Transcendentalism
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There’s a classic Unitarian Universalist way of talking about nonconformity and resistance to social pressure. You probably know where I’m going. We lift up Henry David Thoreau–living at Walden Pond, refusing to pay his poll tax because he would not support a government that upheld slavery and waged war on Mexico. We remember his jail…
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Voice Still and Small Within: Elizabeth Palmer Peabody and the Work of Unfolding the Soul (Transcendentalism, Part 3)
How many of you went to kindergarten? How many of you have children or grandchildren who go now? Part of the story of my life is that I never went. I started Grade 1 when I was midway between four and five years old. Kindergarten to my parents seemed a distraction from the journey of…
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A teacher once recommended a spiritual practice to a student. She said, “When you wake up, before doing anything else, write down on separate pieces of paper these sentences: (1) I am but dust and ashes, and (2) I am a Child of God. For these truths are both true, and together they spell out…
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Transcendentalism, Part 1: Introduction
It was the Persian mystic and poet Jalāl al-Dīn Muḥammad Rūmī who said, in the 13th century, “The task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.” These words are at once hopeful and sobering. Love is a human potential.…
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The Story of Unitarian Universalist Faith
You know how it is when you’ve taken a thing for granted, and then something shifts and all of a sudden you’re seeing it as if for the first time? That happened for me not too long ago, with something that is printed in every one of our church hymnals, right at the beginning and…
Spiritflow 