Church of the Larger Fellowship UU Worship

Over the years, and in different congregations I’ve served, I have received feedback that I was “too political” and not “spiritual enough.” I will name that spirituality absent recognition of the politics of the day is disassociation. We can be spiritual as we navigate the challenges of our times. The invitation is to engage in grounded spirituality that feeds the soul while not denying what is happening in the world.

How does our relationship with the sacred call us to integrity? Does wholeness simply require us to be ourselves, or is there something more involved? We will explore the dimension of integrity that connects us to something beyond ourselves.

What is the relationship between story-telling, meaning-making, memory and thriving? Join us this week as we explore remembering and reclaiming our past as a liberative practice.

We are called to bear witness to the lives of our incarcerated beloveds. Through their words and their songs, written with Unlocking Harmony, we will be entrusted with a sacred gift of giving voice to those our society makes voiceless.

The Unitarian Universalist tradition of the Flower Ceremony (also called Flower Communion or Flower Festival) was introduced in 1923 Prague by the Revs. Norbert and Maja Čapek to celebrate the beginning of summer. It soon became a symbol of the beauty found in diverse community, which was already under attack in Europe at the time. We will celebrate a CLF version of the flower ceremony and use the courage of the Čapeks to guide us together.

In this soul-deep service, I’ll speak the truth of my own grief—of what it means to love someone whose memory is fading, and to keep remembering anyway. Together, we’ll honor the tenderness of memory, the ache of forgetting, and the fierce, faithful ways we carry love forward.

The concept of moral injury is a phenomenon of distress when people witness horrors that contradict one's deeply held beliefs. Humans in the past few decades have been experiencing moral injury when we witness the horrors in Gaza and the horrors here in the U.S. with seemingly no way to stop them. We will explore ways to maintain our sense of self, justice and the will to continue fighting for a kind and equitable world.

If self-care is communal care and communal care is self-care, who benefits when we hide or dim our light; our unique manifestation of the Source/Force of life? Join us this week as we re-shape and reframe our relationship to ourselves and the (often problematic) metaphor of light.

Poet Toi Derricotte once wrote that “joy is an act of resistance.” We will claim joy as a necessary act of defiance to an authoritarian state and as a source of strength. We will tap into the sources of our joy and embody them in the world.

We’re told we’re depressed, have ADHD, experience anxiety. Too often, the treatments for those ailments don’t get at the deeper spiritual issues: financial and housing insecurity, increasingly authoritarian regimes, discrimination and violence. What is the treatment for this pain of our hearts and spirits?