NOW AVAILABLE - Our New Year's Day Service (Shusho-E)!
Ralph Honda, Service Chair
Spirituality and Technology
With the January 1 New Year’s Service, our Temple and Sangha were able to celebrate the New Year in real time — safely, separately, and together with our Zoom service.
Service Chair Ralph Honda rang the opening Kansho, provided a cordial welcome and the public face, of a group effort among many people behind the scenes to keep PowerPoint slides and audio clips flowing along. In his Dharma message, Kenji Sensei thanked all who helped with identifying Temple members Kimberly Kruse, Bill Teague, and Rev. Laverne Imori.
Breakout Rooms. A special feature of the service is the transition from the end of the service to breakout rooms in which smaller groups of Sangha members were able to meet and chat together, a close equivalent to the hospitality time at the end of our traditional services provided at the Temple in normal times.
Zoom and YouTube. While most Dharma messages during the Pandemic have been achieved by recorded YouTube videos, this service was a rare opportunity to watch and participate in a live service.
Because Zoom provides the ability to interact, Kenji Sensei and Ralph Honda identified current opportunities for members to join weekly Zoom events, including Buddhism 1-2-3 (Wednesdays), a chanting group (Saturdays), a Qi Gong group (Sundays), and Dharma School services (Sundays). For more information about participating in these groups, please contact the Temple. Dharma School welcomes all Sangha members to join them.
Zoom and our General Meeting. All Temple members are asked to join us for the General Members Meeting on Sunday, January 31, at 11 a.m. Kenji Sensei hopes that our broad participation in the New Year’s Day service will make even more of our members familiar with Zoom so that they can participate. The General Meeting is required to vote on Board members and handle other important Temple Business.
Notes: To be cautious and respectful of Sangha members’ privacy, we did not include images of our Sangha members during the video. In future Zoom sessions we hope to provide advanced notice so that members can turn off their video feeds before we record them in gallery or other view. Note also that the breakout room sessions are not part of the posted video.