Chalice Circle Session Topics 2019 – 2020

 Download topic schedule using this link

This statement expresses the difference we hope to make through the Chalice Circle program uses the UUAA Core Values statement as an organizing framework.

Spiritual life
Chalice Circles actively support members, friends and visitors of this congregation in their journeys toward spiritual growth and self-knowledge. They provide small groups in which individuals can share and reflect on their own experiences, and benefit from hearing the experiences of others.
People find Chalice Circles to be important worshipful experiences in which they share the power of collective spiritual experience and have opportunities for personal transformation.

Social Justice and Environmental Action
The Chalice Circle curriculum developed for each program year includes at least one topic that encourages the development of participants' social justice consciousness.

Chalice Circles develop people's skills at listening, understanding and speaking their truth in a group united by a mutually created covenant. All of these skills contribute to the development of peace and justice in the wider community.

Community
Chalice Circles create and foster community by providing an intentionally welcoming and safe environment where all feel valued and cared for. Participants are given the opportunity to form meaningful connections with one another. We foster a climate of purposeful inclusion of all regardless of gender, age, race, ethnicity, national origin, disability, sexual orientation, gender identity, financial means, education, or political perspective. We live together in peace, search for truth in love, and help one another.

 While we have not yet publicized the Chalice Circle program outside the congregation, we do actively welcome and include visitors. Chalice Circles are one of the strongest mechanisms for incorporating new entrants into the community of the congregation. They thereby promote and make Unitarian Universalism available to those who request it.

Stewardship
The Chalice Circle program supports wise stewardship through its recruiting, training, and support of leaders during their period of service.

Recruiting
We require that Chalice Circle facilitators be members of the congregation (though exceptions are currently granted). This requirement promotes the importance of membership and the increased emotional and moral commitment members have made to the values and practices of the UUAA community.

Training
We make good use of our facilitators' time by providing a well thought out, well presented training that prepares them to succeed in their work. Training and experience in the Chalice Circle program also equips lay leaders for effective service in other areas of congregational life.

Support
We provide ongoing practical support and community for our facilitators through monthly meetings patterned after the Chalice Circle meetings as well as one-on-one conversations with the program co-chairs and/or supporting minister. The Chalice Circle program deepens people's sense of connection and commitment to the congregation and Unitarian Universalism through service projects and volunteer appreciation.

Service Projects
Each Chalice Circle performs a service project that enhances the well being of the wider congregational community. With gratitude, we appreciate the Chalice Circle for their service project work and model mutual appreciation of all contributions to the good of the congregation.

Volunteer Appreciation
We regularly and formally appreciate our facilitators and other leaders. We support their spiritual development, the development of their skills for use elsewhere, and their ability to express appreciation of others. This recognition also extends to the overall program.

Active Continual Program Evaluation
We consistently and frequently seek feedback from program leaders and participants. This insures that the Chalice Circle program is responsive to the needs of the congregation. We have identified the need to seek program feedback from people not participating in the program.

1.5 Culture
In their design and functioning, Chalice Circles embody the core principles and values of this congregation and Unitarian Universalism.
The core truth of Chalice Circles is that we learn and grow from our differences. The curriculum always intentionally includes at least one session overtly focused on one of the UU Principles or Sources. Through this we express the value we place on our connections-past, present and future, to the Unitarian Universalist world network.

Recall a time when you were filled with joy. Where were you? At home? At a concert? A party? Maybe you were in a religious service or on vacation. Perhaps you were on a hike or seated on the sand at a beach, watching the tide roll in. Were you alone or was someone with you? Maybe you were making love, or gardening, telling a joke, jogging.

Now pay attention to how you recalled this time. You found things: memories, sensations, experiences. You gathered them together and by so doing filled a moment of time. You packed it full of thoughts and feelings, places and things and bound them together as yours.

