Monday, January 15, 2018

UUs are blessed with their appreciation of the interdependent web

Unitarian Universalists covenant together to affirm and promote a respect (which I think should be love) of the interdependent web of all existence which (it would seem to go without saying) we are a part.

It is a principle in systems theory that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. We, humans, have learned much about the nature of the world by breaking things down into their component parts. Our logic and rationality is linear and reductionistic and this approach has contributed to great scientific understandings of the phenomenal world. And yet, with this linear and reductionistic approach, some of us understand that something is missing. Newtonian physics, looking at the world like a mechanism of a clock, doesn't quite cut it. This perception is missing something. So we put the things we have deconstructed back together again looking for the whole and the quality that the parts, individually, are missing.

What gives us peace and satisfaction is wholeness, oneness, the still place where there are no boundaries, no limits, no discrete parts that are less than the whole. We long for the whole, for the Oneness from which we came and to which we return.

Humans complicate things. We break existence down into parts. We separate things and in doing so we create illusions that are not real. We are only seeing a part of the whole, the proverbial "tip of the iceberg." Don't be fooled by perceptions. They are not what they seem to us to be. We are missing the whole picture which we consciously or unconsciously crave.

UUs explicitly state in their covenantal principles their appreciation of the interdependent web of all existence, some of us would call, God's creation. In this principle, UUs name their longing and their place in the world. We are so blessed in our recognition and our acknowledgement and our gratitude.

3 comments:

  1. What does it mean when people die and say they are "going home?"

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  2. We sense, don't we, that we are not really at home here and we long for something more. What is that "more" that we long for? People think it's money, love, power, fame, but realize, sometimes too late, that that's not it.

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    Replies
    1. Robert: We are looking for love and happiness. Like Tina Turner said though, "looking for love in all the wrong places." We even joke about marrying for love or for money - first time for love and second time for money or maybe vice versa. :-)

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