This page is curated by Steven Mead, Religious Educator. We come in all "religious flavors," and regardless of your perspective, use the wide-ranging sources on this page to inspire, challenge and create a life of sacred purpose for yourself and enrich the lives of those around you. ​ [There is a lot of content on this web page​―much of which is accessed by opening up the accordion files below.]
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On Your Own Time | Adult Lifelong Learning Resources​

To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.―Ralph Waldo Emerson
If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.―The Gospel of Thomas

Soul Food

​"No whining on the yacht."―Tim Duncan
2018 Ware Lecturer - Brittany Packnett
You need only claim the events of your life to make yourself yours. When you truly possess all you have been and done…you are fierce with reality.―Florida Scott-Maxwell
​

​WISDOM CONTENT FROM THE DIGITAL WONDERLAND

This content changes monthly or so (sometimes more often). Visit often!

More Wisdom Resources | The Accordion File of Good Stuff

Open the accordion file (+) below to reveal (lots of!) additional content.
Wisdom Resources:  Reading | Websites | Blog Sites
Reading | Contemporary Authors
It seems presumptuous to even suggest a list from among the combined wisdom of the world; but one must start somewhere. Try Goodreads 100 Best Spiritual Books of the Century. Here's a broad, short, sampler list:
​The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn and relearn.―Alvin Toffler​
​Web Sites
The following sites cover a wide range of spiritual and wisdom tradition topics. Feed your mind and soul!
Blog Sites
We spill a lot of electronic ink talking about spirituality and religion. Here are some excellent resources biased toward Unitarian Universalist voices, but including others as well: 
What, at this moment, is lacking?―Rinzai
Wisdom Resources:  Elder Spirituality | Spiritual Practice | Multimedia
 The most important thing is to find out the most important thing.―Zen master, Suzuki Roshi
Elder Spirituality
​Spiritual Practice
"And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer."―Rainer Maria Rilke
  • Spiritual but not religious? But if you are curious which faith or wisdom tradition might nourish you, try the Belief-O-Matic!
  • For centuries and across religious traditions spiritual directors have helped people along the way.  If a more intense engagement with spirituality is calling you, you might wish to connect with someone from the Unitarian Universalist Spiritual Directors Network
  • Quotes about spiritual growth from Goodreads readers
Multimedia | Film | Performance Art
"...contemporary art that roams the ground between faith and mystery. . . calls us into the imaginative life and makes us aware of the rich possibilities of being human."―Image​
​Do Shag!
“The Buddhist word for attachment is “do shag” which literally translates to mean “sticky desire.” I love this translation! If you really think about how you feel when you are grasping for something that you really want, you can feel its sticky pull. And until you figure out a way to get it, you feel this longing and obsession. We have all been there with different things and at different times in our lives. In a world that entices us with constant cravings and sticky desires, we can slow ourselves down and let go of attachment to that desire for more. And surprisingly, without fail, if we let go, we will receive…”―Rev. Karon Sandberg
Wisdom Resources: UUA Common Reads | Study Issues

Unitarian Universalist Common ReadS
Unitarian Universalist Common Read 2018-2019
  • Justice on Earth: People of Faith Working at the Intersections of Race, Class, and Environment, edited by Manish Mishra-Marzetti and Jennifer Nordstrom (Skinner House Books, 2018) is the 2018-19 Common Read selection (https://www.uua.org/books/read). The book looks at the ways in which the environmental justice, racial justice, and economic justice are intertwined, calling us to recognize that our Unitarian Universalist faith calls us to long-haul work for justice for our human kin, for the Earth and for all life.
  • Purchase Justice on Earth at inSpirit: UU Book and Gift Shop (https://www.uuabookstore.org/Justice-on-Earth-P18357.aspx)
  • The 2018-2019 UUA Common Read discussion guide is now available!

