Sunday Service

...it starts when you say We

and know who you mean, and each

day you mean one more.

– Marge Piercy, from The Low Road

Out of all our themes this year, resistance is among the most complex. But it also may be the most simple.

Let’s start with the complexity.

Sometimes resistance involves bravely picking up a picket sign; other times it asks us to courageously put down our masks and allow who we really are to see the light of day. Sometimes it involves defeating the enemy; other times it’s a matter of noticing that treating “them” as the enemy defeats us all. Often the path of resistance asks us to stay in it for the long haul, but just as often it’s about taking that first tiny step. Most of the time it requires us to fight to the bitter end, and yet there are many moments when we need to stop resisting and let go. Resistance certainly takes the form of speaking the truth to power, but often what the world needs even more is for us to speak the truth in love.

Bottom line: practicing resistance is tricky business and takes multiple, even contradictory, forms.

But beyond this complexity lies the simplicity of Marge Piercy’s words. In all cases, she reminds us, practicing resistance starts when we say “We!” For instance, the power of our picket sign resides in the fact that it hangs alongside those of others. Being who we are usually begins with another person loving us for who we are. Both the long haul and our first courageous step are made possible by reaching out to receive a helping hand.

It’s all one big reminder that none of us resist alone.

Or maybe what really needs to be said this month is that none of us have to resist alone.

Yes, we certainly need pushed and prodded this month. But maybe what we need most is to be reassured. Reassured that when the road gets too treacherous and the forces against us grow too big, others will be by our side. Maybe it’s not more courage that is required, but more connection. Maybe what we really need to hear is not simply “Resist!” but “I will resist with you!”

Maybe it is as simple as that.

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

Ask Them About Resistance

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 guide your conversation. 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.

Resistance Questions

●       As a kid, did you resist the rules, or did you follow them? How might you see an echo of that earlier self in your life today?

●       How did your parents’ acts of social justice resistance shape you?

●       Has your resistance to change grown or eased as you’ve gotten older?

●       Of all the moments of your life where you found the courage to accept change instead of resist it, which one are you most proud of?

●       Is there a time from your past where you wish you would have found a way to resist the fear of failure?

●       Do you have a life story that exemplifies the saying, “What you resist, persists”?

●       Is it possible that the form of resistance life is calling you to right now is rest?

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

Photograph Resistance for a Week

The instructions for this exercise are simple: For each day of one week, take 1-2 pictures of “resistance.”

Don’t overthink it. Don’t predetermine what counts as “resistance.” Just keep your eye out for whatever seems to be announcing itself to you as a form of resistance. So one minute you might find yourself taking a picture of the TV screen as the news reports on a protest. But an hour later, it might be a flower pushing itself through a crack in the sidewalk. And then a day later you may find yourself taking a picture of your dog refusing to take a bath or of your wife’s tattoo which she got to resist the stereotypes of what Grandmas should and shouldn’t do.

And for the final step: At the end of the week, go through all the pictures you took and look for common themes. Let those common threads tell you how your definition of resistance seems to be growing in ways you didn’t fully realize!

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

Critical thinking without hope is cynicism. Hope without critical thinking is naïveté.

~ Maria Popava

Cynicism masquerades as wisdom, but it is the farthest thing from it. Because cynics don't learn anything. Because cynicism is a self-imposed blindness, a rejection of the world because we are afraid it will hurt us or disappoint us. Cynics always say no. But saying "yes" begins things. Saying "yes" is how things grow.

~ Stephen Colbert

For comfortably situated people, hopelessness means cynicism and letting oneself off the hook. If everything is doomed, then nothing is required.

~ Rebecca Solnit

The danger of hopelessness is that we can lose each other. In times of hopelessness, it’s easy to get scared of everything and everyone. It’s easy to start believing that your neighbor is the problem and that hoarding is a better strategy than generosity. The problem is that when community starts to break down, we lose the most important source of hope we have: each other.

~ Rev. Sean Parker Dennison

Be careful of who you let regulate your dreaming. All dreaming is dangerous to those who benefit from our hopelessness.

~ Cole Arthur Riley

Do not fall asleep inside your enemy's dream.

~ John Edgar Wideman

We are not saints, we are not heroes. Our lives are lived in the quiet corners of the ordinary. We build tiny hearth fires, sometimes barely strong enough to give off warmth. But to the person lost in the darkness, our tiny flame may be the road to safety.

~ Kent Nerburn

I imagine, somewhere in the future,

there is a better version of me.

He is watching this moment,

brandishing a smile and saying to himself,

I knew everything would work out.

