SESSION 6 – WHO ARE WE CALLED TO SERVE?

MARCH, 2009

Chalice:  Love is the spirit of this church, and service is its law.  This is our great covenant:  to dwell together in peace, to seek the truth in love and to help one another.

The Blake Covenant

Check-in:

Reading:

 We challenge ourselves and our world to look for options other than violence to resolve differences.

We need to challenge ourselves and our world to build bridges of understanding and respect across differences

We are committed to the work of dismantling prejudice, racism and all types of oppression.

We challenge ourselves to question values (such as consumerism and conformity) permeating our society.

The Commission on Appraisal 2004 Mission Affirmations from Engaging Our Theological Diversity

Quotes from the Common Bowl: see attached

Life Questions:

• Do you think we are a religion of service to others?  Or do we tend to be more self serving?  How is either of these ways valuable or significant in spiritual growth?
• What are some personal experiences of your own around service as part of a religious community?
• Should UU congregations be a presence in the wider community?  How?
• Is it conflicting to be a faith that honors  and encourages individuality and also seeks to be an agent of change for the greater good in the world?

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 o remember the wholeness of our lives, the weaving of light and shadow in this great and astonishing dance in which we move.

Kathleen McTigue

Check-out

QUOTATIONS FOR LESSON 6, MARCH 2009

WHO ARE WE CALLED TO SERVE?

We are prone to judge success by the index of our salaries or the size of our automobiles, rather than by the quality of our service relationship to humanity.

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Service is never a simple act; it’s about sacrifice for others and about accomplishment for ourselves, about reaching out, one person to another, about all our choices gathered together as a country to reach across all our divides.

Former president George Bush

If you want to lift yourself up, lift up someone else.

Booker T. Washington

There is a tremendous strength that is growing the world through sharing together, praying together, suffering together and working together.

Mother Theresa

Life is short and we have never too much time for gladdening the hearts of those who are traveling the dark journey with us.  Oh be swift to live, make haste to be kind.

Henri Frederick Amiel

It is one of the most beautiful compensations of life, that no man can sincerely try to help another without helping himself.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Caring is a reflex…You live, you help.

Ram Dass

Learn to lead in a nourishing manner.  Learn to lead without being possessive.  Learn to be helpful without taking the credit.  Learn to lead without coercion.

Lao Tzu

Success is not final, failure is not fatal:  it is the courage to continue that counts.

Winston Churchill

We cannot seek achievement four ourselves and forget about progress and prosperity for our community…our ambitions must be broad enough to include the aspirations and needs of others, for their sakes and for our own.

Caesar Chavez