Sermons focus on friendship and hospitality

Two Unitarian Universalist Fellowship sermons delivered Sunday 6 December, 2009 mention Thomas Moore’s involvement at the UU Ministers’ Convocation 2009. Each focuses on the soul’s need for friendship and hospitality.

At the Unitarian Universalist Church of Athens and Sheshequin in Athens, Pennsylvania, Rev. Darcey Laine speaks about "The Soul of Friendship":

"A few weeks ago I had the privilege of hearing author Thomas Moore address the Convocation of UU Ministers in Canada. He was talking about how we tend and feed the soul, and suggested that the most important way we can sustain our souls is friendship."

After illustrating the value of friendship with a poem by Rumi about childhood friends, Laine continues,

As I heard Thomas Moore talk I realized how the soul hungers for such a friendship. Yet somehow as an adult I had kind of gotten the idea that responsible grown ups didn’t crave that kind of friendship, that it wouldn’t have the centrality it did when we were children. It was so affirming to hear Moore talk about the importance of Friendship not just to our "networks" or to our social life, but to our SOUL.

Moore went on to talk about Jesus’ relationship with his disciples, how he called them friend, and how he often ate and cooked and even drank wine with them. Friendship was in the fabric of Jesus’ ministry."

Laine’s sermon explores the value of friendship and the importance of comfortable intimacy among friends.

In "Soul Food", Rev. Lisa Friedman in Mankato, Minnesota says,

"At a recent conference in Ottawa, Ontario, I had the opportunity to hear Thomas Moore, author of such books as Care of the Soul and most recently Writing in the Sand: Jesus and the Soul of the Gospels. Moore makes a distinction between the spiritual needs of the spirit (or mind) and the spiritual needs of the soul. In his experience as a theologian and psycho-therapist, he finds that the human spirit likes distance, but that our souls crave intimacy. So, first and foremost, he argues that the soul needs a home – a physical body and real places to experience pleasure and beauty, pain and loss. But once it finds that home, what the soul needs more than anything is a friend."

Friedman considers how to invite friendship into one’s home and shares,

"Last, but certainly not least, after sweet words and a sitting place, it is the hospitable tradition to offer our guests refreshments. The Hindu teachings are clear that this need not be anything fancy or extravagant. Even a glass of water will suffice. But every host and hostess in all cultures knows that a shared drink, or a shared meal, however large or small, changes our relationship with one another. For Moore, the meaning found in this sharing is not spiritual, but soulful. It is not an intellectual experience to be pursued, but a visceral experience of being alive that re-enchants us with the world in which we live. It a sharing of the pleasure of taste, the joy of company, and the imagination of story and conversation that creates the intimacy which nourishes our soul. Although there are no guarantees, the evidence of human history is that the shared meal can temper us to our enemies, redeem us to our family and friends, and bring together nations and peoples in new ways. It is the foundation of families, and perhaps even the bedrock of our society."

Both sermons are available in their entirety at the linked pages.

Foolishness flavours friendship and intimacy

In the post, "Simple Mind Zen: In Praise of Folly, the Holy Fool", a follower of Charlotte Joko Beck, Diane Rizzetto and Ezra Bayda, describes the value of foolishness in soul: "As modern thinkers, we may present to the world a well developed intellect, a sense of proportion, but the soul is more fertile in its own imagination, in its own earth, finding value in sometimes irrationality. Perhaps this is in part why great artists and inventive minds seem a bit eccentric or mad to the average onlooker."

After opening the post with a Thomas Moore quote, the blogger states, "The light of Oneness not withstanding, there is great temptation to separate, to judge, to make comparisons of these oddities of soul. Yet this mutual vulnerability is one of the great gifts of love. To give another sufficient space in which to live and express one's soul in its reason and unreason, and then to further risk revelations of your self, in all its potential absurdities. The courage required for this oneness is not easy; it is infinitely more demanding than either judgment or comparisons. While most of us contain ourselves fairly well, the soul and its ways eventually surface bringing forth the unexpressed that we sense stirring inside."

The writer concludes, "Tolerance, 'honoring that aspect of the self that may be irrational or extreme is the basis for intimacy,' writes Thomas Moore. We have fewer expectations of perfection, less judgement; less and less are we separated by these notions. We come to recognize that the soul, in its meanderings, tends to move into new and positive areas in spite of, and because of the oddities expressed."

"To befriend" is a verb beginning with soul

Jack Heppner blogs about friendship and loneliness with references to Thomas Moore’s Care of the Soul. Heppner states, "Many of us spend our lives in the borderlands between loneliness and true friendship. While loneliness is the hallmark of modern North American society, there is nevertheless a continual quest for friendships that are deep and that will last. According to Thomas Moore, the reason such friendships are hard to come by lie both in the nature of the community in which we aspire to find true friendships and in the region of our individual souls."

After talking about his own experiences teaching at an evangelical college, Heppner writes, "Too often, it seems to me, we experience loneliness while surrounded by people because, as Moore says, we wait around to be received into community and thus true friendship. But with such an orientation, even if and when we are welcomed into a community, we may still feel lonely. That is so because we have not yet learned that true friendship is always a two-way street. It is not a birthright owed you by other people. "Belonging" and "friendship" are active verbs that start their work in one’s soul."

Heppner continues, "An ancient philosopher, Ficino, once said that "... to be loved you must love." That is to say that unless and until your soul is ready to give of itself freely and with integrity, you will always be lonely, no matter how much welcoming you receive by others. Belonging is not the work of others, it is our own work. A person oppressed by loneliness can go out into the world and simply start belonging to it, not by joining organizations, but living through feelings of relatedness -–to other people, to nature, to society, to the world as a whole" (Moore).