In the Beginning . . .
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“In the beginning….”
What inviting words with which to begin a text that is to serve as an explanation and guide for a life and a religion!
The human mind is naturally drawn to beginnings, with an urge to trace things back, and back, and back—to try to get to the root. There’s a sense that if you know the beginning of something, then you know what it is, and where it might be headed, and how you might deal with it. You have ground upon which to stand. Read more →
Unexpected New Year
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I write this, and you will read it, at the start of a “new” year. I say “new” because that is how it has been parceled out in the proper number of days and weeks and months to make a year. One is over, one is beginning. For the next couple of weeks we will all persist in writing the wrong year on checks and letters. Quickly, the new year will become simply this year, and the old year will become attached to all that’s past.
In the Beginning
From Your Minister
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One of my favorite tricks when I am frustrated, bored or stuck is to consider where things have begun. For instance, during the awkward social situations into which pretty much all of us are periodically thrown (like standing in clumps of strangers at receptions and coffee hours), one easy path into conversation is to ask about beginnings.
REsources for Living
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Have you recently started up something new? Even if you haven’t, you probably remember a time when you did. I certainly have very clear memories from several years ago when I decided for the first time to take an aerobics class. I’d joined a gym for the first time in my life, and it quickly became clear that running on a treadmill was way, way too boring to keep doing on a regular basis.
Where it Starts
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The journey of a thousand miles begins with the first step, Lao Tzu said in the Tao. But a better translation of this familiar passage is to say the journey begins beneath our feet—not in the first step but in the stillness that precedes it, in the place where we stand before we move, in the very ground of our being. Read more →
A Unitarian Christmas
The Gift of Receiving
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I used to have a hard time letting people do anything for me. I’d work on my own house, repair my own car—I will admit, in years gone by that was largely because I couldn’t afford to pay anyone.
But the issue is bigger than that. I had a hard time letting people give me anything. I would demur. I would say “Oh no, no, you needn’t; Thanks, but no thanks.”
Receiving
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When I was three or four, my older brother Kevin was in kindergarten. He got to do so many interesting things, while I stayed home.
One day he got to go to with his class on a field trip to the local Sunbeam Bread bakery (factory). Later that evening, before dinner, he told us about his adventure—how he got to see the dough rising in the pans and how the pans rolled into the oven on conveyer belts.
A Gratuitous Duck
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Maybe I don’t get out much. But I have always heard the word gratuitous associated with “gratuitous sex and violence” in movies I don’t want to see. Other negative connotations include a gratuitous insult or a gratuitous humiliation.
The definition I always assumed was that gratuitous meant unnecessary, arbitrary, indefensible, senseless, and unjustifiable. Until I purchased a gratuitous duck.
