Due to the overwhelming response, registration for this course is closed. UUMFE is providing a free online course led by Rev. Gail Collins-Ranadive, an experienced facilitator of online workshops. Picture this: You are standing on the rim of the Grand Canyon of the Colorado River. Our Earth’s story opens beneath your feet; you are peering down into nearly two billion years of planetary history. Yet the worldview that frames the culture beyond the Canyon walls, the ‘cosmology’ that most of us were raised in, claims that the world was created in six days some six thousand years ago. So what do you do with that?! As Unitarian Universalists we are free to incorporate the latest scientific findings into our faith tradition. In fact, our Flaming Chalice symbolizes our commitment to the fire of
reason and the light of consciousness, of continuous learning. Yet a religious tradition is much more than rational thinking and revising.

This will be a simple email conversation among Gail and the students. There is no charge.

Registration:To register for the course, please send an email to office@uuministryforearth.org. You will receive a confirmation by email. In the first week of January you will receive the first discussion topic and focus questions directly from Gail.
Registration Deadline: December 31, 2009.

For as Joseph Campbell put it, all organized religions serve four functions:
• the cosmological…exploring our relationship to the cosmos, as in where did we
come from, why are we here;
• the psychological…setting out a blueprint for our personal stages of life from birth
through coming of age to marriage to elder hood and finally to our deaths;
• the sociological…how we are to live in the society into which we are born and what
is our responsibility to it;
• the spiritual….how do we access and interact with the Transcendent, the not me, the Wholly, Holy Other.
Thus our changing perspective on the Universe itself involves all these other dimensions as well.

This workshop will seek to embed our personal stories within the context of the emerging new story of the cosmos, for what our Transcendentalist forebears called Self-cultivation is the human contribution and counterpart to evolution's increasingly complex
consciousness. Only as we consciously become part of and participate in this process will we truly have, in the words of Thomas Berry, 'a spirituality of earth.'

Or as Claudia Kern has so beautifully put it: "UU Ministry for Earth has committed to engaging our faith in a deepening of our collective and personal spiritual understanding of a new theology of ecology for this time of exquisite beauty, tragic destruction, and
amazing possibility. This is a new, deeper, truer story that Unitarian Universalism can help to tell."

In a series of seven sessions, the facilitator will present a carefully researched topic for participants to briefly write about out of their experience. Then, after sharing what each has written, we'll engage in a process of creative interchange whereby we may enlarge our personal insights and contribute to the emerging greater Story.

Working Outline:
1. The Elemental You: Fire, Water, Earth, Air.
2. Cosmic Dynamics: Differentiation, Subjectivity, Communion.
3. Time’s Three Dimensions: Eternal, Everyday, Emergent.
4. Deep Time and Sacred Space.
5. The Quantum Self: from I to EYE.
6. Reframing the Past, Present, and Future through a new lens.
7. Your Piece of the Great Work.

Gail Collins-Ranadive, M.A, M.F.A, M-Div, is an ordained minister in Fellowship with the Unitarian Universalist Association. She is the author of Finding the Voice Inside, Writing as a Spiritual Quest for Women (Skinner House) and Light Year, A Seasonal Primer for Spiritual Focus (Amazon). She has facilitated writing workshops nationally and internationally, including an on-line course for The Church of the Larger Fellowship.