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 Unitarian Universalist minister Clarke Wells:

God of Easter and infrequent Spring:
Announce the large covenant to deceitful lands,
Drive the sweet liquor through our parched veins,
Lure us to fresh schemes of life.
Rouse us from tiredness, self-pity,
Whet us for use,
Fire us with good passion.
Restore in us the love of living,
Bind us to fear and hope again

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 Renewal. Easter celebrates new life emerging from despair, loss, hopelessness, and tragedy. Passover celebrates new life emerging from oppression. Spring brings along new life emerging from winter. How have you experienced new life? How have you experienced renewal in your life?

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 provides day-to-day renewal in your life? Conversation with family or friends? Music? Contact with nature? Exercise or physical activity? Helping others? Rest? Reading? Healthy food? Something else?

2. Have you experienced a time of great difficulty that involved loss, grief, failure, problems at home, problems at work, a medical challenge, a reversal of good fortune, or difficulty coping? Did you somehow experience renewal, or new life, or healing, or a return of hope, that helped lift you out of this time of difficulty?

3. To what extent do you understand the Easter story of death and new life as a symbolic description of personal spiritual renewal?

4. To what extent do you understand the Passover story of oppression and liberation as a paradigm for the collective renewal of a community?

5. To what extent do you understand the arrival of spring as reassurance that life reliably renews itself after a difficult and challenging season?

6. Albert Camus wrote, “In the midst of winter, I finally learned that there was in me an invincible summer.”

Is there an invincible summer within you? How do you know?

7. Unitarian Universalist minister Kathy Fuson Hurt wrote:

Life has not been gentle with me.
Battered and tossed about, wounded deeply and often,
My spirit bears marks of conflict, pain, death.
Scarred by so much suffering,
I wear wounds that will not heal.

But life, so ungentle, told me a secret:
My unhealed wound, source of agony and shame for me,
May be a source of healing for others.
I can share with them my darkness and they see light;
I can speak to them of bitterness and they taste the sweet;
I can show them my wounds and theirs are healed.

Life has not been gentle with me.
But it brought beauty with its blows:
Though wounded past all healing, because wounded past all healing,
I can heal others
And so be made whole.

Does this poem reflect your experience? Does this poem reflect the experience of someone you know?

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 Wendell Berry:

When despair for the world grows in me and I wake in the night at the least sound in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be, I go and lie down where the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.

I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief. I come into the presence of still water. And I feel above me the day-blind stars waiting with their light. For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.