Grace Happens
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Back when I was practicing law, I used to spend my days negotiating loan documents for clients. I would sit down with the lawyers from the bank and talk about repayment terms, insurance clauses in mortgages, and who would be responsible for doing what if there was a flood or a fire. Read more →
The Grace of a Bungee Jump
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A few years back, I went with my family in North Carolina to a big amusement park. After turns on the merry-go-round, the water slide and the roller coaster, our sights turned towards the bungee jump. My sister, my nieces and I stood watching the huge crane lift two people at a time up and up to the height of a 10-story building, then drop them towards the pavement. Read more →
REsources for Living
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Have you ever been homesick? Maybe you were away at camp, or maybe your family moved to a new place that didn’t feel like home. Maybe you were at someone else’s house, where all the food tasted different, and the smells were different, and you couldn’t quite make sense of the rules for behavior. Whatever was going on, you wanted only to go home!
From Pens and Postage to the Digital Age
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Like many other Unitarian Universalist congregations, the church of my younger years owes its existence to the Post Office Mission, a forerunner of the present-day Church of the Larger Fellowship. Read more →
Wishful Thinking: A Seeker’s ABC
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After centuries of handling and mishandling, most religious words have become so shopworn nobody’s much interested any more. Not so with grace, for some reason. Mysteriously, even derivatives like gracious and graceful still have some of the bloom left.
Grace is something you can never get but can only be given. There’s no way to earn it or deserve it or bring it about, any more than you can deserve the taste of raspberries and cream or earn good looks or bring about your own birth.
That Would Suffice
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In the early 1980s when I was serving the Unitarian Universalist Church in Rockland, Maine I would have occasion to go over to Augusta, the state capital, from time to time. This is about a 40 mile trip inland from coastal Rockland, and on one of those journeys I stopped by the Augusta UU Church to visit with a friend and colleague who was the minister there at the time.
Gratitude
Humanizing Mom
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On Mother’s Day, one expects to read about the wonder and glory of motherhood. While I can tell you from personal experience that we mothers like to be appreciated, I can also tell you that a rosy and sentimental Mother’s Day column always refers to mothers in some other family—the picture painted there is not me, not my mom, not my grandmothers.
Rev. Meg to be Installed as CLF Senior Minister
The CLF Board of Directors invites those who attend the General Assembly (GA) in Charlotte, North Carolina in June 2011 to attend the annual CLF worship service. This year, we will install the Rev. Meg Riley as the CLF’s senior minister.
From Your Minister
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The more I sit with it, the more I think gratitude is the very epicenter of the life of the spirit. Pretty much every religious tradition tells us this, even if they put their own spin on it. Every person I respect as a spiritual teacher embodies it. And my own life has taught me that gratitude can open windows where I thought I saw walls.
