Greetings!

This year our children’s Religious Education program is covering festivals and celebrations of faiths around the world as they occur. We began with a class covering some of the beliefs of the Aboriginal peoples of Australia. Their beliefs in dreamtime go back as far as anyone can tell, perhaps over 40,000 years!

We followed that with a class on Confucius and the National Teachers’ Day holiday celebrated in Taiwan (September 28) and China (October 4). We touched on Catholic sainthood with the feast day for Saint Francis of Assisi (October 4). We then had a class on the life and beliefs of Zoroaster, one of the earliest believers in monotheism, as the feast days of Gahambar Ayathrem (October 12-16) celebrate the creation of plant life. Our students watched an animated video of Ramayana, the ancient Hindu epic poem of good versus evil, in order to understand the reenactment of the poem during the Dussehra festival (October 17).

We learned why several celebrations dealing with the dead occur at the same time of year: Halloween (Celtic, October 31), All Saints’ Day and All Souls’ Day (Catholic/Christian, November 1), and the Days of the Dead (Aztec, November 1 and 2). Our students created and drew their own Rangoli on the BUUF driveway as part of our understanding of the Hindu and Sikh New Year Festival of Lights called Diwali (November 5).

We’ve already spanned a good part of the globe (Australia, China, Italy, the Middle-East, India, Europe, Mexico, and North America) and created a timeline that puts a small part of the religious history on this planet into a rough chronological order. Although we’re not focusing on Unitarian-Universalism this year, each week we compare some of the tenets of the faiths studied with our seven principles. Confucius said, “All human beings are alike at birth,” and stressed education. Zoroastrians practice a three-fold path described as “Good thoughts, good words, good deeds.” Diwali symbolizes the vanquishing of ignorance with the light of knowledge. We also discuss polytheism, monotheism, sainthood, beliefs in the before- and after-life, and other concepts as they apply to UUism and to each of us individually.

Your DRE,
Dave Sarra