Group Session Plan

Opening Words:
Love cannot remain by iteself -- it has no meaning
Love has to be put into action and that action is service. --Mother Teresa

Check-in: Sharing by participants in this covenanted UU community.

Topic
"Is love an art? Then it requires knowledge and effort. Or is love a pleasant sensation, which to experience is a matter of chance, something one 'falls into' if one is lucky?

"Not that people think that love is unimportant. They are starved for it; they watch endless numbers of films about happy and unhappy love stories, they listen to hundreds of trashy songs about love -- yet hardly anyone thinks that there is anything that needs to be learned about love.

"This peculiar attitude is based on several premises which either singly or combined tend to uphold it. Most people see the problem of love primarily as that of being loved, rather than that of loving, of one’s capacity to love. Hence the problem to them is how to be loved, how to be lovable.

"A second premise behind the attitude that there is nothing to be learned about love is the assumption that the problem of love is the problem of an object, not the problem of a faculty. People think that to love is simple, but that to find the right object to love, or be loved by, is difficult.

"A third error leading to the assumption that there is nothing to be learned about love lies in the confusion between the initial state of 'falling' in love and the permanent state of being in love.

"The first step to take is to become aware that love is an art; just as living is an art."
--Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving

Focus Questions:

• How much love is present in your life?
• What can you (or any of us) do to increase our capacity for love?
• Relate an experience when your understanding of love deepened.
• What opportunities did you miss before that experience?
• How are things different now?

Likes And Wishes: Invitation to participants to share thoughts, feelings, or issues that came up for them during the experience of this session.

Closing Words:
And now these, faith and hope and love abide, these three, and the greatest of these is love.
--1 Corinthians 13

Opening Words
I want to be more loving. Often there are good and sufficient reasons for exercising what seems a clean direct resentment. Again and again, I find it hard to hold in check the sharp retort, the biting comeback when it seems that someone has done violence to my self-respect and decent regard. How natural it seems to "give as good as I get," to "take nothing lying down," to announce to all and sundry in a thousand ways that "no one can run over me and get away with it!" All this is a part of the thicket in which my heart gets often caught again and again. Deep within me, I want to me more loving -- to glow with a warmth that will take the chill off the room I share with those whose lives touch mine in the traffic of my goings and comings. I want to be more loving!
--Howard Thurman, Meditations of the Heart ,p>

Check-In: Sharing by participants in this covenanted UU community.

Topic:
The rate of divorce in the U.S. is now over 50 percent. Often, especially when there are children involved, the decision to stick with or to leave a failing marriage or partnership is agonizing. What is the right thing to do? Which should be foremost: for the heart, for the soul, for the children? Some believe that the problem with so many failed relationships is lack of commitment or fortitude. Some even think it’s a lack of good religion. Many believe relationships fail because so many people enter them with unreasonably high expectations of what it means to be in a long-term intimate relationship, and a complete misunderstanding of what love is. Some believe it’s just a matter of being lucky enough to find the right person.

Nonetheless, humans seem programmed to love. Even children who have suffered terrible abuse from their parents will describe them in loving terms and feel strong, affectionate bonds with their tormentors. At some basic, animal level, we seem to need each other. And, with very few cultural exceptions, "couples" of whatever sexual orientation, seem to be the basic family unit for mammals on planet earth.

Focus Questions:

• What makes a long-term relationship work? What makes love stay (or go away)?
• Does love still matter after 30 years with the same person? Why or why not?
• Is "romantic love" still possible with the same person after 30 years?
• Is there such a thing as a "soulmate?" Is there someone for everyone out there somewhere?
• Why do so many relationships fail?
• Imagine your only child is about to make a life-long commitment to their chosen partner. What is the best advice you could give them? If you don’t have children, use your imagination and answer the question anyway. What advice do you wish you had been given?

Likes/Wishes: Invitation to participants to share thoughts, feelings, or issues that came up for them during the experience of this session.

Closing Words:
Someone once challenged Sigmund Freud on his propensity to dwell on the neurotic and dysfunctional aspects of being human. How, the person asked him, would a completely sane, emotionally healthy, non-neurotic person behave? How would you recognize one if they showed up on your doorstep? He responded that a completely sane, emotionally healthy person would be able to work and to love.

Opening Words:
Nothing has a stronger influence psychologically on their environment and especially on their children than the unlived life of the parent. --Carl Jung

Check-in: Sharing by participants in this covenanted community.

