First Parish Cohasset

At a special congregational meeting on May 6, the members of First Parish Cohasset voted unanimously to call the Reverend Jill Cowie as the church’s next settled minister.

The congregation welcomed Rev Jill and her family with joy and singing at a celebration in the Parish House. Reverend Jill Cowie will begin her formal tenure with First Parish in August.

Read more about Rev Jill here.

The Ministerial Search Committee is pleased to introduce First Parish Cohasset’s candidate minister, the Reverend Jill Cowie.

Read about Rev Cowie here.

Candidating week, April 29 – May 6, will offer many opportunities to meet and chat with Rev Jill. Schedules for the week’s activities are available in the Parish House. We hope you will plan to attend as many events as possible, and help us welcome Rev Jill to First Parish!

in faith and service,

the Ministerial Search Committee

Bill Baird, co-chair
Beverley Burgess
Peter Eldredge
Eric Kluz, chair
Larry Lunt
Carol Martin, co-chair
JoAnn Mirise
Penny Myles

On March 11 First Parish hosted the annual Union Service with neighboring UU churches from Hingham, Scituate and Norwell. Our children were welcoming hosts and hostesses, friendly and inclusive. We shared our usual chalice lighting and sharing rituals with our guests, heard the forgiveness story of Mussa and Naghib, and then adjourned to Trueblood Hall for activities. Some children chose to work with clay to fashion figures from the story, some made a story theater out of a cardboard box so they could retell this and other stories at home, and some chose to play our favorite get-to-know-you games: Name Toss, All my Neighbors and Would You Rather. It was a fun and successful morning strengthening the ties among our congregations.

This past Sunday the children were in the Parish House. Upstairs, the pre-school and kindergarten children heard the Spirit Play story The Magic Seed. In this story, a poor man is caught stealing bread from the bin behind a bakery. As he is being led away to his punishment (which is death), he begs to tell the King about the magic pomegranate seed in his pocket, lest his treasure perish with him. This magic seed will sprout, flower and fruit in one single night, provided it is planted by someone who has never lied or stolen. The condemned man offers the seed to the King, who remembers something embarrassing from his youth and offers the seed to his General, who offers it to the Prime Minister…you get the idea. The King gives the seed back to the poor man, along with his freedom. The group (seven children this week) talked about the story and then explored the theme through play and art. Some of their art from this and prior weeks is on display in the upstairs classroom. Please feel free to visit and look around before or after RE class.

Meanwhile, the older children began the morning in the Atkinson Room with our usual chalice lighting and sharing ritual. They then heard the story of Miss Rumphius, written and illustrated by Barbara Cooney. (The link will take you to Bowdoin College’s Museum of Art, which holds the original illustrations for this and three of Cooney’s other books. Thank you, Penny Myles, for that information.) We talked about why it was so important to Miss Rumphius that she make the world more beautiful. We then moved to Trueblood Hall and considered motivations, what “makes us tick,” both through a thinking-and-writing activity and an “energy burner” that let us physically express what motivates us.

The children then considered what motivated some famous Unitarian Universalists to achieve their dreams, including Olympia Brown, Tim Berners-Lee, and Linus Pauling. In a related conversation, they decided that Miss Rumphius’s life exemplified 6 or 7 of our UU Principles (there was some debate over principle 5, “the right of conscience and the use of the democratic process, etc”).

The children are getting ready to participate in a social action project this spring, by considering what in their community needs their attention and energy, and what activity or issue they might reasonably tackle as a group.

As time ran out we adjourned to the Atkinson Room for our closing ritual/extinguishing the chalice and a brief reminder about next week, when First Parish will be hosting Union Sunday.

I look forward to seeing you in church on Sunday, March 11, when the children will begin in the Meeting House.

Last Sunday the children were in the Parish House. The pre-school group heard the story of The Wise Men and the Elephant in the upstairs Spirit Play classroom. After the story, they engaged with the story’s themes through art and play.

Downstairs, the older children welcomed some new friends to class with their old favorite game, Name Toss. This game requires concentration and cooperation and is a fun way to learn each other’s names. Next was the opening chalice lighting and sharing ritual. We played and sang We are Free, a song by Nick Page, and talked about the 6th Principle — the goal of world community with peace, liberty and justice for all.

Conversation about the intangibles of peace, liberty and justice was pretty thin, to be honest. On the last morning of February vacation, these ideals weren’t sparking any debate. The goal of world community, however, was very engaging. The children (and their leaders and youth helpers, too) held a lively discussion (aided by a large world map) about people we know in far-flung places and the differing customs they encounter. We learned that even in other English-speaking places you might not understand the conversation due to local slang; that in large parts of the world things we take for granted like indoor plumbing is a pie-in-the-sky luxury and going to school is not an inevitable part of childhood.

While the children created two large collages that represented the world community, they talked about everyday, ground-level choices that have to be made to “wage peace,” like being deliberately welcoming rather than unfriendly or talking out a dispute rather than shouting or wrestling.

After the collage activity we held a closing circle, singing We are Free and extinguishing the chalice.

On Sunday 3/4 the children are in the Parish House again. Please note the change in our usual schedule, due to special events on March 11 (Union Sunday) and March 25 (Youth Sunday).

See you in church.