From Your Minister
I am talking to a man whose wife has just told him she loves someone else. I need to go to the ocean, says this Midwesterner, to see something bigger than my pain.
Read MoreREsources for Living
Our Unitarian Universalist Principles and Purposes statement describes one of the sources of our living tradition as: “Direct experience of that transcending mystery and wonder, affirmed in all cultures, which moves us to a renewal of the spirit and an openness to the forces that create and uphold life.”
Read MoreWalking (Excerpt)
Tonight I walk. I am watching the sky. I think of the people who came before me and how they knew the placement of stars in the sky, watched the moving sun long and hard enough to witness how a certain angle of light touched a stone only once a year.
Read MoreJoy
I took a book to read for work and a book for pleasure. I didn’t touch either of them. I didn’t do anything. Well, I smiled a lot.
Read MoreRational Exuberance
When I started my training for spiritual direction, I figured that it would involve a lot of reading the classics of spirituality all those Desert Fathers and Mothers and Saints and a lot of sitting still, contemplating God’s emptiness or something.
Read MoreThe Great Surmise
The Great Surmise says simply this: At the heart of all creation lies a good intent, a purposeful goodness, from which we come, by which we live our fullest, to which we shall at last return. And this is the supreme reality of our lives.
Read MoreHappy Bird
I saw a meadowlark today, sitting atop the razor wire on the north fence. It’s been many months since meadowlarks were here last. Many months.
Read MoreHappiness
There’s just no accounting for happiness,or the way it runs up like a prodigalwho comes back to the dust at your feethaving squandered a fortune far away.
Read MoreFrom Your Minister
I’m not saying that joy hasn’t been part of many other things I’ve reflected about—celebration, sexuality, justice, love, grief—it’s just that I have never taken the time to reflect specifically and explicitly on joy.
Read MoreREsources for Living
I figured that in exploring the topic of joy it would be good to ask an expert for some input. So I decided to interview my dog, Piper, who is pretty much the most ridiculously joyful being I have ever encountered.
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