Topic:

First Reading: Fathers, fathering, and fatherhood are ideals and models that have been somewhat mixed up from the beginning. Consider the story of Abraham and Isaac. When Isaac is not quite an adolescent, God commands Abraham to lead him away to a mountaintop, and make of him a burnt offering. And Abraham, the father of all the Jews, patriarch of patriarchs, a man with a Big Idea, simply obeys. He does not plead. He does not question. He does not wonder at the kind of God who would ask such a thing, or even check to make sure he heard it right. Imagine the scene... A child tied with ropes to the tinder he himself had carried, an old man, his father, standing over him with the knife raised, his hand stayed at the last moment by God finally believing the Abraham’s faith had been successfully tested.

Scott Turow in The Laws of Our Fathers has written of this story: ". . . the bible does not record Isaac’s responses. We do not know if he, like Jesus, asked, "Father, why have you forsaken me?" We do not know if he begged, the way most of us would, for his life. We know only that he obeyed. That he was a child. That because he knew nothing else, he did as his father required. We know he allowed himself to be bound with rope. We know he let his father lay him on the altar of pyramided firewood which together they had raised to God. We know he watched his father on the mountaintop raise the gleaming knife above his breastbone. We know he was a child, the son of a man with a Big Idea, who in his longing and confusion, even in his final instants, could only look to his father with that eternal if foundering hope for love."

Second Reading: Scott Russell Sanders in Hunting for Hope: A Father's Journeys writes in memoriam to his father: "I never know where you’ll turn up next. Jesse and I were backpacking in the Smoky Mountains this past August, not far from your Mississippi stomping grounds. He was barely three when you died, your fourth grandchild, so he remembers you only through family stories. As we made camp in a grove of hickories and oaks that you would have admired, I was telling him about my own hikes with you. Then along toward supper time the sky turned dark and ornery with a coming storm. Before the rain hit, we decided to rig our ponchos into an awning to cover the stove. In order to stretch a line from one tree to the next, we needed to tie a pair of ropes together. I knew the best knot for the job was a sheet bend, a favorite of sailors and farmers, as you explained on the day you taught it to me. I hadn’t tied one in years, and so long as I stared at the ropes I couldn’t remember how. Then I shut my eyes and my hands began to move, weaving the ropes; when I looked again, there was the proper knot. Jesse and I stayed dry under the awning. After we ate, he asked me to show him how to tie a sheet bend. So I did, and there you were again, reaching through my hands, reaching through his."

Focus Questions:

• Who were these men who were our fathers? What did they strive for?
• How are we like them? How are we different?
• What did they teach us? What did they never learn?
• Tell two stories about your fathers: one positive, one negative.
• What have you never forgiven them for?
• For what will you always be grateful?

Likes/Wishes:Invitation to participants to share thoughts, feelings, and issues that came up for them during the experience of this session.

Closing Words: by Native American poet Dick Lourie from the video Smoke Signals
How do we forgive our fathers? Maybe in a dream? . . . Will we forgive our fathers in our age--or in theirs? Or in their death? If we forgive our fathers, what is left?

Opening Words:
"May the door of this home be wide enough to receive all who hunger for love, all who are lonely for friendship. May it welcome all who have cares to unburden, thanks to express, hopes to nurture. May the door of this house be narrow enough to shut out pettiness and pride, envy, and enmity. May its threshold be no stumbling block to young or stained feet. May it be too high to admit complacency, selfishness and harshness. May this home be for all who enter, the doorway to richness and a more meaningful life."
--Siddur Shir Chadash: Youth and Family

Check-in: Sharing by participants in this covenanted UU community.

Topics:

First Reading:: "Family is the first community that most of us know. When families fall apart, as they are doing now at an unprecedented rate, those who suffer through the breakup often lose faith not only in marriage but in every human bond. If compassion won’t reach across the dinner table, how can it reach across the globe? If two or four or seven people who share house and food and even kinship can’t get along, what are the prospects for harmony in larger and looser groups, in neighborhoods, cities, or nations?"
Scott Russell Sanders, Hunting For Hope: A Father's Journeys

Second Reading:"Popular psychology has implied that if one’s intimate relationships are in order, life will be fine. But the situation is more complex than that. People cannot be whole and healthy unless they connect their lives to something larger than their own personal happiness. Freud postulated a great need for sex; I say our greatest human need is for love. We need to be reconnected one with another."
Mary Pipher, The Shelter of Each Other: Rebuilding Our Families

Focus Questions:

• Who are the people in your family? What are your family values?
• Who do you show up for? Who shows up for you? Who do you have faith in?
• Who are the people who know your secrets? With whom do you take the risk of relating?

Likes/Wishes: Invitation to participants to share thoughts, feelings, and issues that came up for them during the experience of this session.

Closing Words:
A long time I have lived with you and now we must be going separately to be together. Perhaps I shall be the wind to blur your smooth waters -- so that you do not see your face too much . . . Perhaps I shall be a new mountain -- so that you always have a home.
--Nancy Woods, Many Winters