UUSLO

Members sharing transformation stories - Jamie Woolf, Steve Kadin, Dorothy Pitkin with Gina Whitaker as worship associate.

Miraculous stories surround the lives of great prophets, teachers, and figures of religious importance. What do these stories tell us about these people? And what do they tell us about ourselves?

We live in a society where (it is said) "Money talks." However, the transformative piece of this is that we have the power to tell it what to say.

Inform. Conform. Reform. Perform. Transform. All of our lives, we are forming and being formed by our experiences, our relationships, our realizations and reflections. With every breath, we are in formation.

What in the world does death have to do with justice and equity? And how might fully acknowledging our own mortality empower us to work for those things?

Both science and religion have played pivotal roles in the work toward justice and equity...and both have been used in ways that thwart that work. How can we be sensitive to this history and challenge those tendencies in the present time?

The Pagan holiday, Imbolc, falls exactly halfway between Yule (Winter Solstice) and Ostara (Spring Equinox). It strikes me as important that we develop ways to celebrate "partway" points, especially in relationship to our ongoing struggles for justice and equity.

We recognize that there are many kinds of beautiful lives if we step outside the self and walk beside it with humble nonjudgmental curiosity about the many other selves on their own paths.

Freedom has traditionally been identified (along with reason and tolerance) as central characteristics of Unitarianism. But...does that sufficiently capture our most deeply-held values? Is freedom the same as liberation? And how does it relate to love?

The lyrics to the song Rev. Rod refers to at the beginning are here.

Though freedom is generally understood to be something that people embrace, psychologist, Erich Fromm pointed out that there is also a basic human urge to "escape from freedom."