This recollection and binding process is a spiritual act. It is your ability to open up time by giving it the texture, content, feelings and ideas actually present when you experience time. This way of packing time, this way of giving time texture, detail and dimension, this saturation of time is the essence of every spiritual practice. This process slows time down by filling it up with the full presence of life as one extended lived duration-one full moment of your life.

Small group ministries are about this spiritual practice. They make moments matter again. In these small group gatherings of six to ten persons meeting twice a month, each member of the group holds onto the same moment of time through personal sharing and by asking for or by listening to the details of someone's experiences. As persons pay active attention to the small details of each other's lives, this gathered community extends a moment of time until it is filled to overflowing with the thoughts and feelings, ideas and sentiments that turn time into an experience that is not fleeting, but abides, because we are now fully present in each moment of our lives.

Sacred time begins here.

The opening ritual at the beginning of each covenant group meeting calls forth this time by creating it. As the members sing a song together, light a chalice, offer a prayer, pay attention to their breath, notice the sounds in the room, hear their own heart beating, feel the rhythmic breathing of each member become one unified breath, sacred time begins: the time when how we do something, the manner in which we say something, the tone of voice we use when speaking are as important as what is done, said, or discussed.

We must understand sacred time because it is the heart and soul of small group ministry. Let me be clear here. Sacred time is not the opposite of profane time. Sacred time is the opposite of fleeting time. Fleeting time is the kind of time in which we are distracted, racing around and trying to catch up as we fall farther behind. It's the kind of time that passes when we sit in a worship service--isolated and remote at the back of the sanctuary and off to one side--so that we can balance our check book. Fleeting time is working at the computer while a friend talks to us on the phone. On the other hand, sacred time is noticing a shift of tone in a person's voice and asking what's wrong. It's paying attention to what's going on when it occurs. It's being in the moment. It's full presence. It's what happens in a Covenant Group when we discover how to find and stay present to life again.

Sacred time is biological time. When we pay attention to biological time, we focus on the science and the art of spiritual practice.

Let's begin with the science, as described by Dr. Stephan Rechtschaffen, who is a physician, author, and co-founder of the Omega Institute, the largest holistic education center in the country.

In his essay called "Timeshifting," Dr. Rechtschaffen begins his scientific investigation with a simple question: "Do you have enough time in your life?" Few persons in his workshops and seminars answer this question affirmatively. At a Fortune 100 gathering in which he raised this question, As Dr. Rechtschaffen reports, "not one of the one thousand persons present raised a hand to say yes."

So what's so difficult about having enough time? Dr. Rechtschaffen uses two sets of exercises to help us answer this question. First he asks us to think of a red balloon. Try it right now. Next, think of a pink elephant, he says. Do it. Now he asks us to pay attention to how long it took us to shift from one thought to the next. Not long: "tiny fractions of a second." Dr. Rechtschaffen calls this split-second kind of time "mental time."

Now let's try his second set of exercises. Here are his instructions: "Feel sad." "Now feel angry." Now "feel rapturously in love." How long did it take? Dr. Rechtschaffen says that we're still probably trying to make the first shift. Dr. Rechtschaffen calls this kind of time "emotional time." Emotional time is not quicktime thinking; it's longtime feeling. Emotional time takes so long, Dr. Rechtschaffen explains, because feelings can't be conjured up just like that. Feelings are experienced by way of chemical communication within the body. They are a hormonal surge, a wave that washes over us. It takes `emotional time' for them to emerge. And to adequately deal with real feelings takes more time - so, when we are rushed, it's much easier to habitually go to our mind and repress our feelings.

The mind, with its lightening-quick synapses, seems to get the job done. Feelings just get in the way - and given full rein, we fear they might pull us under and drown us. So when we pause and unpleasant feelings inevitably bob up, we bolt from them - by turning on the TV, eating sugar, making a phone call. Anything to not be in the moment (180-81).

