Our community is on summer break; we should be starting Sunday services again after Labour Day, but check out the July Newsletter for summer activities. Notre communauté fait relâche entre la Fête nationale et la fête du Travail, mais consultez le Newsletter du mois de juillet pour les activités estivales.
Please note this special evening time to join us for our annual Christmas Eve service. This year back in the Sanctuary. We will hear our Lakeshore Community Choir, share memorable stories for all ages, and we will sing our favourite Christmas carols.
Please come out in person to be together and to enjoy “The Most Wonderful Time of the Year!”
Several dynamic and outstanding women from Lakeshore Unitarian Universalist Congregation and the community at large will speak about their work toward building a better and more equitable world while others light candles in memory of the fourteen bright, young women who were killed at the Polytechnique on December 6th, 1989. One additional candle will be lit for the countless women who continue to be victims of violence.
Our Lakeshore Community Choir will sing. We are honoured to have as our special guest Brigitte Garceau, MLA for Robert Baldwin.
Margaret Mead once said something about the United States which also holds true about Canada: “Mourning has become unfashionable in the United States. The bereaved are supposed to pull themselves together as quickly as possible and to reweave the torn fabric of life. … we do not allow … for the weeks and months during which a loss is realized – a beautiful word that suggests the transmutation of the strange into something that is one’s own.”
Margaret Mead alludes to grief as something both personal and communal.
Francis Weller, a wise elder in the field of grief work, has taught a much-needed antidote to the “memorialize and get back to work” process that Mead laments. I think she would appreciate Weller’s “FIVE (or SIX), GATES OF GRIEF transmutation process.
Adedeji (Ade for short) is the Community Outreach Worker for Beaconsfield United Church’s (BUC) Refugee Integration and Support Program, which has been a focus of that congregation for over four years and helped over 450 refugees from West Africa. Ade will speak of how he came to be in Canada from Nigeria and the important work he and others at BUC are doing.
The concept of multigenerational co-housing originated in Denmark in the 1960s. Co-housing residents of all ages live in their own homes or apartments while sharing common spaces and caring for each other. Wonderful examples can be found right across.
Kate Coulter, social worker and social activist shares her knowledge and significant interest in the undeniable benefits of co-housing.
Belonging can be thought of as a “longing to be.” Being is our capacity to find our deeper purpose in all that we do. It is the capacity to be present, and to discover our authentic, whole selves. This is both an individual capacity, and a community capacity. Community is the container within which our “longing to be” is fulfilled. Come join Rabbi Sherril Gilbert as she returns to share stories, insights, and reflections on what it might mean to build a community that warmly welcomes and deeply values belonging and inclusion.
We are meeting formally for the first time after the summer hiatus. Our technical assistant (Oddbjorn) is not available to execute a ZOOM service this week, so it seems like the perfect time to share in person our over-the-summer updates. Have you had an impactful summer, whose content you are still digesting, or did you enjoy time for contemplation and a slower pace? We build our sense of belonging here, as part of LUUC, each in our individual way, through sharing our experiences.
Paule Mauffette écrit : J’ai enseigné l’histoire constitutionnelle du Canada au cégep Ahuntsic pendant près de 20 ans. L’analyse de l’histoire de notre hymne national de même que la comparaison entre l’hymne en français et l’hymne en anglais reflètent bien les tumultes de notre histoire et nous font comprendre la nature même du pays dans lequel nous vivons.
I am a retired history teacher from Cegep Ahuntsic and my main subject was the history of the Canadian constitution. We can discover through the analysis of the different anthems in French and in English a country with a tumultuous history that makes Canada so special.
Clifford Lincoln writes: As we gather in peace to celebrate love for one another and understanding among all peoples, we cannot but turn our thoughts towards those countless innocent fellow human-beings who, at this very hour, are the victims of the indescribable savagery and senseless brutality of war. And I could not help thinking of an episode in my own life’s experience involving Russia in another autocratic era of oppression and cruelty, and a remarkable Russian citizen, Vera Parnes, who defying the injustice of an all-powerful regime, became a living symbol of freedom and liberty for oppressed peoples.
