“I guess after plan A fails, I need to remember there’s still a whole alphabet out there.”
Who of us doesn’t need a little help remembering that? Especially after enduring Covid for so long. The war in Ukraine, hatred and violence across the nation, the ongoing reckoning with racism, the world’s inability to deal with climate change. And political division. You get the point.
It’s easy to feel demoralized, daunted and defeated these days. With so many things going wrong, it’s easy to overlook the many things going right.
For Unitarian Universalists, this tunnel vision is the central tragedy of the human condition. Which is also why blessings are so core to our faith. They are our way of widening our view.
As UU’s we don’t say a lot of blessings. But we do point to them. For us, blessings are not so much about giving something to each other or receiving something from on high, as they are about helping each other notice all that’s already been given. To notice and to live into blessings prompts us to live in balance and experience joy and gratitude even when tumult surrounds us.
And it’s not just about widening our view to see the gifts and blessings themselves; it’s about widening our understanding of life. Pointing to blessings repairs our relationship with life, allowing us to see it as generous instead of indifferent or threatening. And that’s no small thing. Because when the world seems stingy with us, we start getting stingy with others. In contrast, those who feel blessed have little trouble passing blessings on. Life spills into us and we spill into others.
And in that overflow, it does indeed get a whole lot easier to notice that there is, most certainly, a whole alphabet out there.
Submitted by Linda Sherry, and modified from the June 2022 Soul Matters materials. Soul Matters is a UU guide for monthly themes available to All UU Congregations. Please consider bringing these themes to your WUUC small groups, circle suppers, even committee meetings. And to those you know outside our community – just imagine if more and more people could balance their life, to sooth their suffering by including and embracing the blessings, wherever they can be found. — and they are everywhere when you know how to look.
Find the June Soul Matters packet here.