Unity of Farmers Branch (Formerly The Church Of One Love)

The 1st Sunday in Advent we traditionally light a candle for hope or faith: the only advent virtue for which 2 different terms are used.  Why?  What is hope?  Is it the same thing as faith? How are they different, and how do we hold them in a helpful, healthy way?   To hope for specific changes in circumstances over which we have no control can be a hopeless proposition, but can we have faith in ou...

In his book “Peace is Every Step”  Buddhist monk Thich Nat Han says,  "There is no way to happiness—happiness is the way."  Does this make sense to you?  Is being happy a worthy goal?  Do you feel guilty pursing happiness when there is so much suffering in the world?  Or could our being happy actually serve? In this service I will bring forward many wise quotes on happiness, so we can reflect on them and hold them up to our hearts ...

When we don’t feel good inside, often our first instinct is to try to change what’s happening on the outside. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work. We can never solve the problems we feel within ourselves by manipulating external effects.  When we try to, it makes us upside down.  Things get worse instead of better as we repeat the same old patterns that don’t work, but more desperately each time around.  To heal, ...

It seems the intensity of world events political, ecological, economic, might be the greatest many of us have felt in our lifetime.  We experience this as loss: we are losing our security in how things used to be (or how we perceived them), our trust in what we hoped for. As a result we are anxious, fearful, angry at the state of our country and the world. This is a loss that we need to honor in the same way we’d honor the loss of ...

When we want to take right action in the world, we must first become truly aware of what is going on—to understand what the problem or challenge really is.  When we become aware of discomfort, we tend to jump to take whatever action we think will most quickly relieve our immediate suffering.  Too often that action leads us to ever more suffering down the road.  Effective action is always only possible following a period of acceptan...

On this,  International Day of Peace—we celebrate the founding ideals of the United Nations: to promote peace, end conflict, and foster global cooperation to build a peaceful and sustainable world.  These are global ideas, but work on the personal level as well.  In fact, peace will only ever happen globally when it first happens person to person as we communicate with others in non-accusatory, non-violent , kind and loving ways.  ...

Stillness is a secret superpower that—when practiced-- brings us closer to who we really are.  In stillness we commune with God, instinctively feel our oneness with nature and with all beings, and come to know ourselves more deeply.   So why is it so hard to get and stay still?  It is so easy to become overwhelmed by distractions, anxieties, activities, to-do lists, that we seldom experience the gifts of true stillness.  This week,...

Throughout history humankind has believed in Truth, only to find out that it was, after all, not really True.  Is it possible that we really do not know anything for a fact?  What and where is our guiding star, or is there such a thing?

We seem to have been on an evolutionary journey to discover what God is, only to see it slide away from us more often than not.

Let us take a look at where we have been, where we are, and imagine wh...

Is that a suit of armor? Can you take it off?  As humans we hurt and then we try to protect ourselves from it ever happening again.  Unfortunately, we cannot build walls (or wear suits) that close our hearts only to what is painful.  A closed heart is a closed heart.  So how do we navigate a world where to keep an open heart feels too painful, but to close it and live in the mind would make us cold and unfeeling?  How can we find b...