COVENANT GROUP LESSON 15 – SEPTEMBER, 2008

OUTRAGE, FORGIVENESS AND THE WORTH AND DIGNITY OF EVERY PERSON

Adapted from G. Turner and the Channing Church, Newport RI

Chalice:  If one by one we counted people out for the least sin, it wouldn’t take us long to get so we had no one left to live with.  For to be social is to be forgiving.

Robert Frost

Check in:

Reading:  “We believe in the inherent worth and dignity of all persons.”  Imperfect as we are this principle calls us into right relationship with others.  It calls for profound respect, even when we differ with the views or behavior of another.  It calls for gentleness and forgiveness and the understanding that redemption is just a decision away.  It calls us to leave the safety of our suburbs and stand against hunger and hopelessness in our urban streets.  Our first principle remains a touchstone out of our remarkable tradition, a covenant of relationship that supports the other principles and orients us remarkably when we lose our way.

Rev. Marilyn Sewell

Life Questions:

• How do we deal as a religious community with friends or members of society when they “go wrong”?
• What measure(s) do you use to assess the “worth and dignity” of every person?  Do you think this principle applies to all people regardless of what they might do?How do you reconcile outrage and compassion towards someone who has committed an atrocity?
• How would you define “forgiveness”? Are there some behaviors that are unforgiveable?
• Do you believe that what Robert Frost says above is true? “ To be social is to be forgiving”.
  

Closing ritual:

We extinguish this flame but not the light of truth

The warmth of community

Or the fire of commitment

These we carry in our heats until we are together again.

Check-out:

QUOTATIONS FOR LESSON 15 – SEPT. 2008

The opposite of love is not hate but fear.

From Rev. Forrest Church

If you knew how I felt inside, you would not act that way outside.  But most likely, if I know how you felt inside I should not mind so much the way you act outside.  Why don’t we try turning ourselves inside out?

Edward T. Atkinson

I don’t like that man very much.  I’m going to have to get to know him better.

Abraham Lincoln

He who is different from me does not impoverish me – he enriches me.  Our unity is constituted in something higher than ourselves – in Man.  For no man seeks to hear his own echo, or to find is reflection in the glass.

Antoine De Saint-Exupery

It is easier to forgive an enemy than to forgive a friend.

William Blake

He who cannot forgive breaks the bridge over which he himself must pass.

George Herbert

Years ago I recognized my kinship with all living things, and I made up my mind that I was not one bit better than the meanest on the earth.  I said then and I say now that while there is a lower class, I am in it, where there is a criminal element, I am of it, where there is a soul in prison I am not free.

Eugene V. Debs

To care for anyone else enough to make heir problems one’s own, is ever the beginning one’s real ethical development.

Felix Adler

…when we finally know we are dying, and all other sentient beings are dying with us, we start to have a burning, almost heartbreaking sense of the fragility and preciousness of each moment and each being, and from this can grow a deeper, limitless compassion for all beings.

Sogyal Rinpoche

As one reads history…one is absolutely sickened, not by he crimes that the wicked have committed, but by the punishments that the good have inflicted; and a community is infinitely more brutalized by the habitual employment of punishment than it is by the occasional occurrence of crime.

Oscar Wilde