Explorez tous les épisodes du podcast Church of the Larger Fellowship UU Worship

In many Pagan and Earth-based traditions, the Autumn Equinox (Mabon) represents gratitude, balance, and letting go. Many see it as a threshold moment, acknowledging what has been harvested and preparing for renewal through darker months. What are you experiencing in this Change of Season? What opportunities for transformation does the Equinox provide us? Join us this week as we honor Mabon (Autumn Equinox) and the gifts and opportunities this celestial event provides us.

Guest Bio

Cecelia Hayes’ more than 29 years of professional experiences run the gamut of organizing, curriculum development, teacher mentoring, & executive coaching for equity with a variety of organizations in Seattle and Chicago.   She was on teaching faculty in Sociology at Northeastern Illinois University in Chicago for nine years, focusing on critical race theory,  gender studies, queer theory, and media studies, She is a former Phyllis Mayo Fellow for Leadership Tomorrow, a national civic engagement institute.   She was a founding member of Black UU’s of the Pacific Northwest, and served as a member of the UUA General Assembly Planning Committee from 2018-2021.  She is currently the senior practitioner for equity, social justice and engagement in Executive Services for King County, WA. The daughter, granddaughter, and great granddaughter of singers and Movement activists, Cecelia’s accomplishments and interests include, vocal performance, “slam” poetry performance, documentary films, local community activism and keeping up with a very energetic 17 year-old daughter.

What is a mistake? Something gone wrong? A decision you regret? Part of transformation is learning from our mistakes, this week we will explore how to have grace for ourselves and others when mistakes are made.

Relationships require a lot of work. Growth requires a lot of work. As we celebrate Labor Day weekend in the United States, we will honor the emotional labor that we are each asked to do as part of our commitment to transformation (and recognize that emotional labor is not distributed equitably in our society).

We have spent the past month exploring all the ways we need rest to replenish our bodies and spirits. On our last day of the month, we will lean into the transition from rest to rising and what comes next on our journey toward collective liberation. And we will honor Dolly, the woman who showed us how to live generously and with love for humanity.

Many times we are told to put things down, disengage, take a vacation or a media fast as ways to rest. Those are definitely ways to rest. And. Sometimes the rest comes in choosing presence, moving closer, picking up threads whose disconnected dangling was wearing us out. There must be at least a thousand ways to rest. Come practice a few together on our faithful journey towards collective liberation.

Bio: Born by a lowland salt marsh, educated by a mighty river, and moved by love to an island cared for by the people of the clear saltwater since time immemorial, Rev. Deanna Vandiver (she/they/De) is a called-auntie in the world and serves as an Affiliated Community Minister for Love and Liberation with the Church of the Larger Fellowship Unitarian Universalist and the founder of Ever Unfolding. As a human raised to be white inside of violent, extractive empire, Deanna is deeply grateful to the People’s Institute for Survival and Beyond for shaping her core understandings as a young adult and beyond of how systemic racism dehumanizes all of us – and how it can be undone together.

Our culture tells us that productivity is worth, that stillness is wasted time. This service pushes back — drawing on Tricia Hersey and The Nap Ministry's teaching that rest is not a reward to be earned but a birthright, and that reclaiming rest is an act of resistance against systems built on exhaustion. We'll explore what rest can actually look like — not just sleep, but the many forms stillness and restoration can take, and an invitation to notice which ones you're missing.

Bio
Rev. Kimberly Quinn Johnson has served as minister of the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of the South Fork since 2015. A committed congregational and denominational leader, she was elected Co-Moderator of the Unitarian Universalist Association in 2025. She has also served as a chapter leader for the Metro New York UU Ministers Association and mentors emerging UU ministers.
Her ministry is grounded in faith formation, racial justice, and popular education—creating spaces for shared reflection, deeper understanding, and faithful action. Rev. Johnson’s extensive service includes leadership with the UU Service Committee, Black Lives of UU, UU Women's Federation, New York UU Justice, and other UU and justice-centered organizations. She is also an active community leader on Long Island’s East End.

Have you ever just needed a nap? Capitalist grind culture makes it nearly impossible for all but a privileged few to do this. Perhaps we can normalize napping when we need it.

