“I wondered about what I espoused as a pacifist and as a lover of life. As a Unitarian Universalist I dug for answers. But I had no answers. I still felt scared, horrified, hurt, angry, and shocked.”— Tom Capo How has this attack on our safe and secure country affected us? When a catastrophe...

Once or twice a generation comes a tragedy so immense that our whole nation comes to a stop and some new day of infamy becomes ingrained upon our memory and calendars. Such a date now becomes September 11th. We fixate on the horror; and then fear, anger, and a kind of helpless despair follow, but...

I invite you to reach out and make contact with the person next to you, a hand on shoulder, hand in hand, arm in arm, arm around, that we might feel our human connection at this dreadful time of mourning. And I ask you to be silent with me in remembrance of those who died on Tuesday, Sept. 11, in...

It’s really complicated honey. I’m only now understanding it myself. We weren’t really thinking about it like you and your friends do. It’s not that we didn’t care about how it would impact you; we weren’t really thinking about you at all. Oh that’s sounds terrible, I’ll say. I...

A while ago my friend told me that his son had come home from school with a new put-down expression. “That is sooo gay.” My friend explained to his son that perhaps he didn’t want to say that—after all, he lived in a family with two daddies—“gay” as a put-down just didn’t seem the...

My friend Sue has a son with autism who is now 19 years old. When Adam was younger (8–13) and when they would go to the grocery store, he would inevitably make a scene because he would want his parents to buy something he couldn’t have. This would be no ordinary scene of power play and wielding...

God, or however you wish to name the Divine, does not make mistakes. What does this mean? What does this mean when a mother gives birth to a child with mental retardation or cerebral palsy? What does this mean when a child is in an accident and becomes seriously physically impaired?...

I’ve always had a fantasy about going to the airport with just the clothes on my back, my ID, a credit card and my toothbrush. I go through the revolving door, walk up to the counter and look up at the day’s flight schedule as if I were looking at the menu in a coffee shop. But instead of...

I want to tell you right up-front that I am unabashedly pro-life. I am also unashamedly pro-abortion. What I am not is unequivocally running for political office! Now, some of you might consider my reproductive platform to be oxymoronic. The fact is that many of us find ourselves in this place of...

It is 2 a.m. I am sleeping in the chaplain’s on-call room at an inner city hospital. My room hovers over the Emergency Entrance and the darkness is punctuated with sirens and lights. It is my night to be available for those unexpected things that happen in the night. But, unlike most of my calls,...

After I graduated from college, I worked for Planned Parenthood for several years. Most days, I walked through protestors to get to work. They usually carried crosses and said things like, "Jesus will forgive you if you repent for your work." It turned out that the most revolutionary thing I did...

In 1935, a US government truck pulled up to my grandfather’s house, a two-room sharecropper’s shack in which sixteen people lived. They were starving to death. Not malnutrition. Starvation. The truck brought surplus food, which on that particular visit consisted of a gallon of mustard. My father...

"I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America..." "Twinkle, twinkle, little star, how I wonder what you are!..." 1 "Sisters are we, Spurs always true, our hearts ring out for the yellow and blue..." "Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, and sorry I could not travel both..." 2 A...

A Sermon for First UU Church of New Orleans and Community Church of New Orleans Sunday, August 27, 2006 First Presbyterian Church The clouds gather and the rumbling is enough to unsettle anyone....

First, let me bring you greetings from the larger family of faith of which you are a part. The Unitarian Universalist Association is the coming together of, now, 1055 free, liberal religious congregations in North America....

When I was a child, the world felt safe and whole and meaningful to me. It reached out and embraced me in a comfortable, welcoming, protective way. I felt "at home in the world," to borrow from the title we use for one of our Church School curricula....

It was Spring. At long last there was no hint of snow on the ground. It was even warm, sort of. Birds and bugs had, at last, returned to Milwaukee. And so in the great flush of Spring madness, Jan and I decided it was time to barbecue....

Your presence here in such numbers today is a wonderful indicator that this congregation is important to you and to people you love....

Last spring, I got a message from the universe. Now I don’t get too many messages from the universe; sometimes I don’t even get my phone messages. But this message was very loud, and it came at four in the morning in the form of a tremendous thud from my closet. This particular message was one...