Rock ‘n’ Roll Sunday
This Sunday, we enjoy a time-honored Unity Fort Worth tradition: Rock 'n' Roll Sunday! Our music team has prepared an awesome program to rock our socks off. Join us to celebrate the joy and beauty of musical expression.
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Readings
“God is Joy” by James Dillet Freeman
We might all be more truly religious if like David we sometimes danced before the Lord and sang Him happy songs.
Often we think of God as love or intelligence or power or life. But how rarely we think of God as joy. Yet, think what the world would be like without joy in it. It is only the joy of love that makes us want to be loving, and the joy in intelligence that makes us want to know. It is the joy of power that gives us the will to do and the joy in life that gives us the will to live.
Most of the time religion is a solemn affair, and we think of God as immutable law and impacable lawgiver, awesome and absolute. But God is infinite, and the infinite includes the joyous aspects of being.
God is not a god of sorrows. He is the joyous One. It is a kind of blasphemy to think of God as sorrowful. God is the very Spirit of joy, pouring forth joyousness. The world was formed out of joy. God's joy overflowed, and the world was formed out of its overflowing.
Sadness could never have conceived life. Life—this everlasting bubbling up, this never-ceasing springing forth, this prodigality of creatures, this fantastic exuberance of shapes and forms, this excess of inventions and surprises—could be only the product of a Spirit of joy. At the heart of things, there is a flame, a dancing flame, a singing flame, a soaring flame, and at it we can warm our hearts.
“Where Everything Is Music” by Rumi
Don't worry about saving these songs!
And if one of our instruments breaks,
it doesn't matter.
We have fallen into the place
where everything is music.
The strumming and the flute notes
rise into the atmosphere,
and even if the whole world's harp
should burn up, there will still be
hidden instruments playing.
So the candle flickers and goes out.
We have a piece of flint, and a spark.
This singing art is sea foam.
The graceful movements come from a pearl
somewhere on the ocean floor.
Poems reach up like spindrift and the edge
of driftwood along the beah, wanting!
They derive
from a slow and powerful root
that we can't see.
Stop the words now.
Open the window in the center of your chest,
and let the spirits fly in and out.
“Mindful” by Mary Oliver
Every day
I see or hear
something
that more or less
kills me
with delight,
that leaves me
like a needle
in the haystack
of light.
Excerpt from “Joy and Sorrow” by Khalil Gibran
Then a woman said, Speak to us of Joy and Sorrow.
And he answered:
Your joy is your sorrow unmasked.
And the selfsame well from which your laughter rises was oftentimes filled with your tears.
And how else can it be?
The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain.
Is not the cup that holds your wine the very cup that was burned in the potters oven?
And is not the lute that soothes your spirit, the very wood that was hollowed with knives?
When you are joyous, look deep into your heart and you shall find it is only that which has given you sorrow that is giving you joy.
When you are sorrowful look again in your heart, and you shall see that in truth you are weeping for that which has been your delight.