Sunday Service

February 6, 2024

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 were you first “saved” by someone who widened a circle to let you in? If you could talk to them today, what would they say to them?

2. If you could go back and change a moment of being excluded or excluding someone else, what would it be? 

3. Has an experience of being excluded permanently left a mark on you? 

4. Have you ever invited and included something or someone in your life that unexpectedly altered the trajectory of it, something or someone that broke you out of a stifling rut, challenged you to finally face something you were avoiding, or forced you to grow in a way that you wouldn’t have on your own? If so, what did the experience teach you about courage, risk, luck or grace?

5. Do you belong to a community or relationship that demands a version of you that no longer is true? Or requires you to remove parts of yourself to belong? 

6. What aspect of your personality do you need to do a better job of embracing and welcoming in? Your judgmental self? Your lazy self? Your vulnerable self? Your bitter self? Your easily frightened self? Your quick-to-anger self? Your jealous self? Your petty self? Your selfish self?  

7. What aspect of your life partner, child or close friend do you need to do a better job of embracing and welcoming in?

8. What excluded and painful memory of yours wants to be welcomed back in and better understood?

9. Have you or the communities you are a part of invited diverse people into your “house” but not allowed them to “rearrange your furniture”?

10. Is it possible the community that has welcomed you with open arms has also burdened you with an unhealthy or unfair understanding of “us and them”? 

11. What if Black History Month is not just a call to remember but also a form of reparations? If so, what might Black History Month be asking of you to include in your awareness and action this month?

12. How is the pain and struggle of those less fortunate than you included in your life?

13. Have your efforts to exclude risk from your life gone too far?

14. 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 ‘Inclusion’)

You hardly knew

how hungry you were

to be gathered in,

to receive the welcome

that invited you to enter

entirely...

You began to breathe again...

You learned to sing.

But the deal with this blessing

is that it will not leave you alone,

will not let you linger...

this blessing will ask you to leave,

not because it has tired of you

but because it desires for you

to become the sanctuary

that you have found...

                            - Jan Richardson

Jan Richardson begins with hunger. And so do we. Just saying the word “inclusion” conjures it up: The primal hunger to belong; the longing to be let in. No one likes standing outside the circle. No one likes leaning against the locked door listening to everyone else laughing inside. From the time we are little, inclusion and belonging is the thing we seek. It’s the hoped for Holy Grail. The promised resting place.

But Richardson will have none of that. To belong is only the beginning. That’s what she wants us to know. One minute she’s wrapping us in comforting words about settling in and allowing ourselves to finally breathe. The next she’s shaking us awake and telling us to get up and go. 

That shaking should tell us something. 

Or to put it another way, hers is not a gentle invitation. It’s not some sweet reminder to think of others. It’s a warning: Beware of the kind of belonging that only wants to bless you!

Deep down we know this. The hard part is to remember it. To use Richardson’s language, if we find ourselves being invited to linger rather than leave, alarm bells should go off. We need to be weary of those who welcome us with a members only card and a soft couch. They may have let us in, but soon they will enlist us into the work of keeping others out. There will likely even be a part of us that wants to keep others out. After all, closed circles don't just set us apart, they also sit us above.

But they also keep us small. Maybe this is why Richardson’s blessing is so intent on not leaving us alone. It knows that we only grow when the circle does. Circles that keep others out also keep the air out. No one inside a closed circle truly sings; they only suffocate, slowly.

It’s all one big reminder that the true blessing of inclusion is not that you get to come inside the circle; it’s that you get to participate in expanding it. As the circle grows, so do we.

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

Ask Them About Inclusion

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. Telling them a bit about Soul Matters will help set the stage. 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. 

Inclusion Questions:

• If you could go back and change a moment of being excluded or excluding someone else, what would it be? 

• Have you ever invited and included something or someone in your life that unexpectedly (and wonderfully) altered the trajectory of it?

• What aspect of your personality do you need to do a better job of embracing and welcoming in? Your judgmental self? Your lazy self? Your vulnerable self? Your bitter self? Your easily frightened self? Your quick-to-anger self? Your jealous self? Your petty self? Your selfish self? 

• What part of your personality do you wish your family of origin would have included and welcomed more enthusiastically?

• What types of people do you have the hardest time being open to? What experiences in your past have led to you being reactive to this type of person? What mental tools and tricks do you use to push yourself to be more open to them?

• How has aging impacted your feelings of being included or excluded?

• Have you ever had an experience that gave you a cosmic sense of being included? A feeling of being at one with everyone and everything around you? Or a feeling of being embraced and loved by the universe itself? If so, how did that experience change you? 

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

Trade Your Differences

We often have more access to diversity than we realize. Our friends, co-workers, neighbours, and family members differ from us in many ways. We just usually run away from it, avoid it or downplay it. 

This month, let’s tap into it! Here’s how: Pick that friend, colleague or family member who is different from you in some way and then exchange suggestions about how you two can expose each other to your respective different worlds. There are so many ways to do this. You could each recommend a book, movie or music playlist to each other and then discuss them. If you are from different cultures, consider suggesting restaurants to each other that serve your ethnicity’s food. You get the idea. The key thing is to empower each other to decide the best way to introduce their difference. 

