There’s a holiness - Robinson

Date/Time
Date(s) - 03/27/2024
12:00 pm - 1:00 pm

A twice-weekly online sacred text reading group. We meet on Saturdays, 4-5, and on Wednesdays, 12-1. All are wide open and you are welcome! Please note that the Zoom room now requires a password, so please drop an e-mail to sacred-text-reading+owner@uucpa.org to express interest.

What do we mean by a sacred text? Any text that helps us to:

  • connect to something of supreme importance to us
  • feel more connected to other beings or to the universe
  • feel more intensely alive
  • align our lives with our values,
  • perceive or feel more deeply
  • be more fully and authentically ourselves.

As Unitarian Universalists, we find these kinds of meanings everywhere, so the text itself might be from a so-called secular source, or from a religious canon, or something in-between.

The participants over the years have found that the approach we take, and the respectful, affectionate community of inquirers in which we read and converse, are as important as the text. Our practice usually follows one of these versions of Lectio Divina. The aims of the sessions are educational (learning something about the texts and traditions), spiritual/moral (discovering what the texts ask of us), and community-building (getting to know each other better).

The facilitator will post a version of the text in the chat for all to see. Everyone is welcome, as are your suggestions of future texts. Group members also take turns facilitating, if they want to try that role.

On Wednesday, March 27, 2024, our text will be from the contemporary US American novelist Marilynne Robinson:

Perhaps when you say the word “God” for yourself, the conception that you have is something that’s foreign to your own higher experience. So trust your experience. There’s a holiness in the fact that people are living in the world in a way that makes them feel that the world is addressed to them.

This quote comes from a February 23, 2024, article in the New York Times: “Marilynne Robinson Considers Biden a Gift of God(the link should take you behind the paywall). There is no need to read the article, but you may find the immediate context helpful:

 

David Marchese (interviewer): Hearing you say that — I’m embarrassing myself, but it’s going to compel a confession from me. One real motivation for why I wanted to talk to you is that there are experiences of transcendence that you write about in your books that connect people to God or the divine. I feel as if I have transcendent experiences: being on my train ride into Midtown Manhattan and seeing an egret in the water of industrial New Jersey; listening to a song and being blown away that people can create that beauty; xperiencing the goodness of my family — any number of things. And I was raised with some religious instruction: I had a bar mitzvah; half of my family is Catholic. But for whatever reason, my heart cannot osmosize religious feeling. What am I missing?

Robinson: Maybe nothing. Perhaps when you say the word “God” for yourself, the conception that you have is something that’s foreign to your own higher experience. So trust your experience. There’s a holiness in the fact that people are living in the world in a way that makes them feel that the world is addressed to them, and I think that’s much closer to the divine, much closer to religion, than the idea of trying to bring the idea of God, which has been abused historically, into the frame that your expectations may create for that figure.For check-in / getting-acquainted time, and for those who are new and want a brief orientation to the practice, the room will be open ten minutes before and ten minutes after the session.

How to join: First, e-mail sacred-text-reading+owner@uucpa.org, since you will need a password. Then:

  • Join this class from your Web browser: https://zoom.us/j/96865808923
  • Join this class using the Zoom app: Meeting ID: 968 6580 8923
  • Join this class by phone: +1 669 900 6833 US (San Jose) Meeting ID: 968 6580 8923
  • Join this class by one-tap on mobile phones: +16699006833,,96865808923#  (San Jose)
  • Phoning in, but not in the Bay Area?  Find your local number: https://zoom.us/u/abL8clvIYT

This is the Zoom link for Wednesdays. For the Zoom link for Saturday, go to Calendar and click on a Saturday session.

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