What Will My Child Learn?

Dear Friends,

Welcome to Sunday School! What can you expect from religious education at the UUCUV? You will find support here in your efforts as your children’s primary religious educators within a friendly community.

Our children will learn about the world, ethics, faith tradition, and themselves from a variety of sources, and we will focus on The Six Sources of Unitarian Universalism:

Direct experience of that transcending mystery and wonder, affirmed in all cultures, which moves us to a renewal of the spirit and an openness to the forces that create and uphold life. In other words, we respect your child’s own experience of Spirit, and we will teach and promote activities like labyrinth walking, journaling, quiet sitting, yoga, breath work, art response, and prayer as tools which your child might choose to help her remain aware of her natural sense of mystery and wonder.

Words and deeds of prophetic women and men which challenge us to confront powers and structures of evil with justice, compassion, and the transforming power of love. In our Sunday School we will learn the stories of historical Unitarian and Universalist and Unitarian Universalist leaders, writers, theologians and activists who model for us how to use justice, compassion, and love. We will meet some of these people in stories, in art, sometimes in person through volunteer actors, and even through stamp collecting; we will try to exemplify them through our collective and individual efforts in the causes we hold most dear.

Wisdom from the world's religions which inspires us in our ethical and spiritual life. We respect any religion which seeks to enlighten. In Sunday School, we learn stories and celebrations of the many religions of the world - not as anthropologists, but in our search to deepen our own ethical and spiritual life. Questions about birth, death, relationship, community, and Spirit have been addressed by every faith tradition, and the answers we find help us to form our own answers - and to find the commonalities between and among people.

Jewish and Christian teachings which call us to respond to God's love by loving our neighbors as ourselves. Your child will join us in using the lens of “beloved community” to working out our covenants of behavior and mutual responsibility. We’ll practice reminding one another of our promises, mediating conflicts, and forgiving one another in order to remain in community

Humanist teachings which counsel us to heed the guidance of reason and the results of science, and warn us against idolatries of the mind and spirit. We understand our world through science; the perpetual questions of existence, answered in previous generations by mythology, we now answer with science. Your child will practice observing, wondering, and using her reason and research into science to study her world - rendering the world even more wondrous for having discovered it!

Spiritual teachings of earth-centered traditions which celebrate the sacred circle of life and instruct us to live in harmony with the rhythms of nature. When we listen to our body’s wisdom - to nature’s rhythms - we have a better handle on our precarious place in the modern world. Our children face stresses that our grandparents never imagined; your child will learn about keeping Sabbath, observing the changes of the seasons, and the sacredness of her own body all in support of her trusting her inner voice of Spirit and managing her life in a way that deepens her and ennobles all of us.

The education your child will experience at the UUCUV is above all religious. Facts are abundantly available, so are opinions. Here, we will ask one another “What does your heart say?” “Are you listening for Spirit?” “How does that make you feel?” and we will bless each other by saying, “I honor the Source in you.”

Welcome. Enjoy the adventure along with your child. Ask, wonder, celebrate. It’s a pleasure to be in fellowship with you.