Stories
These are stories that I have written over the years for use either in the "Story for all ages" segment of a regular Sunday morning worship service, or in a children's worship service, or in an intergenerational worship service. In a decade as a Director of Religious Education and Minister of Religious Education, I've developed dozens of stories for use in worship settings, for use in intergenerational settings (usually for a "children's story" segment of a regular Sunday morning worship service), and/or for use in children's worship services. Most of those stories were mediocre at best. Perhaps thirty of them are worth sharing, and those are the ones that I've posted on this site.
Someday I plan to rewrite these stories, edit them, and put them into a book. In the mean time I've placed them here, for my own convenience. Please note that many of these stories need some serious editing and further work, and therefore I'm asserting my right to protection under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 license. This license allows no commercial uses, it requires you to attribute the stories to me (that way I take the blame), and it does not allow you to create derivative works from my versions of the stories.
As I said above, these stories are a mixed bag. In many cases, I would suggest that you take these stories as a point of departure for writing your own stories -- just a word to the wise....
Stories from the lives of Buddha
Jataka tales, stories from Buddha's earlier incarnations
The Frightened Rabbit
The Quails and the Net
The Little Tree-Spirit
The life of Siddhartha Gautama, also called the Buddha
Buddha teaches about breathing and meditation
(See also stories of Buddha's life in From Long Ago and Many Lands)
Stories from the life of Jesus
The Magi (Epiphany)
Jesus and Gathering the Grain
Jesus and Your Neighbor
The Empty Jar (Gospel of Thomas)
Entering Jerusalem (Palm Sunday)
A Few Copper Coins
Who's the Greatest? (Maundy Thursday)
Jesus in Jerusalem (Easter)
Fairy tales and folk tales
The Children Who Went to Work
Rumplestiltskin (Fairy-tale Exegesis)
Anansi and His Six Sons
Tales from the far and near east
Arjuna and Krisha (Hindu, from the Bhagavad Gita)
A Bird Called P'eng (Taoist, from the Tao te Ching)
The Tale of the Useless Tree (Taoist, from the Tao te Ching)
The Shattered Tea Cup (Zen, sort of)
The Man, the House, and the Cat (Sufi)
Jewish tales
From the Hebrew scriptures:
In the Beginning (Genesis)
Moses and Pharaoh (Exodus)
Moses and the Golden Calf (Exodus)
Tales of the Rabbis :
The Flourishing Staff
The Rabbi Who Prayed
The Backwards Alphabet
Standing on One Foot
The Fox and the Fish
The Basket of Grapes
Real world tales
Louisa Alcott and the Mood Pillow
P. T. Barnum and His Elephant
Rapt in a Revery (Henry Thoreau)
John Murray's Miracle
Unitarian Universalism
and stories for the UU worship year
In the Elevator (explaining what we believe)
The Old Story of Thanksgiving
The Candles of Christmas Eve
How's Your Heart? (Valentine's Day)
Still in the works: brief explanation of child dedications, "The Golden Memory Box"