Beloved Community
“As I stood with them and saw white and Negro, nuns and priests, ministers and rabbis, labor organizers, lawyers, doctors, housemaids, and shopworkers brimming with vitality and enjoying a rare comradeship, I knew I was seeing a microcosm of the mankind of the future in this moment of luminous and genuine brotherhood.”
– Martin Luther King Jr. quote from 1966, after the March to Montgomery. King was among several thousand people delayed at the airport.
“Beloved Community is what happens when we engage our love and our power in a dynamic dance. Navigating the tension between our power and our love is the lifework and the soulwork that every individual, every group, every culture, and every generation must choose in order to live lives of connection, creativity, joyfulness, vitality and deep engagement with Life. When we are engaged in this work, we experience Beloved Community.”
– UUA website
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One of my summer projects was to build a small patio in the middle of one of Linda’s flower gardens in front of our house. (This was the summer of 2016) The space is just large enough for a bistro table and two chairs. And although it is a small space, one advantage that Linda likes is it’s a little less space that needs weeding! I like it because I can sit and drink my morning coffee surrounded by Linda’s beautiful flowers. As the summer progressed different varieties of flowers bloomed and then faded away only to be replaced by others in a smooth succession of color and variation. About two weeks ago the gladiolas arrived. They are the tallest member of Linda’s garden and quickly becoming one of my favorite. The glad has as many as 18 flowers on one stem and they open from bottom to top like they are waiting in line for the one next to them to go first. I think they are the most polite flower in Linda’s garden…
“Beloved Community” is a phrase made famous by Martin Luther King Jr. during the civil rights era promoting social justice and the language has also been adopted by the Unitarian Universalist Association regarding covenant and spiritual health in our congregations. Like a beautiful flower garden, Beloved Community cultivates diversity and inclusion into a living expression of compassion in our world. This vision is a shared vision and each one of us is a flower in the garden adding our unique flair. To create such a community there are responsibilities as well as challenges in the endeavor. “Building Beloved Community” takes all of us working, laughing, crying and loving together.
Moving forward together,
Dave