Sermons from guest speakers and congregational members.
War is everywhere right now: in the Middle East, on the news, in our tiny screens, in our communities, and in our hearts.
From morning until night, we are immersed in conflict and cruelty, trying to figure out how we should be responding, the wisest use of our lives, what we can do to change anything.
For many of us, a sense of helplessness comes easily, but it doesn’t have to.
How do peace-making people navigate these days of prolific war?
LOVE.
It is a word we’ve overused and cheapened: a convenient catch-all label for everything from the food we enjoy to the shoes we found online to the people we hold in the deepest recesses of our hearts.
It is the stuff of cable TV movies, overplayed pop songs, massive ad campaigns, and candy-coated holidays.
Love is ubiquitous; it’s literally everywhere… and, yet, it feels like we’re starving for it.
But what is the nature of and shape of love in its purest form?
This service invites us to notice our inner lives with honesty and compassion. Drawing from Theravada Buddhist teachings on mindfulness and equanimity, we shall reflect on forgiveness, witnessing our thoughts, and focusing rootedness in peace to calm our monkeyminds. Rev Becky shall share some history and teachings from the Walk for Peace monks.
Often when we hear the word “resistance” we think of the most politically charged and publicly visible examples of activism. But sometimes the most critical protest begins at home, with a resistance to our usual patterns that get in the way of all that is good in our world.
Join us for a seasonal service weaving Christmas, New Year, and the solstice. Together, we will share a fire release ceremony, and moments of joy as we let go what no longer serves and step towards the new year with warmth, and renewal.
The sense of smell is important, central even, to many religious traditions. Smell has a long history of connecting humans to God, of bridging this world to the next. One’s “odor of sanctity” sometimes determines one’s saintliness. Aromatics were, and are, burned as a sacrifice, the smoke a way of feeding the gods. Many of the scents used today to capture or describe the aroma of heaven date back to the beginnings of recorded history. Come experience some of
Committing a trembling Yes guides us towards something good, necessary, or significant – even if we don’t yet know how we’ll follow through or what our Yes might cost us. Some choices are clear yeses, some are clear nos, and then there are the yeses that arise with both hope and uncertainty. The trembling yes is a sacred invitation that stirs courage, compassion, and deep curiosity, leading us forward even
On most days, we feel the pressure to have it all together and to be outwardly joyful, but this is never more true than in a season when everyone else seems to be singing: when the expectation is to be merry and bright.
As we gather this week and enter this season, we can embrace the full breadth of who we are and what we’re carrying: our joy and our grief, our faith and our doubt, our celebration and our sorrow.
Bring your thanksgiving, your grieving, your good
Looking to the three refuges of Buddhism for inspiration, we will consider how Unitarian Universalism offers refuge to open hearted and open minded seekers.
This Sunday we celebrated All Souls Day by remembering our loved ones with gratitude for the gifts they have given us – the kindness, their stories, their wisdom, and other ways in which they’ve enriched our lives.
Martin Luther King Jr. said of the tumultuous times in which he lived that the greatest tragedy was “not the vitriolic words and the violent actions of the bad people, but the appalling silence and indifference of the good.”
Similarly, these are days when all people of faith, morality, and conscience bear the responsibility of being counted; of declaring who we are, what we stand for, and what we will not abide.
Whatever we wish good human beings would have done and been in other perilous
Current events can at times cause overwhelm. Drawing heavily from Buddhist thought, we’ll explore how their practices can help us navigate our current political climate, with reminders about staying present so that we don’t miss life’s everyday, ordinary blessings.
We are just past the Autumn Equinox and in the midst of the Jewish High Holidays, so we will explore the deepest spiritual meaning of this time of year.
A church historian, Ken Wilbur, has said that faith traditions have two primary functions: to give us a sense of belonging, and then to encourage us to reach beyond that to higher levels of consciousness. A middle step in that process is to hollow out enough space for compassion for oneself. What might this look like?
How do we consciously hold uncertainties with presence and kindness, weaving questions into our lives as companions on the path to our becoming? Join interfaith minister Becky Suzik this Sunday and let’s identify and hold the questions together.
The Jewish High Holidays are coming up in a few weeks. Jewish lore holds that what will happen to us will be written into the Book of Life on Rosh Hashanah and the book will be sealed on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. We’ll explore these themes and consider if we need to seek forgiveness from others or perhaps forgive someone else. Advice from this chaplain: say what you need to say before it’s too late! Confession, as the saying goes, can be good for the
