Greater Nashville UU News Update
Oct. 15, 2025
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Minister’s Note
“Self-compassion is not an event but an ongoing daily practice.
It is the root practice for our inner life and for our relational lives. [...]
Our ability to receive love is proportional to our capacity to welcome all of who we are.
~Francis Weller, In the Absence of the Ordinary:
Soul Work for Times of Uncertainty
Dear Ones,
October this year (following our Soul Matters community) is a month of leaning into the practice of cultivating compassion. Compassion seems at once the only possible response to the world around us (I mean, really, how can I even keep up with news of what’s happening, let alone choose how to focus my energy in response?) and an impossibly difficult and inadequately soft response to everything around us.
And yet: I remain committed to our shared UU understanding that love is at the center of life and is the force that connects and animates our values and our efforts to move the world (and ourselves) from where we are to where we dream of living together. And I know from experience that love extended from a place lacking in self-compassion generally feels “off” whether I am the giver or the recipient. So I find myself this October exploring what I need, in what ways I might extend compassion to myself, not only (as Weller suggests) for the sake of my inner life, but in service of a fuller, more useful, more satisfying life in relationship to all who/that surrounds me.
It’s not an easy, step-by-step process: I’m finding myself needing to create space for my feelings, to read and re-read wise words, to be willing to listen to my wise ones even when they challenge me, and to persist in staying present to what is unhealed in me despite the absence of a scheduled conclusion to all or any of this internal process. (I really prefer clear plans!)
How about you? I hope you are finding ways to honor your whole self in the midst of our never-ending, so very human, search for more love and compassion.
Yours in longing for love and practicing compassion,
Rev. Denise
RevDenise@gnuuc.org
Please Note
Next Week's e-blast will be emailed on Thursday, October 16.
