September’s Ministry Theme is Building Belonging
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.
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Sunday Worship: Water Communion Multigenerational
Sanctuary 1260 18th Street, Santa Monica, CA, United StatesWorship ServicesThe Rev. Jeremiah Lal Shahbaz Kalendae with The Rev. Dr. Kikanza Nuri-Robins, ministers; Dr. Susan Hendricks, worship associate. We embark upon our 98th year of liberal and liberating religion with our annual Water Communion and Ingathering Service. There is much despair in the world as wars rage, bigotry is emboldened, science and education are attacked, and public health is being dismantled (to name but a few of our immense societal problems) but the embers of hope, resilience, and resistance are also present. Join us as we name our hopes and dreams, offer our prayers, and pour libations of water imbued with our hearts longings. Join us in-person or online.
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Sunday Worship: Falling Leaves
Sanctuary 1260 18th Street, Santa Monica, CA, United StatesWorship ServicesThe Rev. Dr. Kikanza Nuri-Robins, minister; John Hart, worship associate. Just as the leaves begin to turn colors and drop to the ground, we too experience change and loss in the autumns and winters of our lives. What can we learn from the ancestors and our community about responding to and coping with loss? How do you navigate new pathways when you are not dead—yet? Join us in-person or online.
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Sunday Worship: High Holy Days
Sanctuary 1260 18th Street, Santa Monica, CA, United StatesWorship ServicesThe Rev. Jeremiah Lal Shahbaz Kalendae, minister; Karen Hsu Patterson, worship associate. If we open the Book of Life, as it is taught the Holy One does on Rosh Hashanah, what would we find inscribed there? Have we seized life in all of its awesome power and possibility? Are there times when we've strayed from the path of profound living and what would it take for us to return? Join us for our annual reflection on the Jewish High Holidays. Join us in-person or online.
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Sunday Worship: Our Calling
Sanctuary 1260 18th Street, Santa Monica, CA, United StatesWorship ServicesThe Rev. Jeremiah Lal Shahbaz Kalendae, minister; Chela Metzger, worship associate. What is your life's calling? What is our calling as a gathered spiritual community? Where do these various summons meet and inform each other in creative and transformative ways? Join us as we explore the nature of religious callings and practice listening to our deepest selves and the spiritual inspirations of our lives. Join us in-person or online.
September Generous Congregation Recipient: Santa Monica Area Interfaith Council
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 organizations doing work in the world that advances our Unitarian Universalist principles. This month we’ll share our Sunday Offering with the Santa Monica Area Interfaith Council (SMAIC).
The Council’s mission is to create a collaborative environment among peoples of all faiths in this region, through education, community activities, and interfaith dialogue, that will foster peace and justice for everyone regardless of race, gender, sexual orientation, nationality, religious affiliation or belief, or other communities, and result in a better and safer life for all. Membership includes First Presbyterian Church, Agape International, Santa Monica Synagogue; the Church in Ocean Park, and UUSM. The group collaborates on an annual Martin Luther King Day Interfaith Breakfast, an annual Interfaith Holocaust Remembrance Day, and protests and rallies.
The Council consists of a diverse group of leaders, advocates, and volunteers united by a shared commitment to fostering understanding, respect, and collaboration among faith communities in the Santa Monica area. The team reflects the rich diversity of traditions and beliefs that make our community in the Santa Monica area vibrant and inclusive.
Thank you for your generous support of our beloved community and the Santa Monica Area Interfaith Council. 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.
September 2025 Theme: Building Belonging
Our theme this month invites us to consider our world, our community, and our lives in the light of the practice of Building Belonging. As we begin the congregational year, let’s explore what belonging means. May each of us (who were once the newcomers here) now welcome newcomers and not be too shy to learn about them and what each one is looking for — and to share the ways we engage with this community… both which activities we do and why we like doing them. Let’s see if we can keep building belonging; it’s a worthy investment in the future.
A Prayer for Remembering Our Belonging:
Sacred Presence,
Root us in belonging so deep we cannot fall alone.
