded with slower, deeper breathing and in that tranquil moment, I found myself humming a UU hymn. As I finished the tune, a smile beamed across my face. So this is what they mean in the last line of the song, I thought. This is how it feels somatically in my body for “we feel the power of each other’s faith, then our heart is in a holy place.”
My heart is in a holy place.
I hope to see you this Sunday at the Celebration for Neighborhoods Party after the service. I’ll be there and am looking forward to hearing more about the places in this area that make your heart expand, too.
This week, may you be nourished by the abundance of beauty inside you and around you and find yourself anew in a whole/holy place.
-Brigitta Vieyra
Ministerial Intern