There was once a crow who was very hungry. Flying over the tops of the trees, it spotted a large, tasty-looking walnut growing from one of the tallest branches below. Seeing the makings of a fine supper, the crow swooped down and plucked the dangling walnut and held it triumphantly in its beak....

Does the match love the wick? Does the wick love the wax or the air it consumes? “Yes, without question.” To melt together, To burn together, To change together, The pieces of the candle must love each other. Though not necessarily wisely, and not necessarily well.

Dear God, Dear Love, hold the people of Uganda in your heart. May you grant courage and safety to our gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender siblings who are in danger this day, In Kampala and Entebbe, along the shores of Lake Victoria and Lake Kyoga, among the kingdoms of Toro, Ankole, Busoga,...

There was an elderly man in England named Arthur Flowerdew. He’d lived his whole life in the seaside town of Norfolk, and had left England only once, to journey to the French coast. All his life, however, Arthur Flowerdew had been plagued by vivid mental pictures of a great city surrounded by...

The gospels are full of stories about Jesus healing. The healing stories represent some of the most moving images in Scripture. They are the most important miracle stories that were used to convince the world that Jesus was the Son of God during the first five centuries of the Common Era....

How can we begin to understand what hope and healing mean in the face of a deadly illness with no known cure? We have many sources of hope and healing in our lives—singing, praying, thinking, communicating, acting, giving, and remembering. Dr. Richard Cabot tells the story of a young theological...

Let us seek the quiet and the calm Let us lay aside our loud calling Let us lay aside our struggle Speak softly: let us listen to the melodies that recall other proportions Our moments tarry not with us Let us then seek the dimension that endures beyond all nowness and hereness beyond all...

I feel sorry for the kids today who are taking geography in school for the first time. When I was in school, unless you got really interested in the history of Iraqi Kurdistan, there was a chance you could get all the way through geography class without ever having to know learn to spell Sulaymania.

Let us be humble, for the worst thing in the world is of the same stuff as we are. Let us be confident, for we too are composed of the same stuff as the stars. Amen.

We pause this hour to honor the spirit and to accept ourselves as fragile humans, equally full of nobility and strength. We gather, weary of life’s trials, yet cheered by infinite possibilities for love’s grace. We meet with smiles and glad voices for old friends and new—every stranger a gift...

Ten years ago, I was asked to present a paper to a new ministers’ study group that was forming at Cedar Hill, a small conference center near Boston. The group had chosen a perennial topic for UU clergy study groups: "Science and Religion." My job was to review one of the books we’d read in...

As must be obvious to every one of you, these are times of great tension and conflict in America. Much of this turmoil in our nation is focused on what many observers have called The Culture Wars...the very vocal and visible battles that are occurring on many fronts to determine whose values,...

We believe there is a place at God’s table for each and every child of earth Hey, ain’t that good news! We believe the giver of life has been given many names and loves the givers of all of them Hey, ain’t that good news! We are more interested in getting heaven into people now than getting...

I am a man and I am a woman; I am a boy and I am a girl. And I am a Unitarian Universalist I am young and I am old and I am middle-aged. And I am a Unitarian Universalist...

O Creative Spirit of Life, in which we live and move and have our being:We give thanks for all of nature's bounties.We give thanks for caring friends and compassionate neighbors.We give thanks for the communion of those who seek to serve others.Each of us carries our private griefs and burdens.

Unitarian Universalists are proud of themselves for doing nothing to seek converts to their faith. A person’s religion is a private inward thing, it is said, and we should in no way seek to influence another person to choose our way in religion. The underlying principle here is respect for the...

Every once in a while in my life, I have a human conversation that so stuns or startles me that it proves impossible to ever forget. It wasn’t long ago that I had such a troubling and transforming interaction, and I want to tell you about it. But first, I have to set the stage. Twenty years ago,...

Rev. James Madison Rasnake was the best Baptist minister in Georgia. His first career had been as a lawyer, and he was known for his splendid reasoning abilities. After creating a well-known law practice, he found his true calling—ministry—in particular, the Baptist ministry. In 1896 he was...

