January’s Ministry Theme is Practicing Resistance

Join us in-person and online on Sundays at 10:30 am. All are welcome! We as Unitarian Universalists in Santa Monica look forward to being with you.

Masks are optional, but always acceptable and welcome. If you or someone in your household is not feeling well or has tested positive for COVID, please stay home; you can still join us via our Facebook or YouTube live-stream worship. 

Parking at the UCLA parking structure at 1311 16th St. is available to people attending Sunday services. The entrance is from 16th St. between Santa Monica Blvd. and Arizona Ave., on the SE corner of Arizona and 16th; ask the attendant for a free UUSM parking permit to place on your dashboard. For those with a handicap parking tag, several spaces are also available onsite, via the alley west of 18th St., as well as in the UCLA structure.

Worship Online: We livestream our service from the sanctuary. Join us by clicking the WATCH NOW button above where the video is live every week beginning at 10:20 am, or watch on YouTube or Facebook. You don’t need to have a YouTube or Facebook account, or be logged in, to watch the service. You do have to be logged in to comment and chat with other members of the congregation. 

Explore past services on our Sermons page, available 24/7. Tune in anytime to catch up and worship with your community. We encourage you to light a chalice or candle at home, meditate, and sing along. 

Generous Congregation Recipient: ACLU Foundation

Our practice here at UUSM is to dedicate half of our non-pledge Sunday offerings to support the life of our church and the other 50% to nonprofit organizations doing work in the world that advances our Unitarian Universalist principles. This month we’ll share our Sunday Offering with the ACLU Foundation.

Together with the American Civil Liberties Union, Inc. (ACLU) the ACLU Foundation engages in a broad range of work to protect civil liberties. Gifts to the ACLU Foundation help fund litigation and public education efforts. 

The ACLU stands on principle, protects the personal liberties we all cherish, and defends freedom every day all across America in every state. Since 1920, the ACLU has been our nation’s guardian of liberty, working in courts, legislatures, and communities to defend and preserve the individual rights and liberties that the Constitution and the laws of the United States guarantee everyone in this country. Whether it’s achieving full equality for LGBT people, establishing new privacy protections for our digital age of widespread government surveillance, ending mass incarceration, or preserving the right to vote or the right to have an abortion, the ACLU takes up the toughest civil liberties cases and issues to defend all people from government abuse and overreach.

Thank you for your generous support of our beloved community and the ACLU Foundation. To give $10 right now, text “$10 GCC” (or another amount) to 844-982-0209. (One-time-only credit card registration required.) Or visit uusm.org/donate.

January 2026 Theme: Practicing Resistance 

Our theme this month invites us to consider our world, our community, and our lives in the light of the practice of Practicing Resistance. A new year is a time to pay attention to beginnings, fresh starts, and hopes — to celebrate them — not a time to isolate. May we make use of collaborations and community in practicing resistance. 

Chalice lighting: To Speak When Silence Feels Safer
This flame burns for the courage we find when fear makes sense. Not the absence of doubt but the choice to act anyway. We light it for those who speak when silence feels safer and those who act when invisibility beckons. ~ Rev. Michelle Collins.

Prayer for Moving Forward
Our hearts are stretched thin. We see and hear the devaluing of people of color, of those with disabilities, of women, of immigrants; this list, incomplete as it is, is exhausting…
However thin our resilience may be wearing; we do not give up or give in…
We will not rest until we are heard.
We will not rest until equity is made more real… ~ Rev. Jennifer “Jo” VonRue, full prayer

Time is the ultimate form of human wealth on this earth. Without time, all other forms of wealth are meaningless. It is this insight about time—patently obvious but frequently forgotten—that makes keeping a Sabbath day both spiritually profound and politically radical. To reclaim time is to be rich. To reclaim a full day every week is to be among the 1 percent. ~ Rev. Ana Levy-Lyons

Prayer for Martin Luther King, Jr., Sunday
We gather especially to remember Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. 
but not only him, for there were thousands of unnamed women and men
who put their bodies and lives on the line
so that all may be free… ~ Rev. Kathleen Rolenz, full prayer

Breathe
…Don’t tell me to be calm
when there are so many reasons
to be angry, so much cause for despair!
I didn’t say to be calm, said the wind,
I said to breathe.
We’re going to need a lot of air
to make this hurricane together  ~ Rev. Lynn Ungar, full poem

On resisting despair (and not rooted resistance in hope for success)
Surrender to despair is surrender to evil. It is important to feel anxiety; it is sinful to wallow in despair… There are those who maintain that the situation is too grave for us to do much about it, that whatever we might do would be “too little and too late,” that the most practical thing we can do is “to weep” and to despair. If such a message is true, then God has spoken in vain… History is not all darkness. It was good that Moses did not study theology under the teachers of that message; otherwise, I would still be in Egypt building pyramids… The greatest heresy is despair, despair of [humanity’s] power for goodness, [humanity’s] power for love. ~ Abraham Heschel

Chalice lighting: A Flame to Light Our Path
Fire consumes, and casts a bright light.
May our chalice flame consume our regrets for the past,
our fears about the future, and our worries about today… ~ Debra Burrell, full text

Time is the ultimate form of human wealth on this earth. Without time, all other forms of wealth are meaningless. It is this insight about time—patently obvious but frequently forgotten—that makes keeping a Sabbath day both spiritually profound and politically radical. To reclaim time is to be rich. To reclaim a full day every week is to be among the 1 percent. ~ Rev. Ana Levy-Lyons

Rest Is Resistance: A Manifesto (excerpts) ~ Tricia Hersey
   * Capitalism deserves to be resisted and disrupted. It is a violent, global force that constantly steals our time and power. It is not redeemable and has always been a demonic force pushing divine bodies to the edge.
   * The Rest Is Resistance framework also does not believe in the toxic idea that we are resting to recharge and rejuvenate so we can be prepared to give more output to capitalism…We are not resting to be productive. We are resting simply because it is our divine right to do so.

Our service in the world continues.