Unitarian Universalist Common Read 2016-2017
  1. Centering: Navigating Race, Authenticity, and Power in Ministry, edited by Mitra Rahnema (Skinner House, 2017), centers the stories, analyses, and insights of a number of Unitarian Universalist religious professionals of color as they explore how racial identity is made both visible and invisible in Unitarian Universalist communities.
    Download the discussion guide.
  2. Daring Democracy: Igniting Power, Meaning, and Connection for the America We Want, by Frances Moore Lappé and Adam Eichen, (Beacon Press, 2017) lifts up the importance of democracy itself. It examines the anti-democracy movement that has led to the Trump presidency, then offers a vision and call to action to save our democracy and to take our civic life to a place it has never been.
    Download the discussion guide.
UU Faith and Spirituality Resources​
​Websites YouTube Social Media
UU Church of the Larger Fellowship  | Quest for Meaning
The Church of the Larger Fellowship is our wider movement's online virtual church-without-walls. It is one of the best resources for current Unitarian Universalist thinking and spirituality.

​"Love and Loss. Awe and wonder. Journeys and home. The events of our lives and our spiritual curiosity lead us to ponder topics close to our hearts. Through 12 curated themes, you will find a wide range of spiritual resources to expand your perspective and enrich your search for meaning."
​Unitarian Universalist Perspectives
Sometimes described as "one faith and many beliefs," Unitarian Universalism draws from a wide range of wisdom traditions, both secular and sacred.
"I am now convinced that “belief,” in the way we usually use the word, is actually the enemy of faith, religion, and spirituality. Let me say that again: belief is the enemy of faith. When we dwell on beliefs we ask all the wrong questions. My faith is much more about what I love than about what I think."―Rev Peter Morales​
UU Santa Fe Current Monthly Theme - April
Content to Explore
  • ​Song and Music​
What Does It Mean To Be A People of Wholness?
Let’s just say that we’re skeptical about rushing in to fix things.
 
We Unitarian Universalists understand the urge to restore what once was. Nothing is more human. Who doesn’t want to reverse the damage? Who doesn’t hold on to the humpty dumpty hope that all can be put back together again? But our faith teaches us that this is just not how the world works. Transition and change rule the flow of life. There is no going back. The current of time is just too strong.
 
And so the wholeness offered us is not that returning our lives to their original state but working with what remains to make something new. The shards are not pieces of a puzzle that needs put perfectly back together, but building blocks waiting to be molded into a yet to be imagined form. To be made whole again is to be reorganized, not restored. 

As odd as it sounds, we were meant to be broken, broken open to be exact. Over and over again, our faith reminds us that protecting our personal wholeness is only half the game. The equally important part of life’s journey is about letting in the wholeness of world!
Questions to Ponder
So, which questions below are calling to you? Which one contains “your work”?
  1. Is wholeness for you a solitary or relational journey?
  2. When did you first discover that repairing the world is one of the best ways to put yourself back together?
  3. In what space or place do you feel most whole? How often do you spend time there?
  4. Who taught you that wholeness does not mean perfection? Who helped you with the work of embracing brokenness, rather than trying to fix or hide it? How have you passed on that lesson? Does someone in your life need that lesson now?
  5. How has your understanding of wholeness changed with age?
  6. What part of yourself hasn’t been let out in a while?
  7. Was it ever easier for you to live through someone else than to become complete yourself?
  8. When was the last time you felt “most me”? Did you promise yourself anything in that moment? Did you tell yourself something to never forget?
  9. What if it’s about belonging not becoming? What if wholeness is a matter of noticing we’ve already arrived?
“And above all, watch with glittering eyes the whole world around you because the greatest secrets are always hidden in the most unlikely places. Those who don't believe in magic will never find it.”―Roald Dahl
Content Attribution:  Copyrighted content 2019. Soul Matters ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. Soul Matters. Soul Matters packets are for use by member congregations of the Soul Matters Sharing Circle. UU Santa Fe is a subscribing member of the Soul Matters Sharing Circle. If you are intrigued by this thematic content and want to "go deeper" into this material, then join a UU Santa Fe Soul Matters Covenant Group. For more information, contact Steven Mead, Religious Educator
UU Santa Fe Featured April Author

Karen Armstrong
About this author
Karen Armstrong, a comparative religion specialist is the author of numerous books on religion, including The Case for God, A History of God, The Battle for God, Holy War, Islam, Buddha, and Fields of Blood, as well as a memoir, The Spiral Staircase. 

