A Meditation on Breathing In our turquoise hymnal there is a song called the Meditation on Breathing: It begins: Breathe in, breathe out, breathe in, breathe out. And then it continues, When I breathe in, I breathe in peace. When I breathe out, I breathe out love....

Sunday, June 13, 2021 10:00 a.m. On Zoom SPECIAL PRIDE SERVICE THIS SUNDAY! Join us on Zoom for a special service in celebration of the Pride Month led by Charles Nazarian, joined by Kathleen Williams, and featuring videos by local LGBTQ musicians performing and...

Reflections for May 10 Reverend Janet Parsons Gloucester UU Church   Spaciousness in Between, Part One© One of the frequent comments about life in this time of pandemic, here in Coronaville, is that it’s hard to keep track of what day it is. Let’s be clear; it’s...

Reflections for May 3, 2020 Reverend Janet Parsons Gloucester UU Church Betwixt and Between I reached an interesting milestone the other day, on May 1. I suddenly realized that I have not filled the gas tank of my car since the second week of March. It’s been almost...

Radical Gratitude Kelly Knox “There is great joy in an unworn path” – this is according to Lord Byron – a poet from the 16th and early 17th century. He shared this with me from the other side via an herbal tea bag. An unworn path however, often causes great fear and...

The First Easter Reverend Janet Parsons Today, probably more than any other day, our new way of daily life just feels wrong. We have been asked to make many sacrifices during the past few weeks. And the timing of that is appropriate, in its way, as we have just...

Dreams in the Desert Reverend Janet Parsons Gloucester UU Church April 5, 2020   This week the two religious traditions that give us our roots are celebrating important holidays. It’s Holy Week in the Christian tradition: beginning today with Palm Sunday and...

Sunday, March 22 2020 Call to Worship As Susan Taormina plays our opening hymn — wordlessly on piano— see if you can recollect singing the version in our hymnal, in which we sing in praise of the blue skies of our homeland, but then acknowledge that other people love...

Singing Our Way to Hope Reverend Janet Parsons Gloucester UU Church March 15, 2020   A period of time spent wandering in the wilderness is one of the oldest and most common themes in storytelling. It is the idea of a quest: a journey into uncharted territory,...

Today we are drawing on some wisdom that was written over 700 years ago. Imagine your writings surviving for over 700 years. Not merely surviving, but becoming known more and more around the world, translated into new languages, spread by technologies that the author...

Hagia Sophia: The Feminine Face of God Reverend Janet Parsons Gloucester UU Church March 1, 2020 In the sixth century of the Common Era, a church was built in Constantinople by the order of the Roman Emperor Justinian and the Empress Theodosia. The church was the...

To Rise, To Reach a Little Deeper Reverend Janet Parsons Gloucester UU Church February 16, 2020 “It is that time and place to remember those who came through the long night to witness another sunrise.” (Qiyamah Rahman, in Voices from the Margins, p. 14-16.) This is...