Dr. Rechtschaffen helps us think about timeshifting as a science. As science, timeshifting refers to our innate ability as human beings to alter the kind of time in which we live, simply by paying attention to the way in which we make our way through a moment of our own life. Do we navigate this moment as "mental time" or do we navigate this moment as "emotional time"?

If we resolve to pay attention to the way in which we timeshift and if we also make the commitment to enter into "emotional time," then our scientific analysis of time turns into a personal practice. Here, our personal practice of stress reduction begins. Dr. Rechtschaffen explains how this stress reduction occurs:

Being open to and accepting of our emotions allows us to sit quietly in the present. And then we experience something quite remarkable that is key to living at ease with time: in the present moment there is no stress.

Stress comes from resisting what is actually happening in the moment - and what is usually happening is an emotion or feeling. Our continued effort to change what is so in this moment is, in fact, the very cause of the stress we wish to avoid. Pain, either emotional or physical, may be present right now, however, it's the resistance to it that causes stress, while acceptance causes relief. If, for example, you're going through a divorce, a job loss, a painful illness, problems with children, etc., and you don't allow yourself to feel the pain, then the suppressed pain becomes a lens through which you see all of life. And life seen like that holds little but stress." (181-2)

This personal practice of paying attention becomes a spiritual practice in small group ministry.

In covenant groups, we practice stress-free living through the actual experience of stress-free moments of our lives. These moments are the product of small group ministry as spiritual practice.

Small group ministry as a spiritual practice begins with a biological fact. Our bodies matter. They are the way we experience sacred time. I learned this hard lesson several years ago when I accidentally slammed a door on my finger. My finger pulsed with excruciating pain. I did everything I could to ignore the pain. But I was with a friend who, unknowingly, had walked around for three years on a broken leg because her doctors had mistakenly assumed that the source of the problem was elsewhere. So my friend had to learn how to deal with pain - all the time - for three years, until her leg injury was, finally, surgically corrected. Now, my friend saw me trying to pay attention to everything except the pain and she said, "stop."

"Pay attention to the pain," she said. "Concentrate your entire attention on the pain because your body is trying to tell you something. It's signaling distress. Danger. Your body is telling you to get out of harm's way. The pain will decrease as your attention to it increases," she explained. "Your body wants to make certain you have received the message. So it's trying to get your attention through pain."

I stopped everything I was doing, gave up all the distractions and concentrated full attention on the pain so that my body would be fully satisfied that I had received its message of distress. As I did this, quite to my surprise, the pain began to subside. Here's why: I paid attention to an actual moment of my life instead of avoiding it. My finger still hurt, but not as much as before because I now felt the rest of me. I was fully present in this moment. My finger was now part of my full life again and my whole life was wider than this immediate pain. As I discovered and then entered this difference between the pain and the rest of my life, my stress level was reduced.

Small group ministry is a de-stressor. In our Covenant Groups, we pay attention to aching souls. And the attention is healing. This kind of radical attentiveness is the foundation of therapeutic work. The healing power of group therapy was given vivid account in a New York Times article on January 15, 2004. The story described a group therapy program for H.I.V. positive and AIDS victims in a remote area of Uganda. Western psychologists trained local facilitators to lead group discussions with such persons. In these groups, the depression, sadness and despair of these persons began to recede. Why? As one member put it: "This group didn't take the virus out of my body..... I still fall sick. I am still weak. But at least now I'm living." Or as another group member put it, "The group told me my life was worth something." She no longer tosses and turns at night, but sleeps peacefully.

The reporter gives us the key concept: beloved community. "The therapy sessions drew participants together so effectively that many have continued meeting [after the outsiders left]. Some have also used their counseling groups to start business ventures together. Women weave multicolor mats. Men pool their money to buy chickens and goats."

Covenant Groups are not group therapy sessions, but they do create beloved community among their members. Covenant Groups are the "work of the people": liturgical acts that bring persons back into the moments of their lives in order to abide there. When they abide in this reality they discover the rest of their lives. They touch life itself and are renewed.

