Northern Light October 2007

Oct. 7 Gracious Giving. Rev. Ritchie and Stewardship Chair Sarabeth Mahusky-Petras speak on the difficulties and rewards of giving—and receiving.

Oct. 14 Bonnie Awan speaks of her experience as a practicing Muslim in Central Ohio.

Oct. 21 Of Barbarians and Butterflies: Visitor Sunday (invite a friend to service!). Each of us has different components to our identities, and belong in many different circles. How the richest ideas—and the deepest spiritual inspirations—arise when we allow those worlds to mix, mingle, and meet.

Oct. 28 All Souls. Comparing customs regarding death and mourning across different cultures and religions helps us to understand Unitarian Universalist teachings on mortality and loss.

Nov. 4 NUUC member and politician Kelley Wenzlaff offers reflections on the connections between spirituality and democracy.

Children’s Worship

Oct. 7 Explorers: how and why some people believe there is a God, and some don’t.

Oct. 14 Explorers: Children’s Chapel

Oct. 21 The Explorers look at a variety of images of God.

Oct. 28 The Explorers ask: What do different groups believe about death?

Nov. 4 Explorers: the story of Noah poses the question: What is just punishment?

Also in this issue
Page 2 Events & Activities. Find out what's happening in October!
Page 3 From the Committees and Board.
Page 4 A Call to Action! See how you can support your congregation and your world!

Can we revisit our first principle just one more time? Just once more, I promise. I have recently become convinced that we have been misunderstanding it, all along.

We often speak of the “inherent worth and dignity of all people.” What we forget to say is the whole part of the sentence. “We covenant to affirm and promote the inherent worth and dignity of all people.”

What’s the difference? Well, the difference is everything. The Congregationalist churches in this country which later became Unitarian did so because they didn’t want to have to agree to particular creeds in order to belong to a church. They thought an agreement on how they would treat each other and how they would shape their actions to reflect all that was holy—a covenant--was the better choice. This was a direct legacy of the Pilgrims, and their famous compacts.

So when we speak of the inherent worth and dignity of all people, we are not making a statement about abstract belief. We are not saying “I believe in the creed that all people have inherent worth and dignity.” That’s where we get tripped up in unhelpful questions. Does Osama bin Laden have inherent worth? How about the jerk that just wronged me? Meanwhile, we’ve forgotten we were supposed to be making a promise about how we would try to behave. We covenant to affirm and promote the inherent worth and dignity of all people. In other words, we promise to do our very best to make sure our actions are such that they assign inherent worth and dignity to others.

This is a thing very simple, and very hard. For as those Pilgrims knew, while we can make personal resolutions all by ourselves, it takes a village to help us make them real. And that would be the point of our covenant groups, the details of which are outlined a little further into this newsletter. Sign up, if you can.