Feb 10 2025 26 mins
Rev. Marta Morris Flanagan, Lead Minister, leading
Worship service given February 9, 2025
Prayer by Bill Licea-Kane, Worship Associate
https://firstparish.info/
First Parish
A liberal religious community, welcoming to all
First gathered 1739
On the Sunday before Valentine's Day, Marta will consider how to practice love in our time and at this chapter in our lives.
*Note: This service was not filmed in the Meetinghouse and was only offered live online via Zoom due to inclement weather.
Offering and Giving First
For February 2025, the Giving First recipient is the Arlington Youth Counseling Center (AYCC). AYCC is a state-licensed, community-based mental health center serving Arlington youth (ages 3-21) and their families. AYCC is the leading provider of outpatient and school-based child and adolescent mental health services in Arlington, offering individual, group, and family counseling, psychiatric evaluation, and medication management. Central to its mission, AYCC is committed to ensuring that all community youth and families have access to comprehensive, culturally sensitive, and high-quality mental health care, regardless of their ability to pay. In the past fiscal year, 22% of our clients had public insurance or received grant funding to help cover the costs of care. In addition to mental health services, AYCC oversees First Step- a support group for victims and survivors of domestic violence.
The remaining half of your offering supports the life and work of this Parish. To donate using your smartphone, you may text “fpuu” to 73256. Then follow the directions in the texts you receive.
About our Lead Minister: Rev. Marta Flanagan began her ministry as our twentieth called minister at First Parish in the fall of 2009. She is a genuine and forthright preacher. In conversation she is direct and engaging. She speaks of prayer with as much ease as she laughs at human foibles. We call her “Marta.” Marta is a religious liberal, a theist, a feminist, and a lover of the woods. As a student of American history at Smith College she was captivated by the stories of social reformers who were motivated and sustained by their faith. That led her to consider the ministry and to study at Harvard Divinity School from where she was graduated in 1986. She was the first woman minister in the city of Salem, Massachusetts, serving at the First Universalist Church there (1987-1997). She served in a co-ministry at South Church (Unitarian Universalist) in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, (1997-2005) from where she is minister emerita. Marta served as interim minister in Montpelier, Vermont (2008-2009). She is trained as a spiritual director. For three years she lived in the Vermont woods practicing voluntary simplicity and the spiritual life. Marta enjoys the vitality of First Parish and our strong sense of community. She celebrates the yearning for depth and the desire to make a difference in the world that she finds here.