“Perhaps for you it is the stars at night, somewhere beyond the reach of our puny, interfering city lights, the whole sky filled with uncountable rays originating from trillions of light-years away… Or perhaps your taste runs to the deep forest, or the towering redwoods… or the suspense and drama of a thunderstorm… or even the first unfolding green of the garden, coming back to life after winter’s severity… Let me promise you: …None of that has anything to do with Jesus. Or Buddha… The primal experience of reverence in and for the natural world precedes theology of any variety.  It is an organic human experience that requires no supernatural explanations…The visceral response of reverence is as real and as functional to the kind of creatures we are as our hunger, our fear, our sexual impulses, our protection of the young.”

— The Reverend Dr.  Kendyl Gibbons, “Primal Reverence,” UU Worlds, Summer 2015.  Pp 22-30.
​         —  Dr. Gibbons is minister of All Souls Unitarian Church of Kansas City, Missouri, a past
                 President of the UU Ministers Assn., and former co-dean of the Humanist Institute.