Finding Your Path - UUA - Unitarian Universalist Association

Session 5: Our Highest AspirationsFor the FacilitatorThis session focuses on what participants aspire to do and be, and requires a somewhatsafe space if participants are going to risk saying things that might not be popular orexpected. Be sure to create that space here. If participants brought a story aboutsomething they’ve always dreamed of doing, you might weave those stories into thecheck-in, or into the first round of sharing after the focus reading. Be careful not to letthis go on for too long.Opening Words/Chalice LightingMay we be reminded here of our highest aspirations,and inspired to bring our gifts of love and service to the altar of humanity.May we know once again that we are not isolated beingsbut connected, in mystery and miracle, to the universe,to this community and to each other.-Anonymous (Reading #434 in Singing The Living Tradition)Focus ReadingEverywhere IncarnateRev. David E. BumbaughHumanism believes that man is a part of nature and that he has emerged as a result of acontinuous process.— Humanist Manifesto I (1933), Second AffirmationWhen the Humanist Manifesto declared that we are part of nature and have emerged asthe result of a continuous process, it not only denied the creation stories of thewestern religious traditions: It gave us an immensely richer, more complex history-onerooted in a system which invites not blind faith but challenge, correction andamendment, one which embraces "truth, known or to be known." It also gave us alanguage of reverence because it provided us a story rooted not in the history of asingle tribe or a particular people, but a history rooted in the sum of our knowledge ofthe universe itself.It gave us a doctrine of incarnation which suggests not that the holy became human inone place at one time to convey a special message to a single chosen people, but thatthe universe itself is continually incarnating itself in microbes and maples, inhummingbirds and human beings, constantly inviting us to tease out the revelationcontained in stars and atoms and every living thing. A language of reverence for16