~ Rudy Francisco

Lament is not anti-hope. It's not even a stepping-stone to hope. Lament itself is a form of hope. It's an innate awareness that what is should not be. As if something is written on our hearts that tells us exactly what we are meant for.

~ Cole Arthur Riley

In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer. And that makes me happy. For it says that no matter how hard the world pushes against me, within me, there’s something stronger — something better, pushing right back.

~ Albert Camus

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

What is hope? It is a hunch that the overwhelming brutality of facts that oppress and repress is not the last word. It is a suspicion that reality is more complex than realism wants us to believe and that the frontiers of the possible are not determined by the limits of the actual.

~ Rubem A. Alves

Hope is an embrace of the unknown and the unknowable, an alternative to the certainty of both optimists and pessimists. Optimists think it will all be fine without our involvement; pessimists take the opposite position; both excuse themselves from acting. It’s the belief that what we do matters even though how and when it may matter, who and what it may impact, are not things we can know beforehand.

~ Rebecca Solnit

Hope causes not rest but unrest, not patience but impatience. It does not calm the unquiet heart, but is itself this unquiet heart in [all of us.] Those who hope…can no longer put up with reality as it is, but begin to suffer under it, to contradict it.

~ Jürgen Moltmann

Hope has two beautiful daughters. Their names are Anger and Courage. Anger at the way things are, and Courage to see that they do not remain as they are.

~Author Unknown

People speak of hope as if it is this delicate, ephemeral thing made of whispers and spider's webs. It's not. Hope has dirt on her face, blood on her knuckles, the grit of the cobblestones in her hair, and just spat out a tooth as she rises for another go.

~ Matthew@CrowsFault

As usual Hope is a woman

herding her children

around her,

all she retains of who

she was…

Hope rises, and she puts on her same

unfashionable threadbare cloak

and, penniless, she flings herself

against the cold, polished, protective chain mail

of the very powerful…

~ Alice Walker

Hope has holes in its pockets. It leaves little crumb trails so that we, when anxious, can follow it.

Hope’s secret: it doesn’t know the destination— it knows only that all roads begin with one foot in front of the other.

~ Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

Hope begins in the dark, it’s a stubborn hope that if you just show up and try to do the right thing, the dawn will come. You wait and watch and work!

~ Anne Lamott

Hope is a practice, an act you can do even as you mourn, or regret, or dread. Hope is an act of trust, regardless of what the future may hold, trust in the gravity of grace, the life that sings in all things… Hope is not wishing but acting. Birthing. Planting. Getting up.

~ Steve Garnaas-Holmes

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

December 4, 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.” Or as we like to say, “Read over them until one of the questions picks you.”

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?

●       What might my inner wisdom be trying to say to me through this question?

●       How might this question be trying to wake me up or get me to realize something through this question?

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

1. Was your childhood home full of optimism or pessimism? How has wrestling with that legacy shaped who you are today?

2. Who is hope for you? Whose way of being in the world helps you believe that tomorrow will be better? What small strategy might you employ to keep their hope front and center for you?

3. What might it mean for you to “be hope”? It’s one thing to believe in hope; it’s quite another to become it.

4. If hope could speak, what do you think it would most want to say to you right now?

5. If you could magically infect someone with hope, who would it be and why?

6. Might life be inviting you to bring an old hope back to life?

7. What is your cynicism protecting you from?

8. We all carry within ourselves the hopes and fears of those we’ve loved. Is it time to put one of those down so you can make your path your own?

9. How might surrendering an ego-driven hope for the future enable you to live more fully (and joyfully) in the here and now?

10. What would happen if your hopes suddenly grew one size larger?

11. Who carries hope for you when the weariness of the world wears you down? Who needs you to carry hope for them?

12. What dreams have you silenced in yourself because of cynicism?

13. 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 ‘Choosing Hope')

For many, meditation and compassion go hand in hand. By setting aside time to direct our attention and thoughts in very intentional ways, meditation re-wires our brain so we are able to experience the world and interact with others differently. The Buddhist practice of metta meditation (also known as loving-kindness meditation) is one of the most well-known compassion meditative practices, but there are so many other compassion-oriented guided meditations out there.

To honor this long-established connection between compassion and meditation, you are invited to establish a daily compassion meditation practice for a week (or two) this month. To help you explore the many types of meditations out there, we’ve put together a list of diverse guided meditations to try. You can find that list by following this link: https://docs.google.com/document/d/13QPwt93L89fvmbTTfBAOXEm4B4XYWCnHkjSdqGGoVjM/edit?usp=sharing

You do not have to do all the meditations on the list. Just pick the ones that interest you most.  

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