Daily Compass

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

Inspiration: 

Children I implore you
get out of the burning house now
three carts wait outside
to save you from a homeless life
relax in the village square
before the sky everything’s empty
no direction is better or worse
east is just as good as west
those who know the meaning of this
are free to go where they want
― Han-shan

 

The God Beyond

In my office sits a statue of Quan Yin, a representation of the Buddhist image of compassion. For months now, when my daughter Neva walks into my office, she stops, looks at the religious artifacts, goes to the coffee table, takes a tissue from the box, climbs onto the chair next to Quan Yin and wipes the statue’s nose, and then wipes her own.

Her first instinct is not to ask What is this? or Who is it? or even What does it mean? Her first instinct is to reach out, as if born with an intuition that the sacred question is not What do I believe? but rather Who is in need?

I think all of us are born with this instinct. And my hope in watching her is that the future will hold a world united in the effort to reach out to one another rather than one divided into tribes based on beliefs.

May we, my friends, help to carry this intuitive question forward, so that the generations that follow us are helping address the needs of the world as they live out their religious calling, no matter what they believe.

BY KAAREN ANDERSON, PARISH CO-MINISTER, FIRST UNITARIAN CHURCH OF ROCHESTER, NEW YORK, TO READ MORE

Inspiration: 

“Who would then deny that when I am sipping tea in my tearoom I am swallowing the whole universe with it and that this very moment of my lifting the bowl to my lips is eternity itself transcending time and space?” 

― D.T. Suzuki

Walking

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. Without written records, they knew the gods of every night, the small, fine details of the world around them and of immensity above them.

Walking, I can almost hear the redwoods beating. And the oceans are above me here, rolling clouds, heavy and dark, considering snow. On the dry, red road, I pass the place of the sunflower, that dark and secret location where creation took place. I wonder if it will return this summer, if it will multiply and move up to the other stand of flowers in a territorial struggle.

It’s winter and there is smoke from the fires. The square, lighted windows of houses are fogging over. It is a world of elemental attention, of all things working together, listening to what speaks in the blood. Whichever road I follow, I walk in the land of many gods, and they love and eat one another.

Walking, I am listening to a deeper way. Suddenly all my ancestors are behind me. Be still, they say. Watch and listen. You are the result of the love of thousands.

by Linda Hogan, TO READ MORE