Inspiration

UU thoughts, sermons, music

The Moral Bucket List

Robert

“It occurred to me that there were two sets of virtues, the résumé virtues and the eulogy virtues. The résumé virtues are the skills you bring to the marketplace. The eulogy virtues are the ones that are talked about at your funeral — whether you were kind, brave, honest or faithful. Were you capable of deep love?”

“But if you live for external achievement, years pass and the deepest parts of you go unexplored and unstructured. You lack a moral vocabulary. It is easy to slip into a self-satisfied moral mediocrity. You grade yourself on a forgiving curve. You figure as long as you are not obviously hurting anybody and people seem to like you, you must be O.K. But you live with an unconscious boredom, separated from the deepest meaning of life and the highest moral joys. Gradually, a humiliating gap opens between your actual self and your desired self, between you and those incandescent souls you sometimes meet.”

— David Brooks, “The Moral Bucket List”

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/12/opinion/sunday/david-brooks-the-moral-bucket-list.html

Explaining our Faith

CZ

A teenager explains her UU faith:
“We have members who identify as Christian, Jewish, Buddhist, Pagan, Atheist, and more. As I got to know the people in my congregation and learned that I, too, was accepted, I have found my place among UUs. I have grown to love my church. It has become a place of refuge for me, a place where I can escape the stress of boarding school, relax and be present, for once not rushing from one place to the next.”
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/…/our-world-an-interdepende_b…

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Changing the Story

CZ

“Once we recognize how these stories hold us in thrall, entranced or entrapped, we can get a sense of their power. They are not just slogans created by politicians, corporations or even religions; they arise from the archetypal inner world where myths are born. We can recognize the archetypal dimension of earlier myths, the gods and goddesses of earlier eras, for example; some can see it in the more recent myth of a patriarchal, transcendent God living in a distant heaven. The archetypal power of the present myth of materialism is harder to recognize because it is deceptive as well as seductive. And yet if one looks more closely one can see the archetypes at work here too. There is the patriarchal myth of the domination of nature—a primal masculine power drive. But less obvious is the way in which the dark side of the rejected feminine has caught us in her web of desires. For what is materialism but the worship of matter, which is none other than the domain of the goddess? We are more present in the archetypal world than we dare acknowledge.” —Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee
Read more: http://www.scienceandnonduality.com/changing-the-story