SESSION 14 – OUR UU PRINCIPLES, JULY, 2009
JUSTICE, EQUITY AND COMPASSION IN HUMAN RELATIONS
ADAPTED FROM JUDY MORGAN AND DAVID HUGHES
Chalice: You may call God love, you may call God goodness. But the best name for God is compassion.
Meister Eckhart
Check-in:
Reading: “Go in peace. Live simply, gently, at home in yourselves.
Act justly. Speak justly.
Remember the depth of your own compassion.
Forget not your power in the days of your powerlessness.
Do not desire to be wealthier than your peers
And stint not your hand of charity.
Practice forbearance.
Speak the truth, or speak not.
Take care of yourselves as bodies, for you are a good gift.
Crave peace for all people in the world,
Beginning with yourselves,
And go as you go with the dream of that peace alive in your heart.
Mark L. Belletini
Life Questions:
1. What was time that you strongly felt inequity or injustice, either for yourself or others? How did you deal with it at the time? How would you deal with it differently now?
2. Have you ever had a time in which you had to close your heart to compassion because you felt it would be too overwhelming?
3. What inspires compassion in us? How do we keep from becoming cynical or hopeless?
Closing ritual: May the light around us guide our footsteps, and hold us fast to the best and most righteous that we seek. May the darkness around us nurture our dreams, and give us rest so that we may give ourselves to the work of our world. Let us seek to remember the wholeness of our lives, the weaving f light and shadow in this great and astonishing dance in which we move.
Kathleen McTigue
Check-out:
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Quotations page – session 14, july, 2009
Thou shalt not be a victim. Thou shalt not be a perpetrator. Above all, thou shalt not be a bystander.
Compassion is a foundation for sharing our aliveness and building a more humane world.
Do not believe that possibly you can escape the reward of your action.
It is the spirit and not the form of law that keeps justice alive.
We cannot seek or attain health, wealth, learning, justice or kindness in general. Action is always specific, concrete, individualized, unique.
One should never direct people towards happiness, because happiness too is an idol of the market-place. One should direct them towards mutual affection. A beast gnawing at its prey can be happy too, but only human beings can feel affection for each other, and this is the highest achievement they can aspire to.
You know, there's a lot of talk in this country about the federal deficit. But I think we should talk more about our empathy deficit -- the ability to put ourselves in someone else's shoes; to see the world through the eyes of those who are different from us -- the child who's hungry, the steelworker who's been laid-off, the family who lost the entire life they built together when the storm came to town. When you think like this -- when you choose to broaden your ambit of concern and empathize with the plight of others, whether they are close friends or distant strangers -- it becomes harder not to act; harder not to help.
The major block to compassion is the judgment in our minds. Judgment is the mind's primary tool of separation.
To care for anyone else enough to make their problems one's own, is ever the beginning of one's real ethical development.
Nobody has ever measured, not even poets, how much a heart can hold.