I want to thank all of you who let me know that our service and my sermon last Sunday resonated with you. Living with the virus for a year felt like an important milestone to mark. We tried to make space for the complicated streams of meaning, the losses and the blessings, that are part of this last year.  We will continue that reflection this coming week, beginning to look to what possibilities and what challenges the future may hold.  But this week, I have been in a quiet space, trying simply to be present to the unusual bright sunlight,…

“Sincere congratulations on First Unitarian’s on-going commitment to LGBTQ+ welcome and inclusion.”  We received the UUA’s letter earlier this week, recognizing First Unitarian’s successful completion of the Five Practices of Welcome Renewal for 2020. This new version of the original Welcoming Congregation Program focuses attention and asks for commitment to deepening the welcome our congregation offers to individuals with the variety of gender identities/expressions and sexual orientations present within the broad LGBTQ+/TGQNB (Transgender/Queer/Non-Binary) community.   The Unitarian Universalist Association early in its life (1970), made our affirmation of gay, lesbian and bi-sexual persons public. That General Assembly Resolution was an important step. But many UUs realized that the experience of welcome in too many congregations was far from complete. …

Kintsugi is a Japanese approach to pottery repair in which cracks are filled with golden lacquer, highlighting the shapes of the cracks with the valuable material. The flowing shape of the flaws adds to the beauty of the piece.  The technique was developed accidentally when 15th-century shogun Ashikaga Yoshimasa broke his favorite tea bowl. He sent it to China to be repaired and was disappointed that it came back stapled together.   “Local craftsmen came up with a solution—they filled the cracks with a golden lacquer, making the bowl more unique and valuable. The repair elevated the fallen bowl back to its place…

Wholeness is a challenging spiritual theme, in part because we are so ambivalent about it. Wholeness suggests finality. “To do list” complete. Check.   Most of us are such goal-directed folks that living without a destination is a disorienting experience.  Gwendolyn Brooks describes, poetically, a different understanding of the way the universe works and how we might best approach our own lives. The title of the poem is almost as long as the poem itself:  Speech to the Young: Speech to the Progress-Toward (Among them Nora and Henry III)  Say to them,  say to the down-keepers,  the sun-slappers,  the self-soilers,  the harmony-hushers,  “Even…

We enter Black History Month 2021 after a year which saw, among many other things, the Movement for Black Lives manifested in the largest and most diverse demonstrations for equity in our nation’s history. More and more Americans affirm the need to dismantle the Culture of White Supremacy and the need to center the voice of Black, Indigenous and People of Color.  Black History Month was made a national celebration in 1976 during the US Bicentennial. But the celebration traces back directly to historian Carter Woodson, who, with the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History which he founded,…

Rev. Sinkford is on break this week. The following is by Rev. Marilyn Sewell, Minister Emerita of First Unitarian Church. At last it’s over! I mean the last four years of suffering from an abusive relationship—with our former president.  Why am I not alive with energy, ready to get back to my writing? Wanting to Zoom with friends? Pushing ever harder with my climate activism? I find that I’m simply exhausted, needing to recover. The ethical and relational norms in our society have been breached, not just a few times, but almost every day for four years. Truth? Doesn’t exist. Decency?…

I have heard from many of you how much you appreciated Rev. Connie Simon’s sermon, From the Inside Out, last Sunday. A book group of elders that has been meeting for more than 50 years with whom I met wanted to talk about it. A group of racial justice activists praised it. More individual folks wrote to me with comments, praise, or critique than I receive most weeks.  Connie addressed, in a more focused way than I have from the pulpit, what Process Theology suggests about how the world works and how love works in our lives.   Perhaps the eagerness to understand, to have at least a working hypothesis about how the…

The first time I teared up during the Inauguration was when Lady Gaga sang the Star-Spangled Banner. Neither the singer nor the song normally bring me to tears. It was not grief, though there is much to grieve. Nor were they tears of anger, though I have felt much anger.  They were tears of relief. Almost a let-down reflex after maintaining vigilance for so long.  From that point on I simply allowed the tears to flow…not every moment to be sure, but my eyes never fully dried until the final prayer.  I was grateful for the Catholic priest’s invocation, a prayer that, with…

James Baldwin Weary. That is how many of you have described yourselves to me in recent days. Not tired. We know how to deal with being tired. Rest is recommended, and respite. Recovery is predictable and expected. Weary is a feeling of being worn down. Over time. Resources depleted. Spent. Rest may be recommended, but the weariness that has been described to me has more to do with demands on our strength that we have carried successfully, but not without effort, for just too long.  Yet we are approaching an inauguration, a time “to begin” or “mark a new beginning” … those are two of the…