Liberation Worship
For Pittsburgh’s “Liberation Sunday” worship experience, we heard LGBT writers and lyricists including Leslie Feinberg, James Baldwin, Holly Near, Audre Lorde, and others. Of course there’s so much that could be added. But here’s the more extensive quote from James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time nugget: Freedom is not something that anybody can be given. Freedom is something people take, and people are as free as they want to be. You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that...
Read MoreJune 10: LGBTQIA+ Liberation Sunday Worship
This week is Pittsburgh’s LGBTQIA+ Liberation Sunday!
Read MoreSources of Faith
Life on Earth sings of creativity, multiplicity, abundance. Snowflakes… Soil… Fingerprints… Stars… Everything named “tree” differing from every other thing named “tree.” (Not only every tree, but every wonder-soaked leaf on the same tree. Completely unique.) How much more so for this very human creation called, “religion.” Maybe religion, like nature or nature’s God, abhors monotony. Maybe religion, like nature or nature’s God, ebbs and flows between unity and chaos in a cosmic dance of creativity, multiplicity, abundance. Perhaps faith, at its...
Read MoreWhite Supremacy & UU?
On February 4, 2018, Allegheny’s Get Woke/Stay Woke and the Worship Ministry answered the call from the Black Lives of Unitarian Universalism Organizing Collective (BLUU) to create a worship experience centering the voices of Unitarian Universalists of color from across the denomination. Grateful to be part of a church that has been doing a lot of good things for years that BLUU has challenged Unitarian Universalists to do, like lifting voices of people of color in worship and actively engaging with local organizations that are run by people of color; we still remain vigilant to recognize, address, and heal from remnants of the legacy of White Supremacy that continue to live within the culture and structures of even this Beloved Community of spirit and engaged compassion.
Read More“… naked but for the stories we have of each other….”
Oh sun, moon, stars, our other relatives peering at us from the inside of god’s house walk with us as we climb into the next century naked but for the stories we have of each other. Keep us from giving up in this land of nightmares which is also the land of miracles. This from the poem, “Reconciliation: a prayer,” that accompanies the lighting of the flame throughout the March-April 2018 worship series, “Listen 2.0: listening to one another.” The poetry is from Muscogee (Creek) poet, Joy Harjo who I first heard in our back alley as part of a City of Asylum summer “Jazz...
Read MoreBalance & Emergence: Listen 2.0
Human biology and neurology have confirmed what ancient wisdom (and, frankly, intuition) has always taught: Healthy individuality is impossible without community. Yet community demands conformity—with some communities demanding more conformity than others. This makes fully human life at best a balancing act. The March-April worship series “Listen 2.0” moves from a rich inner life cultivated by last series’ “Listening Within” to the necessary and more authentic life of “Listening to One Another.” It’s worship that offers the opportunity to...
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