Strip away the illusion of separateness…
Awaken in us a sense of kinship so wide it undoes every wall…
May we move from Me to We…
as a sacred return to who we really are. ~ Rev. Cameron Trimble,
What does it feel like to be lonely? It feels like being hungry: like being hungry when everyone around you is readying for a feast. It feels shameful and alarming, and over time these feelings radiate outwards, making the lonely person increasingly isolated, increasingly estranged. It hurts, in the way that feelings do, and it also has physical consequences that take place invisibly, inside the closed compartments of the body. It advances, is what I’m trying to say, cold as ice and clear as glass, enclosing and engulfing. ~ Olivia Laing
My friend is one who knows my song and sings it to me when I forget. ~ Anonymous
Peculiarly enough our need to belong is also tied in with our need to be different and unique. Our sense of community clashes with our fear of difference. We want to belong to our tribe or our family and to feel loved and cherished. Our desire for connection and love runs deep, so much so that we may compromise who we are, in order to belong. Brené Brown says that when we “fit in” instead of actually “belong,” we mold ourselves to the situation instead of standing for our authentic self. This doesn’t create real connection, and we can end up feeling lonelier with people than we would have if we had stayed true to ourselves. ~ Aziel ReShel
True belonging is the spiritual practice of believing in and belonging to yourself so deeply that you can share your most authentic self with the world and find sacredness in both being a part of something and standing alone in the wilderness. True belonging doesn’t require you to change who you are; it requires you to be who you are. ~ Brené Brown
The most terrible loneliness is not the kind that comes from being alone, but the kind that comes from being misunderstood. ~ George Orwell
But we don’t understand why loneliness is bad for us if all we can say is that it hurts. Why does it hurt? And what does that pain tell us about how to live?… The way out of loneliness runs, ironically, through attending to the needs of other people… ~ Kieran Setiya, What people fail to understand about the dangers of loneliness, book excerpt
For this one moment / Know only that you are loved / That you are safe, and whole and loved / Know that you belong here / Here among us, here upon this earth In your body / However tired, or broken / Your heart may be / Whatever fear, disappointment, anger you carry / For this hour know you are not alone / Feel the presence of others / Surrounding you, / Breathing beside you, and with you, / Discovering together the way our voices rise, and fall together / In harmony, in hope / Claim here a resilient freedom / The choice for love, for light, to live with joy / and gratitude and praise / as a form of resistance. ~ Rev. Gretchen Haley, Know You are Not Alone and Discover the Way Our Voices Rise
Spirit of Life, woven into every breath, every gathering, we come with our longing to be part of something whole. Not perfect, but whole.
May we remember that belonging is not given once, but made daily, in the courage to reach out, the patience to listen, the willingness to be changed.
When we falter— in fear, in fatigue, in forgetting— may we begin again.
Let us be builders of circles that widen, keepers of doors left open, stewards of spaces where truth and tenderness can meet.
May this community be not just a refuge, but a growing ground for trust, for justice, for shared joy.
Amen. And may it be so. ~ Rev. Michelle Collins, Not just a Refuge
Exclusion operates by the same rule of mutuality as welcome, for it harms both the excluded and the excluder. If you are the hands of exclusion for long enough, you learn acceptance only at the hands of someone else’s exile. You learn belonging as competition, not restoration. It is also a kind of restlessness, for the energy you expend forbidding others to walk through the door of community is only matched by the energy you expend competing to stay inside yourself. This is maybe more dangerous; no one ever perceives the doorkeeper as needing an invitation themselves.… ~ Cole Arthur Riley
On allowing all parts of ourselves to belong:
I have started to want to pray to everything —
or maybe more truly, to pray with everything —
the wave, the blossom, the awkward smile,
the dirty cotton, the broken glass, the rising ache,
the wonder that opens in me when I trust
there was never even a half of a moment when we all
did not deeply, fully, wholly belong to each other. ~ Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer, full poem: “How I’ve Started to Pray”
Our service in the world continues.
