It hurts to let go of intensity that zapped like electricity yesterday. It hurts to disconnect arcing power, watch it ground and vanish. What was it that surged through us to lighten gray, indifferent skies? What was it that connected our hearts to hope?...

Oh, the comfort—the inexpressible comfort of feeling safe with a person—having neither to weigh thoughts nor mea­sure words, but pouring them all right out, just as they are, chaff and grain together; certain that a faithful hand will take and sift them, keep what is worth keeping, and then...

Today we light our candle of remembrance. On April 19, 1943 the Jewish community in the Warsaw ghetto rose up against their captors in a valiant effort to regain their freedom and return a common humanity to those intent on destroying their very existence....

I somehow lost my chalice necklace on Commonwealth Avenue in Boston the same day I lost my marriage and my religion. I must have dropped it while I was walking down the street. It was a bad day. Let me back up. I grew up Unitarian Universalist. I had a chalice necklace for a long time that I only...

Our task is to be who we are, in every way we can be; our salvation proceeding in putting ­ourselves back together after each tumble...We irridesce, shine, and radiate. We exclaim and roar: we are.

Identity is one of those concepts I have tried desperately to push to the sidelines for most of mi vida. It was always too complicated, too painful, or too divisive....

I must live my own way, Refusing all that binds. I must know my own mind Among all other minds. I must do my own deeds, And in whatever lands. I will know my own hands Among all other hands. I must forsake the crowds, And walk with lonely fools, To seek for my own face In bleak, deserted pools. I...

I realized I was a woman, or more precisely at the time, a girl, the day in first grade I noticed boys were looking up my dress when I was on the monkey bars. I started wearing shorts under my dresses. I now prefer pants. I realized I liked other women when I was nineteen and noticed I was...

Each of us is meant to have a character all our own, to be what no other can exactly be, and do what no other can exactly do.

Wisdom, fundamentally, is knowing who you are, where you are, and what you’re trying to do or be.

By the time I was in my late twenties, I was convinced that I would never find love. I had had a few boyfriends, but over and over again, I was exiled to the dreaded Friend Zone. I always suspected that it was because I was “too much”: too smart, too feminist, too radical, too fat, too...

This is what one hundred years look like: A rounded wrinkled back, sparkling wet and soapy above the shower bench, and my hand, having ­gently formed in your seventieth year, and emerged with lifelines bent ­toward blessing, scrubbing ­circles across your soft, white skin. I drag the cloth...

New ­People came this time, and we shared our stories, the familiar truths, about shock and healing and being glad that at last our children can say who they are, and we know them now, love them more. Funny stories and good news ripple around, and smiles about lesbigay ways, and jokes, against...

There was a period in my life when, within three months, all my major relationships changed. The most joyous of these was getting married; Sarah and I had dated for three and a half years, and I proposed to her at our holiday party....

Love is knotted and gnarled, like an old tree fighting with the wind, like branches too brittle for their own good, like roots that relentlessly inform how deeply we can trust and how freely we can forgive.

The history and legacy of Unitarian Universalism are shaped as much by Emerson, Fahs, and Channing as it is by the ancestors in our congregations. We come to it through different avenues: the Internet, an invitation, reading the Transcendentalists, or as babies or ­little kids. I came as a fourth...

In the ­struggles we choose for ourselves, in the ways we move forward in our lives and bring our world forward with us, It is right to remember the names of those who gave us strength in this choice of living. It is right to name the power of hard lives well-lived. We share a history with those...

I lift my eyes up to the hills from where will my help come? My help comes from Love abundant. my help comes from the hills my help—my help, it comes from ancient Mothers whose hearts beat in mine. It comes from the trees that sway and the breeze that sways them . . . my help comes from all that...

Now is the time to call on the memories of the ancestors who thought they ­could not walk another step ­toward freedom—and yet they did. It is that time and place to call on the memories of the ancestors who, when the darkness of their lives threatened to take away the hope and light, reached a...