Sunday Service

Alice Walker famously wrote, “I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don't notice it.”

Walker’s words are a beautiful reminder that attention and gratitude go hand in hand. Indeed they are a perfect embodiment of the dominant understanding of attention: that it’s here to wake us up to life’s many gifts.

But dig a little deeper and you discover that attention has a few additional and ulterior motives up its sleeve. So, friends, we want to give fair warning right here at the start. We want you to be ready for all that attention has in store for you. You see, the truth is, attention won’t just make you grateful, it will make you fall in love. And it won’t just enable you to notice life’s gifts, it also will make it impossible to ignore life’s pain.

So, first, the part about falling in love.

Mary Oliver wrote, “Attention is the beginning of devotion.” It’s an essential reminder that we cannot love someone or something that we do not fully see. Glances and self-interested attention never get to the real person or thing. They keep us on the surface of things and treat the other as a mirror. What we fall in love with, in such cases, is what we want from them and how we want them to make us feel. Which means that all we’ve really done is fall in love with ourselves and our own longings.

Attention wants more for us than this. It wants us to learn that truly loving someone or something requires the difficult work of noticing our wants and then putting them down. This kind of love asks us to look without expectation of who or what we hope the other will be, an act that mystic and philosopher, Simone Weil, calls self-emptying. It’s a type of looking that keeps on looking until we discover something entirely new, entirely other, entirely unique. And once we notice that stunning uniqueness, we’re in trouble, because it will completely reshuffle our desires and devotions. It will knock us to our knees. Nothing will seem as important or precious as the particularity of the other. We will want nothing more than to ensure that the other feels seen. And we will come to know this as love.

Now, what about attention and pain? What does attention want from us in this regard?

Well, this time it’s a UU minister, Rev. Sean Dennison, that best guides us on our way. Rev. Sean writes “The ability to see beauty is the beginning of our moral sensibility. What we believe is beautiful we will not wantonly destroy.” In other words, seeing the beauty of something comes with a commitment. You don’t just think to yourself “Oh, that’s pretty,” you think “My God, I must protect it.” Its survival becomes your survival. Its pain becomes your pain.

All of which is to say, yes, you can expect to leave this month feeling grateful, but you should also be prepared to feel altered. To understand attention as a doorway into love and pain, is to understand that the work of attention is not just about realizing all we’ve been given; It’s also a reminder that to look, to really look, is to risk being re-ordered. And made larger, as devotion to others and the pain of others displace the smallness of love of self.

And maybe in the end, that’s what we should be most grateful for: the way looking, almost always, leaves us larger.

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

Ask Them About Paying Attention

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. 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. As always, keep a lookout for how your inner voice is trying to send you a message of comfort or challenge through these conversions with others.

Paying Attention Questions

• As a child, which of your senses was your favorite way of paying attention to the world?

• When growing up, what one or two things, above all others, did your family communicate were worthy of attention? Beauty? Duty? Kindness? Humility? Honesty? Reputation? Education? Loyalty? Success? God?

• It is said we become what we give our attention to. What are 2-3 things that you pay attention to that capture 2-3 things you treasure about yourself?

• Tell me a story about a time you purposely avoided paying attention to something painful or hard. Often our avoidance involves a mix of both healthy and not-do-healthy motives. How was that true for you?

• What do you turn your attention to when you want to find yourself again?

• Have you ever given your attention so deeply to something that you suddenly felt one with it? How did that experience change your living and loving?  

• As you’ve aged, what new things have grabbed your attention in a way they haven’t before? How are you a different kind of person because of this?

• Who taught you the most about using your attention wisely?

• Are you paying enough attention to yourself?

• Has paying close attention ever led you to an encounter with the holy?

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

Four Walks Through Four Pairs of Eyes

The only true voyage … would be not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes, to see the universe through the eyes of another, of a hundred others, to see the hundred universes that each of them sees.                                                                                                        - Marcel Proust

Cognitive scientist, Alexandra Horowitz, is the author of On Looking: Eleven Walks with Expert Eyes. It’s an inventive and adventurous effort by Horowitz to expand her attention and deepen her relationship with her home neighborhood. Simply put, she took eleven walks around her city block with eleven “experts,” including a sociologist, a geologist, typographer, a physician, a sound designer, a woman who became blind as an adult, as well as her toddler and dog. By looking at her “well-known” world through their “eyes,” she awoke to the reality that many worlds lay in front of us at the same moment.

With this in mind, you are invited to use the attention of others to discover the many worlds right under your nose. The instructions are simple: Take a walk around a place you consider “home turf” with at least four people and have them tell you what they notice along the way. 

Obviously a big part of this exercise is thinking about exactly whose perspective you want to guide your attention. Some many options exist: a child, an older friend who walks at an older pace, a bird watcher, a friend who uses a wheelchair, an artist you know, your scientist brother, your most philosophical friend, your most introspective friend, a friend struggling with illness or loss.

Whoever you pick, it’s important to explain to them why you are asking them to take this walk with you. It will also help to explicitly ask them to pay attention with what they consider their unique perspective.

