Sunday Service

One of the most important things you can do on this earth is to let people know they are not alone.

~ Shannon L. Alder

We are biologically, cognitively, physically, and spiritually wired to love, to be loved, and to belong. When those needs are not met, we don’t function as we were meant to. We break. We fall apart. We numb. We ache. We hurt others. We get sick.

~ Brené Brown

Without community there is no liberation, only the most vulnerable and temporary armistice between an individual and her oppression.

~ Audre Lorde

Where you belong is where you choose to constantly choose to show up.

~ Karina Antonopoulos

I was so shocked to learn that the opposite of belonging is fitting in. Because fitting in is

assessing a group of people and changing who you are. But true belonging never asks us to

change who we are. It demands we be who we are.”

~ Brené Brown

Locate the kind of belonging that doesn’t demand your erasure.

~ Cole Authur Riley

Our longing for community is so powerful that it can drive us to join groups, relationships, or systems of belief that give the false impression of belonging. These places of false belonging grant us conditional membership, requiring us to cut parts of ourselves off in order to fit in.

~ Toko-Pa Turner

I do feel life would be easy if I was like everyone else. If I conformed to everything society wanted me to be. Yes, life would be easy. But I don’t think life would be colorful.

~ Kathleen Yap

We belong to every part of our lives and every part of our lives belongs to us. Even the failures. The cruelty. The betrayals. The addictions. The cowardice. Until we embrace those scared and tender parts with the kindness and forgiveness we so generously give to others, we will never be whole. We will never be home.

~ Rev. Scott Tayler

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

September 11, 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.” 

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?

• How might my inner voice be trying to speak to me through it?

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

1. What is your favorite memory of childhood belonging? How does that moment still live in you today?

2. Do you remember the moment when you knew for certain that you no longer belonged to childhood, the moment when you knew your childhood was over and that you were now, without doubt, a grown-up? How did the uniqueness of that moment shape who you are?

3. Of all the communities you have belonged to, which is your favorite? If you could say thank you to it, what would you say?

4. What aspect of your personality do you need to do a better job of embracing and welcoming in? Your judgmental self? Your lazy self? Your vulnerable self? Your bitter self? Your easily frightened self? Your quick-to-anger self? Your jealous self? Your petty self? Your selfish self? 

5. What long hoped-for life do you need to let go of in order for you to belong to the life right in front of you?

6. Has loneliness ever tried to protect you?

7. Do you know what it is like to be in a community or relationship that requires you to remove or deny parts of yourself to belong? 

8. What gift did your “chosen family” give you that your family of origin didn’t or couldn’t?

9. What is the greatest lie that our culture tells us about belonging?

10. Some of us live in a place and others of us belong to a place. How does the place you belong to carry your stories, make room for your pain and keep you in touch with your longings?

11. Self-belonging is about self-love. So…what if you are the love of your life?

12. What failure are you glad you belong to?

13. Have you settled for belonging to people who include you when your heart longs to be surrounded by people who adore you?

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 2025 Soul Matters materials on the theme ‘Building Belonging')

Don’t surrender your loneliness so quickly.

Let it cut more deep.

Let it ferment and season you

as few human or even divine ingredients can.

Something missing in my heart tonight

has made my eyes so soft

my voice so tender

my need of god

absolutely clear.

Daniel Ladinsky, inspired by an original piece by the Sufi poet Hafiz.

Let loneliness cut more deep? It’s an odd place to start a month on building belonging. Maybe even an insensitive place, given how many of us have suffered and suffocated under loneliness’ weight.

But notice how the poem turns quickly to talk of a softening, tenderness and something missing in the heart. It’s apparent that a different kind of loneliness is being pointed to. A kind that has to do with a painful inner longing rather than the typical external-oriented sadness of not finding friends.

It brings to mind something said by the spiritual writer, Toko-Pa Turner,

Our longing for community is so powerful that it can drive us to join groups, relationships, or systems of belief that give a false impression of belonging. These places of false belonging grant us conditional membership, requiring us to cut parts of ourselves off in order to fit in.

So what if loneliness is sometimes a cry from one of these cut off pieces? What if sometimes the pain of loneliness is one of our buried parts pleading to belong to the rest of who we are? What if loneliness is quite often a sacred inner discomfort trying to push, pull and prod us back to wholeness?

