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Today, I would like to invite us to reflect on the 5th of our 7 principles….. “The right of conscience and the use of the democratic process within our congregations and in society at large.”
Over the past couple of weeks of thinking about this reflection, what I have found particularly clarifying, is the word “secular.” I find something in that word “secular” liberating just now. And I have become curious about what that was. How do you think about the word secular? Perhaps you might share your thoughts at the end on our uses of the word secular.
I’ve been trying out this word and found the word “secular” to be quite useful in trying to explain what chaplaincy in a public and multicultural university is and could be. Once in a while I have said that “I thought my religious sensibilities are secular.” I have to be a little careful where and how I use it. Some find the use of that word to be provocative and disloyal to the traditional calling of those who are “religious” professionals. How can you be a chaplain and be “secular”?

The full text of this interesting and provocative talk by the Rev. daniel Jantos can be found here.

This a sermon by the Rev. Geoff Usher.

Life is a gift.
We have life – not because we made it, but because we received it. Life was given to us through other people: through our parents, and their parents, and the countless generations of ancestors from whom we are
descended through all those who lived in ancient times and through our friends, to whom we turn for companionship, with whom we share the beauty, the pleasures, the trials and the pain which life in all its richness brings to us.
Blood is thicker than water, but the bonds of true friendship go beyond those of family – they are different because they are voluntary.
We cannot choose our relatives: we get them as part of the package deal when we are born. But we can choose our friends. And – the ultimate compliment – others may choose us to be their friends

This thought provoking talk can be read in full here.

by Rev. Rex A. E. Hunt

There is something deeply ‘human’-ising being in a garden.

Listening to the rustle of eucalyptus leaves in a light spring wind overhead.
Watching a bee flirt with a yellow daisy bush.
Kneeling onto a patch of soil planting a newly purchased seedling,
while gently moving aside a startled reddish-purple Squirter earthworm or two…
Biophilia—the love of nature and living things.

To read this talk, please click here.

This talk was given by the Rev. Geoff Usher.

In March 2009 I went to Japan for the Council meeting of the International Association for Religious Freedom, held at the Tsubaki Grand Shrine near Suzuka.
While in Japan I was given a copy of a book by Ervin Laszlo, entitled “You Can Change the World: The Global Citizen’s Handbook for Living on Planet Earth.”
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The first chapter is entitled “The World in Our Hands”, and I have taken that as the title for this sermon, in which I want to share with you some ideas from Laszlo’s book. It sets out the simple message that we must not wait for fundamental change to come from “above”, from the elected or appointed leaders of contemporary society.
Meaningful change must come from “below”, from the people – the ordinary people like us – who live in those societies.

The complete sermon can found here.

The Rev Steve Wilson is Unitarian minister from the US who has visited our Fellowship in the past, and with whom we keep in touch. This message, titled as “The Quiet Opportunity and Cost of Catastophe”, relates some thoughts on the current epidemic.

It is almost too cliché to say that we are presently “living history,” but it so overwhelmingly true that it must be said.
Every e-mail, every newscast, almost every new advertisement, even, has to connect to the virus or risk feeling out of touch. The Coronavirus storyline is so strong, we barely notice it’s spring, that Passover and Easter are right around the corner, that baseball season would have started Thursday, or that the Dems haven’t even completely figured out their candidate yet. This new reality has left most of us working through our day with a mix of “I’m bored” meets “What’s the next shoe
to drop?” I don’t need to tell you that the present drama in which we are trapped has an element of fear in it, a through line of certainly some isolation, but also some down time.
Living in any culture, or at any given time in history is always, mostly silently, a little like being a character in a script. In normal times with a thousand stories and our own lives pulling in different directions, we don’t feel it so strongly, but who we are down to our souls is always greatly both affected and effected by our surroundings. Mostly,
however, it is really only in times of great tragedy or celebration that we feel absorbed. As I said last week, these days feel like we are reading the same script, but it’s a fresh, unfinished script that has no clear ending. It is a moment when the sense that all is lost can rub shoulders with a sense that humanity could turn the page on a lot of false divisions and inequality. Part of the underlying anxiety is that we know this moment could go a few ways.

The full text can be read here.