UNITARIAN UNIVERSALIST
PRINCIPLES/PARENTING: SMALL GROUP MINISTRY
Social Justice
AFFIRMATIONS:
Justice, equity, and compassion in human relations; and
The
goal of world community with peace, liberty, and justice for all.
We
are fair and kind to others. We help to make the world a better
place for everyone.
Opening
Words/Lighting Candle/chalice The Flaming Chalice:
The flaming chalice
is a flame burning the holy oil of helpfulness and
sacrifice--spreading warmth and light and hope. The chalice has been
a symbol of liberal religion since the fifteenth century, dating to
John Hus in Transylvania.
Hans Deutsch was an
Austrian refugee who lived in Paris until France was invaded in 1940.
He had worked in many European countries as a musician, drafter, and
portrait artist. Having contributed many cartoons with unflattering
content (about Nazism) to several newspapers in Vienna, he fled Paris
and finally settled in Portugal where he joined the staff of the
Unitarian Service Committee for six months as secretary and assistant
to Dr. Charles E. Joy, executive director of the USC.
Dr. Joy felt that this new, unknown
organization needed a visual image to represent Unitarianism to the
world, especially when dealing with government agencies abroad.
He asked his new assistant to work
in his spare time on designing a symbol for the Committee to use. The
result was the Flaming Chalice that grew out of social action and to
be adopted by the Unitarian Service Committee in 1941.
From http://www.uua.org/aboutuu/chalice.html
Check-in:
How are things going for you today?
Topic/Activity:
How
have or how could we involve our children in social action?
How
do we grasp the significance of social action on the ‘receivers’?
How do we help children to understand why a social justice issue is
important?
Within
Unitarian Universalism, social action is being called “Faith in
Action.” How does involvement in social action enhance our
spiritual journey?
There
are numerous ‘causes’ that come to our attention.
What
criteria do you use in determining which ones to support with your
resources?
How
do the Unitarian Universalist principles or affirmations apply in
making choices?
Closing
Words:
It
is Thanksgiving and an eight-year-old had not cleaned her plate. I
heard my son say, "Laura, clean your plate. Think of all the
starving children in the world." Laura steadily asserted that
there were no longer starving children in the world. Everyone
"jumped down her throat," as we say. She adamantly
replied, "Uncle Walter, you don't understand. My class sent
them a care package last week." Dorothy Spoerl
Likes
and Wishes: How was the session for you?
ADDITIONAL RESOURCES
Dan Harper, REsources for Living,
July/August 2003, Church of the Larger Fellowship. Also see
http://www.uua.org/clf/re/listings.html
, Ethics/Social Action
Sometimes we tend to think of social
action only in terms of social service projects, but I suggest that
we think about four different types of social action.
Social
education, or helping people to understand social issues.
Social education can include both learning about a particular social
issue and teaching others about an issue.
Social
witness, or publicly expressing your personal convictions
about a particular issue. Social witness can range from letters to
the editor, to participating in rallies and marches, to getting
arrested as a public statement of your views.
Social
service, or providing direct services to those who are in
need. It is this type of social action in which we most often ask
kids to get involved: we ask kids to work in a soup kitchen, or to
raise money for a good cause.
Direct
action, where you attempt to affect the decision-making
process. Examples of this type of social action might include writing
letters for Amnesty International, contacting elected
representatives, and even engaging in civil disobedience.
Any time we do social action with young
people we should start with social education. For example, your
family wants to serve dinner to homeless people on Thanksgiving Day.
The first step is to learn something about homeless shelters. Some
preliminary questions you might try to answer in this example are:
What do homeless shelters look like? Who works there? How many
homeless people use the homeless shelter? Maybe you could arrange to
visit a homeless shelter as a part of this learning process.
Then you might ask some harder
questions together: Is it OK to give money to homeless people when we
walk down city streets? Why do people become homeless? What
experiences of homelessness have people we know had? What are the
best ways to help homeless people?
You should ask that last question any
time you're planning to do social action: What's the best way we can
help? In the example, even though you started out wanting to serve
dinner at a homeless shelter on Thanksgiving, maybe as a part of your
social education you discover that everybody wants to serve dinner at
the shelter on Thanksgiving Day, but the shelter really needs people
who will contact elected representatives on a regular basis, and that
sounds just as interesting. Any social action project should
provide a good match between the needs of the people we're trying to
help and our own abilities and interests.
There are two other questions you will
want to consider as you plan your social action project. First, is a
given project appropriate for young people? Kids need (and want)
projects they can understand, and projects where they can see an end
result. Second, is a given project really going to contribute to a
long-term effort, or is it just another "band-aid" project?
Ideally, we want to find social action projects that are real and
meaningful. You can answer both these questions by starting off your
project with social education.
Zidowecki,
January 2006