Church of the Larger Fellowship UU Worship

Often when we discuss grief, we are being encouraged to identify, acknowledge and/or accept the layers and cycles of grief that we are experiencing. But how do we engage this subject when we are the cause of another person’s grief? This week. I will share a story about a time when I was a source of grief.

The Rev. Meg Barnhouse once said, "I believe in the inherent worth and dignity of every person, not every idea." In what ways can we lean into affirming each other and maintaining the humanity of all as we work to dismantle systems of harm.

Arundhati Roy, in her novel The God of Small Things, describes trauma, grief, and loss as leaving holes in the universe--shaped like the things we have lost. When we sew up those holes, we leave a mark behind even as we restore our fabric to wholeness. How do we honor those marks and help each other sew up our holes of grief?

Lamentation is a ritualized approach to grief. It creates opportunities for us to acknowledge, reflect upon and say goodbye to the piles of rubble we leave behind; our many unmet expectations, dreams and desires.

How do progressive religious folks maintain their faith in a time of monsters? This was the question posed during a symposium in Seattle recently. I will share my own reflections and learning on how we keep the faith in a time of monsters.

Can lament over the suffering all around us be our hope? Can we express lament without getting stuck there? We seek to build a religious community where that lament is welcome as part of a cycle of healing, growth, and action.

So much talk about accountability focuses on our accountability to others but how are we accountable to ourselves. . .our values. . . our flaws. . . our visions. . .our desires? How do we honor the “sound of the genuine” in us, our embodied knowing that is beyond words? Rev. Donté's questions to think about: Why are you on this path of life ? What are your patterns of dissatisfaction with the path...

When we center the needs and care of the most vulnerable among us, we help all of us. When we reject the idea that anyone is unworthy, we refuse to let systems of oppression flourish. We are faced with a moment in time right now. Humanity can center each other, the planet, life and love or we can ignore the reality that our destinies are intertwined at our peril.

We see the atrocities everywhere--starving children, bombed cities, concentration camps. People take to social media and the news talking about "toxic empathy," as if there could be such a thing. It feels like we are losing our humanity in real time. How do we turn the tide?

“The Circle Is Still Open” is a message about grief, covenant, and accountability as sacred practices rooted in love, truth-telling, and community. Through personal story and collective memory, it calls us to reject silence and systems of harm, and to stay in the work of justice by holding one another with care, courage, and integrity. Reflection Question: How might your understanding of accountab...

The beginning of August is celebrated in European paganism as the beginning of the harvest season, known as Lammas or Lughnasadh. We will celebrate the ways in which the Earth sustains our lives, and ponder what accountability means in this context.

In a world that often asks us to wear masks or shrink parts of ourselves, integrity calls us to live with wholeness and authenticity. This service explores what it means to align our inner truth with our outer lives—and how that alignment can be a path to healing, liberation, and sacred belonging.

As Unitarian Universalists, we care deeply about matters of justice. However, in a world where the chaos and evils of Empire are becoming more and more apparent to many, how do we confront and transform overlapping and interlocking systems of structural evil, while fostering the integrity of our fullness? Join us this week as we explore how valuing sacred little things can offer us a new perspecti...

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.

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 ha...

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...

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 k...

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?

An improvisational worship on empire and resistance made necessary by a disruption in the Force (aka our technical capabilities).