The Unitarian Universalist Congregation in Westport
10 Lyons Plains Rd., Westport, CT 06880 - Ph: (203)227-7205 Sunday Services: 10:00 AM
Opening Words: It’s Father’s Day. The commandment says ‘honor your father and mother,’ but love can’t be commanded…can’t be made a rule. It’s a result. It grows out of the day-to-day process of interacting…of playing, working, learning, testing, failing, and trying again. “When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant I […]
The word religion literally means ‘to re-connect,’ yet religion is too often the most divisive word in the human lexicon, separating groups of people from one another, dividing families, and often, in the deepest sense, dividing a person internally, separating the rational mind from the emotional. Religious divisiveness is nothing new. The most ferocious, bloody […]
Mother’s Day became In the United States an official holiday in 1915. Its establishment was due largely to the perseverance and love of one daughter, Anna Jarvis. Anna’s mother was, as the old saying goes, ‘the woman behind the man.’ Her husband was a Presbyterian minister, and her mother was the strength in the family, […]
The 1986 coming of age film, Stand By Me was directed by Rob Reiner and it opens with a middle-aged man looking back on his early life, remembering specifically being a 12 year old on a an adventure that included a confrontation with death. He realizes that this was the day he lost his innocence […]
Opening Words: United Nations Environmental Sabbath Program Prayer We who have lost our sense and our senses–our touch, our smell, our vision of who we are: we who frantically force and press all things, without rest for body or spirit, hurting our Earth and injuring ourselves: we call a halt. We want to rest. We […]
Opening Words: 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 […]
I want to talk about money; about giving money and about making a year-long commitment, or pledge to the church. Perry’s story about ‘warm fuzzies, and cold pricklies’ reminds me that talking about money could easily be a ‘cold prickly,’ and sometimes the risk is necessary; but I want this to be a ‘warm fuzzy’ […]
Opening Words: Why it was wonderful – Archibald MacLeish Why it was wonderful: Why, all At once there were leaves, Leaves at the end of a dry Stick, small, alive Leaves out of wood. It was Wonderful, You can’t imagine. They came By the wood path And the earth loosened, the Earth Relaxed, there wereFlowers Out […]
Opening Words: A tale about Rabbi Ben Meir of Berdichev “Why are you rushing so much?” asked the rabbi. “I’m rushing after my livelihood,” the man answered. “And how do you know,” said the rabbi, “that our livelihood is running on before you, so that you have to rush after it? Perhaps it’s behind you, […]
Opening Words: On Thy Wondrous Works I Will Meditate (Psalm 145) Every morning I want to kneel down on the golden cloth of the sand and say some kind of musical thanks for the world that is happening again—another day— from the shawl of wind coming out of the west to the firm green flesh […]
