June 28, 2026: Nurturing Beloved Community

Rev. Susan Frederick-Gray
How do we create in the context of our communities the qualities of love, compassion, inclusion, dignity and justice that are necessary for the Beloved Community?

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Sermon Text

Nurturing Beloved Community

Rev. Susan Frederick-Gray

UU Church of Bloomington

June 28, 2026

SERMON Nurturing Beloved Community

Thank you, Gladys, for sharing your beautiful poem, “Come Sit with Me.” I am so grateful to be reading your book, Come Sit with Me: Life in Poetry, Prose and Plays. Thank you, Cloud 7, for the beautiful gifts of music this morning. We are grateful for the abundant gifts and wisdom of this community.

Have you all heard the phrase, “I am spiritual, but not religious.” This phrase was going around a lot a decade or so ago, especially with the conversation on the “nones” - n-o-n-e-s. People with no religious affiliation.

Well, recently, a couple totally unrelated people here in the congregation talked about being “religious but not spiritual.” This was actually a phrase that a religious educator I worked with at the UU Congregation of Phoenix used to describe herself.

A lot of people who are “spiritual but not religious” can find a home in Unitarian Universalism - after all, many would say we are not that religious, especially if you define religion as a set of doctrines and rules set from on high, where authority and obedience are highly valued. That is not UU. But, understanding “religion” differently, I imagine there might be a lot of UUs who better describe themselves as “religious but not spiritual.”

I cannot speak for everyone for whom this idea resonates, but I remember the religious educator explaining how she took the UU religious community seriously - that she didn't feel spiritual in any way - but the discipline of coming to church, getting involved, nurturing the community, being fed by the practice of worship - the music, the readings, the sermon, singing together - these communal acts of practice and community were incredibly rewarding and meaningful. That was what brought her to UU - and it was religious to her, but not particularly spiritual.

It also connects to the etymological root of the word religious - which means to bind together, by emphasizing the communal practices of being religious.

This month and all year, we have been exploring what it means to nurture beloved community. Today we will focus on the “community” in beloved community.

The teachings of Thich Nhat Hanh are a beautiful place to center ourselves. Within Buddhist tradition, there are the three jewels that are pillars of Buddhist practice. They are the Buddha, the Dharma, and the Sangha. The Buddha is the teacher. First and foremost, this is the historical Buddha, Siddhartha Gautama, but also all the contemporary teachers and guides who lead Buddhist communities. The Dharma is the teachings - including the eightfold path, the four noble truths, and more - the specifics of Buddhist teaching. And the Sangha is the community, the community of practice.

Thich Nhat Hanh put a great deal of emphasis on the importance of the Sangha - the community. He used this metaphor that if we are a drop of water and we want to get to the ocean as a drop, we will be quickly dried up. But if we go as a river, we will make our way to the sea.

How do we get from a place of greed, despair, cruelty in our lives and society to a place like the beloved community - defined by compassion, mutuality, dignity, and care? Thich Nhat Hanh argued that being in community, practicing in community, is essential. For we can't nurture a more just world if we cannot cultivate it in ourselves and in our own families and community. Community is where we learn, practice, and are changed by compassion and mutuality.

Thich Nhat Han writes of the sangha, or community, in his book, Creating True Peace: Ending Violence in Yourself, Your Family. Your Community and the World. He writes:

“The sangha is your river. In our daily practice, we learn how to be a part of this river. We have to train ourselves to see the happiness of our community as our own happiness and to see the difficulties of our community as our own difficulties. Once we are able to do this, we will suffer much less. We will feel stronger and more joyful. As members of a sangha, we can develop our individual talent and our individual potential, and at the same time contribute to and participate in the talent and happiness of the entire group. Nothing is lost; everyone wins.”