Global extractive capitalism manufactures scarcity and inflation for the masses by hoarding resources for a few elites. Then, Empire and it’s agents coerce us to trade our sacred bodies (labor) for very trivial amounts of money (a thing that literally has no inherent value). Many of us are so busy on the hamster wheel of capitalism that rest feels like a luxury we cannot afford; but what if, REST is the only thing that can free us from the evils of the Empire?

Suggested Resources:

Rest is Resistance by Tricia Hersey; The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk ; The Deepest Well by Nadine Burke Harriss, MD; Loving the Body ed. By Anthony Pinn and Dwight Hopkins; Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome by Joy DeGruy Leary, and Crisis Contemplation by Barbara Holmes

Robin Wall Kimmerer takes us on a journey illustrating how nature teaches us the lessons of abundance and reciprocity. We will explore her book The Serviceberry, and lean into the ways we can show up for each other and build a better world.

Description
Centering folks with lived experiences of oppression creates greater equity, more people getting needs met, a safer society, and draws on gifts that are otherwise ignored. Pip discusses this orientation to disability justice, prison abolition and restorative justice, and antiracism with a UU lens of placing love at the center.

Bio
Pip Paris is a trans man (he/him/his) living in Chicago Illinois. He graduated from seminary in 2025, and is a Candidate for ministry with the Unitarian Universalist Association. Pip has been a Pagan for 25 years, including 6 years as a Heathen (Norse Pagan), and has been UU for 12 years. His home church is Second Unitarian Church of Chicago, and he completed a parish internship at Broadway United Methodist in Chicago. He is on the steering committee of the Unitarian Universalist Prison Ministry of Illinois, where he began volunteering for inside ministry in 2018.

Violence is a tool used by empire to keep people subjugated. It is expressed through all systems of oppression in different ways--white supremacy, patriarchy, heterosexism, and ableism all require violence to sustain themselves. How do we maintain the inherent dignity of all people when violence is the dominant political narrative?

This July 4th weekend, the United States of America will be celebrating 250 years. It is hard to fully celebrate in light of the current political climate, and yet I think there is plenty of reason for hope and celebration in spite of the ways this country has been the gold standard for oppression.

Archbishop Desmond Tutu taught that we become human through one another. In a culture that often values independence more than connection, this service explores the everyday practices that help us build communities where everyone can flourish. From the unseen work that sustains our lives to the relationships that shape who we become, we'll reflect on what it means not only to recognize our interdependence, but to practice it with intention.

What do our faith, shared values and covenant call us to do about the Prison industrial Complex? The ministers, staff, and incarcerated members of the Church of the Larger Fellowship will invite us to embody our Universalism as we unlearn theologies of punishment and embrace one of inherent worthiness.

250 years ago, a group of privileged colonizer men declared the United States an independent nation. What might it mean to understand instead a world community of interdependence? Who gets to declare that?

Interconnectedness is a central tenet of Buddhist teaching. We will explore the ways Buddhist teachings illustrate the ways we cannot escape the ways what we do impacts each other.

For a few brief days, the world got to experience collective wonder and exhilaration through the crew of the Artemis II spacecraft as they circled the moon and came back to Earth. “Moon joy” has awakened in me a curiosity about what it really means to thrive, and how we can make such a thing available to everyone.

Why do we expect justice from imperial systems that are designed to perpetuate injustice? When you live at the margins, like Alice in Wonderland, we must learn to navigate the world differently;  our vision and pursuit of justice must be reimagined.

Justice has always been contextual. It is a hard truth and one that we must understand as we work to dismantle systems of oppression. As an abolitionist, I am called to understand what justice looks like when we dismantle the idea of locking people away.

We are called to create communities where all people can thrive. For this to happen, we need to be able to bring our whole selves, unapologetically. Our identities, our backgrounds, and our accomplishments, and also our struggles, our mistakes, and our places of brokenness. Unitarian Universalist theology creates a space for this to happen. Will we make it possible?

What do we owe each other? Not in theory. Right now, in this country, in this moment — when people are being taken from their children, their homes, their languages, and placed behind walls designed to make the rest of us forget they exist. This sermon is about the covenant that follows us into the wilderness.

