Come to Church Anyway!
Come no matter what the topic is, because your church needs you and you need your church.
A Recipe for Resilience
This recipe has been tweaked over time, so adjust as necessary. Sometimes it yields more servings than anticipated. Sometimes it needs a bit more of this ingredient or that. It comes from generations who have gone before me, and I've added my own flavor along the way. A Recipe for Resilience…
Reflection on Bipolar Disorder
The author, a member of a Unitarian Universalist (UU) congregation, reflects on living with bipolar disorder.
Crushing Systems
Shame seems to be a bestselling product pumped out of all these crushing systems.
Wild Emancipation for All of Us
When I was small and just learning how to do life in my body, I didn’t hesitate, didn’t hold back, didn’t worry how it would look, didn’t look for cues or ask for a line. My imagination ruled... I was entirely free to be, driven by the innovation my body inspired.
Humans’ Core Function Is Love
Love leads us to observe in a much deeper way than any other emotion.
A Faith of Holy Cartographers
I don’t want a smoothed-out, disproportionately aggrandized faith that attempts to draw all comers to its one self-righteous place at the top of the map of humanity… Instead, I want an imaginative and wandering faith of holy cartographers…
The How, Not the Why
Figuring out the why doesn’t really help me. My work is to figure out the how.
This Is the Landscape
So reads the doormat of conditional welcome: Here will pass the en-abled, blessed be their less complicated bodies. They will be able to hustle up a flight of stairs, decipher the PA, endure fluorescent lights, and follow long, thick, complicated words....
The Promise, the Practice, the People
As Unitarian Universalists, we believe democracy is more than a political system; it is a shared journey, a collective responsibility, and a profound act of faith in one another.
Hopefulness in Bad Times
To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness.
Simply Cherish The Earth
Regardless of our differences, there are a host of affirmations that we embrace as the basis for our faith. Whatever we think the holy may be, Creation itself is holy. We make no distinctions between the natural and the supernatural, the secular and the sacred. We simply cherish the earth and all...
Song of the Universe
Listen carefully… Can you still hear the song? The one sung for you when you were born. The song sung by a cosmos in motion rejoicing at your life.
Charge from the Earth
Today, we are charged to remember. To know that as we live together in community, we are also in community with the silently singing lives in the vast congregation of the earth as well... Let us remember, and then act.
Disturbance and Change
Disturbance opens the terrain for transformative encounters… Humanists, not used to thinking with disturbance, connect the term with damage. But disturbance, as used by ecologists, is not always bad—and not always human.
Multispecies World Making
All organisms make ecological living places, altering earth, air, and water... In the process, each organism changes everyone’s world.
The Origins of the Anti-Choice Movement
How white evangelicals became the most powerful voting bloc in the U.S. and the fuel of the American white supremacy engine.
The Power to Choose
The power to choose is the power of life in the midst of brokenness.
A Seed Knows How to Wait
A seed knows how to wait. Most seeds wait for several years before starting to grow; a cherry seed can wait for a hundred years with no problem. What exactly each seed is waiting for is known only to that seed. Some unique trigger-combination of temperature-moisture-light and many other things is...
A Strong Reverence for Life
Those of us who call ourselves religious Humanists have a strong reverence for life. Many of us experience a deep sense of awe before the mystery of life and death, those powers greater than ourselves. We share a respect for science and reason, and we are willing to live with ambiguity to live...
Peace Like a River, Strength Like a Mountain
Nature provides ready metaphors for peace and justice. Jesus' peaceful kingdom is described as a mustard seed that grows into a large bush, providing shelter to all. the Hebrew prophet Amos cried for justice to roll down like water, and we sing, "I've got peace like a river" and "strength like a...
The Miraculous Pitcher
During the hot Nebraska summers of my childhood, I spent hours, high in my treehouse, devouring the books I found in the small collection my parents had acquired from the estates of various relatives. One of my favorites was A Wonder Book, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s retelling of classical myths. My...
Green Sanctuary Kick-Off Responsive Reading
Setting ourselves to the task of Greening our Congregation, together we promise these things: Most simply, we will each do our small part to care for the earth around us. We will start with one step forward toward the thriving world that we envision....
Let Our Table Stand Like an Altar
I [do not] mean to present myself as some kind of bodhisattva of compassion. However, in my better moments—at least in my more conscious moments—while I’m eating, I do try to imagine the lives and even the deaths of the creatures who nourish me. I try to think of the freedom and exhilaration...
Are You What You Eat?
On a deeper level, do we consider what we are eating and whether its origins are compatible with our personal values? Since the beginning of time, dietary practices have been incorporated into the religious practices of humanity....
Food for Thought: UU Values and Sustainable Food
I remember back to the 50’s and 60’s when, once a week, my mother would don her shirtwaist, climb into the family car, and make her way to the A&P. How did she choose her groceries then? In our family, in New England and a long way from the fertile, productive valleys of California, proximity...
