Opening Words, by Lucille Clifton i am running into a new year and the old years blow back like a wind that i catch in my hair like strong fingers like all my old promises and it will be hard to let go of what i said to myself about myself when I was sixteen […]

When you stop to think about it, or more importantly, when you start to feel about it-to ‘get’ the deeper human meanings, it’s a wonderful story the ancient story of the birth of the Christ child in a stable, in a manger-the eating trough of the animals. This is a marvelous mythology, the truth of […]

 Opening Words by Mary Oliver: Morning Poem Every morning the world is created. Under the orange sticks of the sun The heaped ashes of the night turn into leaves again And fasten themselves to the high branches- And the ponds appear like black cloth On which are painted islands of summer lilies. If it is […]

George Bernard Shaw said, “My method is to take the utmost trouble to find the right thing to say, and then to say it with the utmost levity.” I’ve taken the utmost trouble to put together some comments about a difficult subject, divorce. When I say ‘the utmost trouble’ I mean that the more I […]

  It’s time to talk about money matters. It’s time to talk about money, because money matters. What’s your earliest memory of money? How healthy is your relationship to money? (During the sermon delivery several people responded ‘out loud.’ They said: ” I remember getting an allowance of ten cents a week.I remember being able […]

During our recent pilgrimage to Unitarian roots in Boston we visited King’s Chapel, the first congregation in America to declare itself Unitarian in theology. It was, and remains, Anglican in its liturgy. The Ten Commandments (Protestant version) are engraved on the sanctuary wall behind the altar rail-carved in stone, as it were. This is where […]

PREFACE: Many thoughtful people in our culture are turned off from religion for a variety of rather persuasive reasons: Biblical literalists and fundamentalists who insist that the Bible was not written by mere mortals but was dictated, word for word, by a god who, if we do take the Bible literally, said and did some […]

  We are into the High Holy Days of Judaism, ‘the days of awe,’ as they are called: Rosh Hashanah, the New Year, or literally, the head of the year, and Yom Kippur, the day of atonement. The Jewish New Year is agricultural: in the northern hemisphere the crops have been, or are being harvested-the […]

The attack on America came as a complete surprise-though in retrospect we might have expected it. The planes, flown by pilots prepared to commit suicide by flying their planes into their unsuspecting targets, came in two horrendously destructive waves hitting the first target at 7:53 a.m. and the second at 8:55. By 10 a.m. it […]

Reading: The Summer Day, Mary Oliver Who made the world? Who made the swan, and the black bear? Who made the grasshopper? This grasshopper, I mean- the one who has flung herself out of the grass, the one who is eating sugar out of my hand, who is moving her jaws back and forth instead […]