UUFP meets next on...

Sunday, February 12
at 3:00 PM

"Turning to the Light"

Lay Service featuring the Voci Di Donne vocal ensemble

Several members of UUFP are creating this lay service, of which music will be the major element. The women's vocal ensemble Voci di Donne of Saint-Remy-les-Chevreuse is a group of 13 women who have been singing together since January 2005. They sang for us at our service in May 2010 and we are delighted that they will be returning again on February 12. The ensemble's repertoire includes sacred and secular music from the Middle Ages and Renaissance up through contemporary pieces. For more information about Voci di Donne, and to hear them, go to www.vocididonne.org.

Where We Meet

President's Letter

The new year has already been very busy for the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Paris. We learned a few days before the last service that our host church, the Temple de Pentemont, would not be renewing our lease in September.  We have known since last fall that they were questioning whether the presence of our fellowship was compatible with their beliefs.  Despite our best efforts to show them that many of our core values are similar to theirs, and to show them our inherent respect for all religions, they decided to focus on our differences and their often erroneous perceptions of us.  The Conseil de Pentemont voted not to renew our lease at a meeting which we were not allowed to attend, despite having asked to be present.  We have since then discovered that the documents given to the members of the Conseil before the vote were heavily biased against us.  Though we know that we have many friends and supporters within their congregation, unfortunately their support did not change the outcome.

Now that the initial shock and indignation at their decision has passed, we should all look at this as an opportunity for the fellowship.  We need to look at different options for the future and question in what direction we as a fellowship should be moving.  We currently have some volunteers starting to look for a space to rent for next September, hopefully in a church or other religious building, so that we can continue to meet as before. If you'd like to help with this let me know; we can use all the help we can get.

One of the questions our being forced to move has raised is that perhaps the ultimate goal for the fellowship should be to find a place to call our own, a space in which we are on the lease and no longer have to worry about a host church becoming more conservative or deciding we don't belong.  The idea is still in its infancy, and there is still a lot to be worked out so we'd love to hear from you on the subject.  Some of the ideas that have been considered are finding a place just for us and renting it out to other like-minded groups to help cover costs, or teaming up with others to create a Center for Liberal Religion and sharing the cost/burden of the space. It may very well be just a dream.

But as former UUFP president Karen Kyker Frey wrote to me after the last service: "David Usher said that he wrote the sermon on Sunday morning for us, and I know that his 'We All Have Dreams' message was indeed a response to our current situation.  The idea I recall was that dreams are rarely realized in full, but it is not the fulfillment of the dream that makes life worth living, but the working toward it, often in community.  And that if we have a dream that means something to us -- in this case, the dream of our UUFP community continuing and growing and perhaps having a home of our own -- then we cannot retire and wish for it, but we can and must step up and keep working to make it a reality."

So now we need to figure out exactly what our dream is and how we as a community can make it happen

In fellowship,
Claire Quimbrot

(Click here to continue reading past President's letters.)