Month: June 2012

Inspiration: 

 

Where does the homesick snail belong? – Ric Masten

 

 

 

Finding Your Tribe

Where do you feel at home? Where do you feel lost and detached from who you are and where you belong? Often, the answers to these questions have little to do with geography. At one point or another, most of us have felt lost and alone in our own homes, when it seemed like our family didn’t recognize or value us, or when it seemed like a spouse or dear friend willfully denied our true self. And, if we are lucky, many of us have experienced walking into a crowd of strangers and feeling perfectly at home, welcomed into a place where we instantly belonged.

It’s always hard to open a door, to meet a new set of people, never quite knowing whether this time we will find our people, the tribe we have been searching for, or whether we will feel even more like strangers once we cross the threshold. It’s easy to assume that the people who look or sound or dress the most like us will provide the key to where we will feel most at home. But the moments when we can transcend those assumptions and look for deeper connections of heart, mind and purpose are the places where magic can happen, where we can find home in a place that is totally new.

Inspiration: 

 

Where do you look for traces of the Holy?

Transcendence and the Holy

Transcendence does not mean that the holy exists separately from the beauty and heartbreak of life on earth, which pulses in our bodies and daily lives (immanence). Rather, divine mystery is woven throughout every moment of time, every cell of our aging and imperfect bodies, every interaction and choice. Our spiritual practice is to remember to see it!

I don’t know a God who is a big abstract perfect God…a being in the sky, removed from life on the earth. Sky and earth are as inseparable from one another as breath and body. This is not some remote abstract principle. Try holding your breath and see how long you make it!

I have always felt that worshipping the remote God of abstraction is similar to being devoted to a parent who is never present, lavishing the absent one with longing and adoration, while not recognizing the worth of the one who is there day after day, preparing meals, caring for us. We can, instead, commit our lives to seeing holiness as what is right here, rather than something that we long for in some other time and place.

BY MEG RILEY SENIOR MINISTER, CHURCH OF THE LARGER FELLOWSHIP TO READ MORE

Inspiration: 

 

 

“Why walk when you can fly?” ―Mary Chapin Carpenter

The Grace of a Bungee Jump

A few years back, I went with my family in North Carolina to a big amusement park. After turns on the merry-go-round, the water slide and the roller coaster, our sights turned towards the bungee jump. My sister, my nieces and I stood watching the huge crane lift two people at a time up and up to the height of a 10-story building, then drop them towards the pavement. My sister Kathy and niece Kailey immediately said “No way!” My niece Lauren and I stepped bravely forward….

The bungee cord, the plunging, the bouncing: all of that is life. The arc of the pendulum, the flight after you are forced to let go: that is grace. It’s not what you expected; it might come after a hair-raising drop or challenging event—and still, grace arrives as a gift you did not know you would receive. Perhaps you have your own description of the sensation. Grace is the absolute calm of being caught. Grace is the peaceful knowing you are beloved. It is ending your scream, opening your eyes, and smiling at a new landscape.

by Louise Green, Minister of Pastoral Care and Lay Leadership, All Souls Church, Unitarian Universalist, Washington, DC TO READ MORE

Inspiration: 

 

In each moment, invisibly, the world enters into us through our lungs. Take a deep breath, and appreciate how that which you cannot see enters you and gives you life.

Fatherhood

For as long as I can remember, I’ve wanted to be a father. When I met my wife three years ago, it started to become a reality. The first time we met, I talked about wanting a family…Last summer, we got pregnant, and in the next few weeks we’ll welcome our little baby.

So how, then, can I welcome a new life into a world where so much is wrong? I will just refer you to the news if you need evidence that there is plenty wrong with this world of ours. I worry about this. I worry that I’m too broken, too troubled myself to be any sort of parent, protector, or role model to our child. I worry that bad things will happen to my family, to my child…

I have hope. That’s how. I have hope and faith that, despite all the evidence of our brokenness, we can do better. We can make a better world for ourselves, for our children, for all humanity. I have seen the good that lies in people, sometimes buried underneath so much brokenness. I’ve seen it in myself. I have faith that my child can grow up in a better world than I have known, and that my child can be a part of making an even better world.

Christian Schmidt, Intern Minister at the First Parish in Needham, Unitarian Universalist, TO READ MORE

Inspiration: 

 

You are made of stars and dust. But actually, the dust is also made of stars.

 

Love and Death

What a luxury we enjoy, wondering what will happen after we die, even what will happen before we die. Having spent billions of years in gestation, present in all that preceded us—fully admitting the pain and difficulty involved in actually being alive, able to feel and suffer, grieve and die—we can only respond in one way: with awe and gratitude.

We see little of the road ahead or the sky above. And the dust we raise clouds our eyes, leaving only brief interludes to contemplate the stars. All we can do, every now and again, is to stop for a moment and look.

Look. Morning has broken, and we are here, you and I, breathing the air, admiring the slant sun as it refracts through these magnificent, pellucid windows and dances in motes of dust above the pews, calling us to attention, calling us homeward.

Dust to dust.

Heart to heart.

By The Rev. Dr. Forrest Church, TO READ MORE