It was in Alaska, right before the first Gulf War, that I first realized how music can “teach us how to hear the world differently,” as jazz critic Jed Rasula once said. I was in the Air Force “Gateway to the West” jazz band and my unit was temporarily deployed to Alaska, waiting anxiously...

Poem Try to Praise the Mutilated World , by Adam Zagajewski (translated from the Polish) Try to praise the mutilated world. Remember June's long days, and wild strawberries, drops of wine, the dew. The nettles that methodically overgrow the abandoned homesteads of exiles. You must praise the...

For if they are evil and we are not, if that's how we see things, then we are committing the same kind of error which led to this tragedy. That's the problem of evil. Not so much that it exists — in that it's really just a fact of life, or a force of nature. The problem of evil, as I see it, is...

A child I know, when asked this week whether she would answer the call of her elementary school principal to wear red, white and blue clothes on Thursday, was in a quandary. She put down the crayon with which she was painstakingly trying to squeeze the words Peace is Possible onto the white bars...

“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...

For many of us this Sunday service is where we come together to examine what gives our lives worth and to make sense of the seemingly incomprehensible events around us. Our time in this sanctuary is not mundane; it is a special time where we wrestle with many of the fundamental questions about life.

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...

Wealth, bounty, scarcity, money, are complex—layered with meaning. We use money all the time, frequently worry over it, try to manage it—but to really think about it is pretty daunting. Money is a tool in a world based upon exchange; it can’t be avoided. At one time people exchanged goods,...

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...

The first step is to notice the mountain. It is there. And it belongs to a range of mountains. There’s no going around it. The next step is to reach the kind of acceptance that has us praying in our hearts: "Lord, I don’t ask you to move the mountain, just give me the strength to climb." The...

We retell the birth, life, and death of Dr. King to symbolize that it is not until humanity can measure the worth and meaning of a single life, that it can extend worth that to all souls. But, this is a new day....

Fantasies sometimes reveal undisclosed information about ourselves: our hidden phobias, unspoken desires and unexamined motives. And group fantasies say much about our culture—our society's real values as opposed to the ideals that receive mainly lip service.

Introduction One year for the November Service Auction, [a member] asked and I agreed to have a sermon topic listed among the many items available for bidding....