To practice Oneness, we must have values that we engage in our daily living. Much like organizations have found that guiding values help shape the way they pursue their mission; Spiritual Virtues help individuals and groups shape the world they are creating for themselves and in their communities.
While an exhaustive list of values would be impossible to create, these particular Spiritual Virtues give us a powerful opportunity to focus in on a number of shared values that inform the other values we might choose to take up in our individual practices. Variations of these specific virtues can be found in spiritual and religious schools of thought across the globe and throughout human history.
While the words being used to express these Spiritual Virtues have a multitude of definitions in a multitude of contexts, for our purposes we invite them to reflect their meaning as it relates to our Core Principles and the Creative Process. This means we don’t have to deny that these terms may be used in other ways, but Oneness invites us to use them confidently so that we can articulate our beliefs to others and explore them within ourselves and each other.
We also use these Spiritual Virtues to celebrate our faith throughout the year. Each Spiritual Virtue also has an annual place on our calendar to call our attention to that specific idea and invite us to celebrate it with our communities. These celebrations are about the Spiritual Virtues themselves, not the way we choose to celebrate them specifically. This means that every community, and even every individual, can find their own ways to connect with these ideas and celebrate them in their own lives and communities.
