Sunday Talks / Random Musings

The Emptiness of Easter

Easter, Sunday Talks / Random Musings
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with Rev. Clay Nelson

The Emptiness of Easter
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Follow this shortcut to the bottom of the page for the various readings, videos, etc. shared in the service.

Clay Nelson © 4 April 2021

There is no getting around it. Our rationalist faith doesn’t “get” Easter. We get Christmas. Jesus was born. We get Good Friday. Jesus died. We don’t get Easter. If we think about it at all, we struggle with the idea of resurrection. Our first reaction is to dismiss what we don’t understand or can’t relate to. Even if we know the stories about Jesus’ last week in Jerusalem, what Christians celebrate as Holy Week, they can feel old, dusty and irrelevant to our lives. Too much suspension of disbelief is required to take them any more seriously than fairy tales. As a result, many Unitarians find Easter as empty of meaning as the tomb. Why bother going to the effort to roll back the stone? There is nothing to see … or is there?

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The Walking Dead: Are we all infected?

Sunday Talks / Random Musings
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with Rev. Clay Nelson

The walking dead: are we all infected?
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Follow this shortcut to the bottom of the page for the various readings, videos, etc. shared in the service.

Clay Nelson © 28 March 2021

I have a bone to pick with my daughter. In a recent FaceTime call she was appalled to learn I wasn’t familiar with a TV series called The Walking Dead. I reminded her that I do do dragons and wizards — and werewolves if Michael J Fox is one. I don’t do horror films or at least not since I was 14, when I “watched” Hitchcock’s The Birds with my jacket over my head. A book about vampires is okay, but I don’t want to read about or watch zombies.

Then while looking for a new series to watch I saw that Neon had just made The Walking Dead available — all ten seasons. Just to be more up-to-date with cultural references I decided to watch just one episode and then tell my daughter it was a waste of time. I’ve just about completed season four.… I am thoroughly hooked.

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Unitarians live in a parallel universe

Sunday Talks / Random Musings
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with Rev. Clay Nelson

Unitarians live in a parallel universe – this is an edited version, with deliberate mistakes removed, you can see the full live stream here.
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Follow this shortcut to the bottom of the page for the various readings, videos, etc. shared in the service.

Clay Nelson © 21 March 2021

From my experience, one of the most difficult things to do in life is to cross a threshold. I would like to be able to claim that I do so bravely and boldly. Sadly, human frailty being what it is, that has often not been the case. Sometimes it has required tornado public transport to move me from Kansas to Oz. Sometimes I have crossed by accident while playing hide and seek with myself and my fears in the back of a wardrobe.

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The Carbon Footprint of Faith

Climate Action, Sunday Talks / Random Musings
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with Rev. Clay Nelson

The Carbon Footprint of Faith
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Follow this shortcut to the bottom of the page for the various readings, videos, etc. shared in the service.

Clay Nelson © 14 March 2021

I have shared in the past that I was reared by, and infused with the values of, a staunch empiricist. Yet my scientist father was a highly committed and active member of the Episcopal Church most of his adult life. Furthermore, to everyone’s surprise, including mine, he parented an Episcopal priest who evolved into a Unitarian minister. As a teenager I could not untangle the mystery of how belief in science and faith could be embodied in a single skin. It was a conundrum. It was an impossible juxtaposition. It was mind-numbing cognitive dissonance. It defied an adolescent’s black and white view of reality.

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The road to hothouse hell is paved with good intentions

Climate Action, Sunday Talks / Random Musings
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with Rev. Clay Nelson

The road to hothouse hell is paved with good intentions
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Follow this shortcut to the bottom of the page for the various readings, videos, etc. shared in the service.

Clay Nelson © 7 March 2021

To continue with Elizabeth’s Kolbert’s river metaphor, I am reminded of a gift a friend who knew me too well gave me at the beginning of my ministry. It was a poster of a landscape featuring a river. The caption beneath it read, “Don’t push the river”. This intrinsically Taoist wisdom taunted me from its primacy of place on the wall facing my desk. All my stereotypic male traits wanted to move the river faster; straighten its meandering nature; keep it carefully constrained within its banks. There was way too much to be done to accept the river’s natural pace. The river’s course might be more picturesque, but posters be damned, it wasn’t efficient or fit for purpose from my limited view. Time to push it.

