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.
All the services are listed at the beginning of the monthly Newsletter.
Please click on NEWSLETTERS in the top Menu of this HOME page to obtain the latest issue.
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!”
As the New Year approaches, let’s look to Buddhist and Hindu calendars and cultures for acknowledgment and celebration of new beginnings. What other traditional forms meet the universal need for hope and resilience throughout the year?
Milda Graham is a Religious Studies scholar at McGill with a focus on South Asian traditions such as yoga, and the Sanskrit language.
Marlene Hale has just returned to Montreal from her Wet’suet’en territory in BC. She had brought a Human Rights lawyer from Montreal there to meet with Hereditary Chiefs, and both sides of the pipeline. “I got to see at first hand the atrocity it has caused our people of Smithers BC and Witset as preparations resumed to tunnel under the Morice River [Wedzin Kwa] south of Houston BC, as construction of its natural gas pipeline from northeastern B.C. to the LNG Canada liquefied natural gas facility now underway at Kitimat continues.” Marlene will give an update on the Coastal Gas Link and its impact on the Wet’suwet’en Nation.
She will speak about our Fossil Fuel Addiction, which is supported by Canada’s largest fossil fuel investor – RBC. “RBC must be accountable to their direct contributions to the endangerment of Indigenous Title and Rights.”
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.
Come join us for an overview of the technology of “Fusion Energy”, and what it may offer for the future.
The search for an inexhaustible and safe energy source is the holy grail of energy research.
Recent advances are promising, but more challenges have yet to be conquered.
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.
Heather has been a member of Lakeshore for over 40 years. With war raging in Europe, her thoughts returned to her childhood days in London in the 1940s – where she sees certain parallels. Cities destroyed, people fleeing, mothers clutching their children, fathers and brothers joining the armed forces to rid their country of a pernicious enemy – led by a charismatic leader.
It never occurred to her at the time – and for many years after – that this experience had ‘affected’ her in any way – but of course it did. She will talk about children caught up in war.
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.
