The Rev. Dr. Craig Rubano
Your experience of being alive consists of nothing other than the sum of everything to which you pay attention. At the end of your life, looking back, whatever compelled your attention from moment to moment is simply what your life will have been. So, when you pay attention to something you don’t especially value, it’s not an exaggeration to say that you’re paying with your life. ~ Oliver Burkeman
We are witnessing the dark side of our new technological lives, whose extractive profit models amount to the systematic fracking of human beings: pumping vast quantities of high-pressure media content into our faces to force up a spume of the vaporous and intimate stuff called attention, which now trades on the open market. Increasingly powerful systems seek to ensure that our attention is never truly ours….We need a new kind of resistance, equal to the little satanic mills that live in our pockets. This is going to require attention to attention, and dedicated spaces to learn (or relearn) the powers of this precious faculty. ~ D. Graham Burnett, Alyssa Loh, and Peter Schmidt
The average attention span of the modern human being is about half as long as whatever you’re trying to tell them. ~ Meg Rosoff
Here’s the deal. The human soul doesn’t want to be advised or fixed or saved. It simply wants to be witnessed — to be seen, heard and companioned exactly as it is. ~ Parker Palmer
Paying attention is becoming a difficult skill to maintain. As Burnett et al. describe above, the algorithms of greed reach ever farther and deeper into our minds and our pockets, seeking to warp our consciousnesses and rob us of our livelihoods. Paying attention to that which we give our attention, then, becomes an essential, life-giving (life-saving!) practice. And it’s not just our own lives at stake, but those of our neighbors—in this country and around the world. One of the most powerful things we can do in the face of the constant assaults upon our attention is to make a special effort to listen to the words, the realities, the lives of those around us. Our attention spans, as Rosoff says partly in jest above, tend to be about half as long as what someone is trying to tell us. And yet, at bottom, all people want to be seen, heard, and companioned (Palmer) in each of their specificities. Being UUCMC together, in a real way, is a spiritual practice of paying attention to what really matters. Oliver Burkeman reminds us that if we are paying attention to things that, ultimately, we don’t really value, we are paying for those things with our very lives. Couldn’t our lives—our time, our talents, and our treasure—be better used to fund our values, lived out in action? I will address this topic on March 22nd.
For a month that kicks off our Stewardship campaign for the 2026–27 fiscal year beginning July 1st (and which will include UUCMC’s 70th Anniversary in early 2027!), there can be no more appropriate congregational theme than “Paying Attention.” In a congregational governance system like UUCMC’s, where the members literally own the place, careful attention needs always to be paid, lest many of the things we value go unstaffed, unled, unpaid-for. UUCMC is, as our 2026–27 theme proclaims, a wellspring of hope and courage. Unlike, however, many wellsprings in this world, which are often considered to be inexhaustible, our wellspring requires careful tending, maintenance, replenishing, stewardship, and love. I look forward to joining together on our multigenerational Stewardship Sunday, March 1st, complete with a Pancake Breakfast!!
On the other Sundays of the month, we are blessed to have a variety of speakers, beginning on March 15th with 2026’s Myra Zinke Lecturer. The late Dr. Myra Zinke, a Holmdel internist and psychiatrist and a congregant of UUCMC, recognized very early on how cultural issues impinge on women’s physical and mental health. At her death, she left a bequest to fund an annual speaker on women’s issues and to promote gender equality. We are honored to welcome, as our lecturer, lawyer Kendra Reinshagen, who spent her Chicago-based career focused on the needs of women and families. On March 8th and 29th, we will be joined by two people whom I have met as part of the NJ UU ministers’ cluster who are at the very beginning of their ministries Both are active in New Jersey UU work as well as national activism, they will bring unique and fresh perspectives on UUism and the world to our pulpit.
As March has five Sundays, on the 22nd, we will have a special “fifth Sunday” collection for the Mexico-based literacy group Libros para todos with which I have been working the past several years, and will do so again when I travel to Mexico in April. The rest of the month’s Sundays, will have half of the plate going to the International Convocation of UU Women, a vital nonprofit organization in special consultative status with the United Nations Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC), focusing on global women’s rights and empowerment.
March is a month chock-full of reasons to remember how vital and life-giving UUCMC can be to each one of us. UUCMC is, truly, a wellspring of hope and courage.
Rev. Craig