What Does It Mean To Be A People of Beloved Community?  This is the question from our Soul Matters team – a question and a challenge.  Rev Victoria Stafford defines it this way:

“The Beloved Community [is] not a goal or destination, and it was not any kind of idealistic, Christian utopian dream, but instead a way of being – spiritually, politically, economically, emotionally, intellectually. Beloved Community is an attitude, an orientation of the heart; it’s a disciplined understanding of your own relationship to other people, to everyone else on the planet, to every living thing.”

Other questions to consider:  What was your first experience of Beloved Community?  Who taught you the most about creating Beloved Community?   What do you think is the most unrecognized impediment/threat to Beloved Community?

We will explore this theme together  at Sunday services and in our Soul Matters groups.  You can find all the materials for your own spiritual practice in the materials for individual reflection.

ON important aspect of Beloved Community is a commitment to inclusion and liberation from what keeps us disconnected. I encourage you to join us on February 7th for an important service about the proposed 8th principle of UU. If you miss the service, you can find a recording on our webpage.  Here is the proposed wording:

“We, the member congregations of the Unitarian Universalist Association, covenant to affirm and promote: journeying toward spiritual wholeness by working to build a diverse multicultural Beloved Community by our actions that accountably dismantle racism and other oppressions in ourselves and our institutions.”

Our congregation will vote on adopting this principle at our May meeting. This give us time to learn, reflect, and spiritually engage with this concept of Beloved Community and what it can mean to our congregation and our world.  I hope you will join us.

February materials for individual reflection (PDF)

Rev Lucy