Sacred Moments and Holy Places © Reverend Janet Parsons Gloucester Unitarian Universalist Church January 23, 2022   The other day Thich Nhat Hanh, the venerable Vietnamese Zen Buddhist monk, transitioned from this life to the next one at the age of 95. His life was...

Dictionary.com’s 2021 Word of the Year © Reverend Janet Parsons Gloucester UU Church January 16, 2022   In case there are any of you who haven’t looked up the 2021 Word of the Year yet, we’ll get to that in just a minute. Maybe your curiosity got the better of you and...

To Live with Zeal © Reverend Janet Parsons Gloucester UU Church January 9, 2022   On a summer day in 1845, Henry David Thoreau wrote these few words in his journal: “July 5. Saturday, Walden. Yesterday I came here to live.”   And live there he did, for two years, two...

Kelly Knox Dec 12, 2021 Good Morning. It is so wonderful to be here, to see everyone. I have missed this community so very much. The idea for what has now morphed into nothing more than a conversation starter, was born of me telling Reverend Janet that I was chairing...

Giving Thanks for the Pizzazz © Reverend Janet Parsons Gloucester UU Church November 21, 2021 Yesterday afternoon the Gloucester Meetinghouse Foundation hosted a symposium on refugees and immigration right here in our sanctuary. There was so much information shared,...

Reverend Janet Parsons Gloucester Unitarian Universalist Church November 7, 2021   Suddenly, it’s November. Like the trees, who spend autumn drawing nourishment back into their roots, we, too, find that our instincts begin to turn us inward, toward memory and...

What Graveyards Are 1418 Words Karl Frank Oct 31, 2021     When asked if I would deliver a homily today, in a service where we would commemorate the dead, I knew I had some ideas about those things, more particularly about graveyards.  I had recently read Robert...

Make Our Broken Pieces Whole © Reverend Janet Parsons Gloucester UU Church October 24, 2021   I had a really positive experience the other day, that I enjoyed thoroughly – I got to sit with a couple of church members to air some conflict.   I’ve said often that...

The ‘We’ Above the ‘I’ © Reverend Janet Parsons Gloucester UU Church October 10, 2021   Braiding Sweetgrass, a beautiful book about indigenous wisdom and what plants have to teach us, is full of stories. The author, Robin Wall Kimmerer, recounted that she once met a...

Good Neighbors © Reverend Janet Parsons Gloucester UU Church October 3, 2021   There is a hillside in Salem, that I discovered recently. It’s a small area, tucked between two ordinary houses on an ordinary street. It is a hillside known as Proctor’s Ledge, and there,...

Led by Newt Fink, Aug 22, 2021   August 22, 2021  UU The guidance system In many examples from nature we see the workings of an apparent guidance system. A tiny bird, the Red Knot, migrates every year eight thousand miles without a map, without a device, through...

Led by Lucille LePage July 18, 2021 So, what is a Flower Communion?  And what is its significance? The story begins almost 100 years ago, in Czechoslovakia, with Dr. Norbert Capek and his wife Maja.  Both were Unitarian ministers who started the Unitarian Church of...