Bio (feel free to edit):

Rev. JeKaren Bell (she/her) is an ordained and fellowshipped Unitarian Universalist minister, certified Death and Grief Doula, artist, and poet with more than fifteen years as a religious professional. Rooted in African earth-based and Womanist traditions, her work sits at the intersection of grief, transformation, and communal care. She is the founder of The After Practice, offering guidance for leaders and communities navigating loss, conflict, and institutional change. She currently serves the Unitarian Universalist Association as Co-Director of the New UU Communities Fund. She is married with two bonus kids and two dogs.

It has been 63 years since Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. handwrote one of the most famous letters in United States history. We will read excerpts from the letter and consider how far we have and have not come as a country.

In the West, we are socialized by the logic of empire to understand identity as a static or fixed self. However, as embodied beings, we change and grow from every lived experience, emotion, and life lesson.  What happens when we pay close attention to the various selves we have been and are becoming?

Many years ago, I heard a line in the movie Kung Fu Panda, "You meet your destiny on the road you take to avoid it." I learned later that this sentiment is attributed to French poet Jean de La Fontaine. We will explore what this means for our lives and our communities.

Twenty years ago this week, I brought a group to volunteer in New Orleans, and began a spiritual journey of understanding resurrection in a new way. On this Easter Sunday, I will wrestle queerly with the notion that what is dead might once again live.

The phrase "it's easier to wear slippers than to try and carpet the world," has stuck with me since first hearing it many years ago. The phrase is a way to embody our role in movement work. This week, we'll explore the ways we can wear slippers and impact what we can locally as a way to keep from falling into despair at the state of the world.

In the Northern Hemisphere, this weekend marks the beginning of spring. In this service, we will connect our spiritual journeys to the Earth, honoring the green shoots of new life that herald the beginning of something beautiful.

Using Grover’s fear in The Monster at the End of This Book, the sermon explores how fear often comes from the stories we tell ourselves about what lies ahead. The message reflects on courage, curiosity, and the spiritual practice of continuing to turn the page even when uncertainty is present.

In the Christian Scripture of Luke, Jesus is asked, “Who is my neighbor?” We will be paying attention to the people in our neighborhoods--physical and metaphorical--so that we might better respond to them with love.

Join us this week as we explore the importance of communal rituals like worship in creating the sacred bonds of belonging.

Regarded as one of the founders of gospel music, Rev. Charles Albert Tindley, an African American Methodist minister, composed the songs, “The Storm is Passing Over” and “By and By” over 100 years ago, and they continue to sing to us. In witnessing the rise of fascism and authoritarianism, how do we keep journeying toward a world of greater acceptance and affirmation? Perhaps Rev. Tindley’s example of generosity can inspire us all.

A close friend of mine described death as "not the end, only a change of address." This has stuck with me and on this weekend where most people celebrate love, we will honor death and the reason we grieve is indicative of how much we love.

What does it mean to cultivate generosity of spirit? The practices of generosity, gratitude, hope, and interdependence can be part of our embodiment of resilience, especially in difficult times.

The Pale Blue Dot is a photograph of Earth taken on Feb. 14, 1990, by NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft. Carl Sagan wrote about this image and its implications for humanity. We will explore what it means to be human on a pale blue dot floating through space.

“Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.”
― Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space

When powers and principalities do their worst, how do we receive and respond to the call of love?

Poet Nikita Gill, in a blessing of a poem for the beginning of 2026, tells us that “when love comes knocking, do not doubt it. Instead open the door with warmth and let it in.” Sometimes, love comes knocking from unexpected sources. We will experience that love and allow it to challenge us to practice our faith in deeper and more liberatory ways.

The Words of Welcome from our Beloveds in Newton, Iowa:
We gather, as one community with many beliefs, following many paths, all with unknown destinations.

As one, we seek to be treated fairly.
• Justice is possible only with love for one another.

The heart in your chest pulses with life as does mine.
• Equity in our humanity is the design of nature.

Each step we take on our journey allows us to explore who we are.
• Transformation stops only when we refuse to advance.

As believers in a multitude of thought, we embrace the challenges of acceptance.
• Pluralism is celebrated through respect for individuality.

Through recognition of the effects of our actions we govern our words and deeds.
• Interdependence allows strength in numbers with caution toward selfishness.

