Nance Guilmartin has written a book entitled Healing Conversations, which focuses on the art of abiding with another through rough times. Through this and other resources, this sermon will explore ways to companion others when we are most challenged to be there for them.
This month's World Religions contribution is a dive into Sufism, a mystical tradition born out of Islam. Sufism's main tenet is to close down the distance between human and God, to come into the knowledge and truth of the divine through varied disciplines that shed the obstacles to such knowing. Rumi, a thirteenth century mystic, is the most familiar sage, world-wide, who practiced within the Sufi tradition.
Today the Creative Spirituality Group will render The Man Who Planted Trees, written by Jean Giorno. It is in tribute to Earth Day. This story tells of Elzeard Bouffier, a man who single-handedly restored the ecosystem of an area of the foothills of the Alps near Provence over the decades of the early 20th Century. All people 2nd grade and older are invited to stay for the service.
The author of a recent list of the world's most influential persons places Isaac Newton second, just after Mohammad and just before Jesus. Newton makes this list for the obvious reason: his enormous, continuing influence on the world of science. But Isaac Newton was more than a scientist. In a long life, he engaged in pursuits that ranged from mathematics to politics, and the subject into which he poured the most time and effort wasn't science, it was religion. He was a religious thinker on a grand scale, a closet theologian whose heretical writings were composed secretly and held so tightly that they remained out of the public eye for nearly three hundred years. On this Sunday we gather to explore a little of Isaac Newton's life and delve into the secret world of his religious thought.