I have begun this post a few times. I keep getting bogged down in throat clearing.
What I want to talk about is how my current religious community informs the way I live my life. The background here includes the UU posts from a few years ago (see the This is Worker Speaking posts in the Categories list). Especially the posts about free-range UU. Take a look.
My wife and I (and children) are not currently attending a UU congregation. Instead, we are members of a community with its own peculiar twenty-year history, moving from a member congregation of a reformed denomination to a “community from all backgrounds, spiritual and secular, who have come together to honor and explore what it means to be fully human.”
Someone from a UU congregation would probably feel pretty comfortable pretty quickly with our form and substance. I certainly did when we started attending in earnest. There are even moments when, sitting in our Sunday Gathering, my subjective experience is one of being perfectly right. This this is the place where being and becoming perfectly overlap.
But the difficult thing about where we are is similar to the difficult part of being UU. How does that actually inform how we live? We are kind, and sensitive, and try to walk lightly on the earth, we read–seek out–perspectives which are not our own, and we try to remain conscious of those experiences. We do these things independently of our membership in our religious community.
So.. why do we need the community? What makes it better to be with?
And… separately, how does with work? That’s what I’ll be working out here.
Grumble Flap 