Thanks to all who gathered to mark the beginning of a new Lenten season with fellowship around a fire in the garden.

Thanks so much to all the volunteers who came to help in the garden this past weekend!

The youth kicked off the new year with their annual game night complete with pizza, board games, ice cream sundaes, ping-pong, and of course, flashlight sardines. *A huge thank you to Jane Epstein for the ping pong table and to David Sedlock for helping to transport it to the church!

More night time fun was shared at the Davis Farmland Mega Maze where we played a variety of lawn games, jumped on inflatables, pet and fed farm animals, braved the corn maze with flashlights, and enjoyed food and company around the campfires.

Faith exploration has also begun again. Our traditional “Sink a Worry, Float a Hope” ritual helps to set the stage for a year of self-reflection in light of God’s promise to walk with us always. And the beautiful weather has allowed us to experiment with different kinds of centering prayer, including a walk through the labyrinth in our Welcome Garden.

Thanks be to God for the lives of these amazing teenagers, for the adults who walk with them every day, and for the world which is blessed by their voices and visions.

On an absolutely gorgeous first Sunday of Pentecost, we celebrated our graduating seniors, thanked our talented teaching staff and Children’s Ministries members moving onto different roles, welcomed the Rev. Dr. Jim Antal as our guest preacher calling us to action on climate change, had a ridiculously fun time playing games in Sunday school, and enjoyed the sunshine outside with watermelon and ice cream. Such a perfect way to end our programming year at WCUC. Enjoy the pics!

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• Playing Up Cup Down Cup!

Thanks to everyone who helped clean up the church and parsonage grounds on May 4th!

Belated thanks to everyone who helped prepare for and host our Open House! It was a wonderful day connecting with each other and with visitors. See photos below!

As I was walking up from my house to the Welcome Garden last Saturday, I was joined     by a woman who had moved recently to the neighborhood. She noticed that I was carrying pruners and garden gloves and asked me where I was going. I explained. Her response was music to my ears. “Is that the place with the labyrinth? It is so wonderful; it’s like an open ministry to the whole community.” That, of course, is what we had prayed for when we imagined and created the Welcome Garden.

On Saturday, spring cleanup day at WCUC, a team of gardeners went to work in our Welcome Garden with loppers and rakes, hedge clippers and gloved hands to spruce up the area for Holy Week and the coming season. The winter, harsh as it was, had not left a great deal of damage. Indeed, all that snow cover probably protected the plants. Once leaf litter was cleared away, we saw ample evidence of new growth.

Indoors, a companion team cleaned out closets, cleaned and straightened up the meeting places in the building. As we did in the garden, I believe they too looked around at the end of the morning and felt grateful that so many hands had once again made our sacred and beloved home a “Welcome Place.”

~Polly

Walkers on the labyrinth in the WCUC Welcome Garden

Usually, when people talk about walking around in circles, they mean they’re not getting anywhere. Remember the Winnie the Pooh story, where Piglet and Pooh traipse round and round a little copse of woods in search of Woozles, only to have Christopher Robin point out that the prints they were so fearfully tracking were actually their own?

Unlike Pooh and Piglet, visitors to our Welcome Garden walk around in circles quite intentionally — pacing around our stone labyrinth in a kinetic prayer, a deliberate slowing, a meditative journey. There’s something about winding along the twisting circuits that calms the mind and restores the spirit.

A book I’m reading, Labyrinths from the Outside In: Walking to Spiritual Insight, by the Revs. Donna Schaper and Carole Ann Camp, offers up a spiritual perspective on the ancient practice of walking a labyrinth. “Many of us live life walking in circles without much intention,” they write. “We feel a little caught, trapped, encumbered: we make our next move because somebody else or some other thing mades its move.” But walking a labyrinth is different: “Here we walk in a circle with much intention. We let the circle guide us as we guide our feet. We un-know. We untangle. We twist and turn toward peace, away from powerlessness.”

Think about walking the labyrinth as “the spiritual acknowledgment of life’s ups and downs, ins and outs,” they say, and recognize what the labyrinth shows us: “that in every end there is a beginning.”

Beautiful.

See you in the garden! –KC