R e l i g i o u s e d u c at i o n
Mind, Body, and Spirit
On February 2, I will be joined in the service by the Coming of Age students and several members of last
year’s high school Our Whole Lives class to explore Mind, Body, and Spirit from their perspective.
What we do here matters. What we take from this congregation into the world matters. How we
understand ourselves, from youngest to oldest, to be a vital, vibrant, crucial part of this congregation
matters as well.
Our congregational mission is multigenerational, community based, and reaches out to the wider world.
Our religious community supports and challenges us as we stretch to live our mission more deeply and in
new ways. We live our mission personally with our minds as we listen, think, talk about ideas; with our
bodies as we connect with one another at worship, events, work parties; with our spirit as we join in
meditation, song, deep listening to personal sharing.
We live our mission collectively through outreach (visit the Parlor and see a photo and text update about
the goats for the Bod me Limbe village in Haiti that the COA class of 2011 funded with your help)
through creating community, through learning and growing in formal and informal ways. We continue
to reach to meet this mission in some of the same ways, and we challenge ourselves to live our mission in
new ways.
Dr. Rebecca Parker says that Unitarian Universalist communities offer salvation from those things that
deny life or make life less whole. We offer opportunities to embrace life, and to become more whole – as
individuals, people in relationship, as a whole community. We here at USNF are variously comfortable
with the word “salvation,” but I think it is an important one, particularly when others use it to mean,
“take us out of our bodies, out of our communities, and orient toward an imagined post-life future.” I
think we ought to own the word salvation. Here. Now. Unitarian Universalism saves people who may
be in soul-wrenching crisis, in loneliness, in hunger, or trapped in a culture that objectifies and
depersonalizes them. Unitarian Universalism says to people, “We here embrace life. We live life. We
will live a whole, embodied, loving life together. You are not alone.”
One of the many ways we might describe how we are embodied is to talk of Mind, Body, and Spirit.
People articulate this in different ways, but we tend to understand these not as separate elements, but as
threads woven together within ourselves, reaching out to weave connections with others, and with the
world in various embodied ways. We reach out always with our bodies, with courage and love.
Cindy Beal, DRE
The Pioneer 3