Minister’s Letter — January 2008

Cartoonists like to represent the New Year as a new baby, to connote new beginnings or starting over, a fresh start. Sounds innocent enough. But I was reminded recently in something I read that babies do have to grow up and that the first two words most babies learn to speak consistently are “no” and “mine.” You might say that a lot of us go through the rest of our lives saying these two words over and over. No and mine. Interestingly, most religious traditions at their best, including our own UU faith, would call you out of yourself into something bigger, broader, more beautiful.

We are called out of ourselves to love God and our neighbor. This idea goes against the grain of the modern day emphasis prevalent in our culture, including even contemporary “spirituality” which is unabashedly about you. It’s about me: my feelings, my adjustment, my success, my happiness, my relationships, my salvation, my opinions and my needs. It’s about good advice on getting ahead, achieving my goal, increasing my net worth.

There’s a place for personal goals and feelings, of course. But the principles of our UU faith–compassion, justice, equality, tolerance place the emphasis elsewhere: to love one another and live for the common good, for God or the greater Source of Life and for neighbor. In that regard, all religious traditions at their best–including our own–talk about our responsibility as a community of human beings to our world, our earth, our planet, our fellow humans, and our responsibilities to those less fortunate, those who are oppressed and those who are in need.

In a recent sermon I suggested that the heart of our UU faith could actually be defined as gratitude. In fact, I believe a deep sense of gratitude saves us from succumbing to the “me and mine–focusing on the self alone” syndrome and transforms our outlook to that of us and our. That’s because the discipline of gratitude reminds us how utterly dependent we are on the people and world around us for everything that matters. From this flows an ethic of gratitude that obligates us to create a future that justifies an increasing sense of gratitude from the human family as a whole. The ethic of gratitude demands that we nurture the world that nurtures us in return. It’s another way of defining what love means.

In a similar vein, one of my favorite modern prophets, William Sloane Coffin, once wrote: Love is the final measurement of our stature: The more we love , the bigger we are. There is no smaller package in all the world than that of man all wrapped up in himself.

I love you all. May our new year together be one of abiding love and gratitude in all that we do. See you at the Fellowship.
Jim Covington