Не continues:
“A sangha has the power to protect and carry us, especially in difficult times. We have a better chance to develop our potential and protect ourselves when we participate in the work of sangha building. The Sangha River is a community of friends who practice the way of harmony…”

Maybe this seems pollyanna or overly simplified, but there is a reality in our world that too many of our lives have been shaped by trauma and violence. When we consider what leads people to find joy in cruelty, to celebrate the removal of protected status for people fleeing violence to find safety as we have seen our government leaders do, when we see people relish the wanton disregard and dehumanizing of other human beings, celebrate the exploitation of the earth for financial gain, and be willing to threaten and attempt genocide - where does this love of violence, where does this cruelty come from? Often it comes from the experiences that shaped us, including experiences of violence, neglect, cruelty, abandonment, chaos, and crisis when we were young. There is a brokenness, a wound, a trauma revealed in cruelty. And honestly, we all likely carry some woundedness, and some of us have a longer way to travel than others to actually experience what compassion, belonging, and safety outside of systems of violence can be. Some never seem to get there.

But community is one place where we can begin to heal, and trust, and nurture practices of compassion and mutuality - for ourselves and others in our lives. Specifically, communities that seek to practice beloved community - that seek to affirm the individuality, wholeness, and dignity of each person - that seek to foster mutual care and cooperation and shared endeavor - that is rooted in creating more peace, more compassion, more liberation within and beyond the community - these values and commitment are not something you find every day. And if it is far from your own experience, it is not something easily trusted.

In Buddhism, as in our own tradition of Unitarian Universalism, it is the teachings and the values of interdependence, mutuality, generosity, dignity, compassion, love that can help us free ourselves from fear of the other, from scarcity thinking, from greed, from isolation and division and from violence (toward ourselves or others). But it is actually practicing together in community the acts of sharing each others joys and sorrows, feeding the community, working together to build houses or raise money for shelters, or getting out the vote, or sitting in the quiet peace of the Meeting Room, singing together, lighting candles, learning, listening to each other’s stories in a Chalice Circle - these practices are the practices of the religious community.

They are the discipline that help us learn how to cultivate more love, peace, more generosity and more care for each other and all creation. The teachings alone are not enough. The community helps us embody them, feel them, remember them. It helps us be a river and not a lonely drop. And it can be a source of healing and connection that ripples out, that draws in, that weaves through more lives.

In reflecting on Thich Nhat Hanh's teachings; another monk of Plum Village that Hanh founded, Brother Phap Dung wrote: “[He] understood the power of the collective energy for healing and transformation, recognizing the interbeing nature of the individual and the collective. He consistently invited us to embrace the noble task of building the beloved community, a vision shared by Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. [Thich Nhat Hanh] proclaimed that the twentieth century's emphasis on consumerist individualism must now give way to the twenty-first century's call for communities of interbeing - or communities of mindful resistance - if we are to survive as a species. ‘Sangha building is the most noble task,’ he often encouraged us."2

In this last line Brother Phap Dung is quoting Thich Nhat Hanh - “sangha building” - nurturing the religious community, the beloved community - “is the most noble task.”

2 Brother Phap Dung, Plum Village, “Thich Nhat Hahn's Vision: The Village Way as the Beloved Community of Engaged Buddhism.” September 19, 2025. Quote of Thích Nhất Hạnh is from "True Transmission," The Mindfulness Bell 81 (2019): 6-15.

In this religiously and spiritually diverse community, the words spiritual and religious, they don't work for everyone, and can even be painful. They can mean so many different things to each of us. What I hear in the phrase “religious but not spiritual” is the emphasis on the practice - the discipline - of being a part of and nurturing a religious community that is seeking to teach us all how to be more loving, more kind, more generous, more mindful and connected to our wider world. And while no community is perfect - and perfection is actually not the goal - nobody is perfect; how could community be perfect - the beloved community is one where we nurture our compassion and attention to one another and all creation.

As Gladys DeVane reflects, it is about awakening from numbness, or constant negativity and self-absorption, to be attentive to the wonders and beauty around us, to our larger connection to life and to each other. And it is not just knowing this - it is practicing it, and being reminded of it again and again through a community of practice - a religious community. Where we come sit together. Religious not because of doctrine or creed or authority or obedience. Religious because it is faithful, because it is practiced, because it calls us together to the values and teachings that we hold most high - love, dignity, interdependence, generosity, justice, compassion, and transformation - in other words, the values we seek in the beloved community.