Grace and Mercy by David Saetre

David Saetre, Speaker: “Grace and Mercy”

Dear UU Friends: I plan to dedicate my talks with you this year to the classical themes and ideas that have animated the western spiritual traditions for centuries. These great themes include core ideas like “grace”, “redemption”, “atonement”, “charity”, even the meaning of a word like “faith”. These words have also become loaded with historical baggage of church dogma. It’s occurred to me that we risk losing the power of these ideas as we move away from the traditions associated with the terms. How might these classical themes inform a lively spirituality today? Can we rediscover or recover the power and meaning these words once conveyed?

In my talk on September 11, “The End(s) of Religion” I suggested that ideas like redemption and love were the proper and sometimes forgotten goals of religious imagination and spirituality.

And, I suggested that religious communities like ours would do well to reconsider the worldhealing power contained in these classical ideas. So, my first talk in the series is simply titled, “Grace and Mercy.” What does the word “grace” mean; what is there in that core idea of the western tradition that might animate our sense of well-being in everyday experience? That seems like a good place to begin.
Future talks will include some of the other ideas mentioned above. I hope our explorations of these ideas will be meaningful contributions to deepening our spiritual lives as individuals and as a progressive, living and liberal spiritual community.