Unitarian Universalism

Today I will host the monthly meeting of the Steering Committee/Sponsoring Committee of Flint Area Congregations Together, the congregation-based community organization we are creating in Genesee County among a couple of dozen congregations. The organization is overwhelmingly Christian, as one would expect, and in my faith reflection today I want to think about our work tohether from the UU perspective of my people.

Largely, then, I need to reflect our pluralism. But I think that that needs to be done less by listing a number of hyphenated UU identities. I'm thinking, rather, of a brilliant presentation (lengthy, quite academic, surely Orthodox) by Archbishop Demetrios, where he made reference to Christian thought from the first, third, eighth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries (of the Common Era). This broad approach to what it means to be "the Church" was pluralistic, charitable, breathtaking.

What I can say in four or five minutes will contain nothing of Demetrios's impact. But it is his intention that I look toward, and I too hope to display charity, pluralism and a little movement of the soul.

My "impromptu" speech about Unitarian Universalism (not my twenty-five second elevator speech, but my "a couple of sentences" remarks) usually says something like this:

Our Unitarian ancestors may have been obsessed with the question of Unity. The unity of God has been a very important question for our Unitarian Christian forbears; but the unity of the human family, the unity of the one planet we inhabit, the unity of experience in the one cycle of life we are called to share; these perhaps are the Unity that now animates our unitarianism.

Our Universalist ancestors gave us a faith that says that God is Love, and their Christian faith knew a Love so powerful that all will be reconciled: in history, that all souls will be saved, yes; but in our work with one another, that each soul is precious, that each person is inherently worthy, each has inherent dignity; and that the living into Love that we are graced to exhibit happens as each of us responds to "the Love that will not let us go, that will not let us down, that will not let us off" (R. Hardies).

Unitarian Universalism calls us, in society, to make real the ethic of the interconnectedness of all existence, knowing that all we do has effects in the real world, and the inherent worth and dignity of each person, including ourselves, our families, our neighborhoods. Thus we act in the world to raise up all of us, and to build together a more blessed and beloved community.

The morning, after an evening of loud and bright thunderstorms, is clear, crisp. Humidity remains, and clouds overhead. But how green the grass! How red the tomatoes!

Good morning.