Finally, be sure to carve out space ahead of time to tell each other why each of you picked the thing you did, along with sharing whatever background - personal or historical - will help the other get the most out of the experience. And afterward, debrief your experiences, asking questions of each other and talking about why the experiences you recommended to each other are so important to the two of you. 

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

My story is not a pleasant one; it is neither sweet nor harmonious, as invented stories are; it has the taste of nonsense and chaos, of madness and dreams — like the lives of all who stop deceiving themselves.

~ Herman Hesse

Those who tell the stories, rule the world. 

~ Proverb, exact source unknown

anyone who's organized for any period of time knows, if we don't have a story that people can see themselves a part of, it doesn't matter how good our data and our facts are, people are not going to radically change.

~ adrienne maree brown

When you uproot myth [and story], dogma is the result.

~ Katharine Weinmann

Humans don't fight over territory and food; they fight over imaginary stories in their minds.

~ Yuval Noah Harari 

It is precisely because great narratives seduce us that the best stories deserve the greatest skepticism.

~ Derek Thompson

A story is a trick for sneaking a message into the fortified citadel of the human mind.

~ Jonathan Gottschall

Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.

~ Attributed to G.K. Chesterton

What if the creation story in Genesis had featured a flawed deity who was understanding and sympathetic rather than autocratic and rigid?... What if the animals had decided on their own names? What if Adam and Eve had simply been admonished for their foolishness?... What kind of a world might we have created with that kind of story?

~ Thomas King

I see my dad through my own filter and then present it to the world as whole, when really it is inherently inadequate—full of the holes of my own limitations. My story of my dad is my story of my dad and me. Always. 

~ Courtney Martin

Most of us spend most of the time living in the spaces between big events. We live our small stories… Life’s best moments happen in the cracks, in the little moments we hardly notice, that pass us by day-by-day.

~ David Majister

Remember, you don’t fear people whose stories you know.

~ Margaret Wheatley

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

Stories are told as spells for binding the world together. 

~ John Rouse

There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you. 

~ Maya Angelou

I now see how owning our story and loving ourselves through that process is the bravest thing that we will ever do.

~ Brené Brown

At some point we have to understand that we do not need to carry a story that is unbearable. We can observe the story, which is mental; feel the story, which is physical; let the story go, which is emotional; then forgive the story, which is spiritual.

~ Joy Harjo

storytelling is a way to give someone an experience they haven’t had yet, or maybe didn’t even know was possible. 

~ adrienne maree brown

Those without power risk everything to tell their story and must. Someone, somewhere will hear your story and decide to fight, to live and refuse compromise.

~ Laura Hershey

The question is not so much ‘What do I learn from stories?’ as ‘What stories do I want to live?

~ David Loy

I can only answer the question ‘What am I to do?’ if I can answer the question ‘Of what story or stories do I find myself a part?’

~ Alasdair MacIntyre

You are the main character in the story of your life, but other people are the main characters of their own lives. And sometimes you can find healing just by playing a supporting role in someone else's experience.

~ Timothy Kurek

A good story is one that makes you good, or at least better.

~ Daniel Taylor

Listening to both sides of a story will convince you that there is more to a story than both sides.

~ Frank Tyger

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

Videos & Podcasts

Nick Cave on Loss, Yearning & Transcendence

https://onbeing.org/programs/nick-cave-loss-yearning-transcendence/

Be Kind (On small acts of repair that mean so much!)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1eKoOoOTvgk&t=16s

These Three Natural Things Can Repair You...

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

The Museum of Broken Relationships

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lMNdTZhQ1TU

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R6Q731asMtg

How Trauma Lodges in the Body

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

Related Video HERE

Related book HERE

Repair & Needlework

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EITLA0fvx0I

On how mending and stitching the clothes outside us repairs what is torn inside us.

Visible Mending

https://psyche.co/films/a-whimsical-ode-to-the-reparative-power-of-knitting-rendered-in-wool

Two more needleworkers and knitters testify to creativity’s power to help us repair and heal.

Stitching Our Wounds, Andrea Gibson

https://www.tiktok.com/@andreagibsonpoetry/video/7242840039527386414

Articles

A Slower Urgency

https://www.bayoakomolafe.net/post/a-slower-urgency

“In ‘hurrying up’ all the time, we often lose sight of the abundance of resources that might help us meet today’s most challenging crises…” 

Grief is Healing in Motion

https://toko-pa.com/2019/07/24/grief-is-healing-in-motion/

“Grief plays an essential role in our coming undone from previous attachments. It is the necessary current we need to carry us into our next becoming…”

The Sounds of Grief

https://mariandrew.substack.com/p/the-sounds-of-grief

Might repairing from grief be more about the sounds of grief than the famous five stages?

Want to Fix Your Mind? Let Your Body Talk

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/18/magazine/somatic-therapy.html


(Curated and adapted for KUF from the 2024 Soul Matters materials on the theme ‘Repair)