It’s easy to get mired in sadness. But it’s also possible to let sorrow move through you and open you to the light within your heart. Just as anger can be a doorway into strength, and desire the force behind creativity, so sorrow can trigger soft-heartedness, humility, and other profound spiritual emotions. It’s a station […]
We live in a paradigm of domination and control. Our political, economic, social, and cultural systems all have an expectation that someone will be in charge. Where does this expectation come from? Is it inherent in our binary brain or our binary sexuality? Is it an appropriate paradigm for the future? We’ll explore some ideas […]
Our UU faith tradition was grounded in Christianity. As such, the Bible and its many interpretations have largely shaped UU history. Yet, for many of us the Bible is a strange, largely unknown book that we rarely, if ever, open. Yet, English authors over the centuries have presumed that their readers were Biblically literate. In […]
Americans of all generations are familiar, whether they know it or not, with Cuba and its history. Words such as “Che” Guevara, embargo, Fidel, Elián González, Mariel, resonate with the American history of the last half century. These terms are also intimately related to Cuba and its peoples. I invite you to join me at this special moment […]
A conversation from ancient China opens up for us a question about the relationship between the world in our mind that grapples with global issues and the world of our hands that do small useful tasks. Do we ignore the small when thinking big and ignore the big when doing small?’ Can we find a […]
With the unfolding conversations and awareness around gender identity and diversity, how do we understand what it means to be “us” in ways that welcome and open the fullness of all our gender identities and possibilities? Rev. Karen Hering is consulting literary minister, rooted at Unity Church-Unitarian, St. Paul, and author of Writing to Wake the Soul: Opening […]
“They were not social thinkers, but their friends were. Their summer friends, in particular, harvested facts row on row from newspapers like mice on corncobs. The Maytrees were not always up -to-the-minute. Their city friends envied their peace.” — The Maytrees by Annie Dillard From this hour, freedom! “From this hour I ordain myself loos’d […]
Most of us have brushes with death when we’re young but in those years it is usually never more than a rare visitor, to be forgotten as quickly as possible. After 50 it becomes an acquaintance, sometimes a frequent one. Too soon, for all of us, it will be a companion and, finally, move in […]
Our current existential dilemma – intimately intertwined over-population, over-consumption, and myriad environmental quagmires – can best be understood in the light of human behavioral characteristics that have arisen over evolutionary time. Our most unique trait as a species, our clever brain, has gotten us into a lot of trouble. I will argue that humans have […]
Since before recorded history, the human animal has gathered in groups to perform rituals, to share spiritual experience, and to sit in awe at that which we find ourselves embedded in. Worship, derived from the old English word to acknowledge worth, takes on many forms today. Especially in the UU movement, worship can be most […]