Gratitude: The Heart Of Unitarian Universalism

Back in the Spring of 2007 the UU World published a feature article entitled The Heart Of Our Faith by Rev. Dr. Galen Guengerich the senior pastor at All Souls Church in New York City. The article was based on a sermon that Rev. Dr. Guengerich had given at All Souls on October 15, 2006.

Rev. Dr. Guengerich writes in part:

The feeling of awe emerges from experiences of the grandeur of life and the mystery of the divine. We happen upon a sense of inexpressible exhilaration at being alive and a sense of utter dependence upon sources of being beyond ourselves. This sense of awe and dependence should engender in us a discipline of gratitude, which constantly acknowledges that our present experience depends upon the sources that make it possible. The feeling of obligation lays claim to us when we sense our duty to the larger life we share. As we glimpse our dependence upon other people and things, we also glimpse our duty to them. This sense of obligation leads to an ethic of gratitude, which takes our experience of transcendence in the present and works for a future in which all relationships—among humans, as well as between humans and the physical world—are fair, constructive, and beautiful.

Rev. Dr. Guengerich had a book published in May of 2020 entitled “The Way Of Gratitude: A New Spirituality For Today.”