Rob Napier UUSE - July 5, 2026 It’s hard, just now, to celebrate America. I know many of you feel that. I feel that. Maybe it was always hard. Or at least maybe it always should have been hard. But I want to raise up something else today. Something I think should be celebrated. And that’s the Idea of America. I know it sounds naive, maybe even blind, but I think the Idea of America has been a powerful thing and often a good thing. It belongs to us, all of us. And I won’t let

“Here comes the sun, and I say ‘It’s all right.’”[1] When our world is not all right—and, as you know, it’s not—we need music, poetry, art, dance, literature, worship, prayers and sermons that instill in us the confidence that there are reliable paths forward through the pain and the mess, that the people who care about people and not profits, the people who care about the planet and not profits—including ourselves—are collectively going to find a way, are going to

The Ancient Spring At our Earth Day service two weeks ago I said it is always a worthwhile exercise to reflect on what it means to have a place in the interdependent web of all existence. I then said that such contemplation can, at times, lead us into that kind of spiritual or mystical experience in which all the borders and the boundaries between us and everything else melt away, ebb, fade, disappear, revealing in their wake an endless, crisscrossing multitude of connection

(With writing assistance from Janet Heller, Christine Larson, Mike Baxter, Mary Lawrence, Anne Vaughan, Janet Dauphin and special guest, Anthony Clarke) Yes: for our food we thank the bees and the moths (who work at night) the birds and butterflies, the bats (for the bananas) – indeed, all the winged workers – not to mention “the light upon the busy leaf’ and the ‘water at the root.’ [1] Lyrics from “Grace for Pollinators,” by the composer Nancy Schimmel, which appears in