Nancy Shaffer

Nancy Shaffer (1950-2012) was a Unitarian Universalist minister, a poet, and the author of Instructions in Joy: Meditations (Skinner House Books, 2002). She served congregations in Carmel, California; Glen Allen, Virginia; Evanston, Illinois; and Ann Arbor, Michigan.

From Nancy Shaffer

Displaying 1 - 5 of 5

In 2011, Nancy Shaffer's life suddenly changed when she was diagnosed with what would be a fatal brain tumor.

Book | By Nancy Shaffer, Mary McKinnon Ganz | From Skinner House Books

When you heard that voice and knew finally it called for you and what it was saying—where were you? Were you in the shower, wet and soapy, or chopping cabbage late for dinner? Were you planting radish seeds or seeking one lost sock? Maybe wiping handprints off a window or coaxing words into a...

Meditation | By Nancy Shaffer | June 5, 2016 | From WorshipWeb

May each one among us have skin that longs to touch other skin: fingertips that long for other fingertips or whole hands and even arms; bodies that want to stand next to other bodies, not alone, while singing and bending, stirring soup. May ones whose skin doesn’t cry out for other skin wish it...

Meditation | By Nancy Shaffer | June 5, 2016 | From WorshipWeb

When I begin to bless this food and close my eyes I lose myself first just in green: how do leaves grow themselves this green and how do they grow at all to be so large and how do they make themselves from soil which in itself is only brown and sunlight helps and water but how is the end of this,...

Meditation | By Nancy Shaffer | April 18, 2015 | From WorshipWeb

Two women, thin, one small, one gray-haired, sit side by side on a high-backed bench. The smaller one leans against the other, lays her head atop the other’s shoulder, wraps her arm around the other. The one wrapped around, leaned against and onto, sits upright. The smaller one sits up also, but...

Meditation | By Nancy Shaffer | January 21, 2015 | From WorshipWeb

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