Sunday Service with Rev. Barbara Whittaker-Johns

"So What’s the Story? Hanukkah, Hershel of Ostropol, and the Harley"

The telling of story is one sacred tool we have as continual creators of new life. These stories may be drawn from history, received from religious or cultural traditions, or recalled from our personal lives.

“Reality isn’t what it used to be”, wrote political scientist Walter Truett Anderson, suggesting that story-making is as essential as facts to our becoming at home in a universe of vast uncertainties and possibilities.  With a deepening appreciation that the ‘cosmos’ is less a ‘thing’ than an evolving process we might call ‘cosmogenesis’, comes our awareness that, similarly, “the continual creation of reality is at the heart of every person’s life” - at the heart of our personal, communal, and political/global relationships.

We gather in the UU Meetinghouse of Pittsfield – “a real gem” – before the first evening of Hanukkah, with the Winter Solstice just a few days away. We ask: What stories will light the way for you, for the community, for the world?

Worship Leader, Rev. Dr. Barbara Whittaker-Johns

Barbara is a UU minister who has served parishes on Cape Cod, in Amherst, MA, and Arlington, MA. An Honorary VP of the Institute on Religion in an Age of Science (IRAS), she has had many leadership roles in that community for over 30 years. Growing up in Bangor, ME, in the environs of Bangor Seminary and the Congregational Church, has shaped much of her journey, which, before parish ministry, included college nursing training, and 15 years of work and study in special education with youngsters now referred to as ‘neuro-diverse’. She and her husband Frank Toppa, a music educator and church musician, and their grown son Isaac Toppa, have a home on Cape Cod.