Sunday Service

When you pay attention to something you don't especially value, it's not an exaggeration to say that you're paying with your life.

~ Oliver Burkeman

When we cede control of our attention, we cede more than what we are looking at now. We cede, to some degree, control over what we will care about tomorrow.

~ Ezra Klein

Tell me what you pay attention to and I will tell you who you are.

~ José Ortega y Gasset

Your attention is like a combination spotlight and vacuum cleaner: It highlights what it lands on and then sucks it into your brain—for better or worse.

~ Dr. Rick Hanson

I once had a garden filled with flowers that grew only on dark thoughts but they needed constant attention and one day I decided I had better things to do.

~ StoryPeople

Shake the scales from your imagination. Reach. Stretch. Rise. There is no more time for pretending that everything can be all right without your care, without your attention.

~ Rev. Julián Jamaica Soto

All winter long I overlooked three uninhabited nests… What else is there in this world that my hustling and bustling have barred me from sensing and seeing?... My guess is that it is not only delights, such as these nests but violence, too, that’s within perception’s range, if only I gave it my true attention. Acts of exclusion, discrimination, and the impacts of systemic oppression are all there, right before me… I have been taught to not see them—but they are there.

~ Rev. Karen G. Johnston

If we want to support each other’s inner lives, we must remember a simple truth: the human soul does not want to be fixed, it wants simply to be seen and heard.                                       

~ Parker J. Palmer

Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.

~ Simone Weil

You cannot love something or someone you do not truly see.

~ Ben Sternke

In any moment, on any given day, I can measure my wellness by this question: Is my attention on loving,

or is my attention on who isn't loving me?

~ Andrea Gibson

I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don't notice it.

~ Alice Walker

The world is full of magic things, waiting for our senses to grow sharper.

~ Eden Phillpotts

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

Instructions for living a life:

Pay attention.

Be astonished.

Tell about it.

~ Mary Oliver

Pay attention to the things that bring a tear to your eye or a lump in your throat because they are signs that the holy is drawing near.

~ Frederick Buechner

When you really pay attention, everything is your teacher.

~ Ezra Bayda

The land is the real teacher. All we need as students is mindfulness. Paying attention is a form of reciprocity with the living world, receiving its gifts with open eyes and open heart.

~ Robin Wall Kimmerer

Once there was a man who filmed his vacation…

With a flick of a switch, there it would be. But he

would not be in it. He would never be in it.

~ Wendell Berry

Distraction gives you plenty of stimulation, but very little chosen experience. You don’t decide what matters; you drift into what is loud, new, frictionless, and emotionally sticky. And drift becomes a worldview — an unconscious credo: nothing deserves full presence; everything can be interrupted. The deeper problem is not that you miss a few minutes. It’s that you slowly lose the thread of your own life. You become someone who is always “around,” but rarely here.

~ J.W. Bertolotti

Evil is whatever distracts.

~ Franz Kafka

If we were not so single-minded about keeping our lives moving, and for once could do nothing, perhaps a huge silence might interrupt this sadness of never understanding ourselves.

~ Pablo Neruda

For anyone trying to discern what to do w/ their life: PAY ATTENTION TO WHAT YOU PAY ATTENTION TO. that's pretty much all the info u need.

~ Amy Krouse Rosenthal

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

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

2. 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?

3. When was the last time paying attention left you astonished? What would it mean to have more of these moments in your life?

4. Would you be pleased if your gravestone read: “She attended well to a few worthy things”?

5. Do you need to stop beating yourself up for avoiding paying attention to an overwhelming or painful part of your life?

6. Is it time to finally pay attention to that overwhelming or painful thing you’ve been avoiding?

7. Are you wasting your attention and energy on people who take you for granted?

8. Wise ones tell us that we become what we give our attention to. What has more of your attention - and more of you - than you want?

9. 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?

10. Where in your life would it help to say, 'Look what's happening!' rather than 'Look what's happening to me!'?

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

12. What in your life is hungry to be noticed?

13. Are you paying enough attention to yourself?

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 ‘Paying Attention')

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')