Daily Compass

Inspiration:

Where in your body do you physically feel pain or discomfort? Spend a moment envisioning that spot surrounded with warmth, light, and acceptance of the flawed state it is in.

 

 

To Be Joyfully Determined 

by Joshua Mason Pawelek, minister, Unitarian Universalist Society: East, Manchester, Connecticut

Happiness and fulfillment, says Ben-Shahar, come from what we choose to see and seek, what we choose to focus our attention on. These days it can be difficult to see goodness, dignity, worth and wholeness, let alone bring it into our lives. In a world facing potentially catastrophic climate change; in the midst of tragic land wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and a more amorphous and seemingly unending war on terror; in the midst of an economic recession with enormous housing and job insecurity; in the midst of a first world culture focused on material consumption and addicted to corporate media—in the midst of all this breaking and brokenness, all these generators of fear, anxiety and numbness, all these demonstrations of human shortsightedness, arrogance, selfishness, and sinfulness—how do we focus on what is working well, on what brings joy, on what brings happiness and fulfillment? Tal Ben-Shahar says, “Practice.” MORE

 

Join us at 7 pm ET tonight for our service of Reflection & Connection: http://www.livestream.com/questformeaning

 

Inspiration:

A boulder cannot imagine what it would mean to become part of a beach.

 

Prayer 101

by Forrest Church, Minister Of All Souls Church (Unitarian Universalist) in New York City from 1978 until his death in 2009

Prayer is the art of listening. Reverent attention to something unites us with it. Distraction divides, fragmenting us. Salvation and sin are much the same. Salvation: wholeness, health, healing — all words stemming from the same root — occurs in this lifetime when we are at peace with ourselves, united with one another, and at one with God. Sin is a state of brokenness. It exists when we are consumed by preoccupations and distractions, inattentive to the needs of others, at war with ourselves and the world. MORE

 

Inspiration:

He halted in the wind, and, what was that

Far in the maples, pale, but not a ghost?
He stood there bringing March against his thought,
And yet too ready to believe the most.

‘Oh, that’s the Paradise-in-bloom,’ I said;
And truly it was fair enough for flowers
had we but in us to assume in March
Such white luxuriance of May for ours.

We stood a moment so in a strange world,
Myself as one his own pretense deceives;
And then I said the truth (and we moved on).
A young beech clinging to its last year’s leaves.

— Robert Frost

Rev. Meg: Forgiveness and Brokenness

“…and one day, I realized: I don’t know why she doesn’t like me!”

Inspiration:

Blessed are the hearts that can bend; they shall never be broken. –Albert Camus

 

 

“Friend”

by Kim K. Crawford Harvie, Senior Minister, Arlington Street Church, Boston, Massachusetts

Water, shelter, food … and a friend. A friend can save your life.

Rev. Dan Kane was cooking, I was washing, and what happened next was definitely my fault, although he says “we” broke it. Drying on the counter was a hand-painted platter that Dan and Darin had brought home from Italy, a large, expensive piece of pottery with significant sentimental value. And “we”—that is, I—somehow unsettled it and it dropped like a little bomb onto their kitchen floor, shattering into shards and dust with a c-r-a-s-h. I couldn’t believe it…. MORE

 

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