Sermons, meditations, and conversations from Foothills Unitarian Church. Featuring Rev. Gretchen Haley, Rev. Sean Neil-Barron, Rev. Elaine Aron-Tenbrink, and special guests!
Reflect on how relationships are essential to your life. How can you intentionally hold space for others and build relationships that allow each person to be themselves without attempts to fix or change one another? Featuring Rev. Gretchen, Rev. Elaine, and Rev. Sean.
Revs. Elaine and Sean kick off our Essential series, where we're taking a deep dive together into asking what matters most in this life? What is the essence of being human? In this time with so many distractions and a premium put on staying busy and achieving productivity, how do we remember what is most essential? How do we consciously live lives that reflect our understanding of what is most deeply important?
This week on the podcast, we invite you to listen in on a sermon on the tensions of individualism and community. You’ll also hear a conversation between Revs. Sean and Gretchen about some of the questions the sermon raises and the heartbreak and the hope of choosing community and the common good rather than reverting to individualism or tribalism.
Welcome to Episode One of Deeper, a podcast from Foothills Unitarian Church! In this episode, Rev. Elaine talks with special guest Rev. Karen Hutt about rage, grief, goodness, and being human in the world today, and Rev. Sean guides us in a meditation for connecting with our anger.
Rev. Gretchen uses storytelling to illustrate that, at its core, living in covenant means calling one another back to our truest selves over and over again - and to receive the message when we ourselves are lost and those with whom we are in covenant call us back to our authentic selves.
Rev. Gretchen teaches about the practice of mutual edification in the context of covenantal relationships (like we have at Foothills Unitarian) and explores how we each exist in a constellation of belonging and accountability.
Rev. Gretchen draws on Rev. Nancy Bowen's teaching about being in covenant with the whole world to explore what it means to embrace that there is no "them," there is only "us" even when our partners break our hearts.
Rev. Gretchen explains what it means to be a covenantal, rather than creedal, faith and explores how in making promises to each other, to ourselves, and to life itself - promises towards our highest ideals - we must also practice repair and forgiveness.
Rev. Gretchen explains the meaning of Beloved Community and how building the Beloved Community is an integral part of what it means to journey together as a Unitarian Universalist faith community.
Sometimes people talk about being either someone who focuses on inner growth or social change. Rev. Gretchen invites us to consider these instincts as two sides of the same journey.
Rev. Sean explains what our mission of unleashing Courageous Love actually means.
Rev. Sean Neil-Barron draws on the work of Parker Palmer to explore how Unitarian Universalism asks us to live from the inside out - how the work of being in relationship with ourselves helps us be in relationship with others. When we shake off the tyranny of “should,” we make space to listen to our authentic selves, and when we listen to our authentic selves, when we live by our own standards, we are empowered to discern our vocation – our calling.
