As we honor Memorial Day this weekend, people across our country take time to engage in rituals of public grief and remembrance. As the national and global death toll of COVID-19 climbs, those who’ve lost loved ones yearn for public rituals to honor those dying today. What do our rituals of public grief tell us … Continue reading Heroes, Monuments, and the Theology of Public Grief ?
“How are you?” we ask, over Zoom, FaceTime, or just the phone. And we all try our best to give the social grace of an answer, though how can any of us sum up how we are doing right now in the everyday language of conversation? As we tend to our inner worlds, it can … Continue reading The Ancestor of Your Future Happiness
Happy Imperfect Mother’s Day! Mothers are imperfect. All parents, all people are imperfect. Our families and communities are imperfect. Our whole world is especially imperfect right now. How do we love and bless all this imperfection? Today is another chance to embrace the messy journey of relationship, family, commitment and community. Rev. Emily Hartlief holds … Continue reading Bless The Imperfect
The acclaimed writer Arundhati Roy has written of the pandemic as a portal from one world the next. As orders to shelter in place are extended again, many of us are trying to sift through the tea leaves for a glimpse at the world to come. What wisdom guides us when our journey, inner or … Continue reading Between One World and the Next ?
Surrender can be a challenging word, perhaps especially for Unitarian Universalists. As we honor the holy month of Ramadan beginning this week, what can we learn from Islam’s powerful wisdom about this word at the heart of the tradition? As we are asked to surrender a great deal of freedom and control we have often … Continue reading A Thousand Ways to Kneel and Kiss the Ground ?
We celebrate the 50th Earth Day with people around the world in an unprecedented moment in human history. As the challenging truth of our radical interdependence rocks our daily lives, we reflect on our role in a global struggle for a just and verdant world. What will it take to sustain the focused attention of … Continue reading And All Her People One ?
Ten plagues, forty years in the desert, one wild woman with a tambourine. Three crosses and a cave, one stone rolled away. We tell ancient stories and remember old rituals in a time of tremendous change and uncertainty this year. How can the traditions of Passover and Easter help us to locate ourselves and our … Continue reading A Shelter of Memory ?
Services have been moved online.Please join us online at 10:30 am. What day of the week is it? When was the last time you showered? Is it still March? When will this be over?! As we navigate this crisis, our sense of time is warped. What wisdom teachings about our relationship to time can we … Continue reading Time Out of Time ?
Services have been moved online.Please join us online at 10:30 am. Rev. John Buehrens, our past UUA president who spoke with us in November, likes to say he is a Unitarian of the third part—by which he means, of the trinitarian Father, Son and Holy Spirit, he’ll take the Holy Spirit. Pneumatology is the branch … Continue reading The Wisdom of the Spirit ?
Services have been moved online. Please join us online at 10:30 am. The Dalai Lama imagined a “a map of our emotions to develop a calm mind,” and in 2014 asked a father-daughter team of emotion scholars to develop an Atlas of Emotions. As the role of emotion has taken a more prominent place in … Continue reading The Wisdom of the Heart ?
