On this day, Thanksgiving Day, I think we are remembering the wrong message. I think our society has taken the wrong meaning from the mythologized story of starving pilgrims, a coming hard winter, and Native Americans who shared. We give thanks to God, or to some sense of the Universe … Read more →
Tag Archives: Compassion
General Assembly Day 5: Passionate Arguments for Our Faith’s Center
I want to say on Celestial Lands what I said in person to many people about the overall “theme” for this General Assembly. In my most humble opinion, the overall theme was not the 50th Anniversary of the UUA. It was not where we will be as a religion in … Read more →
General Assembly Day 4: Universalism, Compassion, Spiritual Practice and Salvation
My experience of the fourth day of the 2011 General Assembly in Charlotte, NC, was framed around two lectures… the Murray Street Address by the Rev. Bill Sinkford… and the Ware Lecture by Karen Armstrong. For me, these two lectures swam in my personal pond through waters that have been … Read more →
Hope, Courage, Compassion, Love, Faith.
I know that there is currently a lot of anxiety among those who hold our liberal faith, to realize that we can be the target of a hate crime… but that is not what has moved me in this tragedy. What has moved me in this tragedy has been the … Read more →
The Inherent Worth of Terrorists
In 1992 I saw a set of pictures of a village in Peru that had been massacred by members of the Sendero Luminoso, the “Shining Path”. It is hard for me even today to describe the brutality of those images. Hate is not too strong a word for the emotions … Read more →
Time, Wounds, and Compassion
Does time heal all wounds?There are so many of these old adages around, we sometimes accept them without much thought. There always seems to be some truth to them, but in our desire for the world to be black and white, positive and negative, right and wrong, we say these … Read more →