I AM AN ORDAINED Zen priest and an ordained Unitarian Universalist minister. I might give the Sunday sermon from the pulpit of an old stone UU church in central Illinois, wearing a robe and a colorful stole, and the next night an online dharma talk for a Soto Zen center in Chicago or Santa Fe, wearing black koromo and rakusu. On any given day I might meet with a member of my UU congregation to talk through a thorny family conflict, and later I might sit with a Zen student to discuss living the precepts.
I’m a sixth-generation Unitarian, down a line of women from my Iowan great-great-great-grandmother, Jane Potter, to me. Jane Potter’s obituary, from
