Minister’s Musings
From Rev. Denise Cawley, Interim Minister

“Once we believe in ourselves, we can risk curiosity, wonder, spontaneous delight, or any experience that reveals the human spirit.”

– e. e. cummings

Our interim time begins with reminding you all of what you have done as a congregation. By inviting ALL of you to attend Friday at 5:30 p.m. (we have childcare even), we invite you into a time of storytelling to help us get to a place of wonder and curiosity. Too much institutional knowledge and any of us can get stuck in old habits. Too much fresh energy and we can be stuck reinventing everything. Growth needs a mix of both. Sustaining growth is difficult when a congregation, family or team are composed solely of people steeped in existing ways of working, and interim ministry is a time we examine those ways. We do not want to change everything, because many things work well. We want to refine. The key to that is looking at everything with curiosity. In fact, becoming curious is even a path to greater peace in your life. Even though our exercises Friday will be about the congregation, every lesson in Interim work has lessons for us to improve our own lives.

“Curiosity is, in great and generous minds, the first passion and the last.”

― Samuel Johnson

Sunday, I mentioned the book “Radical Curiosity” by Seth Goldenberg in my homily after our Water Communion rituals. That book offers: 

“Embedded narratives are coded into the objects, behaviors, policies, and assumptions that our shared world is built upon. If we are to regain agency in our personal lives, to give ourselves agency as proactive narrators of our own story, we need to become more curious about how powerful stories shape us and the common agreements that construct contemporary society.”

Friday evening’s Interim Start Up event will have us telling stories about the history of James Reeb Unitarian Universalist Congregation. It will be an opportunity for us to be wildly curious about what and why things happened as they did. Practicing curiosity means being a detective. It is not helpful to share opinions stated like a fact, but instead to use language that invites inquisitiveness.

Phrases to Invite Curiosity:

• What I witnessed was…did anyone here see something else?
• Tell me more about that…
• Can you say more? 
• I am not sure I recall it that way. Could you share more about your recollection?
• Invite people to imagine. Imagine – this word activates the brain’s creative center and assists people in unlocking new ideas.
• I wonder what we would discover if we compared those accounts?
• Tell me more about why you think that happened? According to research, inquiry-based questions increase engagement by over 50%.
• Could I challenge you to imagine a different way to go about that?
• What if we ran an experiment? Experiments give us data and with new data we see if our ideas worked. There is much less pressure on a system if we experiment with a new way of operating.
• What if we tried this other idea and we all meet again to see what happens? This concept reduces fear of failure and encourages participation.

The kickoff to our interim time will be a lot of fun this weekend. We will make new friends and get to know people in new ways. Not only that, but in this time of so many structures of our society being broken down, and misinformation being spread, we have one wildly radical way to counter all that: COMMUNITY. It is people who know and trust one another that can overcome anything. I hope you attend this weekend to participate in something radical: human to human community building.