In the spirit of unity, we vow to give as much as we receive.
• Generosity is measured in thought, attention, gift and assistance.

Every soul who seeks our community will be given the opportunity to become the masterpiece that nature intended.

With this vow we open our hearts to the love of one another in this place.

As is our custom to begin the year, our tech crew is on holiday break. Donté and Aisha will come to you live through Zoom, sharing a less-formal worship experience on our monthly theme of Love.

Come conjure and experience joy with us. Please bring things with you that bring you joy: food/beverages, activities like knitting or puzzles, etc as we listen to music that has been popular in CLF worship, develop a joy list, and commit to make joy a priority in the next year.

Here on the longest night of the year in the Northern Hemisphere, we will find joy in the darkness. Come celebrate Yule with us!

I was recently on a podcast to talk about dating divorced and over 50. In this sermon, I'll share the ways UUism has shaped who and how I am in the world.

The state of the world feels dire, so isn’t it time to get serious? Author Atena O. Danner talks about why cultivating pleasure in a time of depravity is among the most important things that people of conscience can do right now.

Atena O. Danner is a cultural worker who imagines Black liberation, engaged in boundless curiosity. As a poet, singer, and visual artist, Atena’s work encompasses kitchen-table specificity and folk story relatability, covering topics including neurodiversity, human connection, and collective liberation. Atena is also a facilitator, a speaker and occasional worship designer/sermon giver in UU communities around the United States. As an organizer and activist, she has worked to incorporate struggles for justice into her life as a caregiver in a family of complex needs while also writing and publishing in journals, anthologies, and her own book of poetry: Incantations for Rest: Poems, Mediations & Other Magic, Skinner House Books' InSpirit 2021 volume. She is a Roots. Wounds. Words. fellow, an Anaphora Writers Residency fellow, an alum of the Hurston/Wright Writers Week and of Immersion Writers Africa. In their home north of Chicago, near the traditional homelands of the people of the Council of Three Fires and of the Peoria, Menominee, Miami and Ho-Chunk nations, Atena lives with her partner, pets and two free Black children. Her poetry collection, ‘Incantations for Rest’ was awarded a Nautilus Silver Award for poetry in 2023.

In this service, we’ll explore redemption through the lenses of abolition and harm reduction — not as a clean arc, but as a communal, messy, and ongoing process. We’ll look at how people and places dismissed by empire often carry profound wisdom about care, resilience, and transformation. In these overlooked spaces— in the world, in ourselves— grace becomes visible, and new paths toward collective liberation take root.

We will look to the ancient and current wisdom of the Haudenosaunee people as we nurture gratitude for each other and for the beings with whom we share this planet. We are reminded by this wisdom that all flourishing is mutual.

Currently, many of us are experiencing days that are darker due to the seasons of fall and winter. Typically, in these seasons there are numerous celebrations and observations that center the “return of the light.” This week, I ask us to reconsider our relationship to the dark as I assert that the dark is the place we find redemption.

If our faith teaches us that every person is inherently worthy, it means that no one is disposable. How does this change the way we gather, live, and advocate for justice? How does it change how we approach redemption and salvation?

It has been over two years since the start of the genocide in Gaza and the world has been grieving the continued loss of life and potential of thousands upon thousands of Palestinians. Together we will honor the lives lost and hold in our hearts prayers for an end to the horror and destruction.

Description: Job's wife is vilified for her anguished, irreverent response to tragedy in her household. But what if we listened more closely to her challenge? What if, instead of avoiding or ignoring the pain of loss, we allowed it to open a path to a fuller, more courageous faith?

Reflection question: It has been said that a broken heart is an open heart tenderized to love even more deeply. What's breaking your heart in these times? What losses have you avoided grieving? What haven't you said to God for fear of rebuke? What support do you need to tell God the truth?

Often when we discuss grief, we are being encouraged to identify, acknowledge and/or accept the layers and cycles of grief that we are experiencing. But how do we engage this subject when we are the cause of another person’s grief? This week. I will share a story about a time when I was a source of grief.

The Rev. Meg Barnhouse once said, "I believe in the inherent worth and dignity of every person, not every idea." In what ways can we lean into affirming each other and maintaining the humanity of all as we work to dismantle systems of harm.