Circles of Love © Reverend Janet Parsons Gloucester UU Church February 13, 2022   Last week an article in the Boston Globe magazine caught my eye; it was about the legacy of Maria Mitchell, known as the first female astronomer in the United States. (“The Heirs of...

The Road to Hell © Reverend Janet Parsons Gloucester UU Church January 30, 2022   “If you come as softly as wind within the trees You may hear what I hear See what sorrow sees.   If you come as lightly as threading dew I will take you gladly, nor ask more of...

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,...