Speaker & Worship Leader:- Rachel Mackintosh

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Rachel Mackintosh © 2 February 2025

Why do we repeat this ritual every year? It isn’t just to brag about our travels. When we share our water in the common bowl, it reminds us that while we are separate people, we are also part of an interdependent community.

You probably know about the water cycle.

Speaker & Worship Leader:- Kate Lewis

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Kate Lewis © 22 December 2024

Given that we’ve been communicating with each other since birth, it’s a wonder that it is still so difficult for most of us. Too often, we misunderstand, hurt and offend each other and only listen to each other enough to be able to rebut the other person’s point of view. Although our second principle includes striving for compassion in human relations, often our communication is anything but. Maybe there’s a better way.

Speaker:- Zeo Haami
Worship Leaders:- Rachel Mackintosh and Betsy Marshall

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AUC © 15 December 2024

True to our Unitarian tradition of having an open pulpit, this past week we welcomed Zeo Haami as our speaker. Zeo is Community Organiser with Te Ohu Tāmaki, of which our church is a member.

In her address, Zeo highlighted the difference between Te Tiriti (as the agreement between Māori and the British Crown) and the Principles of the Treaty. To explain the difference, she used the analogy of marriage, where there are two key parts: the legal contract and the relationship. Te Tiriti can be seen as the legal contract while the Principles can be compared to the living relationship part of marriage.

After hearing Zeo, we had an opportunity to stand up for justice by making submissions on the Treaty Principles Bill currently before the New Zealand Parliament.

If you were unable to attend the service and/or the workshop, you still have an opportunity to learn about the Bill and make a submission. As the submission deadline of 7 January is fast approaching, please contact me for background information as well as tips on how to write one.

Submissions:

• can be made by anyone of any age
• only have to be a few bullet points
• can be made online at bit.ly/treatyprinciplesbill or handwritten.

Several members also have offered to make their submissions available as examples.

Betsy Marshall
Unitarian/ Te Ohu Working Group Member
betsy_marshall@icloud.com

Links

• Te Ohu Tāmaki

Speaker:- Viv Allen
Worship Leader:- Shirin Caldwell

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After a short talk about the latest research on how it’s been shown that there is a link between the amount of green space in our lives and our better health, mood and longevity, we’ll break into small groups and discuss this.

Viv Allen © 8 December 2024

Once upon a time in ancient Greece in the town of Delphi on the slopes of Parnassus, there stood a temple. This was a temple to the god Apollo. The ancient Greeks believed in many gods who had many different responsibilities. Apollo was the god of the sun, of music and dance, of healing and disease, and many, many more.

Speakers:- Karn Cleary, Ann Blyth, Chris Childs, David Fougère.
Worship Leader:- Karn Cleary

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In this service, long-time members of the church share memories from the 1950s, 60s, 70s & 80s, and what keeps them coming back.

Speaker:- Ron Ahnen
Worship Leader:- Viv Allen

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In this sermon, Ron Ahnen (Intern Minister at First Unitarian Church of Albuquerque, New Mexico (USA) reflects on the nature of Truth and how we find especially our own personal truth.

Ron Ahnen © 24 November 2024

Truth. What’s the truth? Can you handle the truth?
I want the truth.

As you all know, we just finished an election in the U.S. with so many different candidates—not just presidential ones—putting forth many competing claims about what “the truth” is. The good news is that we’ve got fact-checkers and journalists all trying to help us sort out exactly what is and is not true. You might think it’s easier to find the truth these days, given that you can Google just about anything in a nanosecond. It turns out, finding out the truth is not so easy. In fact, it’s often really, really hard.

Speaker & Worship Leader:-
Barbara Thomborson

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Barbara Thomborson © 17 November 2024

Ageing and death are two timeless themes, universal to our human experience. Our culture’s near phobia about death has created unneeded anxiety and irrational fear about “passing on, passing away, kicking the bucket, giving up the ghost, breathing your last, losing your life, expiring (like a use-by date), or just plain croaking”. That’s a small sample of the euphemisms English has for dying. In her book The Coming of Age, Simone de Beauvior says, “The vast majority of humankind looks upon the coming of old age with sorrow and rebellion. It fills them with more aversion than death itself”.

Speaker:- John Maindonald
Worship Leader:- Shirin Caldwell

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John Maindonald © 10 November 2024

Today, no business of any size uses paper based accounting. The move from paper based systems started in the late 1950s when large corporations started using computer mainframes, as they were called, for basic operations. In the 1980s personal computers made computer-based accounting systems widely available.

The chatbots that have attracted wide attention in the past several years are a very different technology from accounting systems. In January of last year, Ted Zorn spoke about “Finding our humanity in a technologized world”, looking in particular at the abilities of 2024 chatbots akin to ChatGPT. Chatbots per se are not all that new. The Eliza chatbot came on the scene in the mid 1960s. One could ask it “What can you say that will make me happy?”, and it would come back with a sympathetic response. ChatGPT is of course a vastly more powerful beast, using information that it gathers from the internet for answers that usually appear plausible.

Speaker & Worship Leader:- Rachel Mackintosh

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Rachel Mackintosh © 3 November 2024

Barbara Kingsolver, in her novel Demon Copperhead, has Demon say this:

“… she looked at me in the eyes, and we were sad together for a while. I’ll never forget how that felt. Like not being hungry.”

Like not being hungry.

She looked at me in the eyes, and we were sad together for a while.

I’ll never forget how that felt.

Like not being hungry.

Have you ever been seen like that by another person? Have you ever shared such a deep understanding, be it of sadness or of some other emotion? Do you know that feeling, of not being hungry?

Will you ever forget how that felt?

I will never forget how that felt.