Sunday Service

 Jewish teaching includes frequent reminders of the importance of a broken-open heart, as in this Hasidic tale: A disciple asks the rebbe: “Why does Torah tell us to ‘place its words upon your hearts’? Why does it not tell us to place these holy words in our hearts?” The rebbe answers: “It is because, as we are, our hearts are closed, and we cannot place the holy words in our hearts. So we place them on top of our hearts. And there they stay until, one day, the heart breaks and the words fall in.

    - Parker J. Palmer

Oh how we want to escape our pain.

Worry, loss, death, exhaustion, anxiety, economic instability, the unraveling of our democracy, the destruction of our planet, the ever-present trauma of racial injustice. It’s all overwhelming. We want to stitch up our protective coverings as soon as we can, so our exposed and tender nerves can rest. We want the pain behind us as soon as possible.

But what if the work is to travel toward it? What if proximity to our pain, not distance from it, is the real route to healing?

This seems to be what Parker Palmer is trying to tell us. And what our faith teaches us as well.

Here’s what else Palmer has to say: “When the heart is supple, it can be “broken open” into a greater capacity to hold our own and the world's pain. When we hold our suffering in a way that opens us to greater compassion, heartbreak becomes a source of healing, deepening our empathy for others who suffer and extending our ability to reach out to them.”

This doesn’t just reframe pain and healing; it also helps us reimagine our relationship with vulnerability. Maybe vulnerability isn’t the cause of our pain, like some chink in our armor. Maybe, instead, it is the first and needed step toward healing our pain. Or, to put it another way, maybe vulnerability isn’t so much the problem as the ticket that allows us to get on healing’s train.

If this is true, then our instructions this month seem to be this:

Forget eliminating your pain; lean into it! Don’t run from it as fast as you can; befriend it. Hold it in your frightened and tender hands until you realize it’s more malleable than you thought. Until you realize that your strong and courageous hands can shape it. That you can take its sharp edges and mold them into pathways that connect you with other people’s pain. That you can transform it from a weapon that has wounded you into a bridge that connects you to the beautiful, broken hearts of others.

When we do this, we may discover that pain can be more than a cage cutting us off from the world. It can also become a tool that makes room, carving open an entirely new space to live in. A space where we are more deeply connected to each other than we imagined possible.

This of course doesn’t mean the hurt goes away. But it does mean we end up feeling larger, more whole, and more tightly held by the holy web that reminds us we are never alone.

And maybe that is the most important healing of all.

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

Ask Them About Healing

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.

Healing Questions:

●       What wound has been with you the longest?

●       Loved ones who have died live on in our hearts. Who do you miss the most? How do they continue to shape you? Have they ever spoken to you?

●       If you could have healed one of your parent’s wounds, which would it be?

●       Has your body ever led you toward healing? i.e. Has it ever shut down or caused you pain as a way of waking you up? 

●       What is your relationship with self-inflicted wounds?

●       Have you ever swallowed your grief or hidden your pain because others were uncomfortable or unwilling to make room for it? If you could speak to that previous version of yourself who swallowed or hid their pain, what would you say?

●       What has life taught you about the difference between “being cured” and “being healed”?

●       Tell me a story about being healed by a place.

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

The Story of Your Scar

Some people see scars, and it is wounding they remember. To me, scars are proof of the fact that there is healing.

- Linda Hogan

Scars have the strange power to remind us that our past is real.

 - Cormac McCarthy

Some scars are just scars. But most contain stories. They keep us tethered to an important memory or part of ourselves that we would never want to live without. The scar from the surgery that removed the cancer reminds us, not only how lucky we were to survive, but that we have the power to survive. The faint imprint of stitches on our chin doesn’t just take us back to that night we fell on the ice and dad rushed over to help; It also reminds us how much we miss him. The blemish left by a dozen busted lips stands as a monument to how much our adolescent self always wanted someone to fight; it’s also a testament to all of those precious people who loved that anger out of us.

So how about you? What’s the story of your scar? What memory does it help you hold on to? What important part of yourself does it keep you tethered to? What wisdom does it carry? Why would you never want to be without it? How does remembering its pain heal you over and over again?

Spend this month reflecting on it. Or, if you are so inclined, writing about it.

