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So this month the worship theme is compassion, but I don’t think that I’m going to talk a lot about compassion.  Isn’t it more about how you offer and express your compassion to another, rather than talking or writing about it?  I haven’t always been good at that, but I’m trying harder these days.  Interestingly, I was recently put in the position of compassion denied.  Upon meeting a friend at a regular social gathering that she had been absent from for a while, she told me that her father had died, “He’s gone, it’s over, so that’s that.”  What do you do when your offerings of sympathy are denied?  I was also thinking about how grief delayed/denied is also healing delayed/denied, but she wouldn’t be having any of that either.  All was not lost, however.  A little while later she pulled out a photo album of her father.  Only then did she open up, and in turn, was I able to offer some sympathy and understanding.  We humans are interesting creatures, aren’t we?

If you’ve followed my monthly columns for a while, you know that I open with personal experience and observation and close with whatever is a timely topic in the congregation or in the wider world of UUs.  This time around it means, “Let’s talk about being a delegate to General Assembly (and District Assembly, too).”  At the “Justice GA” we will be able to combine social justice and compassion around the issues of immigration rights.  UUCB will have just nine delegates slots this year.  I hope that we will fill all of them.  Not everyone who attends GA wants to be a delegate.  Accepting the role of delegate carries the responsibility to attend the plenary sessions, studying the issues and candidates to be voted on, and so on.  Just when you might want to be somewhere besides the convention hall, the call to order draws you back in.  Plenary sessions combine both tense debate and the tedious drone of mundane business.  This year the plenaries are planned to be shorter and focused on the social justice theme.  This year we also have the option of having off-site voting delegates, either at home or at the church, connected by Internet and telephone to the convention hall.  This is a great innovation, but we’ll be better served with having all of our delegates in Phoenix at the convention hall, as well as on the streets or wherever we conduct our public witness.  As impor-tant as our work inside the hall will be, our more important business will be in public view.

You’ll be hearing more in announcements, email blasts etc., but contact me or Board of Trustees Vice President Jean Gleason, sooner rather than later, if you are going to GA, as a delegate or not.  The same also applies to District Assembly which happens a lot sooner:  April 27-29.  Register now! For both!

It’s always a great time to be a UU!

Stephanie Ann