The Flying Trapeze and the Fine Art of Freedom (Excerpt)
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I’ve attended the circus exactly three times in my life—twice as a child and once as an adult. The first two were the Ringling Brothers, Barnum and Bailey circus (under the big-top, the “Greatest Show on Earth”) and the third was Cirque de Soleil, held in an auditorium theater.
Carrying the Language of Freedom
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This year what has taken hold of me about Passover is not so much the story itself, but the very fact that the story is reliably told and retold, generation after generation, at the family Seder. The story is a fundamental part of the language of a people. It provides the basis for religious identity, and helps to preserve the community, sustaining an enduring culture and tradition.
From Your Minister
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In the early 1990s I interned in the Church of the United Community, a tiny storefront congregation in the Marcus Garvey Center in Roxbury, Massachusetts, triple yoked between the United Church of Christ, Disciples of Christ, and Unitarian Universalists.
Many in the congregation had been through drug treatment. More had been to jail, at a time when crack cocaine was plentiful and arrests of young black men more plentiful still. Many had contracted “the virus,” as AIDS was called there.
REsources for Living
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The Passover story is, of course, a story about freedom. It’s the story of how the Israelites went from being slaves in Egypt to being free people with a land and a religion of their own. But I wonder when exactly in the story it is that the Hebrew people finally become free.
From “For Memory”
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Freedom. It isn’t once, to walk out
under the Milky Way, feeling the rivers
of light, the fields of dark—
freedom is daily, prose-bound, routine
remembering. Putting together, inch by inch
the starry worlds. From all the lost collections.
Excerpted from “For Memory” by Adrienne Rich, published in 1981by W. W. Norton & Company in her book of poetry A Wild Patience Has Taken Me This Far.
Duty and Service
My name is Dave Thut. I am an orthopaedic surgeon. I have been a member of five UU churches over the past 20 years. I am a healer, a pacifist—and a veteran. Read more →
A God We Can Believe In
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At home on a bookshelf we have a massive folio-style slipcover book titled Cabinet of Natural Curiosities by Albertus Seba, a pharmacist in eighteenth-century Amsterdam. In 1731, after decades of collecting strange and exotic plants, snakes, frogs, crocodiles, shellfish, corals, insects and butterflies, as well as a few fantastic beasts, such as a hydra and a dragon, Seba published an illustrated catalog of these curiosities. It’s an amazing display of biodiversity—enough to make anyone curious about why things change and how the same species can vary so much from one specimen to another.
People Ask About God (Excerpt)
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People go astray in their search for God because they do not take the right starting-point. We should never begin by asking, “Is there a God?”—as though God could be something outside of ordinary experience; or, to put it in the old-fashioned way, something outside of Nature. Read more →
If I Were Asked
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If I were asked to confess my faith or my beliefs out loud, and I were scrambling for some place to begin, I would start in the desert, in the lonesome valley, and say that first of all and ultimately we are alone. No god abides with us, caring, watching, mindful of our going out and coming in. The only certainty is chance connections, both chosen and involuntary, that matter most of all and ultimately help and heal and hold us.
Sun/God
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Your missionary ancestors told Indian people that they were worshipping a false god when we prayed to the sun. The sun is the most powerful physical presence in our lives. Without it we could not live and our world would perish. Yet our reverence for it, our awe, was considered idolatry.
