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Soul Matters Archive: 2024-25
June 2025: Freedom
“Freedom From” or “Freedom To”
Adapted from Soul Matters Small Group Introduction
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There is a big difference between “freedom from” and “freedom to.”
Our Unitarian Universalist faith gets this. At its best, it never simply asks us, “What do you need to get away from?” No, it pushes us to ask the deeper question of “What is it that you want to run toward?” Mature freedom is never about the absence of all constraints; it’s about being able to commit yourself to the things that have your heart. Or to put it another way, true freedom is about constraints of our own choosing.
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So what is it for you, friends? Where in your life are you feeling forced to say “No” when your heart really wants to say “Yes”? What is it that you want to use your freedom for? It’s not the bars of a prison that make us want to escape; it’s suddenly noticing what’s on the other side of those bars that makes us want to get out.
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This month, don’t take your eyes off of it. Keep that longing clearly in view. And if you do, you’ll be surprised how easy it is to bend open those bars… and simply walk out.
May 2025: Imagination
The Practice of Imagination…What does it mean to practice imagination? We use our imaginations all the time, whether we recognize it or not. We imagine what our day might hold, or imagine what that person may be thinking about us, or imagine a trip we are about to take. We need our collective imagination right now, more than ever! We need to be able to imagine ourselves in a world where love stamps out hate.
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Adrienne Rich reminds us, “But nothing less than the most radical imagination will carry us beyond this place, beyond the mere struggle for survival, to that lucid recognition of our possibilities which will keep us impatient and unresigned to mere survival.”
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We need to imagine we are the answers to help create the world we want to live in. Walter Brueggemann writes, “The task of prophetic ministry is to nurture, nourish, and evoke a consciousness and perception alternative to the consciousness and perception of the dominant culture around us… Our culture is competent to implement almost anything and to imagine almost nothing… because imagination is a danger. Thus every totalitarian regime is frightened of the artist. It is the vocation of the prophet to keep alive the ministry of imagination, to keep on conjuring and proposing future alternatives to the single one the king wants to urge as the only thinkable one.”
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Join us this month as we lean into the practice of imagination and our prophetic place in imagining the world anew.
Wanderer in the Sea of Fog by Caspar David Friedrich
Art, Poetry, and Programming
April 2025: Joy
Joy is a funny thing—no pun intended—you can resolve to have more joy in your life (I’ve done that a few times in the last few years), but that isn’t how joy works, by working at it. It is often the thing that happens to you. Sometimes it happens when it is very appropriate, like laughing at a particularly awkward or sad moment. When it does happen, it feels like it adds years to your life, better than vitamins and exercise together. Maybe too, though you cannot make it happen, and working at it almost makes it harder to find, you and I can put ourselves in the way of it. We can pay attention to when we feel it, who we feel it when we are around, what we have to let go of to open up to it—and do more of all of that. Maybe too, these days, like so many days, when the world is falling apart, we can also just give ourselves permission to feel joy. The world isn’t more virtuous or more compassionate because we don’t feel joy. In fact, joy can be the engine and the fuel to keep us leaning into the storms and engaged in the muck and mud of the world. Maybe laughter is the sound you hear when the world is being knit back together, and joy (along with love, courage, and stubbornness) is what is threaded through all the fraying and hurt places to make it gorgeous and whole again. Maybe. What gives you joy?
These images are from the Museum of Black Joy. If you want to see more photos, go to https://www.museumofblackjoy.com/.
Art, Poetry, and Programming
March 2025: Trust
In her poem "Trust the People," adrienne maree brown emphasizes the importance of trust in building connections and fostering community. She encourages us to trust those who feel like home, allow us to rest, and inspire us with their capabilities. Trust deepens through shared experiences, even in the face of breaches, and is essential for personal growth and emotional expression. This month, the theme "The Practice of Trust" invites us to engage in various activities that explore trust, including discussions, worship services, and creative expression. By leaning into trust, we can overcome fear and anxiety, enriching our lives and relationships. Participants are encouraged to reflect on their own experiences with trust and find ways to engage with the theme both individually and collectively.​
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February 2025: Inclusion
Our theme for the month of February is the practice of inclusion. In a time when it feels like the safe place to be is curled up in bed with the curtains drawn, it can be difficult to know that challenging ourselves to be in community and welcoming others are the best places for us to find safety right now. Inclusion calls us to move beyond just belonging or tolerating. It calls us to live into our values and put love at the center of all we do. Inclusion invites us to examine ourselves and determine what we are not recognizing in ourselves that prevents us from being whole. The practice of inclusion reminds us we have to actively participate in our lives and in our communities to constantly become aware of how to make more room in our hearts and in our congregation. This is especially important when so many are pulling back policies and practices of expanding their communities. Let us enter into this month with curiosity about how we can be more inclusive of pieces of ourselves and inclusive of others in our congregation and community.
