Daily Compass

Inspiration: 

“In the point of rest at the center of our being, we encounter a world where all things are at rest in the same way. Then a tree becomes a mystery, a cloud a revelation, each [person] a cosmos of whose riches we can only catch glimpses.”

― Dag Hammarskjöld

A Case for Religion

Religion is about connection. It is about community. It is about accountability. Religion is about having people to share your spiritual experiences with.

Religion is not necessarily about dogma. My chosen faith, Unitarian Universalism, is a creedless religion. We believe it’s more important for people to be in community with one another than to agree—even about the big things like God or death or salvation.

We learn from one another. We challenge one another. We support one another. Sometimes, we even irritate one another, and our response to that irritation teaches us how to live in the world with people we don’t necessarily like.

But we wouldn’t have any of these things—the good, the bad, the uplifting, the challenging—if we chose the path of individual spirituality.

by Rev. Michael Tino, minister of the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Northern Westchester in Mount Kisco, New York. TO READ MORE

Inspiration: 

 

Spirit flowing through all things, may I find ways to move with that flow.

Love First

What we need is a revolution in our values, a revolution that turns our attention more reverently and responsibly to the interdependent, relational character of life. What we need is a spiritual and practical revolution that embodies love for neighbor and for the world through sustaining structures of care and responsibility….We need to love from the start—not as an emergency strategy when everything has gone wrong.

by Rebecca Parker, president of Starr King School for the Ministry TO READ MORE

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.

TO READ MORE

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 
TO READ MORE

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