Minister’s Reflections November, 2009
We are great individually. And we are better together.
Thanksgiving and winter holy days seem to be an antidote to our common human practice of taking for granted the gifts of nature and of community. Year around gratitude and generosity may indeed be the essential practice of our Unitarian Universalist faith. Humble submission in Islam; obedient hospitality in Judaism; and loving discipleship in Christianity. This season of feasting and gifting, this season of family gatherings and community celebration reminds us of what we too often take for granted. We are great individually, and we are better together.
Socialism-bashing has been going around recently. How indeed are we better together than alone? Currency, rather than bartering, is a government service for the common good, as are banking regulations which guarantee capital funding of industry. Few could run a business from money kept under their mattress. Clean water, clean air, food quality would be spotty at best without our collective efforts. If we were each to have private sewage and water, private roads, fire and police protection, private legal recourse rather than laws and courts, it would be clear that we are better together. We take so much of our collective community services for granted.
Despite our Unitarian and American forbear, Ralph Waldo Emerson’s celebration of self-reliance, his calling us back from human society to honor the wild and free, we are deeply communitarian. We are better together. We must not forget that our guts are a community of bacteria, our flesh and bone intimately dependent on plants and animals, soil, sun and water. Our language and DNA, no private creation. Our culture of self-reliance and private accumulation are the products of social movements, reactions to social circumstances. We are part of an interdependent web of all existence.
Winter holy days are the culture’s seasonal celebration of gratitude and generosity. As Unitarian Universalists, gratitude and generosity are our year-around religious practices.
We recognize inherent worth and dignity in every individual. And when we come together as a religious community we become more than private valuing persons. We become Unitarian Universalist communities of celebration and compassion, collective service and spiritual growth, communities of mutual trust and support. Something more than herding cats!
This holiday season may we celebrate greater gratitude and generosity for our global and intimate interconnections. Blessings!
Rev. Rod Debs, pastor