Beloved community,

As we—finally! at long last!—get settled into our new space and continue to adjust to all the changes on our campus (we have a campus!), you will notice that we are paying fresh attention to the names of our rooms and buildings. This is because we now have new rooms and a new building, and we want the names of our spaces to make sense as we move forward.

For example, those of us who have been at Chalice a while probably know what I mean if I refer to “the back door” to the chapel or the kitchen. But when you think about it, those doors are actually closest to the street. To many people, those might naturally be thought of as the front doors! So we’re going to call them the “west entrance” (west entrance to the chapel, west entrance to the kitchen), while the other doors to those areas are the “main entrances.”

We’re also going to start calling the area outside those two west entrances “the patio.” Because it is a patio! If you haven’t been out there in a while, take a look. We’ve tidied it up, and there is now a table and chairs out there, as well as our new bike rack. It’s wonderful to have that be a more useable space (it was previously mainly used for storage).

Calling that area “the patio” will probably be the most confusing change, initially, because what we now call “the courtyard” used to be called “the patio.” But the courtyard really is a courtyard now that it’s bigger, and the patio really is appropriately called a patio.

That room we used to have most of our meetings in, that we called the Common Room? Now we’re going to call it the Fireside Lounge. There’s almost no reason for anyone to have a meeting in there anymore, and now that we don’t have to use it as childcare space on Sunday mornings, it’s tidied up and you can see the fireplace! (I know some of you didn’t even know there was a fireplace there.) Coordinating Team will figure out what the seating in there should be over the next few months. It’s a great place for some quieter conversation on Sunday morning, especially if the courtyard feels a little overwhelming.

We’re calling what most of us think of as our main building “the Fellowship Building.” So our main kitchen is in the Fellowship Building, and the kitchenette is in the Hub. Naming it the Fellowship Building will make even more sense in the future, when our chapel eventually becomes our Fellowship Hall.

Are you still with me!?!

And at last, as you know, we have the Hub. The full name is the Idell & Nelson Discovery Hub. Sometime in the spring, when we have our new playground installed, we’ll have a special dedication ceremony for the building, and we’ll have a plaque that hangs outside the main door at the Hub porch. This is what the plaque will say: Welcome to the Idell & Nelson Discovery Hub, dedicated in honor of Jim Idell, Chair of the Capital Campaign, and Bob Nelson, Chair of the Renovation Committee, for the countless hours each volunteered in service to Chalice Unitarian Universalist Congregation and our dream of a better world for our children and generations to come.

Bright blessings,
Sharon