Meaningful Conversations Chapel Hill is hosting a free discussion about finding justice in forgiveness at the Chapel Hill Community Center on Wednesday from 7 to 9 p.m.
The group began holding gatherings in Chapel Hill and Carrboro last fall, and this week’s discussion will be their eighth in the series. Other conversations they have held featured topics such as spiritual truth, the unity of world religions and the kind of spiritual values that are desirable in a future society.
Brian Kurzius, a group organizer, says that the conversation is based on the writings of the Bahá’í faith, but the group is non-denominational.
“We have people from all backgrounds, cultures and religions,” Kurzius said. “It’s really designed just to have people come together and share. It’s especially important now, when there’s such a divisive environment in the country, that we create spaces where people feel like they can share their background and their understanding of different issues.”
Meaningful Conversations is an effort by Bahá’ís in many different parts of the country to encourage people in communities to come together, share their perspectives on different topics and build community by getting to know one another, Kurzius said. The topics are chosen by a group of organizers nationally, and each regional group receives a program with quotes from Bahá’í writings that can potentially be used to start discussions.
The program for this week’s conversation on forgiveness includes relevant writings such as, “To nurse a grievance or hatred against another soul is spiritually poisonous to the soul which nurses it, but to strive to see another person as a child of God and, however heinous his deeds, to attempt to overlook his sins for the sake of God, removes bitterness from the soul and both ennobles and strengthens it.”