The difference between small group ministry and therapy groups, 12-step groups, or other problem-focused group sessions is spiritual practice. In Covenant Groups, personal practice becomes a spiritual practice. Small Group Ministry focuses on process, not problems. It treats all content of a person's life in the same way: as a moment worthy of one's full, undivided attention. Small group ministry does not offer advice, guidance and direction. It does not resolve personal problems. It simply stops time so that the FULL presence of each person is acknowledged and appreciated in that moment. Problems are not "worked on." Feelings are shared. Treatments aren't offered; attention is given. Each moment is packed full of the joys and sorrows, the victories and defeats, the thoughts and ideas that make each lived moment of our life an experience worthy of our time.

This is the spiritual power of small group ministry. It is presence, the feeling of life itself.
Neurologist Antonio Damasio, in his book Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain, calls the source of this feeling of life itself our "background body states." Here, in this feeling of life itself, here in this moment of life itself, timeshifting ends. We no longer reflect; we experience. We no longer observe; we are.

In Damasio's words, background feeling is not what we feel when we jump out of our skin for sheer joy, or when we are despondent over lost love; both of these actions correspond to emotional body states. A background feeling corresponds to what happens between emotions.... When background feelings are persistently of the same type over hours and days, and do not change quietly as thought contents ebb and flow, the collection of background feelings probably contributes to a mood, good, bad, or indifferent (Damasio, 150-1). Without this foundational feeling, Damasio concludes, the "very core of [our] representation of the self would be broken" (Damasio, 150-1).

Our world would become mere abstraction. We would believe our life consists of "mental time." We have only to remember the story about René Descartes at a cocktail party to understand this point. The hostess asked him if he would like another cocktail. He said, "I think not," and disappeared. We are more than our thoughts. We are more than our ideas. We are alive.

Developmental psychologist Daniel N. Stern uses Damasio's description of "background feelings" to help describe the actual content - the physical states that accompany and thus have input into our mental activity. This input, says Stern, includes the momentary states of arousal, activation, tonicity, levels of motivational activation or satiety (in various systems), and well-being. This input is what Damasio . . . has called ‘background feelings,' which are similar to the ‘vitality affects'...."

Stern reminds us that the body "is never doing nothing." It's blinking, breathing, pulsing; muscles are contracting and relaxing. Stern calls all of these feelings together our feeling of being alive, our "vitality affects," and he uses musical references to explain them. Here's what he says: All these body signals come from the self - [and for the newborn infant,] an as-yet-unspecified self. Such signals need not be attended to. They need not enter into awareness. Yet they are there in the background. They are the continuous music of being alive. That is why I refer to changes or modulations in this music as vitality affects. . .. It is this music that will permit the emergent self . . . to appear. But first it must be yoked with a mental activity (Stern, xv-xvi).

Stern's musical metaphors include a literal claim. These movements are our soul's music, the harmonics and dis-harmonics of engagement. When we are directly and immediately aware of the music of our soul, we are in sacred time.

A story can help us under this sacred time. The story is about an experience in the life of experimental musician and composer John Cage recounted in his book Silence. The story begins, almost 50 years ago, when Cage entered a small, six-walled, echoless chamber constructed by Harvard University engineers using special soundproofing materials. Once inside the chamber, Cage heard two sounds: one was high pitched, the other was lower. Afterwards, Cage was told what he heard: the sound of his own nervous system in operation and the sound of his own blood circulating through his veins.

This experience led Cage to conclude that, as he put it, "Until I die, there will be sounds." But Cage went on to draw a second, less obvious conclusion. These sounds, he concluded, "will continue after I die." To make sense of Cage's second conclusion we have to focus our attention on what Cage's body felt.

In the chamber, Cage felt, audibly, more than these two sounds alone. The floor and his shoes and the skin on his feet met and altered the pattern of his nervous system. The quality and temperature of the air in the room affected his breathing and thus the flow of his blood.

