Essays on Meaning and Everyday Life

Reflections

Thoughtful writing on spirituality, uncertainty, compassion, resilience, community, and the deeper meanings found within ordinary experience.

Writing by Kathy Hurt

Pausing to consider what life is asking of us

These reflections explore the questions, relationships, changes, and challenges that shape our spiritual lives.

Drawing from ministry, personal experience, literature, current events, and everyday encounters, Kathy invites readers to look more closely at the meaning within their own lives.

From the Archive

Explore Kathy’s reflections

WHO’S TO BLAME?

by | Aug 29, 2025 | News, Reflections | 0 comments

Sister Joan Chittister, a popular author of books on contemporary spirituality and a Benedictine nun, posed a question that stopped me in my tracks: “in the last three things that went wrong in your community, who did you blame?”      Daily, almost hourly, our...

WHEN UNCERTAINTY IS ALL THERE IS

by | Nov 2, 2024 | Reflections | 0 comments

One of the congregations I served as an interim minister included in their values statements the commitment to “honor uncertainty and ambiguity in the search for truth, meaning, and equity.” Given my usual response to uncertainty and ambiguity, namely to try and...

NOT LISTENING TO MORE OF THE SAME

by | Oct 24, 2024 | Reflections | 0 comments

  As our culture became increasingly polarized, we began to hear how we gravitate towards sources of information that will confirm what we already believe, how we prefer like-minded people and like-minded news networks and like-minded online commentaries. The...

THE WORD BEING SPOKEN

by | Oct 17, 2024 | Reflections | 0 comments

  Trappist monk Thomas Merton suggests that each one of us is a word, a particular word that is present in us at birth and stays with us all our lives. That echoes the comment made about clergy, namely that each minister has one sermon they preach over and over,...

AFTER A CLOSE CALL

by | Oct 9, 2024 | Reflections | 0 comments

  As I read news and watched video footage of the destruction hurricane Helene inflicted on western North Carolina, I frequently heard myself saying, “there, but for the grace of God, go I.” A natural human response, a way of expressing relief, and a reminder of...

BLESSING FOR AN OUTSIDER

by | Oct 4, 2024 | Reflections | 0 comments

You may not remember. You may have intentionally forgotten. But this blessing remembers And it refuses to forget Not in order to torment or shame you But to keep your heart open Whenever you see another standing outside the door Hoping to be let in Or standing outside...
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