Mind the Mules: Theology and Justice in the Food Chain
I grew up on my family farm in the southern part of Illinois. There was nothing about it that was a golden age. And I’m NOT nostalgic about the good old days. I don’t like carrying water from the well out back. I don’t like going to an outhouse at 4 a.m. in the snow. I don’t like the wasps...
CSA as Spiritual Discipline
I understand participation in Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) as a spiritual practice or discipline. While the word discipline may want to make us run and hide, a spiritual practice or discipline is meant to help us find our center. Approaching my participation in the CSA as a spiritual...
Recognition of Volunteers: A Litany
Leader (L): When there was a need, you came forward. Congregation (C): And so we thank you. L: In the nighttime or daytime, on weekends and even in the coldest, darkest part of the year, you helped. C: And so we thank you....
Cultivating Trust as an Organizing Strategy
It takes courage to bring our trust forward and invite another person to meet us there. This sometimes sure, often shaky, surrender is an opportunity to discover something deeper than the confines of our individual experience.
Toward Goodness
The fulcrum of the Earth tilts toward goodness and I will ride along…
Company on the Path to Inner Truth
The journey toward inner truth is too taxing to be made solo.
The Work of Repentance
The work of repentance demands curiosity, care, and a willingness to face hard things with bravery and honesty.
The Work of Repair
A person is not entitled to forgiveness if they haven’t done the work of repair.
The Path of Repentance
The path of repentance is one that can help us not only to repair what we have broken, but to grow in the process of doing so.
Atonement versus Forgiveness
Atonement is, in the framework of my tradition, something that happens in connection with the divine.
We Are Not Guests
Am I a guest here. Here in this House. Are you? Are we guests here. Here in this House. And, whose House do we inhabit? In the small world of our lives the borders between us: easements, fences, gates, hedges—serve to delineate, to separate us. To remind us of where my property begins and ends.
Easter and Ostara
Easter gets its name from the Teutonic goddess of spring and the dawn, whose name is spelled Oestre or Eastre. (The origin of the word east, the direction of the rising sun, comes from various Germanic, Austro-Hungarian words for dawn that share the root for the word aurora, which means “to...
May Means Mother's Day
May means Mother’s Day. I’m going to trust Hallmark and daddies and six year-olds and grown-up kids who are mommies themselves to honor the mothers among us as they deserve to be honored—with brass bands, flags flying, breakfast in bed (and kitchens cleaned up afterwards). I wish for those...
Visitors in the Struggle for Racial Justice
No matter what tactics and methods racial justice activists use, the general response of society will be a collective head-shaking and tsk-tsk-ing — because what people are actually complaining about are not the specific tactics that are being used in the struggle for racial justice, but that the...
Every Mother Has a Different Story
Every mother has a different story, though we tend to group them together. We like to think that partnered moms have it good and single moms have it rough, but the truth is that we're a diverse bunch....
The Promise and the Practice: "Missing Voices" Reading
When I started attending a UU church, I was excited by the promise of worship that would draw from the arts, science, nature, literature and a multitude of voices. Indeed, some of the voices that Unitarian Universalists hear in worship each week belong to Thoreau, Emerson, Ballou, and others....
The Promise and the Practice: "Black Joy" Reading
Joy Unspeakable is not silent, it moans, hums, and bends to the rhythm of a dancing universe…. For our free African ancestors, joy unspeakable is drum talk… For enslaved Africans during the Middle Passage, joy unspeakable is the surprise of living one more day… For Africans in bondage in the...
Widening Our Welcome
Recently, I ordered 4-foot-tall rainbow bunnies for my church. Just after I hit “order,” I wondered if we really needed them. Later that day, one of my parishioners sent me a picture taken in front of a local church: on the lawn was an enormous banner with a picture of the Holy Family, and the...
A False Story of Discovery
Every October and November in the United States, we find ourselves in a season of false and misleading stories about European settlers and Native Americans. First there’s the story that Columbus discovered America in 1492. Then there’s the story about the Pilgrims and the Indians at the first...
Thanksgiving as a Day of Mourning
In 1617, a few years before English settlers landed, an epidemic began to spread through the area that became southern New England. It likely came from British fishermen, who had been fishing off the coast for decades. By 1620, ninety to ninety-six percent of the population had died. It decimated...
It Began with a Stone
When some people think of Easter, they think of a bunny rabbit. Others would point to other fertility symbols and signs of Spring, springing forth out of the ordinary, the plain, the seemingly dead: butterflies, flowers, and the like. Christians might think of the empty cross, or of a cross with...
In This Delicate Turning
It is time to throw out our exceptional identity and humble ourselves... We have always done good in the world—it is in our DNA. The question is, are we ready to do better for our own people? Because the world includes every person in our faith—many of whom have been micro-aggressioned right out...