Take notes as you go, but also be sure to capture your insights and thoughts right away after each walk. As you reflect, think about what your walking partner’s way of looking says about your own way of attending to the world. Also think about what aspect of their attention you want to develop as your own.

Another thought: In addition to taking the walk with others, consider starting things off and ending things with a walk all by yourself, using these two solo walks to help you notice how your well-known part of the world has just grown!

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

A lot of people think about grit and resilience as having the ability to push through tough times to get to where you want to go. But the truth is, it’s more about having a strong sense of purpose to pull you towards your ultimate goal. When you view challenges or setbacks in light of that all-important goal, they start feeling much smaller — sometimes almost irrelevant — in light of your bigger commitments.

~ Jonathan Fields

While we can’t stop the collapse of ecological and social systems and their scary implications on our lives, we can create islands of sanity - for ourselves, for the people around us and for everyone else who needs it. We can create spaces that acknowledge the insanity of the world and make each other feel sane again.

~ Till Leinen

Sure grit and resilience mean pushing through against all odds. But sometimes being able to say, “I quit,” and to actually quit, takes grit. It takes resilience. Sometimes withstanding adversity looks like withdrawing from certain activities. Sometimes pushing through looks like pulling out.

~ Emen Washington

You got to know when to hold ‘em, know when to fold ‘em, know when to walk away, and when to run. 

~ Kenny Rogers

Finish every day and be done with it. You have done what you could. Some blunders and absurdities

no doubt have crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day; begin it well and serenely and with too high a spirit to be cumbered with your old nonsense.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Here’s the real kicker. The people who break free from their past aren't the ones who never made mistakes; they're the ones who stopped identifying with those mistakes.

~ Brene Brown

You are allowed to be a work in progress!

~ Mel Robbins

Any shields I would build up as barriers—

life keeps peeling them away.

What thickens around me now are layers

of dynamic compassion—vital, vulnerable,

ever-growing. They do not protect

against wounds. Instead, they seem to say,

Be with what aches, my dear. Trusting

discomfort is the only way.

~ Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

They tried to bury us, they didn't know we were seeds.

~ Dinos Christianopoulos

(Curated and adapted for KUF from the 2026 Soul Matters materials on the theme ‘Embodying Resilience')

Observing the water teaches me [that] Resilience isn’t trying to hold on to all you have been and somehow get through. It is the flow of water that responds to its environment and even changes its form, yet never changes its fundamental nature.

~ Sue Heartherington

Resilience is really a secular word for what religion was trying to say with the word faith. Without a certain ability to let go, to trust, to allow, we won’t get to any new place.

~ Richard Rohr

my heart, a cottonwood seed,

landed on rock instead of soil—

love says, time to trust the wind.

~ Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

When people face adversity, it's incredibly common for them to walk away thinking… it's going to feel like this forever. If you look at the evidence on this, most of those predictions turn out to be false… And so part of moving past this imagined permanence is changing all those times where you use “always” and “never,” into “sometimes” and “lately.”

~ Adam Grant

If you see successes and failures as being placed in your path to teach you things, you are more likely to be psychologically hardy and therefore more resilient in the face of trauma.

~ Andrew Zolli

The truth is that things don’t really get solved. They come together and they fall apart. Then they come together again and fall apart again. It’s just like that. The healing comes from letting there be room for all of this to happen: room for grief, for relief, for misery, for joy.

~ Pema Chödrön

Anyone can slay a dragon, he told me, but try waking up every morning and loving the world all over again.

~ Brian Andreas

Forests may be gorgeous. But there’s nothing more alive than a tree that learns how to grow in a cemetery.

~ Andrea Gibson

Only to the extent that we expose ourselves over and over to annihilation can that which is indestructible be found in us.

~ Pema Chodron

Kintsugi is the Japanese art of putting broken pottery pieces back together with gold, built on the idea that, in embracing flaws and imperfections, you can create an even stronger, more beautiful piece of art. It is also a metaphor for resilience: embracing your wounds as part of your path of evolution.

Your scars show the path travelled, and you are more beautiful and stronger for having been broken.

~ Paige Bradley

(Curated and adapted for KUF from the 2026 Soul Matters materials on the theme ‘Embodying Resilience’)

February 5, 2026

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. When do you remember first witnessing one or both of your parents act resiliently? How might that memory have a message for you today?

2. Has someone else’s resilience ever helped you survive? When did you not give up because they didn’t give up?

3. How has your life partner made you more resilient?

4. What is your most beautiful scar? What wound ended up giving you a surprising gift?

5. Have you been trying to act strong for far too long?

6. What if resilience is not about holding tight against the wind, but letting go and trusting the wind to take you where you need to go next? 

7. Who are you without your wound?

8. Might your resilience be found by releasing yourself from the role your family system has stuck you in?

9. If saving the world seems no longer within reach, how might creating islands of sanity be your road back to hope?

10. What parts of you did you have to hide to survive? What would it look like to invite them back into the world?

11. Why do you keep pushing through when you could save yourself by courageously quitting?  

12. What if you allowed yourself to be a work in progress?

13. What if the biggest secret to resilience is loving it all?

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 2026 Soul Matters materials on the theme ‘Embodying Resilience')