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09/07/2008
Rev. Don Beaudreault
In celebrating the ingathering of this beloved church community at the start of our "regular season," we symbolized this event of "home-coming" by creating a common bowl of life-sustaining water – water whose individual sources have come from various places on the planet we recently have visited.
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BEAUDREAULT’S ELEVATOR SPEECH
09/14/2008
Rev. Don Beaudreault
OKAY, there it is: THE question you have been dreading ever since you told your new friend with whom you are about to have an elevator ride that you were a Unitarian Universalist: "But, what's a Uni…whatever you said you were?"
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JAZZ THEOLOGY
09/21/2008
Rev. Don Beaudreault
"Jazz Theology" – expressed in another way: jazz and God. For our purposes this morning, they link up, both being inscrutably intuitional – and thereby beyond ultimate definition. In other words, jazz and the sense of the divine are both feelings deep inside us and require expression.
Perhaps we can do so by saying that both just happen. Just are. Can't be all that defined.
Perhaps it is what that great jazz legend Miles Davis said when asked to tell what he was about to play: "I'll play it first and tell you what it is later."
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TWO WAYS OF PERCEIVING LIFE -- WHICH WAY DO YOU CHOOSE?
09/28/2008
Rev. Don Beaudreault
How do YOU view your life, your empty sheet of paper? Is it a major creative impasse where from the get-go you can't get going? Where your existence seems as if it were one battle after another; one conflict upon conflict, like mirrors reflecting mirrors, drawing you deeper and deeper into confusion and frustration? A "funhouse" of horrors? Do you, like Benchely, want to say: "The hell with it?" "What's the point?" "It doesn't make any sense!" "Why do I have to suffer so much?" "What's wrong with me?" "It isn't fair!" "Why me, Lord?"
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Installation Ceremony for the Reverend Donald Beaudreault
10/05/2008
Rev. Brian Covell
The charge to the congregation upon the Installation of the New Minister
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IMAGE VERSUS SUBSTANCE (Including the "Billy Bear Meets Pork Chop" Original Story)
10/12/2008
Rev. Don Beaudreault
The "depth psychologists" tell us that we human beings are composed of multiple layers of being, or consciousness. Some believe that we are innately comprised of a "collective unconscious" – that we have an archetypal memory that calls us, down through the generations as a species, to fashion our existence with common-enough and familiar symbols and practices.
In truth, we are not what we appear to be. The "image" we present – our façade - is not always, perhaps is seldom, indicative of our "substance" – our deeper self.
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Pepon the Pumpkin's Version of Halloween
10/26/2008
Rev. Don Beaudreault
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Charles Dickens: Social Activist and Unitarian Universalist
12/07/2008
Rev. Don Beaudreault
In a visit to Newgate Prison, Charles Dickens met with a young girl and wrote the
following sketch of her, believing her to be a victim of environmental factors:
Barely past her childhood, it required but a glance to discover that she was one
of those children born and bred in neglect and vice, who have never known what
childhood is; who have never been taught of love and (to) court a parent’s smile;
or to dread a parent’s frown…Talk to THEM of parental solicitude, the happy
days of childhood and merry games of infancy! Tell them (rather) of hunger and
the streets, of beggary and stripes, of the gin-shop, the stationhouse, and the
pawnbroker’s and (then) they will understand you!"
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Yes, We Can!
12/14/2008
Rev. Don Beaudreault
This time of year, no matter what we call the various mid-winter events we
celebrate, is a time of heightened expectations and emotions, each of us reacting
differently.
Symbolically, of course, with the beginning of the return of the sun from its
farthest distance from the earth and consequently the lengthening of the days –
the time of the year called the "winter solstice" – lies the message to humanity:
we, too, can leave the dark places of our existences, and turn toward goodness
and light.
Said in another way: we can move beyond cynicism toward hope.
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