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 Jesus of Nazareth:

‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.

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 Love. Christian theology has used three Greek words to identify three different meanings of love:philia, or personal friendship; eros, or romantic love; and agape, or commitment to the well-being of humankind. How do you express love in your life? In what ways are you motivated by love? What does it mean for Unitarian Universalists to say that we are “siding with love”?

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. When have you personally experienced our congregation as a loving community with regard to an expression of love or support for a particular person?

2. When have you personally experienced our congregation as a loving community with regard to a congregational decision or commitment or action?

3. Unitarian Universalist theologian Paul Rasor wrote, “Liberals deeply want to create a strong and inclusive community, but we often want to do it without giving up anything, without letting down the barriers we erect around ourselves in the name of individual autonomy.”

Would you agree? Have you experienced occasions when someone’s preference for individual autonomy prevented or truncated the creation of community? Do you think this is a pattern for Unitarian Universalists? Have you experienced occasions when someone’s commitment to building strong, loving, and inclusive community overcame their instinctive retreat toward individual autonomy?

4. Anne Morrow Lindbergh wrote, “People talk about love as though it were something you could give, like an armful of flowers. And a lot of people give love like that – just dump it down on top of you, a useless strong-scented burden. I don’t think it is anything you can give … love is a force that enables you to give other things. It is the motivating power. It enables you to give strength and freedom and peace to another person. It is not a result; it is a cause. It is not a product; it produces. It is a power, like steam or electricity. It is valueless unless you can give something else by means of it.”

Do you find this statement helpful?

5. Paul wrote, “If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. If I give away all my possessions, and if I hand over my body so that I may boast, but do not have love, I have nothing. Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends. But as for prophecies, they will come to an end; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will come to an end… . And now faith, hope, and love abide; and the greatest of these is love.”

We may hear this passage most frequently at weddings in the context of eros (or romantic love), but Paul intended it to serve in the context of agape (or commitment to the well-being of humankind) as a standard for behavior within a religious community. Is this standard too high?

6. Unitarian Universalist theologian Paul Rasor wrote, “One hundred years ago a lot of Unitarians and Universalists rejected Christianity because it was not rational. Today a lot of Unitarian Universalists reject Christianity because it’s too hard to do if we really take it seriously.”

Is the call to love our neighbors as ourselves too difficult?

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 Robert Walsh:

Did you ever think there might be a fault line
passing underneath your living room:
a place in which your life is lived in meeting
and in separating, wondering
and telling, unaware that just beneath
you is the unseen seam of great plates
that strain through time? And that your life, already
spilling over the brim, could be invaded,
sent off in a new direction, turned
aside by forces you were warned about
but not prepared for? Shelves could be spilled out,
the level floor set at an angle in
some seconds’ shaking. You would have to take
your losses, do whatever must be done
next.
 When the great plates slip
and the earth shivers and the flaw is seen
to lie in what you trusted most, look not
to more solidity, to weighty slabs
of concrete poured or strength of cantilevered
beam to save the fractured order. Trust
more the tensile strands of love that bend
and stretch to hold you in the web of life
that’s often torn but always healing. There’s
your strength. The shifting plates, the restive earth,
your room, your precious life, they all proceed
from love, the ground on which we walk together.