Her work has been translated into 45 languages. In 2008 she was awarded the TED Prize and began working with TED on the Charter for Compassion, created online by the general public, crafted by leading thinkers in Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Confucianism. It was launched globally in the fall of 2009.―Goodreads

Try these

Celebrated Authors

Past authors highlighted here:
  • ​Aldo Leopold
  • Angeles Arrien
  • Ann LaMotte
  • Annie Dillard
  • Nisargadatta Maharaj
  • ​Joan Halifax
  • David Bohm
  • Jalaluddin Rumi
  • Mark Nepo
  • Neil deGrasse Tyson
  • Diarmuid O'Murchu
  • ​Karen Armstrong
  • Parker Palmer
  • Rachel Naomi Remen 
  • The Dali Lama
  • Wendel Berry
  • Dorothy Day
​Jack Jezreel, founder of JustFaith observes, “The world cannot be changed-by-love to become just, unless we are changed by love to become whole, but we cannot be made whole without engaging in the work of making the world whole. Personal transformation and social transformation are one piece.” ​

Recommended Books
​2018

​"From the simplest lyric to the most complex novel, literature is asking us to pay attention. Pay attention to the frog. Pay attention to the west wind. Pay attention to the boy on the raft, the lady on the tower, the old man on the train. In sum, pay attention to the world and all that dwells therein and thereby learn at last to pay attention to yourself and all that dwells therein."―Frederick Buechner
Recommended Reading―from the UU Santa Fe Adult Lifelong Learning Team
  • Daring Democracy, Frances Moore Lappe and Adam Eichen, Beacon Press
  • Undocumented: How Immigration Became Illegal, Aviva Chomsky, Beacon Press
  • Loaded: A Disarming History of the Second Amendment, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, City Lights (the author has published other book with Beacon)
  • The Origin of Others, Toni Morrison, Harvard Press 
  • Blue Horses, Mary Oliver, The Penguin Press 2012
  • A Thousand Mornings, Mary Oliver
  • Existence, A Story, David Hinton
  • Hunger Mountain: A Field Guide to Mind and Landscape, David Hinton
  • ​Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow by Yuval Noah Harari

UU Santa Fe Reading List 2018-2019

​At every turn, roots; minute threads feeding grasses;
tough, hollow straws sucking life into cattails and tules.
At every turn, roots invite the question:
by what are you held and sustained?―Excerpt from the poem "Roots" by Linda Whittenberg
​"You don’t get anything here. Not for a dollar. Not for ten thousand dollars. You don’t get Hellfire Insurance at a UU congregation or standing-room-only tickets to the Hereafter Show. If we do not become Truth and become Meaning, we will search for both in vain. We are here to give something of ourselves. Meant to be present for one another. And by being so present, receive what we are meant to―not what we want―but what we need."―Steven Mead, UU Religious Educator
“We are mortals all, human and nonhuman, bound in one fellowship of love and travail. No one escapes the fate of death. But we can, with caring, make our good-byes less tormented. If we broaden the circle of our compassion, life can be less cruel.”―Gary Kowalski, The Souls of Animals
We asked affiliated clergy and those known to possess extensive libraries of the sacred and profane to each give us a select few reading recommendations. Here are their recommendations. We challenge you to read one recommendation from each of the following adepts. Want to recommend some titles to this list? Send to Steven Mead.

