Rev. Frank Hall Services Archive

Frost is in the forecast…Robert, that is. An advisory is usually a warning of some kind, and this sermon might fit that category. The warning is that Robert Frost is intent on being duplicitous, and he says so, himself. So, take my advice – don’t believe what you hear or read at first blush, at […]

“To everything there is a season and a time to every purpose under heaven. A time to be born and a time to die…a time to keep silence and a time to speak…” The book of Ecclesiastes is also called ‘the teacher,’ and it is attributed to King Solomon, the wise. It’s included in that […]

Opening words from The Tao te Ching, Lao Tzu The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao. The name that can be named is not the eternal name. The nameless is the beginning of heaven and Earth. The named is the mother of the ten thousand things. Ever desireless, one can see […]

Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur are referred to as ‘the high holy days.’ Rosh Hashanah is, of course, the Jewish New year: literally ‘head of the year.’ But it means more. It is the anniversary of the creation of the world. The Jewish legend says that God created the world 5773 years ago, as a […]

The New England Transcendentalist, Margaret Fuller, liked to summarize her religious philosophy by declaring, “I accept the Universe.”   Thomas Carlyle, a Scottish friend of Emerson, had a reputation for irascibility, combined with a well-honed sense of humor, was told of Margaret Fuller’s declaration, “I accept the Universe,” and responded, “Ye, gads, she’d better.”   […]

The word congregation is from the Latin congregatio, from the verb congregare, ‘to herd together…to collect into a flock.’     That sounds dangerously like a herd of sheep, which any self-respecting Unitarian Universalist rejects out of hand. Our Congregation is more like a gathering of shepherds, not sheep!  Like our U.S. declaration of independence we […]

First, a brief history of Father’s Day:  It was founded on June 19, 1910 by Sonora Smart Dodd in Spokane, Washington.  Her father, William Jackson Smart, a Civil War veteran, was a single parent who raised his six children. It had a rocky start – Congress turned down several attempts to formalize it, fearing that […]

The first chapter of Genesis is the story of the creation, when God makes everything, including a man and a woman.  In the second chapter man is without the woman; it’s a different creation story from the one used in the first chapter.  Genesis 2 says: “Then the LORD God said, “It is not good […]

Yesterday my granddaughter, Hannah Jean Hildreth, graduated from Hampshire College in Amherst, MA She’s a dancer…she waltzed across stage with a big grin. At least it appeared to me that she was dancing. She was always dancing as she grew up. I watched her take her first steps and I’ve been watching as she steps […]

In Jewish tradition, your mother determines whether you are Jewish…if your mother is Jewish, you are Jewish. The point: our mothers determine so much about ourselves, which is where William Ross Wallace got the idea for his famous poem, or at least the famous line from a relatively obscure poem from which I got my […]