Practicing a UU Religious Life (PUURL)

“Find your contemplative practice and practice it.

Find your contemplative community and enter it.

Find your contemplative teaching and follow it.”

PUURL is a way of thinking about the ongoing programs and classes available through the church to help us better understand what it means to practice a UU religious life. PUURL has four organizing principles, which can be thought of as four quadrants of learning: Mind, Body, Heart, and Spirit. The UU religious life involves exploration of each quadrant. The Adult Programs committee will be producing a new PUURL booklet later this summer/early fall.  Watch for it both on the website and in the pamphlet rack at church.


The Quadrants of PUURL

Practicing a Unitarian Universalist Religious Life can be as free-style, or as disciplined as you like. The Ministry Team, the Adult Programs Committee seek to develop an all-inclusive program of lifespan religious education which involves Mind, Body, Heart and Spirit. Descriptions of each of these four quadrants, and the practice they entail follow:

The Mind Quadrant involves academic study, didactic learning and conversation.

The Body Quadrant includes “body practices,” explorations of our physical body as a vehicle for self-realization that includes our whole being. The Body Quadrant also includes work practice opportunities, such as volunteer service both inside and outside the church community.

The Heart Quadrant involves exercising both our social justice and creativity through the practice of compassionate action and the creative arts. Social justice work is heart work. Seeking to broaden our understanding of the barriers that separate races, classes, genders, and countries is part of our PUURL program. Art practice acknowledges that our creativity and spirituality share a common source.

The Spirit Quadrant has three components: spiritual discipline, liturgy, and work with a spiritual teacher. PUURL can include taking up or continuing the formal practice of a spiritual discipline that you do on a regular, if not daily basis. Liturgy is another part of the Spirit Quadrant. Liturgy literally means “the people’s work.” It is an expression of the underlying religious truths within our lives.

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