Month: June 2012

Inspiration: 

 

What is the biggest thing that you can imagine?

What (if anything) is God?

Or, to ask the question a different way, what is The Ultimate? What is the biggest thing that we all belong to? What is inside each of us and beyond all of us? Different religions of the world have different ways of answering this question, and there is no one “right” answer that allows someone to say “This is what God is like. I know for sure.” Some people relate to a personal God who watches over them and gives them comfort. Some people understand God as something more abstract: the creative force of the universe, or Love. Some people figure that God is just a story that people make up, and not necessarily even a very good story.

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Inspiration: 

 

 

My eyes and my heart are open, and I am prepared to be amazed.

Amazed

Sometimes our souls are healed by silence, or music, or poetry, by letting something beautiful creep in. Sometimes our souls are healed by a willingness to be amazed, like the other night when, very late, I stared up into the sky as the moon ever so slowly slid behind the earth’s shadow and turned a deep red-orange in a full lunar eclipse.

 

by Rev. Lynn Ungar, Minister For Lifespan Learning, Church Of The Larger Fellowship 
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Inspiration: 

 

 

Find a patch of sky, and allow your awareness to float upward toward the stars. 

Another Kind of Knowledge

To surrender oneself willingly to truth,
to earn it,
in every sense, to allow
a voice to the great unbegotten
mystery and, beyond that,
to listen,
is asking for trouble.

Don’t doubt it. But prepare for the aftershocks.
Store water, and cans of tuna fish.
Plan an escape route, and a rendezvous point.
Write messages with lipstick on the bathroom mirror
reminding yourself…
where the flashlight batteries are stashed,
and how to find the pole star.

Keep a list of essentials
posted on the refrigerator: poetry, theology, an aria—
whatever works:
a ticket to Ravenna,
a menu from Provence,
a ballad to be sung at the tomb of Rachel.

And plan to go.

by Holly Horn, Interim Minister, First Unitarian Congregational Society, Brooklyn, New York  TO READ MORE

Inspiration: 

 

Here and now is all there is. But there is more to here and now than you think.

Do You Believe in God?

Within Unitarian Universalism, you can be, of course, a theist, a pantheist, or a Deist, or you can take any other religious position that pleases your heart and satisfies your mind, including atheism. In A History of God, the author, Karen Armstrong tells us that the statement “I believe in God” has no objective meaning at all, that each generation has to create the image of God that works for it. Unitarian Universalists are unified in that we are our own theologians, and the choice is ours, not once and for all, but throughout our lives.

BY JANE RZEPKA, MINISTER EMERITA, CHURCH OF THE LARGER FELLOWSHIP  TO READ MORE

Inspiration: 

 

A fish cannot drown in water,
A bird does not fall in air.
In the fire of creation,
God doesn’t vanish:
The fire brightens.
Each creature God made
must live in its own true nature;
How could I resist my nature,
That lives for oneness with God?
― Mechthild of Magdeburg

Oneness

As a Unitarian Univeralist I draw upon the rich tapestry of theology, which helps us to understand our human relationship with divine mystery and collaborative efforts to fortify justice. We never have to settle for the concept of a separate God who operates over and above us. Ralph Waldo Emerson said that all human being are connected to a God through a transcendent OverSoul. The 18th century Universalist evangelist Judith Sargent proclaimed the oneness of divinity with the “spirits of the human race”  20th century Unitarian theologian Henry Nelson Weiman said that God was creativity itself. Universalists and Unitarians have boldly proclaimed that divine powers are within all of creation, including humans. God blesses bountifully and loves every person. Ultimately I don’t know what of this is metaphor, mystery or just well-intentioned guesses about life.  Many people wish to call the divine by the name community, light, nature, joy or spirit of life. They all work for me.

from “Alcoholism,” by Kent M., Philadelphia. TO READ MORE