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Don’t believe everything you think

Climate Action, Sunday Talks / Random Musings
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with Rev. Clay Nelson

Don’t believe everything you think

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Follow this shortcut to the bottom of the page for the various readings, videos, etc. shared in the service.

Clay Nelson © 28 February 2021

Optical illusions are fun. In part because they are universal as far as I know. The word illusion comes from the Latin word illudere, meaning “to mock”. These illusions trick our brains into perceiving something different from physical reality. Three common ones are illusory motion (images that appear to be moving), double pictures (images that contain two pictures in one), and impossible objects (images that make sense when drawn on paper, but which could never exist in real life!).

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From Gujarat to West Bengal

Freeset India, Peace & Social Justice, Sunday Talks / Random Musings
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with Shirin Caldwell

A story of the Revival of the Traditional Textiles of India after the “Inglorious Empire” of the British Raj.

From Gujarat to West Bengal
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Shirin Caldwell © 21st February 2021

This talk is an introduction to one story (there are many) of how the ancient arts of weaving and embroidery are being revived amongst the artisans of Gujarat and West Bengal in India. The story is told through my eyes, which were opened on a Traditional Textiles tour to India in 2019.

I joined Joji’s Jacob’s Traditional Textiles of India Tour in October 2019. It was dazzling!

India: drenched in colour, the vibrancy of the people, the fascinating accommodation including the 19th century Itachuna Rajbari in West Bengal, or the luxurious Taj Mahal hotel in Lucknow the Terracotta Temples, the idol makers workshops in Kolkata, the stunning traditional weaving and embroideries, the breath-taking ancient step wells whose stories are carved into the stone walls and pillars. And…the Chambal River ride alive with crocodiles and gharials. All of these will linger long in my memory.

But today, I want to talk about one of the major reasons for my choosing this tour over the many others, that was the social justice emphasis on supporting the revival of the ancient weaving and embroidery arts by the artisans of India, that were almost lost due the deliberate, brutal repressive policies of the British East India Company and later the British Raj.

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The art of walking upright here

Sunday Talks / Random Musings, Treaty of Waitangi / Te Tiriti O Waitangi
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with Rachel Mackintosh

The art of walking upright here

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Rachel Mackintosh © 14th February 2021

Reading: The Skeleton of the Great Moa in the Canterbury Museum, Christchurch

The skeleton of the great moa on iron crutches
Broods over no great waste; a private swamp
Was where this tree grew feathers once, that hatches
Its dusty clutch, and guards them from the damp.

Interesting failure to adapt on islands,
Taller but not more fallen than I, who come
Bone to his bone, peculiarly New Zealand’s.
The eyes of children flicker round this tomb

Under the skylights, wonder at the huge egg
Found in a thousand pieces, pieced together
But with less patience that’s the bones that dug
In time deep shelter against ocean weather:

Not I, some child born in a marvellous year,
Will learn the trick of standing upright here.

Allen Curnow, 1943

Musings: The art of walking upright here

Last week was Waitangi Day. Marking the signing on 6 February 1840 of Te tiriti o Waitangi. So it may seem as though today’s service is a week late. To adapt a Christmas poem:

“When the waiata on the marae is stilled,
when the sound from the megaphone is gone,
When the rangatira and the manuhiri are home,
when the workers are back in their workplaces,
Then the work of Waitangi begins”

The work of Waitangi is the work of all of us, no matter how much we feel we know or don’t know.

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Exploring the elephant(s) in the room

Sunday Talks / Random Musings
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with Sally Mabelle

Exploring the elephant(s) in the room
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Sally Mabelle © 31 January 2021

Have you heard the phrase ‘there’s an elephant in the room’?…this is just a metaphor

for an important or enormous topic that is obvious but no one mentions or wants to discuss it because it might make them uncomfortable or is personally, socially, or politically embarrassing. However, we Unitarians like digging into important discussions, so I searched for

‘Elephant in the room quotes’ to trumpet out for us today….here are a few of my favourites…

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