UNIVERSITY UNITARIAN CHURCH

Reflection Groups

Spring 2024 Reflection Groups: Fierce Love

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Reflection Groups at UUC were introduced in Spring 2022 to encourage the experience of discovery, solace, hope, and courage through UU spiritual exploration, reflection, and meditative practice in the supportive company of others. You’ll join a group of 8-10 participants including a trained facilitator or co-facilitators, for six sessions meeting twice a month for two hours each time. Participants are asked to make a commitment to attend for the duration of the group.

A guiding text is chosen to provide an encounter with spiritual diversity, offering a perspective that we hope will be new for most UUs. By engaging terms and concepts likely to be outside the known and comfortable, Reflection Group participants will have the opportunity to practice loosening rigid personal habits and cultural norms and gain insight into adapting and applying meaning in a more fluid frame of circumstances and lived experience.

These are not discussion groups. Rather, they invite personal reflections offered from the heart, and are met with deep listening rather than immediate response. Reflection groups develop the capacity to be present with open acceptance, refraining from cross-talk, critique, offering advice, or trying to identify and fix a problem. Agreements on engagement are held in covenant among group members, who may choose to mutually amend their chosen practices any time.

These are not book groups. While a book will be used to provide a common foundation for personal reflection and introspective spiritual practice, the content will not be reviewed and evaluated as a group. Reading, contemplation and preparation is expected in advance of each meeting. During the gathering, participants will allow reflections to emerge through spiritual practices such as Lectio Divina and periods of silent introspection. Facilitators will guide these practices and offer reflection questions to invite sharing. Journaling (writing, art, music) is an important aspect of this program.

Our guiding text for spring 2024 is Fierce Love: A Bold Path to Ferocious Courage and Rule-Breaking Kindness That Can Heal the World, by the Rev. Dr. Jacqui Lewis. The book may be found at the UUC Bookstore (open on Sunday mornings or by appointment), from commercial sources, or from public libraries, including in eBook format.

Why this text? As the book jacket notes, we are living in a world divided. Race and ethnicity, caste and color, gender and sexuality, class and education, religion and political party have all become demographic labels that reduce our differences to simplistic categories in which “we” are vehemently against “them.” But Rev. Dr. Jacqui Lewis’s own experience—of being the first female and first Black minister in her church’s history, of being in an interracial marriage, and of making peace with childhood abuse—illustrates that our human capacity for empathy and forgiveness is the key to reversing these ugly trends.

The book is inspired by the tenets of ubuntu—the Zulu philosophy that we are each impacted by the circumstances that impact those around us, and that the world won’t get better until we all get better. Fierce Love lays out the nine daily practices for breaking through tribalism and engineering the change we seek. From downsizing our emotional baggage to speaking truth to power to fueling our activism with joy, it demonstrates the power of small, morally courageous steps to heal our own lives, our posse, and our larger communities. Sharing stories that trace her personal reckoning with racism as well as the arc of her journey to an inclusive and service-driven faith, Dr. Lewis shows that kindness, compassion, and inclusive thinking are muscles that can be exercised and strengthened. With the goal of mending our inextricable human connection, Fierce Love is a manifesto for all generations: a bighearted, healing antidote to our rancorous culture.

How do I sign up? Applications are available online (use the button below), and printed application forms are available at the church. Applications are due by February 23. Groups will be formed based on availability of participants, with an eye to balancing warm companionship and diversity of perspective. Groups usually meet in-person at the church, but there are Zoom and off-site participation options too—applicants are able to mark their choices on the application form. Those assigned to groups may expect confirming information by February 28. Groups begin in March.

Need help with your application or have other questions? Contact Janine Larsen, UUC Director of Ministries.

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