Going Beyond

Inspiration: 

What draws you beyond yourself?

Going Beyond

Get over yourself! Or at least get beyond yourself. That’s kind of the idea of “transcendence,” our theme for this month. When you transcend something you go beyond it. A prisoner transcends his circumstances when he focuses on living a life of peaceful compassion while stuck in a setting designed to degrade the human spirit. A student transcends social boundaries when she sits at a table full of people who speak a different language or belong to a different social clique. A job seeker transcends anxiety and depression to go out and contact people who might or might not have leads on a job.

But we also use “transcendence” to talk about a fuzzier sense of something that goes beyond our ordinary reality, a feeling of something larger that’s hard to describe. Our Unitarian Universalist Principles and Purposes statement describes one of the sources of our living tradition as: “Direct experience of that transcending mystery and wonder, affirmed in all cultures, which moves us to a renewal of the spirit and an openness to the forces that create and uphold life.” Which is pretty much of a mouthful, but gets at the idea that there is a mysterious, larger something that holds us all together, that has to do with creativity and open-heartedness and growing.

BY LYNN UNGAR, MINISTER FOR LIFESPAN LEARNING, CHURCH OF THE LARGER FELLOWSHIP TO READ MORE

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