Hopeful Thinking

Order of Service - Sunday September 13, 2015 - First Parish Church - “Listening Honestly” Meditation   Close your eyes and use only your mind for the next while.  Let’s breathe for a moment.  Hear the air moving through your nostrils and into your chest.  Feel the expansion and contraction of your waist.  Not too deeply.  Just a gentle in and out, only slightly deeper than you would normally breathe.  A bit more in, a bit more out.  And now return your breathing to a normal, relaxed flow.  Let your eyes remain closed and listen...     There are two ways to make a plan.  And I will use a travel metaphor to describe them.  One way is to decide what car you want first , and then where you want to go.  Or two, decide where you want to go first and then what kind of car would be best.     It’s always better to choose the destination before embarking on a journey.  Even if that ...

Like many things in our world, what may be the “ultimate reality of free will” could be seen as confluence of three circumstances.  In terms of theology, free will is referred to as something given to us by a higher power.  Something that comes from without.  A gift.  Free will is to be honored out of respect for its origins and not used in vain.  It is, at the very least, a moral story.  At most a demonstration of faith. A second aspect of free will is that it is self-evident.  We are always free to choose, even death.  And gift or not, free will exists.  Added to that component (or not) is the application of Intent , or in this instance, the decision to make use of the evident ability to govern one’s self in earthly matters.  To not only acknowledge the reality of free will as an ability to go right or left, but to choose to practice self-determination mindfully.   It can be used for good, or not.   The ...

The Seventh Principle of Unitarian Universalism:  Respect for the Interdependent Web of All Existence A world begins in fits and starts.  There are many legends of the beginnings of this world, and of every thing, even the beginning of light.  The creation of a world in both the literal and metaphoric sense is fraught with success and failure.  But is failure something that goes wrong, or something that goes differently than expected?  What if words like wrong and failure were actually value-neutral?  What if those words were merely regular old adjectives just like red , or tall , or smooth ?  When you look at the origin and history of the word wrong it doesn’t exactly imply that wrong is bad.  That use of the word didn’t happen until later.  Wrong merely means crooked in the directional sense. 1   Off the expected course.  We love to say that things are right or wrong.  So, if wrong isn’t wrong then how does it ...

There's something new afoot at First Parish Church UU of Fitchburg A lot of changes have occurred in the past year and there’s a lot of new language floating around. Words like “empowered laity,” “lay-led congregation,” “spiritual director,” and a hundred other ideas that are buoyed about in the enthusiasm of change.  So, when I ask myself What is happening here? I’m not sure I get a clear answer either. The truth is, your guess is as good as mine. In many ways we are making it up as we go along. That's not necessarily something to be afraid of, but I know it is unsettling. Ultimately I find that if we follow our "inner directive" at all times when choosing a destination, we may only see the next 200 feet in front of us as we drive down the dark road with our headlights on, but the road continues. And we have chosen to travel it. We have our GPS programmed for a destination and we will be ok. I love the metaphor of the global positioning device.  I love the enti...