Opening ourselves to this other kind of loneliness seems especially important given the dominant trends in this culture of ours, where the marginalized among us are pressured to twist and shape-shift ourselves into smaller beings in order to be acceptable to our racist and homophobic society, and where now our whole culture is “social media-ized,” pressuring all of us - in one way or another - to shave off our rough and imperfect edges and present ourselves as polished people who’ve got it all together.

To focus on such things is to wonder if, maybe without us fully noticing it, our whole society has become a land of lonely belonging, where no one is allowed to live without burying at least one part of themselves. The words of Carl Jung capture this well. He wrote, “Loneliness does not come from having no people around, but from being unable to communicate the things that seem important to oneself.”

So where does this leave us? Well, perhaps it’s an invitation to understand that the work of belonging begins with developing an intimate relationship with its opposite: loneliness. And opening ourselves to the idea that loneliness may not always be just a burden, emptiness or a source of depletion, even though it can feel that way. Maybe sometimes loneliness is also a source of wisdom, arising from a caretaking part of us trying to tell us “This is not the way to live!”

So, friends, this month let’s listen to our loneliness more closely. Because it appears to be the key to the unique kind of belonging that each of us needs.

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

Ask Them About Belonging

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. And remember to answer the questions yourself as they are meant to support a conversation, not just a time of quizzing someone else.

Belonging Questions

● What life has taught you about loneliness?

● When was the first time you thought to yourself, “Now I belong”?

● What food reminds you of belonging?

● Where does your sense of belonging live in your body?

● Has belonging gotten easier or harder as you’ve grown older?

● What is the greatest lie that our culture tells us about belonging?

● Have you ever had to sacrifice belonging for integrity? Or your integrity for belonging?

● Has loneliness ever tried to protect you?

● What pieces of your religious past do you wish still belonged to you?

● How might we deepen our sense of belonging to each other?

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

A Few Favourite Things About Yourself

Self-belonging is about self-love. And at its core, self-love is about being in touch with what you enjoy and treasure about yourself. So for your exercise this month, identify two of your favourite things about yourself. Odds are you’ve not given this much thought before. Most of us don’t. But here’s our promise: If you do give it a bit more thought, there is a gift of, not only self-belonging, but also freedom waiting on the other end.

All this will make more sense if you start things off by listening to this video clip: https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1215744403343558

After watching the clip, get going on figuring out your two things. And just like Jason Reynolds from the clip, don’t just name your two favourite things about yourself, also tease out why exactly that is the case.

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

Quitting is arguably the most under-celebrated means of finding freedom. Indeed, if you add up all the big and small ways we do it, quitting may be the most used form of escape. And one of the most courageous. Whether it’s as life-altering as walking away from careers and friendships or as seemingly minor as giving up a hobby or a diet, quitting is never just freeing, it is always - to some degree - terrifyingly freeing. We humans just weren’t built for the unknown. A love of the familiar is deep in our bones. And yet virtually every story about quitting ends with the storyteller testifying to it being, in one way or another, a life-giving choice.

So, what’s your courageous quitting story? We all need to hear it. We all need reminding now and then of what lies on the other side of our caged comfort. 

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

To be free...You must know, not that you can do whatever you want… You must know instead, that inside you are entire Universes [and]... you must fight for the entire Universes inside of everyone else…

~ Rev. Julián Jamaica Soto

Nobody's free until everybody's free.

~ Fannie Lou Hamer

True individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence. Necessitous people are not free people.

~ Franklin D. Roosevelt

The assumption that truth has a self-evident, liberating power, that once people see the truth, they will act on it, must be reinterpreted. Truth must be repeated over and over again in order for it to cut through disinformation. But even then, truth alone doesn’t set people free—power does…

~ Scot Nakagawa

Those who profess to favor freedom and yet depreciate agitation, are people who want crops without ploughing the ground; they want rain without thunder and lightning… it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.

~ Frederick Douglass

I try to understand why trans folx are so terrifying to people, why we are seen as such a threat. And ultimately, I think the scariest thing we represent is possibility and freedom. We have resisted the imposition of overly-determined stories of our lives and bodies, and we have demanded more. And that is our gift to all of you.

~ Chase Strangio

the days are all too heavy; and then we lift together

~ adrienne maree brown

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