Sunday Service

You must learn one thing.

The world was made to be free in.

Give up all the other worlds

except the one to which you belong. Sometimes it takes darkness and the sweet confinement of your aloneness

to learn

anything or anyone

that does not bring you alive

is too small for you.

~ David Whyte

The bird you put inside a cage, you will have to find it another name, for it is no longer a bird.

~ Shenaz Patel

The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.

~ Albert Camus

Had I not created my whole world, I would certainly have died in other people’s.

~ Anaïs Nin

The eyes of others our prisons; their thoughts our cages

~ Virginia Woolf

It is only through disruptions and confusion that we grow and are set free, jarred out of ourselves by the collision of someone else’s private world with our own.

~ Joyce Carol Oates

The more you try to control something, the more it controls you.

~ Unknown

Freedom is what we do with what is done to us.

~ Jean-Paul Sartre

I used to feel a lot of guilt or shame about feeling emotions like jealousy or insecurity, but they have been and are a path to my freedom. They show me what work still needs to be done. They are an inner compass for healing.

~ Katie Creel

Some days you have to unplug the phone and step out to the porch and rock all afternoon and allow the sun to tell you what to do...

~ Philip Terman 

(Curated and adapted for KUF from the 2025 Soul Matters materials on the theme ‘Freedom’)

June 5, 2025

This list of questions is an aid for deep reflection. How you answer them is often less important than the journey they take you on. So, read through the list of questions 2-3 times until one question sticks out for you and captures your attention, or as some faith traditions say, until one of the questions “shimmers.” 

Then reflect on that question using one or all of these questions: 

• What is going on in my life right now that makes this question so pronounced for me?

• How might my inner voice be trying to speak to me through it?

• How might Life or my inner voice be trying to offer me a word of comfort or challenge through this question?

1. When did you feel most free as a child?

2. Has quitting ever set you free?

3. Has freedom ever frightened you? What did that moment teach you?

4. Is aging trying to offer you a new form of freedom? What is keeping you from accepting that offer?

5. What has life taught you about being imprisoned without realizing it?

6. What story from your life best captures your understanding of freedom?

7. Whose freedom do you envy?

8. Has numbing become your cage?

9. Are you stuck in an old survival mechanism that isn’t needed anymore?

10. What form of “imprisonment” are you most vulnerable to? Fear? The need for safety? Woundedness? Shame? Self-doubt? Anger? Fear of rejection? The inability to say sorry? Regret? Gossip? Society’s standards of beauty? Your own standard of living?

11. Has seeking safety ever become your jail cell?

12. Have you ever been trapped in someone else’s story?

13. Would living more simply bring you more freedom?

14. When were you freed by love?

15. What’s your question? Your question may not be listed above. As always, if the above questions don't include what life is asking from you, spend the month listening to your days to find it.

(Curated and adapted for KUF from the 2025 Soul Matters materials on the theme ‘Freedom')

What if we could listen

like the great salmon

who goes about its ordinary life

when suddenly something shifts.

It does not come as a thunderous

revelation, but a quiet knowing

you have been preparing all

your life to trust.

The path lived until now no longer

satisfies but the path ahead

seems thousands of miles

long, and your womb is heavy.

                 -Christine Valters Paintner

                    from her poem “Following an Ancient Call”

Who of us doesn’t understand that “heavy womb”? Who of us hasn’t felt a deep hunger begin to grow in our bellies? Who of us hasn’t felt a particular new desire rise up, sure and clear? And who of us hasn’t—at some point—turned our backs on that desire, that call? 

Not that we wanted to. It’s just that we were stuck. Imprisoned, so to speak, by circumstances, responsibilities, constraints or assumptions which made that desire seem out of reach. We felt trapped, forced to say “No” when our heart wanted to say “Yes”.

More often than we notice, this is the dilemma when it comes to freedom. It’s not so much about running away from something as it is about wanting to run toward something but not being able to! In other words, there is a big difference between “freedom from” and “freedom to.”  

Our Unitarian Universalist faith gets this. At its best, it never simply asks us, “What do you need to get away from?” No, it pushes us to ask the deeper question of “What is it that you want to run toward?” Mature freedom is never about the absence of all constraints; it’s about being able to commit yourself to the things that have your heart. Or to put it another way, true freedom is about constraints of our own choosing. 

So what is it for you, friends? Where in your life are you feeling forced to say “No” when your heart really wants to say “Yes”? What is it that you want to use your freedom for? It’s not the bars of a prison that make us want to escape; it’s suddenly noticing what’s on the other side of those bars that makes us want to get out. 

