I invite you now into a time of meditation. You may wish to adjust your position: your feet flat on the ground, your body resting easily against the back of the chair, your hands gently open, palms up, resting on your thighs, your eyelids relaxed and half-closed, your breathing soft and easy.

The Congregational minister stopped me in the aisle of the supermarket a few months after I had unexpectedly recovered from a serious illness. With a gentle but slightly teasing smile he asked me, “How does a Unitarian deal with a miracle?” It was a good question, one which I thought about a...

In this time of long nights and short days, let us seek the light within … by contemplating, through our mind’s eye, the image of a candle flame. Notice how the soft, quiet, and gentle flame tamely rises from the wick. Yet, just by touching a dry twig, it has the power to become a raging bonfire...

Your first Christmas, your last Christmas, this Christmas, and the redemption of the whole world are all happening right now, forever.

No hot house flowers, these, bred for perfection, dyed and trimmed, and arranged to order, clothed in ribbons and bows. Not these. No, these are hardy, raw and wild. Grown under the sky, they’ve weathered the wind and the rain and the heat. These drew nutrients from the neighborhood soil and...

When you heard that voice and knew finally it called for you and what it was saying—where were you? Were you in the shower, wet and soapy, or chopping cabbage late for dinner? Were you planting radish seeds or seeking one lost sock? Maybe wiping handprints off a window or coaxing words into a...

Early in the morning, before the children are awake and while the grass is still dewy, I like to walk in my garden. It’s “my” garden only because it shares the same small plot of land my family and I inhabit. The garden does not really belong to me; I belong to it—at least for the short time...

(adapted from the original) If, on a starlit night, with the moon brightly shimmering, We stay inside and do not venture out, the evening universe remains a part of life we shall not know....

Spirit of Life, I give thanks for the opportunities to love that present themselves in the turmoil of life. Where the light catches the tears in another’s eyes, where hands are held and there are moments without words, let us be present then, and alive to the possibility of changing. Let us seek...

The universe does not revolve around you. The stars and planets spinning through the ballroom of space dance with one another quite outside of your small life. You cannot hold gravity or seasons; even air and water inevitably evade your grasp. Why not, then, let go?...

It’s a pilgrimage, like a trek around Mount Kailash, or perhaps Bodh Gaya, but it’s life itself, the whole thing, every moment. On the high passes of Mount Kailash, pilgrims hope for a kind of death, a rebirth of spirit, and it’s not a bad thing to go there, do that, if time and money allow.

When I begin to bless this food and close my eyes I lose myself first just in green: how do leaves grow themselves this green and how do they grow at all to be so large and how do they make themselves from soil which in itself is only brown and sunlight helps and water but how is the end of this,...

Come into this room, weigh into this chair, breathe into this body, the very body that will be you, for better and for worse, in sickness and in health, till death do us part....

In the hours before the birds stream airborne with chiming voice, a silent breath rests in the pines, and upholds the surface of the lake as if it were a fragile bubble in the very hand of God. And I think, this is how we are called....

Emmanuel means "God is with us." Who is your Emmanuel? Who is your "God is with us," the one you were promised, the one you have been waiting for? For the ancient prophet Isaiah, he was a boy soon to be born who would guide the people of Judah back to peace and harmony with God....

Wouldn't it be great if you could take a picture of your soul?...

Now is the moment of magic, when the whole, round earth turns again toward the sun....

Let us enter into a spirit of meditation. Much of our human struggle is with what we do not know or understand. It is often difficult not to want answers—or even more difficult, not to think we have them already. May we experience what we do not know not as an individual failure but as an...

How does one address a mystery? Cautiously—let us go cautiously, then, to the end of our certainty, to the boundary of all we know, to the rim of uncertainty, to the perimeter of the unknown which surrounds us. Reverently—let us go with a sense of awe, a feeling of approaching the powerful holy...

God, God is water sleeping in high-piled clouds. She is gentle drink of rain, pooling lake, rounding pond, angry flooding river. She is frothy horse-maned geyser. She is glacier on mountains and polar ice cap, and breath-taking crystalline ideas of snowflakes. She is frost-dance on trees....