Michael Field's Blog

 

  Harris-Field Holiday Letter 2023   Greetings to our extended family, our dear friends and those close to us both physically and in our hearts. As usual, our holiday letter is getting distributed in early 2024 as the end of 2023 was hectic but that is a good thing. 2023 was a rewarding year in so many ways and having all of you in our lives was no small part of that. We want 2024 to continue the best of 2023 and look forward to sharing it with you. The good things about 2023 started on December 29, 2022, when our son, Evan, got engaged to the wonderful Taylor Short at the Big Sky ski area in Montana. That event created a glow which infused the entire year despite the fact that Evan and Taylor put an information embargo on wedding plans until the middle of the year. We now know they will be married next December in Montana. We also gained another granddog, a Bernedoodle not coincidentally named Montana. Montana was born in Utah on the day they were engaged, and Elizabeth...

  Christmas Reflection 2023 Michael Field   Each December, I ask myself the same question; and, each December, I come up with a different answer. The question seems simple but has intriguing layers like the reds, purples, and yellows of the sedimentary rock cliffs in the Southwest deserts. Their colors make them stand out from the monotonic beige of the barren, arid landscape surrounding them; colors that were formed from teeming marine life in the primordial seas that covered them before these towering structures were pushed up from ancient ocean floors. The question is: Why do UUs celebrate Christmas, the holiday commemorating the birth of Jesus? The Jesus commonly said to be the son of God, part of the holy Trinity. The Jesus controversially said to be the Messiah. That Jesus, not the Honduran asylum seeker at the southern border named after him. After all, the first U in UU stands for Unitarian which a quick reference to a dictionary reveals as meaning a belief sy...