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​--Soul Matters (www.soulmatterssharingcircle.com)
The Women’s Building San Francisco. The Women’s Building is the most notable in the whole of San Francisco. The incredible MaestraPeace came from top muralists; Juana Alicia, Miranda Bergman, Edythe Boone, Susan Kelk Cervantes, Meera Desai, Yvonne Littleton and Irene Perez. It spans the entire face of the beautiful four-story building acting as a true testament to the power and creativity of diverse women. More Info Here.
To engage in ancient practice of meditating on an image as a spiritual practice. Written instructions can be found here. Watch the Visio Divina portion of our August 4th service here. Watch this video recording where we guide you through the process (click here).
Art, Poetry, and Programming
January 2025: Story
Story is our theme for January. We human beings are so many things: tool makers (though not the only tool-making species); language users (though not the only species to communicate in sounds); and also one of the only story-telling species we know—at least so far. Stories are how we make sense of the world. They can tell the hero's journey, teach moral lessons, make us laugh, hold a mirror up to some piece of our world so we can see it clearly, and even show us the shadow side of the human spirit. History is just journalism, Joseph Campbell once said, and not very reliable. “Myth is much more important and true than history.” Myth and story, at their best, capture something deep and powerful, ground us in a narrative, and invite us to throw our life up against or through that narrative. Nothing is more powerful than learning to tell a story about the world that makes sense, a new story to lead the world forward to a new way of being. Come reflect with us on story and what stories are most important to you.​
​--Soul Matters (www.soulmatterssharingcircle.com)
Landscape with the Fall of Icarus by Pieter Bruegel the Elder c.1560
To engage in ancient practice of meditating on an image as a spiritual practice. Written instructions can be found here. Watch the Visio Divina portion of our August 4th service here. Watch this video recording where we guide you through the process (click here).
Art, Poetry, and Programming
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December 2024: Presence
Woody Allen famously once said, “80% of success in life is just showing up.” Showing up certainly matters. Studies of people who “are lucky” find that those folks who are out circulating in the world, making friends, and making connections “get more lucky.” Being there when opportunity arises matters. Friendships are formed, so often, by “time on task.” Presence—that quality of just being there, steadily, reliably—matters. And this month we want to invite you to pay attention also to the kinds of presence we can pay attention to, to how we can deepen our connection to self, to each other, to the miraculous, mysterious, and unknown, to purpose and calling. It won’t all happen in our services. You might find it in the poem of the month or a small group, a discussion of an issue in the world, a piece of music, or conversation over coffee some day in the courtyard. We invite you to be present to presence!
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​--Soul Matters (www.soulmatterssharingcircle.com)
Photo by James Wainscoat
Art, Poetry, and Programming
November 2024:
The Practice of Repair
Repair. In a world of fast fashion and planned obsolescence, of consumer mindsets and quick fixes, there is a parallel world of people and practices that are about how to pull things broken, frayed, a little wonky, back into usable, mended states, and even broken things back into wholeness. Repair is that work. Many of you are familiar with the Japanese practice of "Kintsugi." It is literally that practice—"kin" ” meaning golden and “tsugi” meaning repair—where a broken piece of pottery is mended back together and visibly so, even thought more beautiful for the broken seams and wabi-sabi beauty of it. And in this parallel world bent on mending, there is the underlying assumption that we try not to treat the world and its things, but also its people and institutions, certainly not the earth, as dispensable, as incidental to our forward motion. We are in a world in need of a lot of repair. This month we think about some of the aspects of what it means to be menders.
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​--Soul Matters (www.soulmatterssharingcircle.com)
Art, Poetry, and Programming
October 2024:
The Practice of Deep Listening
Listening helps us find our way. The listening of therapists allows us to navigate our way through life. We turn to prayer to hear God’s guidance. We listen to experts so we can get ahead. Like a flashlight that leads us through the darkness, listening helps us stay on course. And yet maybe there’s more to it than that. What if listening doesn’t just guide us through the world but also creates our world? That sacred space of being deeply listened to isn’t just calling us home; it is home. We don’t have conversations; we are our conversations. Listening literally constructs the world we live in. And whom we become. One wonders if this is why the poet Joyce Sutphen says, “Listen carefully. Your whole life might depend on what you hear.”​​
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-- Soul Matters (www.soulmatterssharingcircle.com)
Art, Poetry, and Programming
September 2024:
The Practice of Invitation
What is in an invitation? It looks so simple—the envelope or virtual envelope we get with the invitation to join in some moment or adventure? A movie, a party? Or the hand extended from someone on bended knee and the larger invitation to join in a life together: Will you marry me? Seems so simple. Just an invitation. Want to join this church? Be my friend? Go climb a mountain? Get an ice cream? What is written and tucked in an invitation if it is real and with the potential to welcome the fullness of everyone invited to be in an authentic relationship? What does the practice of invitation, the spiritual practice of it, say about what we believe invitation requires of us?
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