True beauty often remains hidden in the margins of society, overlooked and ignored as we are drawn to glamor. Through the lens of liberation theology, we reflect on the idea of a God with a preferential love towards the oppressed. How can we shift our ideas of beauty and in doing so create a kinship of all humanity? With this shift, we work to heal an aching world.

There is nothing more elusive than the concept of God – the sacred of many names. This Sunday, we grapple with the sacred in a Unitarian Universalist context, challenging classical theism while exploring different theologies and different forms of theism. We join to appreciate divine love, as we grapple with the holy as both an entity and an experience.

As we honor Mother’s Day, we lean into imperfection and the many forms of love. Our lives are a tapestry of mothers of various roles and titles working to tend to us. Today we honor the lessons these mothers instilled in us, and the lessons I learned from mother figures that led to resiliency and wonder in unexpected ways. How does motherhood, in all its forms, cultivate beauty?

Spirituality and a connection with the divine allow us to uncover and bring beauty to the most unexpected of places. In the many ways we understand the sacred, in whatever theology makes sense to us, we find this overlap. Beauty is reciprocal – we create and we receive. There are bodies and places that we are told are ugly, and yet we can treasure and honor the beauty inherent within any living thing. The most important thing we can do in this life is to uncover that sacred beauty in each other.

We are each immersed in worldviews shaped and molded and understood by the culture we have been raised in, or the various cultures we have experienced in our lifetime. We may understand suffering and joy, all life events, and their consequences, through the lens of our upbringing and our formative years. This can lead to a single narrative, a way of feeling stuck. I invite us this morning to examine two worldviews, two religions, two ways of living, that we may be unfamiliar with: Taoism, and Buddhism. In doing so, I offer an invitation for each of us to awaken. To awaken to the true wonder of our lives – ways to engage with ourselves and the world around us. Ways to cultivate strength.