Posts by Rev. Leland Bond-Upson

Next month, our weekly message array in the Unichord will change from the Minister’s Message by me every week, to one by me only once a month, and the other weekly messages from others, including Steve Stultz as Board President, and other leaders and messengers to be determined. This week, my family enlarged from four children to seven, as Deborah and I became foster parents of three siblings from the Micronesian Island group Chuuk.   Micronesia has a special immigration agreement…

The Service for this Sunday, October 24th, will focus on music that is unusual in its emotional power, both for great happiness and for deep sorrow. There will be five pieces of music in the sermon, and chances are, you don’t know them all. One of them, the last one, is a magnificent piece of music, led by one of the greatest, and long enough for meditative contemplation. This will be my last appearance in the virtual pulpit we have…

I invite you to tune in to this Sunday’s Service, which focuses on Lennon’s 10-year post-Beatles career. Having long tired of Beatlemania, he lit out on his own with Yoko. He issued two amazing records in his first two post-Beatles years, 1970 and 1971: John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band and Imagine. The first was a serious statement of freedom from pop music, and an embrace of his new wife, and of being able to freely sing about his interior states. It’s…

The Church’s leadership and I have negotiated an agreement that saves having to take monies from the scant remaining reserves to pay out my contract for a ministry that too many of you have found unsatisfactory. So, this is a sad ending, but under the circumstances, one that feels fair to all. Personally, emotionally, I am sorrowful, but OK, thank you, and I wish you the best. I depart at the end of October, and my final time with you…

In 2006, Unitarian minister Thomas Starr King’s statue in the U.S. Capitol’s Statuary Hall was removed by vote of the California legislature and the approval of Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and replaced by a statue of Ronald Reagan. Each State gets two statues. California’s other honoree was and still is Father Junipero Serra a builder of missions in Spanish California. There has been a movement in California to banish Father Serra too, on account of his enslavement and mistreatment of native…

The first arrival for me came Tuesday, when I emerged from my car, and was hit at mid-day with a gust of breeze that had a cool leading edge. The breezes have had warm or hot edges til now. The coolness was lovely and refreshing and it sent me off on a search for how to express the coming arrival poetically.  There are lots of springtime poems. One of my favorites for that season is G.M. Hopkins’ What is so…

Last Sunday we experienced the entwining of joy and woe, in real time, simultaneously, as we rejoiced in congregating outdoors for the Sunday Service, on the lawn and under the trees on the west side of the Barn. We haven’t been together, in person, since Music Sunday, March 8, 2020.  By my count that’s seventy-eight virtual Services mounted between then and now. The Executive Team, the Worship Committee, and especially Music Director and show-runner Chelsea Musson have done a fine…

One our favorite documentarians, Ken Burns, has made Muhammad Ali, a four-part series (2 hours each segment) to be broadcast on PBS beginning nine days from now, Sunday, September 19th. Burns began work on the film the year Ali died, 2016. It is described as being comprehensive, because all previous treatments were focused on single events, or short spans of his life. Commentators are saying it is ‘mind-blowing.’ Muhammad Ali became a hero of mine while he was still Cassius…

Would you like to watch movies together and talk about them afterward? I have hundreds of them in my video collection, and access to almost everything else via streaming. If you are interested, let me know, and let’s talk. I have some ideas about what you will likely find interesting (see below) and am very much open to your nominations. Bulworth, 1998 Here’s one example of a movie that has a lot going for it: Bulworth, 1998, starring Warren Beatty…

Let’s try to save the women and girls (and everyone) from Sharia law. And let’s begin with Afghanistan. I think it’s time we in the supposedly non-misogynist countries put pressure on the openly misogynist countries, to reduce the burden of discrimination the women of Afghanistan and of all Islamic countries and communities experience.  Can’t we press those countries and communities more than we do now? It’s so ugly and backward. This would not be an attack on Islam per se but…

Here’s a meditation in the time of pestilence that I hope you enjoy. — Leland We Used to Have So Much to Say by Dorka Hegedus I am sorry to tell you this, but I have decided that one lifetime is not enough. Time is not magical or kind; Time is waiting. It lurks and loiters in the shade of a fig tree (the one I planted in a pot on my porch against your good advice). And just when…

On the occasion of my High School graduation, when I was 17, my minister gave me a copy of Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet. Already knowing I would be taking psychology courses at university, and that I was interested in figuring everything out, everything that still puzzled me, such as why my father was so angry much of the time, I found in The Prophet, a passage that my minister had earlier quoted from the pulpit. Your children are not your children.They…