Honor what your scar has meant to you in the past, but also open yourself to what it wants to say to you today. What new message of comfort or challenge does it have for you?

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

This exercise is about relating to fear in a new way.

Often, when it comes to intense and complex emotions like fear, we get overwhelmed. And fear is especially overwhelming. It hits us hard and overtakes us like a tidal wave. Our thoughts, emotions and body get caught up in the disorienting swirl of its chaotic and violent power, causing us to lose any critical distance from it. It is as if there is no distance between where the fear ends and we begin.

One of the ways we can regain some critical distance from our fear is through the practice of writing a letter to it. The power of this approach lies in its ability to help us step back. Instead of experiencing the fear as something possessing us; we are suddenly communicating with it. With this critical distance, fear’s grip loosens and we are able to move into a freer space from which we can tell it what we want our relationship to be.

So this month, give it a try: Write a letter to fear.

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

Softness is not weakness. It takes courage to stay delicate in a world so cruel.  

~ Beau Taplin

There are two forms of courage in this world. One demands that we jump into action with our armor on. The other demands that we strip ourselves bare-naked and surrender.

~ Jeff Brown

If you want to feel less fear, stop trying to keep yourself safe.

~ Andrea Gibson

If you cannot sit with your own fear, you will project it and act it out on the people you love.

~ Jeff Foster

Do you want me to tell you something really subversive? Love is everything it's cracked up to be. That's why people are so cynical about it. It really is worth fighting for, being brave for, risking everything for. And the trouble is, if you don't risk anything, you risk even more.

~ Erica Jong

Daring to set boundaries is having the courage to love ourselves even when we risk disappointing others.

~ Brene Brown

If you feel safe in the area that you’re working in, you’re not working in the right area. Always go a little further into the water that you feel you’re capable of being in. And when you don’t feel that your feet are quite touching the bottom, you’re just about in the right place to do something exciting.

~ David Bowie

Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

I will not die an unlived life. I will not live in fear 

of falling or catching fire. I choose to inhabit my days, to allow my living to open me, to make me less afraid… to loosen my heart until it becomes a wing.

~ Dawna Markova

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

Here is the world. Beautiful and terrible things will happen. Do not be afraid.

~ Frederick Buechner

Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the judgment that something else is more important than fear.

~ Ambrose Redmoon

When I dare to use my strength in the service of my vision, it becomes less and less and important whether I am afraid.

~ Audre Lorde

The hero is no braver than an ordinary person, but he or she is brave five minutes longer.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Courage is the power to let go of the familiar.

~ Raymond Lindquist

You can choose courage or you can choose comfort, but you cannot have both.

~ Brené Brown

Only one thing is more frightening than speaking your truth. And that is not speaking it.

~ Audre Lorde

If you possess enough courage to speak out what you are, you will find you are not alone.

~ Richard Wright

Courage, it turns out, isn't one dramatic leap. It's the daily, unglamorous decision to keep authoring your own life instead of accepting the draft everyone else already wrote for you.

~ Leena Wilde Ryan

It takes courage ... to endure the sharp pains of self-discovery rather than choose to take the dull pain of unconsciousness that would last the rest of our lives.

~ Marianne Williamson

Courage doesn't always roar. Sometimes courage is the little voice at the end of the day that says I'll try again tomorrow.

~ Mary Anne Radmacher 

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

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.  What fears did your family of origin pass on to you?

2. What is the greatest act of courage that you directly witnessed? And how did it change you?

3. What was your bravest moment of not running away? How are you being called to bravely not run away today?

4. What do you know now about courage that you didn’t know when you were younger?

5. How do you think your future self will look back on who you are today and rate your courage?

6. What fear takes up more space in your head and heart than you want?

7. How has your life partner made you braver?

8. What will it take to finally have that conversation that scares you so much?

9. Is it time to tell someone how scared you really are?

10. Is safely tiptoeing around “it” making you ill?

11. Where are you saying “yes” when you need to courageously say “no”?

12. Is comfort luring you away from courage?

13. What if the secret to feeling less fear is to stop trying to keep yourself safe?

14. Is fear making your world too small?

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 2026 Soul Matters materials on the theme ‘Courage')