Her marriage had imploded, leaving her a divorced, single mother, dependent on welfare to get her from day-to-day.  She was severely depressed, and things felt so bad to her that she considered suicide.  To make matters worse, perhaps, she also was an aspiring author.  She said ever since she had learned what a writer was, she wanted to be […]

Elwyn Brooks White, better known as E. B. White, may be best known as the author of Charlotte’sWeb and Stuart Little, or, by people of a certain age, the co-author of a little volume often called Strunk & White or, more accurately The Elements of Style.  (Some people shudder at the memory of it; others delight in its clarity and decisiveness.  Most are […]

I find it very good news that Love Knocks and Waits for Us to Hear. We need that at times like this. Here we are, on the morning of August 12, 2018. We look back. We pause for a moment here. We go forward. We humans, throughout history, have needed Love again and again when […]

It was 7:00 am on August 7th, 44 year’s ago. A young man, one week shy of his 25th birthday,  stood with one foot on the edge of a building, and the other foot on a steel cable ¾ of an inch in diameter. The man was French wire walker Philippe Petit; the building was the south […]

Opening Words: As a people—a people of faith—that say we are committed to justice, compassion, and equity. As a faith that says we are committed to the inherent worth and dignity of all people. As a faith that says we are committed to respect for the interdependent web of all life—we have a critical role […]

Opening Words: It is common in a great many Unitarian Universalist congregations for the settled preacher to offer what’s often called a “Question Box Sermon” – congregants write questions on index cards, which are then collected and which the preacher does her best to answer.  I first encountered this practice in our congregation in Yarmouth, […]

In the late 80s, early 90s, Sam, Diane, and, of course, Norm, were household names.   They were part of the TV “family” that gathered in a fictional Boston bar, and whose various ups and downs and absurdities formed the content of each episode.  The heart of the show, though, was the idea of a place, “where everybody […]

Opening Words: The German wildlife photographer Norbert Rosing has a particular affinity for polar bears.  His work has been featured in National Geographic, and in 2006 he published, The World of the Polar Bear, which follows a family of bears over the course of a year in words and pictures.  You may have heard the story I’m about to […]

Opening Words: The abbot of a provincial monastery was in something of a tizzy, because the abbot of his school’s main temple was coming for a visit, and he wanted everything to be just perfect.  He had set his students to polishing every bit of wood, and brass, and gold, and to seek out every single […]

That still, small voice inside of us is like a beam of light, evaporating the chaos of a turbulent world. The way toward our still, small voice is listening to what is inside us with discernment and compassion and believing it. When empowering beliefs seem so quiet and hard to hear but angry, uncompassionate voices […]