Saturday, March 21, 2020

Hello friends!

Last week Rev. Aija, Emily, Pam and I (along with brave lay worship associate Chris) had the… let’s say “thrilling”… experience of completely re-vamping a worship service that had been weeks in planning, and arranging to bring the UUCV community an online worship experience via Zoom.  Between Thursday morning and Sunday, we scrapped the music, readings, and sermon we’d planned to offer, and designed a brand-new service that we hoped would both comfort and energize our community in the face of much uncertainty. If you were among the fifty or so households who joined us that morning, thank you.  Seeing so many familiar faces—even in tiny thumbnails on a large-screen computer monitor propped on a card table—was a moving experience for me.  The Sanctuary, though there were only four human bodies in the room, felt full of love and warmth.

This week we’ve had a little more notice, though we’re still on a learning curve (and frankly, the universe keeps throwing curve balls, so we’re trying not to get too attached to any of our “best-laid plans”).  We do hope you’ll join us—again, or for the first time—as we worship again by Zoom tomorrow.

You will probably want to bookmark https://uucv.org/virtual in your favorite browser.

Clicking the picture of the laptop at the top of that page will take you directly to our “Virtual Community” Zoom channel.  That’s where we’ll gather on Sundays at 10:30 for worship, and during the week for pastoral care and other “office hour”-type conversations.  Whatever new information we have about our virtual life will be updated on that page as well as broadcast through our website and Facebook.

We’ll be doing our best, within the boundaries of ethics and copyright law, to display lyrics to the songs we sing together in worship as we’re singing them, but if you would prefer to have a hard-copy hymnal in your hands, we’ll be organizing volunteers to distribute resources to UUCV community members in the days to come.  You can request these resources by completing this Google form.  (There’s also a link to that form at the bottom of the “virtual” page you bookmarked above.)

In any case, while it may at first seem odd to sing hymns while sitting at your computer,  I hope you’ll bravely sing along with me during these “virtual community” worship experiences.  There’s a kind of magic in drawing breath together, and exhaling together to create beautiful, meaningful harmony.  I felt that magic even through that large-screen computer monitor last week, and I look forward to feeling it again tomorrow, and the week after that, and the week after that… until we meet (in person) again.

We need you more than you know.