Tapestry of Faith: Resistance and Transformation: An Adult Program on Unitarian Universalist Social Justice History

Closing

Activity time: 10 minutes

Materials for Activity

  • Worship or centering table and chalice
  • Participant journals
  • Writing materials, including paper, pens, pencils, color pencils, and markers
  • Taking It Home handout

Preparation for Activity

  • Customize the Taking It Home section of this workshop and copy for all participants.

Description of Activity

Invite participants to respond, in their journals or on writing paper:

Describe a situation in your life when adopting one of the approaches we learned about today might have changed your actions. Which theory would you have found helpful in that situation and why?

Allow five minutes for writing.

Share this quote from Proverbs of Ashes; Violence, Redemptive Suffering and the Search for What Saves Us by Rita Nakashima Brock and Rebecca Ann Parker:

Violence denies presence and suffocates spirit. Violence robs us of knowledge of life and its intrinsic value; it steals our awareness of beauty; of complexity, of our bodies. Violence ignores vulnerability, dependence, and interdependence. A person who acts violently disregards self and other as distinct, obliterating the spaces in which spirit breathes.

We can resist and redress violence by acting for justice and by being present to one another, present to beauty, present to the fire at the heart of things, the spirit that gives breath to life.

Invite a participant to come forward and extinguish the chalice as you say these words: "As we extinguish this chalice, may we let the light of our tradition kindle our hope for a better world."

Distribute Taking It Home and invite participants to continue to write in their journals between workshops.