So this month, don’t take your eyes off of it. Keep that longing clearly in view. And if you do, you’ll be surprised how easy it is to bend open those bars… and simply walk out.

(Curated and adapted for KUF from the 2025 Soul Matters materials on the theme ‘Freedom')

Ask Them About Freedom

One of the best ways to explore our monthly themes is to have conversations about them with people who are close to you. It’s also a great way to deepen our relationships! Below is a list of questions to help you on your way. 

Be sure to let your conversation partner know in advance that this won’t be a typical conversation.

Remember to also answer the questions yourself as they are meant to support a conversation, not just a time of quizzing them. 

Come to your group ready to share what surprised you about the conversation and what gift or

insight it gave you.

Freedom Questions:

• When did you feel most free as a child?

• What is a song that always gives you the feeling of freedom when you hear it? Tell me a story about when it came to your rescue. 

• What story from your life best captures your current understanding of freedom?

• Whose freedom do you envy?

• Has quitting ever set you free?

• What do you know now about freedom that you didn’t know when you were younger?

• The philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre said, “Freedom is what we do with what is done to us.” What story comes to mind when you hear that? 

• When were you freed by love? 

(Curated and adapted for KUF from the 2025 Soul Matters materials on the theme ‘Freedom’)

The Escape of a Carefree Moment

There are some things we can never escape: a diagnosis, a loss of a loved one, loss of a job, regret, worry, the numbing repetition of daily life, the joy-filled but nonstop responsibility of parenting. Some of these burdens are rare; some are routine. But regardless of their weight or intensity, we find ourselves longing for a reprieve. A spiritual timeout. A temporary moment of escape that lets us feel carefree just long enough to be refilled or get our resilience back.

That’s what this spiritual exercise is all about: Carving out some space to feel carefree. 

To be specific, here’s what we’re inviting you to do:

1. Find a moment of quiet and watch this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pMWU8dEKwXw. It may not exactly represent what’s weighing you down, but use the emotions that arise from it to spark your imagination and motivation.  

2. Spend some time identifying the burden, weight or responsibility from which you need to break free from, if only for a short time.

3. Then come up with and do something to give yourself that escape. Do something that leaves you feeling carefree. Take your time figuring this out. In fact, pushing yourself to identify exactly what allows you to feel carefree is the whole point!

(Curated and adapted for KUF from the 2025 Soul Matters materials on the theme ‘Freedom')

Videos & Podcasts

We Can’t be Healthy Without Imagination

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pCt9SlDJ1s4

The Untold Story of How Delight Teamed Up With Imagination to Invent Our World

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hLltkC-G5dY

Why You Should Make Useless Things...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c0bsKc4tiuY

On Reimagining Where Creativity Comes From

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=86x-u-tz0MA 

Articles

In Defense of Daydreaming

We Suffer More in Imagination than in Reality

Empathy is an act of imagination

Imagining the Top 10 Future Threats

Books

Imagination: A Manifesto

The Ministry for the Future

A Psalm for the Wild-Built

Parable of the Sower 

(Curated and adapted for KUF from the 2025 Soul Matters materials on the theme ‘Imagination')

Live out of your imagination, not your history.

~ Stephen R. Covey

Despair, when not the response to absolute physical and moral defeat, is, like war, the failure of imagination.

~ Adrienne Rich

I become more and more certain, as the years go by, that wherever friendship is destroyed, or homes are broken, or precious ties are severed, there is a failure of imagination. Someone is too intent on justifying himself, or herself, never venturing out to imagine the way things seem to the other person. Imagination is shut off and sympathy dies. If we know what it is that makes other people speak or act as they do… We might understand. Often we could heal the wounds. But even where that is not possible - even where fuller understanding only leaves us rather sad and helpless, it would still give us the power to be kind.

~ A. Powell Davies

Thinking that we can exponentially grow forever, or even that this is somehow desirable, is a catastrophic failure of imagination, and it’s putting the entire human experiment in jeopardy.

~ Dirk Philipsen

the only war that matters is the war against the imagination. all other wars are subsumed in it. the ultimate famine is the starvation of the imagination. it is death to be sure.

~ Diane di Prima

We think we understand the rules when we become adults but what we really experience is a narrowing of the imagination. 

~ David Lynch

It’s easier for us to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. 

~ Frederic Jameson

(Curated and adapted for KUF from the 2025 Soul Matters materials on the theme ‘Imagination')