Jill Cowley
  • Ecofeminism: Women Culture Nature, Edited by Karen J. Warren  1997  Indiana University Press. ISBN: 0-253-33031-9
  • "Hojoki or the Record of the Ten-Foot Square Hut" Kamo no Chomei  Pp. 3-18 in Kenko and Chomei:  Essays in Idleness and Hojoki.  Trans. Meredith McKinney.  2013.  Penguin Classics. ISBN:  978-0-141-19210-9 (This is a beautiful short essay on a Japanese ascetic's experience of retreating to a small hut in the mountains)
  • The Soul of Sex:  Cultivating Life as an Act of Love Thomas Moore 1998  New York, NY:  HarperCollins  ISBN:  0-06-018697-6
  • Early Buddhist Discourses.  Ed. and Trans. by John J. Holder.  2006  Indianapolis:  Hackett Publishing Co. ISBN: 978-0-87220-792-9
Munro Sickafoose
  • Thinking in Systems – Donella Meadows
  • The Four Shields: The Initiatory Seasons of Human Nature – Steven Foster and Meredith Little
  • The Other Within: The Genius of Deformity in Myth, Culture & Psyche – Daniel Deardorff
  • The Fruitful Darkness: Reconnecting with the Body of the Earth – Joan Halifax
  • The Path – Michael Puett and Christine Gross-Loh
  • A Branch from the Lightning Tree: Ecstatic Myth and Grace in the Wilderness – Martin Shaw
  • Revisioning Transpersonal Theory: A Participatory Vision of Human Spirituality – Jorge N. Ferrer
Leona Stucky ​Linda Whittenberg
  • ​Paul Tillich, The Courage to Be
  • Viktor Frankel, Man’s Search for Meaning (Unfortunately inappropriate title)
  • Marilyn Sewell, Threatened with Resurrection: A Book of Sermons II
  • Robert Bly, poetry: My Sentence Was a Thousand Years of Joy
  • William Stafford, poetry: The Way It Is or Ask Me
Steven Mead Gary Kowalski
  • Reinhold Niebuhr's Moral Man and Immoral Society
  • Marcus Borg's Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time
  • Elaine Pagel's The Gnostic Gospels
  • William James Varieties of Religious Experience
  • Aldous Huxley's The Perennial Philosophy
  • Alan Watts On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are and Myth and Ritual in Christianity​
​Other Recommendations from UU Santa Fe'ers
  • No Is Not Enough by Naomi Klein. Recommended by Mary Neikirk

​​​Sophia Perennis 

Religion as participation is a rediscovery of the Perennial Tradition that Plotinus, Gottfried Leibniz, Alan Watts, Aldous Huxley, and so many saints and mystics have spoken of in their own ways. It constantly recognizes that we are a part of something, more than we are observing something or “believing” in something.―Richard Rohr
​The Perennial Tradition
​by Richard Rohr
​​Sophia Perennis | Perennial Wisdom Tradition
The Perennial Tradition encompasses the recurring themes in all of the world’s religions and philosophies that continue to say:
  • There is a Reality underneath and inherent in the world of things,
  • There is in the human soul a natural capacity, similarity, and longing for this Reality, and
  • The final goal of existence is union with this Reality.
Our own UU movement, beginning with the transcendentalists, contributed to this philosophy. Explore this fascinating wisdom tradition so compatible with current Unitarian Universalist faith development through a bibliography prepared by Steven Mead, Consulting Lifespan Learning Director.
021415_sophia_perennis_bibliography.docx
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Decisions
​Between two words, choose the quieter one.
Between word and silence, choose listening.
Between two books, choose the dustier one.
Between the earth and the sky, choose a bird.
Between two animals, choose the one who needs you more.
Between two children, choose both.
Between the lesser and greater evil, choose neither.
Between hope and despair choose hope:  it will be harder to bear.
 ―Boris Novak, translated by Mia Dintinjana
Picture
Kirsti L. Adkins Original work
​“Seek patience and passion in equal amounts. Patience alone will not build the temple. Passion alone will destroy its walls.”―Maya Angelou

Location

UU Santa Fe
107 West Barcelona
Santa Fe, NM 87505
​​Phone:  505.982.9674

Come! UU Santa Fe is meant for you.

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