This will be my final message to you as your Senior Minister. Let me begin by saying what an honor it has been to have served you these past eight years. When I was called by you to be your Senior Minister, I told you that I would serve no more than ten years. Many […]

This coming Sunday May 14th will be a beautiful and full worship service. It is Mother’s Day, of course, which is cause for celebration. Mother’s Day was founded by a Unitarian Julia Ward Howe in commemoration of peace. Despite years of effort to create a national “Peace Day” in May, it would take Woodrow Wilson […]

With spring blooming around us I find my mind wandering as if the re-emergence of life was somehow disrupting the cold march of days our struggles remind us of. Spring is, in one sense, a disruption. And in another sense it’s not so much a disruption as it is a reminder to pay attention to […]

In the story of Jesus’ resurrection, Jesus is said to have returned in body and made himself known to Mary Magdalene and the disciples. They were, of course, astonished that he had returned at all since the men were sure his death on the cross was the end of the road. So skeptical were they […]

From now until the end of April we are in what in the Christian Calendar is known as Lent. Lent is the season in which we consider giving up something we are accustomed to in order to focus the lens of our lives on what truly matters, be it love, belonging, or the coming of […]

We had a fabulous day on Saturday as a number of us learned from one another about what strengths our congregation has to offer. The Appreciative Inquiry process is one in which we learn, grow and dream from our strengths. I was amazed at some of the dreams that came up; becoming a multicultural, multigenerational […]

I first heard of Appreciative Inquiry in Chicago in the late 1990s. I was dealing with some very thorny congregational issues as a young minister. In consulting with my mentor, I said “We have so many problems, I just don’t know where to start.” She looked at me and with a calm voice said “Don’t […]

As we embark on the spiritual theme of vulnerability in this month of March, I want to take on the question of hope. Brené Brown, who has spent her entire career studying vulnerability, points out that hope is not an emotion that we have but is, rather, “a function of struggle which we develop… hope […]

In her book The Weight of Ink, the author Rachel Kadish tells the fictionalized history of a young Jewish woman in the 1600s, Ester, who loses both of her parents in a fire in Amsterdam and is sent to work for a blind rabbi in London. Her job is to write down his thoughts and […]