Centering (5 minutes)

This is a time to make the transition from the busy world to the group experience. A member of the group may read these words from Alfred North Whitehead:

The kingdom of heaven is not the isolation of good from evil. It is the overcoming of evil by good.

Check-in (10 to 25 minutes)

Each person in the group has the opportunity to share something about his or her life. What significant events have taken place recently in your life? Have you accomplished something meaningful to you? Have you experienced any losses or setbacks? Have you had any insights or new ideas?

Group Discussion (45 to 70 minutes)

Our spiritual theme for this month is Beauty. In developing his concept of divinity, the British mathematician and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead spoke of divine power not as commanding or fearsome, but rather as the appeal of beauty beckoning to the most elevated values within us. What experiences of beauty stand out in your own experience? How did these experiences change you or motivate you? What spiritual power does beauty have? If one thing is beautiful, does that mean that other things are not beautiful? Or can many different kinds of beauty flourish? What might this tell us about different religious understandings?

For group discussion, please consider the questions associated with one or more of the following numbered sections. You need not address all of these sections, and you need not address them in this order.

1. What experiences of beauty stand out in your experience? How did these experiences change you or motivate you? Have you become a better person because of your experience of hearing music, or seeing a painting, or watching a play? Have you become a better person because of your experience of the beauty of nature?

2. If one thing is beautiful, does that mean other things are not beautiful? Or can many different kinds of beauty flourish? For example, if the music of Mozart is beautiful to you, does that mean that all other music must necessarily be ugly? What might this tell us about different religious understandings or theological views? If one religious understanding is intellectually and emotionally satisfying, and if it promotes just and compassionate behavior, must all the other religious understandings be dismissed? What might this tell us about multicultural religious community? If one cultural tradition is worthwhile, must all the others be excluded?

3. In his 1819 sermon “Unitarian Christianity,” the great Unitarian minister William Ellery Channing advanced the following understanding of the relationship between the power and the goodness of God: “We conceive that Christians have generally leaned toward a very injurious view of the Supreme Being. They have too often felt, as if he were raised, by his greatness and sovereignty, above those eternal laws of equity and rectitude, to which all other beings are subjected. We believe, that in no being is the sense of right so strong, so omnipotent, as in God. We believe that his almighty power is entirely submitted to his perceptions of rectitude; and this is the ground of our piety. It is not because his will is irresistible, but because his will is the perfection of virtue, that we pay him allegiance. We cannot bow before a being, however great and powerful, who governs tyrannically. We respect nothing but excellence, whether on earth or in heaven. We venerate not the loftiness of God’s throne, but the equity and goodness in which it is established.”

Would you agree with Channing that admiration of virtue is more appropriate than admiration of power? Can you think of instances when power has been exercised in ways that have been not entirely virtuous?

4. In his 1926 book Religion in the Making, Alfred North Whitehead wrote: “A social consciousness concerns people you know and love individually. Hence, rightness is mixed up with the notion of preservation. Conduct is right which will lead some god to protect you; and it is wrong if it stirs some irascible being to compass your destruction. Such religion is a branch of diplomacy. But a world-consciousness is more disengaged. It rises to the conception of an essential rightness of things. The individuals are indifferent, because unknown. The new, and almost profane, concept of the goodness of God replaces the older emphasis on the will of God. In a communal religion you study the will of God in order that He may preserve you; in a purified religion, rationalized under the concept of the world-concept, you study his goodness in order to be like him. It is the difference between the enemy you conciliate and the companion whom you imitate.”

Can you put Whitehead’s statement into your own words? Have you understood God as “the enemy you conciliate” or have you instead understood God as “the companion whom you imitate”? Channing spoke of venerating the virtue and goodness of God rather than the almighty power of God. Whitehead spoke of moving forward from an emphasis on the will of God to the goodness of God, that is, understanding God as a virtuous companion to be imitated rather than as a powerful enemy to be feared. Would you say that Channing and Whitehead are saying similar things?

5. Beauty can be the result of a creative process. Whitehead wrote, “The limitations are the opportunities. The essence of depth of actuality – that is of vivid experience – is definiteness. Now to be definite always means that all the elements of a complex whole contribute to some one effect, to the exclusion of others. The creative process is a process of exclusion to the same extent as it is a process of inclusion.”

How might this apply to the creation of a beautiful life? How might this apply to the creation of a beautiful religious community?

Conclusion (5 to 10 minutes)

What will you take away from this discussion? What would have made this time together more meaningful or satisfying to you? What did you enjoy? A group member may share these words from Alfred North Whitehead:

Religion is the vision of something which stand beyond, behind, and within, the passing flux of immediate things; something which is real, and yet waiting to be realized; something which is a remote possibility, and yet the greatest of present facts; something that gives meaning to all that passes, and yet eludes apprehension; something whose possession is the final good, and yet is beyond all reach; something which is the ultimate ideal, and the hopeless quest.