Centering (5 minutes)

This is a time to make the transition from the busy world to the group experience. 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 Martin Luther King, Jr.:

If a man is called to be a streetsweeper, he should sweep streets even as Michelangelo painted, or Beethoven composed music. He should sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will pause to say, here lived a great streetsweeper who did his job well.

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 Duty. To live our lives in accord with our principles, we may need to do things because it is our duty to do so. Sometimes this is easy and straightforward, but sometimes this involves a personal cost that we might otherwise wish to avoid. When have you done something out of duty? Is duty an adequate source of motivation for you?

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 things do you do because you believe it is your duty to do them?

2. Unitarian Universalist minister Gordon McKeeman wrote, “Life is so everlastingly daily. But the fabric of our common life is maintained by all of us who do the simple, unglamorous, dull chores faithfully day after day, year upon year, generation to generation. Attention to the daily grind makes our communal life, not only possible, but sustaining, healthful, and secure in many ways. It’s the wider view that helps. My spiritual health is measured in part by my remembrance of, gratitude for, and participation in the daily grind – making flour for the bread of life – finding holiness therein.”

Are you able to take some pleasure in doing simple, unglamorous, dull chores? Do you understand these chores as dutifully maintaining the fabric of our common life?

3. E. B. White wrote, “If the world were merely seductive, that would be easy. If it were merely challenging, that would be no problem. But I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve the world and a desire to enjoy the world. This makes it hard to plan the day.”

Do you find it hard to plan the day because you are torn between a desire to improve the world and a desire to enjoy the world? Do you believe that you have a duty to improve the world? Do you believe that you are somehow shirking your duty if you take time to enjoy the world? What is an appropriate balance for you?

4. Archibald MacLeish wrote, “We can be either pure or responsible.” Similarly, Reinhold Niebuhr wrote, “We cannot be good unless we’re responsible, and the moment we’re responsible we’re involved in compromise.”

Would you agree with this analysis? Can you be both pure and responsible? Is it admirable to never compromise, but always to uphold all your principles no matter what? If you had to choose, which would you prefer: being pure or being responsible?

5. Is a sense of duty a sufficiently strong source of motivation for you?

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 Unitarian Universalist minister Emil Gudmundsen:

And now, may we have faith in life to do wise planting that the generations to come may reap even more abundantly than we. May we be bold in bringing to fruition the golden dreams of human kinship and justice. This we ask that fields of promise become fields of reality.