Calendar of events
Here you will find all of our congregation’s Sunday Services, Board and Committee meetings and other events. Use the calendar controls to see events for past or future dates. For a quick look at recent Sunday Services, click here!
Please join us at 10am on Sunday December 29th for the film “Once Upon a Forest” This film is part of a series called “Something Beautiful for the World”
Maria was a romantic, animal-loving, dreamy child who, growing up, had a hard time conforming to the demands associated with the trajectory towards “a normal life”. As a young adult she became depressed, and was encouraged by her therapist to go for walks in the forest. The myriad of funny-looking twigs and sticks she found along the way immediately put her on a path to recovery. Now, 25 years later, she’s a celebrated “twig poet” whose art is shown in galleries throughout Sweden. When a climate related crisis strikes the forest where she lives and works, she’s forced into a new type of creativity in order to save the place that once upon a time saved her.
The films of the series “Something Beautiful for the World” explore how small acts of love and kindness have the potential to ripple out and change the world, touching hearts and minds in ways that we could never begin to imagine.
Globally, the outlook for 2025 is quite frightening. How can we live joyfully, or at least cheerfully, in a world full of other people’s suffering? I will argue that good cheer is a useful contribution to a disturbed world and suggest some ways to achieve it. This is a follow up to my January 2022 homily on the Discipline of Joy.
Learn how cancer-related research and clinical practice have advanced in recent years. Everyone of us has been touched by cancer. The ways that cancer is detected and treated is radically different than how it was done even 20 years ago.
Dr. Walter spent 23 years as staff scientist at Benioff Children's Hospital, Oakland, Calif., before
returning to Canada. Today he is an Adjunct Associate Professor of Biology and the Zen Buddhist
spiritual care provider at UVic Multifaith.
People in all cultures sing, for many reasons: to connect in community, to revive memories, to tell their stories, to express emotion, to celebrate life events… and some people don’t sing — also for many reasons. Let’s explore this a little, with a lot of singing, and a welcome to join in.
Dick and Cathy are co-directors of Victoria’s Gettin’ Higher Choir, Outside Voices and the Wednesday
Evening Sing-In. Together with Denis Donnelly, they lead the Community Choir Leadership Training
program.
Please join us at 10am on Sunday January 26th for Reilly Yeo – Prophets of Love: Active Engagement in a Time of Polycrisis
We’re called in this time of climate crisis not just to change our world, but to transform it. In the process, we will need to transform ourselves. Climate change is a wake-up call that heralds the urgency of our third principle as Unitarian Universalists – spiritual growth. Join Reilly Yeo, Candidate for Ministry with the Unitarian Universalist Association and Co-Founder of Climate Plan, for this exploration of the spiritual dimensions of the climate crisis.
This pre-recorded sermon is part of the Meaning Making series.
Bio: Reilly is an organizer and facilitator with extensive experience in digital campaigns. Prior to entering seminary, she was the Director of Communications and Public Engagement at the David Suzuki Foundation, and she currently serves as Co-Founder of Climate Plan, a membership-based organization that helps people and their communities respond to climate change. She received her MDiv from the University of Toronto and completed her chaplaincy training (CPE Basic) at Victoria General Hospital. Her work focuses on the twin challenges of spiritual resilience and systems change in the face of the polycrisis, the interlocking crisis of crises that defines our time. She lives in James Bay on the unceded territories of the Swenghung, a Lekwungen-speaking people, with her partner Jamie and their children Avery and Elyse.
The Truth Mandala. Re-created for Capital this was created by Joanna Macy and is a whole group structure for owning and honoring our pain for the world. The practice emerged in 1990 amid a large, tension-filled workshop near Frankfurt, on the day of the reunification of East and West Germany.
What is love? How could it have evolved from an apparently meaningless universe? How, if implemented and practiced, could love be the answer to the problems that afflict each of us and our whole species? How can love give us meaning, purpose and hope for the future?
Our American Unitarian-Universalist cousins have adopted a “Statement of Shared Values” that will help “promote liberation, radical inclusion, and communal care…” In a report, the UUA calls on members to apply the spiritual discipline of love to the work of living our shared values. How do they define love? Discipline? And Spiritual?
With the light of the chalice guiding the way, we explore our aspiration to be theologically alive: seeking to be ever-evolving in our understanding, open to new knowledge. How does our theology respond to the present moment and where might it go in the future?
Rev. Fiona Heath spent nine years as the settled minister at the Unitarian Congregation in Mississauga, as well as two years as the part time minister of the UU Congregation of Durham. Now retired, she lives in the countryside north of Kingston, focusing on fiction and poetry writing, local climate crisis response, and how to be a UU at home.