If commitments shape who we are (see next Sunday), how do we balance commitments competing for our attention, colliding and pulling us in multiple worthwhile directions?  How do we honor and balance our commitments to self, family, work, our community, the environment, to justice?  Finding that balance is hard and has left many of us … Continue reading Colliding Committments

Live Stream Only Our Board of Trustees has been reading and wrestling with the June 2020 report of the UUA Commission on Institutional Change titled “Widening the Circle of Concern.”  The charge of the commission was to conduct an audit of the power structures and analyze systemic racism and white supremacy culture within the Unitarian … Continue reading Widening the Circle

Live Stream Only What if to “side with love” meant making bold, faith-full choices? What if it were even a little bit scary? This worship service brings together worship leaders and musicians from across the country to offer hopeful, moving, challenging reminders about what we, as Unitarian Universalists, are called to do, and BE, in … Continue reading Side With Love

Live Stream Only Beloved Community is a way of being, an attitude, an orientation of the heart.  It is an aspiration and a practice that shapes our relationships with each other and all living things.  What does it require to be a Beloved Community?  How do we live into the tension that exists between the … Continue reading Our Beloved Community

Live Stream Only Humanity has imaged the divine in a myriad of ways – as a comforting presence, as a life-giving, creative force, as a connected web of all existence, as a mental construct projecting and reflecting our human struggles and aspirations.  And much more.  How do YOU imagine God  / Goddess / the Gods?  … Continue reading The God of Our Imagination

Live Stream Only Legendary psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi observes that experiences are genuinely satisfying when we are in a state of consciousness called flow.  During flow, we typically experience deep enjoyment, creativity, and a total involvement with life.  And it is a state that can be controlled, not just left to chance.  How does creativity move … Continue reading When Your Imagination Flows

Live Stream Only Langston Hughes has been called the poet laureate of the African-American experience — a visionary writer of the Harlem Renaissance who gave hopeful expression to the aspirations of the oppressed, even as he decried racism and injustice.  His powerful poetry and prose continues to speak to the dream of Martin Luther King, … Continue reading I Dream a World

Feeling stuck and in a rut?  In a relationship?  At work?  At home?  In retirement?  Relating to yourself?  Feeling stuck in the societal rut of polarization and all its manifestations?  Imagination to the rescue, along with some courage.  Or in the words of G.K. Chesterton: “Fairy Tales are more than true; not because they tell … Continue reading Imagination to the Rescue

Online Only “Be still and God is with you. Be still, and you are never alone.” says Donald L. Hicks.  Whether we perceive God as a creator who pays us special attention or whether we relate to ‘god’ or “the divine” as shorthand for some other, hard-to-express truth, the insight remains the same:  There is … Continue reading Meeting the Mystery in Stillness

The silence of solitude is welcome and needed.  The silence of loneliness feels quite different.  It is a source of pain and distress, common even before the pandemic and ubiquitous now.  Like hunger and thirst, loneliness is a sensation that is telling us something essential is missing – our sense of feeling connected in a … Continue reading The Sound of Loneliness