Meeting Minutes

Celebration Committee Minutes regarding Celebration Rituals

November 13, 2016

Ideas:

• Sprinkle music/singalong pieces throughout the celebration
• Including more prayer, not necessarily Jesus oriented prayer but holding space for prayer, perhaps at the same time and place as we hold space for poetry
• Include music during communion
• Hold space for more movement both performance and participatory
• Lao Tsu and silence is very popular but not necessarily sacrosanct. We should be very careful about not holding space for it
• Substituting the Service of Welcome (iv in songbook) for opening smudge which could also hold space for our children who’ve become invisible during celebration
• Returning to Amazing Grace for closing ritual perhaps just one verse to make space for other songs as well

Action items:

• David will continue to gather input
• We will continue to empower people with ideas to “drive” their own version of Celebration
• We will continue to explore an opening and closing ritual that is meaningful, because it feels important to cast a circle that is familiar, welcoming and intentional especially if we remain committed to changing things up frequently in order to make space for a diversity of aesthetics around celebration.
• We need to protect out decorative banners and make the hanging of them more sustainable by improving communication around their taking down, finding suitable storage for them and providing a mechanism for more easily putting them up

One piece of feedback from the community I forgot to bring forward is that our community music jam is too loud, a criticism that I agree with the few times I’ve listened instead of participated which of course begs the observation that it must be super loud with me and my banjo up there as well.

 

Respectfully submitted by

 

David West