The color of the walls and thereby its light patterns altered his retinas and thus his nervous system. Each sound he heard was thus an alteration of himself by the world about him and thus within him. Cage heard the way he and the world meet. He and the world were amplified together.

Cage felt this meeting place between himself and the world. He thereby heard that which would continue after he died: the room. Cage's feelings and the room had mingled. He was not absolutely alone (the room was present); he was not absolutely still (his blood flowed and nervous system chimed). His body thus made a joyful noise to life itself - a joyful noise of life itself.

In reflecting upon his experience, Cage described what he discovered: the universe: "This psychological turn leads to the world of nature, where gradually or suddenly, one sees that humanity and nature, not separate, are in this world together; that nothing was lost when everything was given away. In fact, everything is gained."

Two hundred years ago, German theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher used strikingly similar words to describe this eternal moment in his book On Religion: Speeches to its Cultured Despisers. Here's what Schleiermacher said:

Observe yourselves with unceasing effort. Detach all that is not yourself, always proceed with ever-sharper sense, and the more you fade from yourself, the clearer will the universe stand forth before you, the more splendidly will you be recompensed for the horror of self-annihilation through the feeling of the infinite.

For Schleiermacher, the human foundation of this "feeling of the infinite" was a physical feeling directly related to the human nervous ystem. Each neural shift of feeling was an affect, the amplification system within the self that announces a changed state. Schleiermacher made this neurobiological fact of human nature -- affect -- the foundational referent for religious experience and belief. Schleiermacher called this experience "the natal hour of everything living in religion."

This attention to our vitality affects, to biological time, to the living content of our life, this attentiveness to the full range of the physical content of our lives let Schleiermacher discover what all religious creeds, all theological reflections and all faith statements have in common as human experiences: affective feeling. This binding principle of our lives is the place where theists, atheists, humanists, Christians, Buddhists, Jews, Pagans, and others meet. Their ideas describe the moment and thus the theological differences. This is "mental time." Their bodies live the moment and thus enter into the experiential unity of sacred time.

Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh invented the word "interbeing" to describe sacred time. In any and every human experience, Thich Nhat Hanh tells us in the opening pages of his book, The Heart of Understanding, everything is present. Just think of the paper on which his words are written, he advises his readers. Look into the paper. Really look and you will see everything there: -- everything except the paper because the paper is all of these events together.

Your mind is in here and mine is also.... You cannot point to one thing that is not here - time, space, the earth, the rain, the minerals in the soil, the sunshine, the cloud, the river, the heat. Everything co-exists with this sheet of paper. That is why I think the word inter-be should be in the dictionary. "To be" is to inter-be. You cannot just be by yourself alone. You have to inter-be. This sheet of paper is, because everything else is.

One very easy way to understand this concept of "interbeing" is to think of the recipe for chocolate cake. It calls for flour, sugar, butter, milk. Missing from this recipe is an ingredient called "chocolate cake." You are not instructed to add two cups of chocolate cake to the recipe in order to make chocolate cake. Thus, everything is present in the chocolate cake except chocolate cake because it is the interbeing of all these other ingredients together.

Small group ministries are concentrated experiences of interbeing. Each moment of our life together in these groups is a moment of full presence in which our life is filled with everything except our lives alone.

Martin Buber said this is where we find God - between us - in the "sphere of the between," in the space between I and Thou. This sphere of the "between" is a pure duration of time.

French philosopher Henri Bergson uses the simple example of making lemonade to show us how pure durations of time occur. Imagine, Bergson says in The Creative Mind: An Introduction to Metaphysics, that tomorrow at noon, you are going to make a glass of lemonade for yourself. The time you imagine - noon - Bergson says, is an abstraction. It is abstract because it is empty of the feelings your will actually have, the sentiments, thoughts, sensations and ideas that will move through your body and flow through your mind as you actually make the lemonade and then drink it.

