Brad’s Blog – Words – Page 6

Emeritus at UUGP

February 24, 2022
Byron Carrier

What a wonderful gathering! We’re here to celebrate the life of this lovely, friendly fellowship, the ministers you’ve had thus far, and this honor in my career. It has been a great opportunity and satisfaction in my life to tend small Unitarian Universalist congregations. Over half of our UU congregations are small fellowships like this one. That’s been my realm, not the mega-churches. Primarily I have been a preacher. I like conducting services and having something to say that open-minded, intelligent, caring congregants find thoughtful…

February 23, 2022
Byron Carrier

Dr. Arvind Vasavada, my guru and friend, my gentle, generous mentor from my seminary days, used to advise me and his analysands (counseling clients), “Be in it.” (Here he is pictured between my friends and colleagues, the Reverend Doctors Bart Gould and Vern Barnet, at my ordination in Saint Joseph, Michigan, in 1972.) Imagine my good fortune upon entering seminary at the University of Chicago in 1969 to meet a man who embodied the two main interests I had – Jungian psychology and Eastern religions. …

February 4, 2022
Byron Carrier

Readings prior to the sermon: “Managing environmental resources sustainably has always been difficult, ever since Homo sapiens developed modern inventiveness, efficiency, and hunting skills by around 50,000 years ago… [E]very human colonization of a land mass formerly lacking humans – whether of Australia, North America, South America, Madagascar, the Mediterranean islands, or Hawaii and New Zealand and dozens of other Pacific islands – has been followed by a wave of extinction of large animals that had evolved without fear of humans and were easy to…

January 31, 2022
Byron Carrier

Don't let the devil sell you what you already have. Good and getting better is a tag line for an impending song extolling our condition. What? Wait! Aren't we weary of Covid, worried about armed crazies, tired of Texas and taxes? Yes, and we're stuck in a dangerously warming planet that the fossil fuel media and lobbyists would have us "don't look up." I would counter that we should look up, not just at the comet of planetary fever increasingly upon us, but at all…

December 31, 2021
Byron Carrier

The huge full moon, the amazingly colorful solstice morning, and Christmas all came together in a beautiful way that seemed to portend a beautiful upcoming year. I hope so. 2021 was a bit of a dreary, frustrating challenge. We're all worn by social, political, and medical worries. I hope and pray we regain a healthy community. Here's the sky on solstice: Solstice Sky Same solstice sky, another view I appreciate those few of you who came here to read what I post. However, it was…

November 30, 2021
Byron Carrier

I don’t want it to. Nor do I believe in some hell in an alleged afterlife. The hell America could go to is an actual one, fires and torment galore! I use this provocative title deliberately in a prophetic way. Prophesies are if/then warnings. If we keep fostering hateful division at home and new enemies to war against abroad, then we could create hell here worse than the Civil War, worse than WWII, worse than we want to think. Besides all the anger and domestic…

November 30, 2021
Byron Carrier

Don't read this unless you'd like to peer into many of the comments I made online these last two months. I'm a bit of a Don Quixote, tilting at various windmills, throwing my opinion into various forums, tweets, and emails. I'm probably a bit ADD too, easily distracted by a variety of topics. I've rearranged the chronological order and omitted some, but tried to group them for your perusal. I used to have appreciative congregations to hear and understand. Now I scatter my interests into…

October 31, 2021
Byron Carrier

“Think, and think, and think,” Art advised. Art Brayfield, former head of the American Psychological Association, learned but reclusive, liked my thoughtful sermons and occasional visits. His advice seems truer than ever. Thinking has gotten a bad rap in my generation. Positivists and quantum speculators would have us believe no thought is accurate or final. Reason and logic, lauded in the Enlightenment, formerly a pillar for Unitarians, get attacked and dismissed even in formerly sensible UU circles as what created and justified patriarchy. Diverse TV…

September 30, 2021
Byron Carrier

Here's my tag line for an emerging song: "Good 'n Gettin' Better" Beyond the ample evidence of how bad things are and are becoming, let's go beyond our brain's inherent typical frightened, hurt, wary view of the world. Our amygdala remembers hurt and stays leery of the world. It creates an automatic chatter that can prevent us from seeing how good we have it - personally and culturally. We're better than that. Our prefrontal neocortex brain can remind and orient us that we're good and…

August 31, 2021
Byron Carrier

Oh, the stress of it all! We fret. We fume. When comes the fun? Covid spiking locally, the highest in the nation for my own Jackson County! What slowly dwindled from 50 or so new cases a day and had gone down to about 10 has suddenly shot up to 350 cases a day, with deaths to go with it, sometimes children. Then there are the friends and loved ones who are dead sure their paranoid suspicions are more reliable than thousands of people who…

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The dream of an Earthly Religion…

Earthly: our precious natural earth which allows us our bodies, lives, cultures and future.

Religion: from the old root words religare and religio, meaning “to bind back to the root and be whole again.” This does not assume we need to believe in God or the Bible. Rather, we should be well-related with our own bodies, each other, natural life, and natural existence as it actually is. If there is connection with divinity or God, it is in and through our bodies and beings that we relate primarily, not via scriptures, traditions, rituals, or supposed religious authorities. In short, by religion we mean “relating well with reality.”

The emphasis here is on the earthly. It is not an afterlife or an instead-of-life that interests us. Living well here on earth together does.

While we take our religious perspective and work seriously, we don’t want it to be stuffy. Too often, religions can be alien to the human condition rather than affirming of it. They can be demeaning and demoralizing, dull and bossy, ponderously pretentious. We lean more towards the fun and sexy, natural and lively, human and humane, thoughtful and pertinent.

Reality: the obvious and inescapable stuff of physical existence. We intend to enjoy and tend our lives in these bodies, for our time, in our cultures, for our singular and interrelated ecosystem. There may be more, but there is AT LEAST THIS of which we are born, in which we live, and into which we will die.

God or no-God is not the point; Earth is. Both believers and non-believers are welcome here, for we all share a common source, opportunity, and responsibility: life as it is and could be. This ranges from simply improving one’s own life to your helping save and restore Eden’s, not just to “sustain” it, but veering it to thrive as never before. If you value your life, each other’s, and Earth’s – welcome!

Learn more…

Emeritus at UUGP

Be in It

Earth’s Eden: Love it or Lose it

Good ‘n Gettin’ Better

Solstice Signs

America Can Go to Hell

Don’t Read This

Think and Think and Think

Good ‘n Gettin’ Better

Fret, Fume & Fun