Happiness is a deep, persistent and universal obsession for humanity. As one of my correspondents asked, "Why isn’t happiness the only thing that matters?" From the very beginning Americans (in particular) have made happiness a central piece of their national quest....

We are all dying, our lives always moving toward completion. We need to learn to live with death, and to understand that death is not the worst of all events. We need to fear not death, but life—empty lives, loveless lives lives that do not build upon the gifts that each of us has been given,...

At one point in her novel Fly Away Home, American writer Marge Piercy has a mother say of her daughters: “The girls had been raised Unitarian (Universalist), which seemed a nice, sensible compromise between having no religion at all and having to lie about what we believed. Enough religion to be...

Living your Unitarian Universalism (UUism) means... If a grieving neighbor needs some companionship, you brew the pot of coffee and sit down to listen. Living your UUism means......

The womb of stars embraces us; remnants of their fiery furnaces pulse through our veins. We are of the stars, the dust of explosions cast across space. We are of the earth: we breathe and live in the breath of ancient plants and beasts....

"It was still dark that morning in 1942 when the Gestapo rousted from bed the Jews of Bobawa, a Polish village. In the confusion, twelve-year-old Samuel Oliner slipped away and hid on a roof, still in his pajamas. The next afternoon, when he dared to look around, the ghetto was silent....

"You want to do what?" her friend said. "But you can’t, you can’t, what difference could you make. It’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve heard!" "But if someone doesn’t do something, how many more people will be killed, maimed or starve to death because of the war?" Emily answered. "But two...

"What do you want for your birthday?" the father asked his daughter. "Do you want a doll?" She wrinkled her nose and scrunched her eyes and thought. "No." "A tea set?" "A pony?" "No, Father, I have a year to think. I want this year to be a special year, to remember." "All right....

How shall we address thee who art the One of a thousand names yet ever nameless? O Vishnu, Maya, Kali, Ishtar, Athene, Isis...Great Mother of Creation, womb of the universe, The Feminine Divine….Blessed art thou who hast given life to all And receiveth us at the end, forever thine... Jupiter,...

We come to this time and this place: To rediscover the wondrous gift of free religious community; To renew the faith in the holiness, goodness, and beauty of life; To reaffirm the way of the open mind and full heart; To rekindle the flame of memory and hope; and To rekindle the vision of an earth...

Because of those who came before, we are;in spite of their failings, we believe;because of, and in spite of, the horizons of their vision,we, too, dream.Let us go remembering to praise,to live in the moment,to love mightily,to bow to the mystery.(No.680, Singing the Living Tradition)...

Take a moment right now to visualize in your mind’s eye the first American Thanksgiving feast which our Pilgrim forebears shared with their Native American neighbors on the shores of Massachusetts Bay in the Fall of 1621. If you’re like me, you imagined a pretty pleasant and peaceable scene—a...

This morning, I want us to grapple with one of the most universal and troubling facts of human existence. Though every last one of us would have it otherwise, it is an unavoidable reality that during our lifetimes people close to us will become sick, suffer great pain, and, in some cases, die. It...

Elie Wiesel was just a wide-eyed and innocent adolescent when he and all the other Jews of the Transylvanian village of Sighet were jammed into cattle cars one April night in 1944 by SS troops, and shipped to Auschwitz....

An Austrian millionaire was in the news this month for giving away all of his fortune. Why? "For a long time I believed that more wealth and luxury automatically meant more happiness," he said....

George: This is Angel Gabriel of KGOD airwaves, coming to you live from the downtown mall in Bethlehem. The air is positively solar as frenzied shoppers scurry from store to store, their camels and donkeys weighted down with purchases. The beasts bawl. There are only, count ‘em and weep shoppers,...

Since the economy is in a kind of black hole, I was interested to read that researchers using NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope have traced the building blocks of the universe back one more step and it leads to the massive black holes in space. We know that the Earth did not spring out of thin air...

Since the time human beings became conscious of their existence, of the reality that they will die, and of the awareness that birth creates new life, they have wondered where they came from, why they were there and what happened to them when they died. They regarded these happenings with awe and...