June 11, 2017
“I have learned that the read church can be defined as our most intimate relationships: How we smile and trust each other; How we talk and touch each other; How we share and protect each other; How we welcome new friends and forgive old enemies; How we love each other—in all the myriad ways that love can be expressed. That is the church.” — Rev David Rankin
June 4, 2017
“This is the highest activity of your mind and heart, this Oneness…to see all the relations and the connections between all objects, forces, peoples, and creatures…This is why all great religions preach the central idea of Oneness.” — Woodie Guthrie
May 28, 2017
“…the true measure of our lives is about how we touch and guide and nurture the lives of others as we are given opportunity to do so. “
May 14, 2017
What these two women [Julie Ward Howe and Anna Jarvis]—from widely differing stations in life—had in common, then, was a vision and a desire for a reconciled human family. This is the vision we should all be striving towards in whatever great or small ways we can, using whatever means and resources are available to us.
April 16, 2017
…when it comes to the rhythms of our lives, in all their great glory and in all their deep tragedy, we are the ones who must be agents of resurrection. We are the ones who still have to reawaken when our bars of the spirit are lifted. We are the ones who have to do the shaping in order that we may fulfill the promises of our own lives.
April 9, 2017
I do believe in resurrection, of a sort. I believe as do most Christians and non-Christians alike in keeping alive the Jewish Galilean prophet’s subversive wisdom. While I no longer adhere to the doctrines that have come to make up the religion about Jesus–doctrines he never promulgated himself–I find much that is worthy in the religion of Jesus. And I’m grateful for the role that our Unitarian and Universalist forebears played in making that distinction.
April 2, 2017
I will say now that we—individually, as part of citizen action groups, as members of this congregation—seek and act in ways to be a part of the positive and uplifting piece of our immigration narrative.
March 26, 2017
A covenant, within the context of ministry, is a promise the minister and the congregation make to one another for as long as they each and all wish to maintain it. Without getting chapter and verse about it here, I’ll say it is a covenant in which the minister and the congregation pledge to one another to bring together their resources, their time, skills, energy, knowledge, love, compassion, and care in order that real ministry can happen. It is more than a contractual agreement, that is to say. It is a pledge to walk together towards the ongoing fulfillment of a commonly shared mission and vision.
March 12, 2017
… we are then called to renewal and to recommitment to be persons of faith in the best sense of the term; the faith that we can be agents of healing and reconciliation and transformation in the broken places of life.
March 5, 2017
[Vonnegut] did not usually make his God references in a dismissive or cynical way, although cynicism is part of his literary stock in trade. He made them instead in the more […] paradoxical way of someone who is honestly searching for something that he thinks isn’t there but who believes the search is worth the effort anyway.