Month: April 2012

Inspiration:

 

 

What would you need to give up to let something new in your life?

 

 

A World-Wide Journey

I didn’t have the choice of where to live when I was a child. It wasn’t until my third year in college that I had a choice of where I wanted to live and what direction I wanted my life to go. It was then that it became clear to me that my life would not go in the direction my family, or I, had thought it would. As soon as I started questioning the Muslim journey, I realized that I would rock the boat with my family in a way that would forever change how I would be in the world. I would give up the security and stability of being held by the people who raised me if I chose a path that would take me away from Islam. So I did just that. I could not be dishonest with the God who I was raised to believe knew what was in my heart and soul…

Journeys are what happens when we let life take us on a ride. I try to “plan” in life, but like the saying goes, “You make plans and God laughs.” To me, it is more important to be open to new experiences and flexible when need be.

by Aisha Hauser TO READ MORE

Inspiration:

 

I can’t change others, but I can change how I relate to them.

Changed Lives

As a minister I have been told that something I said or did changed someone’s life. Of course I live for this! However, what people say in this context is often mysterious and surprising. People quote lines to me that I don’t remember speaking, and then share what they have gone on to make or do because of my words.

I have certainly made some pretty major decisions of my own inspired by a scrap of poetry or the random words of a hitch-hiker. I am a highly intuitive person and, for better or worse, navigate my life in ways that completely baffle more rational souls. But, as mysterious as the ways our lives touch and affect each other might be, I want to use my precious days consciously creating more life and being in contact with others who are doing the same. I want more love, more vitality, more health for me and for the world—those I affect directly through the ripples I send out, and those inhabiting some section of the interdependent web that I’ll never even know about.

by Meg Riley, Senior Minister, Church Of The Larger Fellowship TO READ MORE

Inspiration:

 

How will you be re-born today?

The Impossible and the Laughable

I believe that we are religious when we allow ourselves to be constantly surprised and awed by the world’s complexities. “People flock to religion not in spite of the fact that it’s laughable, but precisely because of it,” says UU minister Rob Hardies. “The reason people come to church on Easter is to look for hope…. The church is the repository of human hope…. The church is the place where we stash away those stories of hope for when we and the world need them most.”

The richly-textured fabric of our Unitarian Universalist community holds countless stories of hope. Those stories give us reason to trust that the impossible can happen. What impossible things does your heart yearn for? What hopes, if you named them out loud, would seem laughable?

Is the “impossible,” for you, the hope that you might emerge on the other side of some harrowing inner struggle?

Is it laughable to think that whatever’s burdening your heart right now might grow lighter, until one day it’s gone?

Does “peace” seem impossible to you? Is it laughable to think that we human beings could live in peace in the Middle East? Between the gang zones in your own city? In our own families?

Or perhaps what seems impossible is that our culture will one day reflect the inherent worth and dignity of every person.

Is it so laughable to believe that you’re nothing less than beautiful, nothing less than whole?

These are all religious matters, every one of them. Do they seem laughable? Do they seem impossible?

Let us decide, nevertheless, to be religious.

by the Rev. Erika Hewitt TO READ MORE

Inspiration:

 

In the blink of an eye, everything changes. And yet you keep blinking.

Reflections on Job Loss

Our job meant income, status and gave us part of our identity—part of who we are. Suddenly we are cut loose from those moorings. We are not quite the same person any more, because part of us has changed: the part that went to work and interacted as we did. It can leave us feeling angry at the time of leaving and fearful about the future. One of the most helpful things a friend said to me in a time of transition was that each of us is the most ourself when we are between things. We are not shaped by an organizational culture at such times, but rather are the most “me” we ever are. This time can yield a fruitful experience of taking stock and making room for who we have become at this point in our lives. We were so busy working that we may not have noticed our own growing and changing. We need to grieve our loss and to recognize our feelings of anger and fear so that we are able to reap the benefits of reflection.

by Susanna Whitman TO READ MORE

Inspiration:

 

If you want to shrink something,
You must first allow it to expand.
If you want to get rid of something,
You must first allow it to flourish.
If you want to take something,
You must first allow it to be given.
This is called the subtle perception
Of the way things are.  

―Tao Te Ching, Translated by Stephen Mitchell

Passover

Transformation is at the heart of the two major holidays of this month, Passover and Easter. Passover is the story of how one man, Moses, transforms from a tongue-tied sheep herder into a leader of the Hebrew people. But more than that, Passover is the story of how the Hebrews, a group of people living in slavery to the Egyptians, transformed themselves into the Jewish people, a people with a religion and a relationship with God and eventually a land that was their own.

This transformation of the Hebrew people doesn’t happen overnight. They aren’t transformed the moment they escape from Egypt, or when they reach the opposite shore of the Red Sea that had miraculously opened up to make a path for them. They aren’t transformed when they see God going before them as a pillar in the desert, and they aren’t even transformed when Moses brings down from the mountaintop the stone tablets containing the rules that God has set for them. They’re transformed as they go along, and no one can really say at what moment it happens…

There’s no single moment when they get enlightened or perfected. They just stumble around in the desert for forty years, and over all that time something…shifts. They become freer, more responsible for themselves, more able to be in relationship with God. They transform. Not from bad or stupid people into perfect people, but from Hebrew slaves to Jewish people in a covenanted relationship with their God.

BY LYNN UNGAR, MINISTER FOR LIFESPAN LEARNING, CHURCH OF THE LARGER FELLOWSHIP TO READ MORE