"Your imagination," Bergson says, "perhaps evokes the movement to be gone through; but what you will [actually] think and feel in doing it you can know nothing of today, because your state tomorrow will include all the life you will have lived up until that moment, with whatever that particular moment is to add to it. To fill this state in advance with what it should contain you will need exactly the time which separates today from tomorrow, for you cannot shorten psychological life by a single instant without modifying its content. Can you shorten the length of a melody without altering its nature? The inner life is that very melody".

Our soul is this melody. Our soul is rhythm, pause, movement, sound, silence, space, interval, measure. This is our grace, the ever-present moment that theologian Paul Tillich calls "the eternal now." It is our experience, as Schleiermacher would say, of the infinite in the finite. This measure of our life is the spirit of life. It is our reverence for life.

So why do we need small group ministries to do this work? Why can't we do this work alone? It takes a village to sustain a soul. I use an extreme example to make this small point. The story is recounted by psychoanalyst R. D. Laing during his work with a catatonic schizophrenic patient.

Each day, as Laing made his rounds, he would sit next to the immobile man and say something like this: "If my mother had locked me in a closet for all of those years, I wouldn't want to talk to anyone either."

Day in and day out, Laing made such statements to the man and then would move on to his next patient.

And then the day came. Laing sat next to the man, told him he would not want to speak to anyone either, if he had been treated the way this man had been treated by his mother. And the man turned to him and said "Yeah."

The man had heard another person say to him "You are sad and for good reason." This man had been left alone for so long. His feelings and thoughts had been gutted of content and he had become an abstraction of time, an experience without thoughts, feelings, or an inner life because no one was there with him; no one was there who cared.

In Covenant Groups, members say to each other "I am lonely, and for good reason" and the group is there with them and says "Yeah." Someone says "I feel sad and for good reason." And the group is there with them and says "Yeah." Someone else says "I need more love, more compassionate engagement, more attentive care - and for good reason." And the group says "Yeah."

Small group ministries are a spiritual practice because they restore time, extend and expand each moment of our life. Small group ministries are a spiritual practice because they create sacred time: loving time, joyful time, painful time, thoughtful time, present time. Small Group Ministries are a spiritual practice because they replenish our souls by making each moment of our lives matter.

Join us on the quest for spiritual growth and fellowship.

Chalice Circle Vision Statement 
Participant's Guide   

Chalice Circle Choices

Are you looking for a way to connect with fellow UUAA members and friends? Seeking opportunities to share your truths in a safe/brave space? Find new connections and opportunities to discover ways that UUAA can be meaningful in your life. Find a Chalice Circle program that suits your needs. All circles are held in Zoom.

• Traditional 14-session Chalice Circle, meeting twice a month, early October through end of April.

• 6-session Chalice Circles, held weekly. Initial sessions will be held early October through mid-November. Due to the success of these sessions in October and November, two more will be offered in February and March.  Details and registration at this link.

• Monthly Newcomer Chalice Circles: Newcomers to UUAA can get to know each other while exploring the Principles. Registration links for these sessions are posted in the Weekly E-News and Monthly Newsletters or by contacting the Welcome Ministries Coordinator Hannah Hotchkiss at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

• Monthly One-Time Chalice Circles, for those who just want to try out a circle or are unable to make a multiple session commitment. Registration will be announced in the Bulletin a few weeks before the Circles are held.  

Benefits of Joining a Chalice Circle

1. Find and build a safe and trusting community.
2. Experience mutual commitment to shared goals.
3. Encounter something sacred in yourself and others.
4. Enliven us spiritually, socially and intellectually.
5. Enhance deep listening skills.
6. Know yourself better by seeing your life in the context of others' experiences.
7. Deepen your understanding of Unitarian Universalist principles and values.
8. Draw us into shared ministry.
9. Give back to the UUAA community by completing a service project.(traditional circles only)

Contact

To learn more about the Chalice Circle program or how to join a Chalice Circle, please email This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.