Rev. Frank Hall Services Archive

Last week’s Dear Friends letter was written in preparation for today’s annual meeting—to encourage you to attend, but also to simply say something about the implications of having an annual meeting—beyond a sense of duty.  I wrote: “During the cold spell, a week ago last Saturday, I was sitting alone in the kitchen reading the […]

Shakespeare said, “One touch of nature makes the whole world kin.” (Troilus and Cressida, IIIiii) Andy Goldsworthy is an artist who touches nature in that way—he befriends the things he touches.  He’s like a little boy going out to play, he forms a close kinship with the world around him. “There was a child went […]

“Now understand me well:  it is provided in the essence of things that from any fruition of success comes forth something to make even greater struggle necessary.” Walt Whitman To struggle is ‘To progress with difficulty.’  None of us knows if we’ll face greater struggle in the future than we’ve faced already, but Whitman’s poetic […]

  One of the Pharisees asked him to eat with him, and he went into the Pharisee’s house, and sat at table. And behold, a woman of the city, who was a sinner, when she learned that he was sitting at table in the Pharisee’s house, brought an alabaster flask of ointment, and standing behind […]

“Up to the present we know the whole created universe groans in all its parts as if in pangs of childbirth. Not only so, but even we…are groaning inwardly.” Romans 8: 22 The groaning has not been so inward since the tsunami hit two weeks ago. The first of the Four Noble Truths of Buddhism […]

Opening Words: “We bid you welcome to this house.  It is a place we love and which we tend with care.  We do not ask what you believe, or expect you to think the way we do, but only that you try to live a kindly, helpful life, with the dignity proper to a human […]

First Reading:  Here Where One Stands, Martin Buber Rabbi Bunam used to tell young men who came to him for the first time the story of Rabbi Eizik, son of Rabbi Yekel of Cracow. After many years of great poverty, which had never shaken his faith in God, he dreamed someone bade him look for […]

Biologists tell us, “You are what you eat.” Psychologists tell us, “You are what you’ve experienced.” Theologians (that I like) tell us, “You are what you love.” Poets tell us, “You are the sum total of your losses; your pain.” One poet, Walt Whitman, for example, says; “Sometimes with one I love, I fill myself […]

I want to begin with a reading from the Gospel of Luke—the story of how Jesus at age 12 gave his parents cause to worry about him.  After the birth narrative—the babe in the manger story, there’s not much about the child growing up; nothing about his mother putting him on the bus on the […]

Opening Words: “So many of our dreams at first seem impossible, then they seem improbable, and then, when we summon the will, they soon become inevitable.  If we can conquer outer space we can conquer inner space, too.” These sentiments from Christopher Reeve explain the title of his second book, Nothing is Impossible. But more […]