Sunday Service

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')

When did we decide that resilience was a solo project?

It's not that we consciously chose to define it that way. It's just what we were taught, from the time we were little right up to today: "Pull yourself up by your own bootstraps"; "You're stronger than you think."; "If at first you don't succeed, try, try again.”; “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.” The cultural consensus is clear: resilience depends on your personal toughness and inner strength. It’s a solo act!

But other voices are on the rise. Take author and activist, Soraya Chemaly, who writes, 

“In spectacular arrogance, our mainstream vision of resilience encourages us to ignore, minimize, and even punish the desire for our greatest resilience assets: interdependence, collective versatility, and shared care. Instead of revealing our relationships to one another, our environments, and the systems we live in, this vision highlights and glorifies self-sufficiency, limitless positivity, and individual strength against all odds. It makes us less resilient, not more.”

In a world facing numerous threats of collapse and conflict, Chemaly’s words help us see that correctly defining resilience is not just an intellectual exercise, but a matter of life and death. We all sense it: the road ahead for us human beings is going to get rough. So we simply can’t afford to overlook a single source of resilience.

Which is another way of saying the world needs us to start speaking up too! If those rough roads ahead are to be successfully navigated, we need people who challenge those old-school chants of “You can do it!” with a new mantra of ”We can’t do it on our own!”

That doesn’t mean we have to abandon old messages about personal resilience entirely, but it does mean that we need to get better at noticing when they get in our way. It’s fine to celebrate the classic resilient image of a tree flexibly leaning and bending with the wind, but we can’t let that distract us from the fact that, today, the kind of leaning that matters most is leaning on each other.    

It’s all one big reminder that while resilience has a lot to do with what is inside us, it is even more dependent on what is between us. We survive our wounds and weaknesses by having the strength to tell others about it. We find the courage to make our way through the dark only when we sense we are not alone. Internal and individual grit only gets us so far; empathy, assurance and love from others gets us the rest of the way. Boil it all down and you get this: There really is no such thing as a resilient person; there are only resilient relationships from which resilient people arise.

So friends, this month, let’s look around as much as look within. Let’s let up on all the “grin and bear it” talk and instead grab the hand that is reaching our way. 

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

Ask Them About Resilience

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 your 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 your discussion partner.

Resilience Questions:

●       What image best captures your unique style of resilience?

●       Wider perspectives infuse us with deeper resilience, enabling us to extricate ourselves from the daily stresses and defeats that seem all-important. Tell me a story about when you survived by finding a way to see the bigger picture?

●       What do you know about having to hide parts of yourself to survive or get by? How were you able to invite those parts back into the world later in life? 

●       What is your most beautiful scar? (What wound ended up giving you a surprising gift?)

●       Have you ever had to fight to see yourself as more than your wounds?

●       With so much of our world seeming fragile and on the brink of collapse, do you still have faith that humanity will be resilient? If saving the world seems no longer within reach, how might creating islands of sanity be your road back to hope?

●       Our culture promotes and celebrates the path of grit and pushing through no matter the costs. Have you ever resisted that and saved yourself by courageously quitting or letting go?

●       How has beauty been a source of survival and resilience for you?

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

Is Your Thinking a Help or a Hindrance to Your Resilience

Resilience and self-talk are tightly tangled together. While popular resilience strategies often focus on positive thinking, psychologists tell us that dealing with negative thinking is even more critical to resilience. And the key to addressing negative self-talk is noticing it. So, that’s what this exercise is all about.

To help us on our way, we turn to the beloved writer, Anne Lamott, who is known for looking at herself with brutal honesty as well as self-compassion. She once stumbled on a sentence that changed her life: “Stinking thinking is the universal addiction.” This led to her confronting how addicted she was to toxic and obsessive thinking by reworking the widely-used Alcoholic Anonymous’s “20 Questions List.” In short, she substituted the word Thinking for the word Drinking.

So, notice your own relationship to negative thinking by answering Lamott’s revised 20 questions list:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/10G_j4upylMc2fe4i1vEptdUoqQIATWfhBBJQjpA0rmI/edit?usp=sharing

As you go through the questions, remember that this is not a pass/fail test. It’s about helping you notice where you might need to do some work regarding your relationship to self-talk. So use Lamott’s 20 questions in any way that feels useful. You can use the check boxes and reflect on what the quantity of your checks might be telling you. Or you could jot notes under each question to get at the unique quality of your relationship with negative thinking. You might also want to use our Soul Matters discernment technique and read through the list over and over until one question shimmers for you. In all cases, be sure to wrestle with how your negative thinking might be undermining your ability to resiliently navigate stress and challenges.

And here’s the most important part of the exercise: Be gentle and compassionate with yourself as you answer the questions!

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

Most of the time, our resistance efforts are aimed at changing others or the world around us. But often we are changed as well. We set out to make the world better and, to our surprise, we end up better.

So, what is your story of being enriched by resistance? Spend some time revisiting the experience in your mind, digging around for details you may have not fully appreciated at the time:

• What assumptions did you go into the experience with?

• What unconscious need or hunger might have led you to that form of resistance?

• What exactly was it about the experience that made it so enriching for you?

• What person was central to your story?

• Why did the gift you received come as such a surprise?

• How exactly were you changed?

• How was your worldview altered in a way that shows up even today?  

It can be overwhelming to witness/experience/take in all the injustices of the moment; the good news is that they're all connected. So if your little corner of work involves pulling at one of the threads, you're helping to unravel the whole damn cloth.

~ Ursula Wolfe-Rocca

You are not required to save the world. But you are required to save your corner of it.

~ Joan Chittister

After all, if you do not resist the apparently inevitable, you will never know how inevitable the inevitable was.

~ Terry Eagleton

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

Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.

~ Audre Lorde

As a rule, it was the pleasure haters who became unjust.

~ W.H. Auden

Joy is not justice… I look at joy as a splint, as a cast that's holding that broken bone in place so that it can heal properly. But the healing really comes from justice. Joy is meant to help on the way. Joy is there so that you don't quit.

~ Kellie Carter Jackson

If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor.

~ Archbishop Desmond Tutu

You can’t be neutral on a moving train.

~ Howard Zinn

In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.

~ Martin Luther King Jr

To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

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