- Dear Members and Friends,
- This will be my last message as president of the Board and it’s natural to look back at what’s been accomplished.
- When I look at the work of our Board of Trustees I find much to admire in the selfless contributions of Jane O’Donnell, Linda Mangelsdorf, Alan Horne, Hollis Kellogg, Bill Domanico and Laura Bair. To their great efforts add the tireless work of Jay Beaumont, John Kinney, Verne Bell, Pasha Moffet, Kris McGuire, Patti Beaumont, Robin Bonne, and many other members and friends.
- It’s easy to be proud of the work of this congregation! Just yesterday we memorialized a dear friend, David Bell, taken from us way too soon. And we are still mourning the loss of Mike McGinn, our previous president, who served heroically through his illness. His widow, Bernadette, has graciously stepped forward to serve on the board along with Nan Dempster and Michael Nichols who will lead us into the future.
- For my part, I see several projects that I had hoped to complete, still undone. The sound system is still inadequate, although Diane Diachishin and I recently met and made plans to move forward on new equipment that will be ready for the fall season of services and music programs. And I’m glad to see our friends at the Birch School are doing well. Yes, there are difficulties when one building serves two purposes and some may see our situation as untenable and schizoid – but we serve each other symbiotically and, for the time being let’s make a virtue of this necessity. Birch School is one of the ways we serve the community and I am gratified to find our beloved building usefully occupied five days a week, ten months a year!
- I’m told there are disputes among UU’s in this country about whether or not to display our nation’s flag. The board has voted (at my suggestion) to hang both the American and the United Nations banners in our sanctuary. I’m happy to take the blame. Those two emblems hung in the old sanctuary when I first joined this body and I’ve missed them. Now, I understand that Old Glory has been soiled lately by politicians and bigots and other lowly forms of life, but that’s not her fault. She was invented by an American woman named Betsy at the request of some men who, with wisdom and foresight and incredible courage, through revolution and hardship, created a brand new form of human government.
- As Reverend Chris so eloquently says in his video tour of our crowded, busy space: “the seven principles in our covenant are aspirational” – and we often fail to live up to them. So is the Flag of the United States aspirational. She is a symbol of hopes and dreams that have never yet been fully accomplished, not by any of us, not even those founders who are now vilified as hypocrites in these tempestuous times.
- Well, I’m now a sentimental old man who weeps at some passages of music and poetry, but I’m damned if I’ll strike our colors. Yes, this country is full of people who completely misinterpret what the flag stands for, and if we take it down it would mean we agree with them. We UUs are better than that.
- In service,
- Mike Landrum