“Help me to journey beyond the familiar and into the unknown.
Give me the faith to leave old ways and break fresh ground with You.
I trust You to be stronger than each storm within me.
I will trust in the darkness and know that my times, even now, are in Your hand.
Tune my spirit to the music of heaven.”

Prayer attributed to Saint Brendan the Navigator (c. 484 – 577), whose feast day is today

“The moment we begin to fear the opinions of others and hesitate to tell the truth that is in us, and from motives of policy are silent when we should speak, the divine floods of light and life no longer flow into our souls… The best protection any woman can have is courage.”

Elizabeth Cady Stanton, author of The Woman’s Bible, who founded the National Woman’s Suffrage Association in New York, with Susan B. Anthony, on this day in 1869

Elizabeth Cady Stanton (left) with Susan B. Anthony

“God is a being beyond being and a nothingness beyond being. The most beautiful thing which a person can say about God would be for that person to remain silent from the wisdom of an inner wealth. So, be silent and quit flapping your gums about God.”

Meister Eckhart (1260 – 1328)

A poem for World Migratory Bird Day –

Puffinus Puffinus [Manx Shearwater] by David Lewis

“Historical crooner, troll-like in burrows
your eerie cries are supernatural.
Lacking red, yellow and orange
but you shear the air to make up for it.
I walked a few steps around your island once.
Got so tired in a day with sandwiches and pop.
Marvelled at your fifty million mile journey from Bardsey, (just down the road really)
to Brazil, Argentina and Southern Africa.
You hang on the gale like the washing on my line
and use your super powers to trace the planet.
Crystals of magnetites within the eye
you navigate better than Shackleton.
Ginsberg’s puffin, who cries at the moonlight
come home to me at night.
And you connect for life
and say hello with a kiss.
As old as me
but much wiser I see.”

“The ‘kingdom of heaven is within,’ indeed, but we must also create one without, because we are intended to act upon our circumstances.”

Florence Nightingale, raised Unitarian, born on this day in 1820

“You are ever close. You are inside, outside, in every vein, in creepers and leaves, immanent and transcendent… All are God’s children. There is no question of high and low. He extends His hand towards anyone who wants His lap… Once the right action starts there is no fall..

What does it mean to enter your own nature? It is what it is. Permeated in every thing, every form and every way. That which is self-effulgent. There, language and speech do not work. The ultimate reality in true sense is formless. Can this be expressed in any language? Indeed, there is only He.”

Shri Anandamayi Ma (1896 – 1982)

“People are the measures of God’s principles; our morality the instrument of his justice, which stills alike the waves of the sea, the tumult of the people, and the oppressor’s brutal rage. Justice is the idea of God, the ideal of humanity, the rule of conduct writ in the nature of humankind. The ideal must become actual, God’s thought a human thing, made real in a reign of righteousness, and a kingdom – no, a Commonwealth – of justice on the earth. You and I can help forward that work..

You and I may work with Him, and, as on the floor of the Pacific Sea little insects lay the foundation of firm islands, slowly uprising from the tropic wave, so you and I in our daily life, in house, or field, or shop, obscurely faithful, may prepare the way for the republic of righteousness, the democracy of justice that is to come…

You and I may help deepen the channel of human morality in which God’s justice runs, and the wrecks of evil, which now check the stream, be borne off the sooner by the strong, all-conquering tide of right, the river of God that is full of blessing.”

Theodore Parker, Unitarian minister, transcendentalist and abolitionist, who died on this day in 1860

“May, and among the miles of leafing,
blossoms storm out of the darkness—
windflowers and moccasin flowers. The bees
dive into them and I too, to gather
their spiritual honey. Mute and meek, yet theirs
is the deepest certainty that this existence too—
this sense of well-being, the flourishing
of the physical body—rides
near the hub of the miracle that everything
is a part of, is as good
as a poem or a prayer, can also make
luminous any dark place on earth.”

Mary Oliver

“We are at a unique stage in our history. Never before have we had such an awareness of what we are doing to the planet, and never before have we had the power to do something about that.. Surely we all have a responsibility to care for our Blue Planet. The future of humanity and indeed, all life on earth, now depends on us.. Real success can only come if there is a change in our societies and in our economics and in our politics.”

David Attenborough, 97 today!

“Through compassion human beings imitate God… We find these two things, compassion and justice, in all the works of God.”

Thomas Aquinas