In a religion that draws from many sources of inspiration and learning rather than one chosen scripture, it is the stories that we tell that communicate our Good News. This 2005 message from the Rev. Dr. Kenneth W. Phifer, now minister emeritus of the First Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Ann Arbor, Michigan, gives us four of those stories:

The Stories of Our Lives

by the Rev. Dr. Kenneth W. Phifer

Is there anything more compellingly interesting than a story?

Is there anything of greater importance to our lives than the stories we tell and the stories we listen to and the stories in which we invest our faith?

Life-like or fantastic, ancient or modern, short or long, poetic or prosaic, musical or visual, written or spoken, filmed or signed, stories are a vital part of the human scene. Epics, comedies, tragedies, novels, short stories, grand operas and plays, soap operas, situation comedies, even advertisements, and dozens of other forms of stories fill our lives.

One storyteller observed, “so much of living is made up of story-telling that one might conclude that it is what we were meant to do.”

(Read on … )