Through All The Cycles and Seasons

This is the text of the sermon I preached at the congregation I serve, Thomas Jefferson Memorial Church Unitarian Universalist, on Sunday, September 25, 2016.

Everything 

Turns, 

Rotates, 

Spins, 

Circles, 

Loops, 

Pulsates, 

Resonates, 

And  

Repeats. 

Circles 

Of life, 

Born from 

Pulses 

Of light, 

Vibrate 

To 

Breathe, 

While 

Spiraling 

Outwards 

For 

Infinity 

Through 

The lens 

Of time, 

And into 

A sea 

Of stars 

And 

Lucid 

Dreams. 

That was Suzy Kassem poem, "Circle of Life." 

The Autumnal Equinox was this past Thursday. It's one of the markers of one of those turnings -- the turning of the seasons: spring into summer, summer into fall, fall into winter, and winter into spring again.  The cycle of these seasons has continued, unabated, since the earth tipped 23 1/2 degrees off its central axis about five hundred and seventy million years ago. "Everything turns, rotates, spins, circles, loops, pulsates, resonates, and repeats."   

Most of us are at least slightly tilted off our axis, too.  We, too, go through cycles and seasons.  Ours are not as measured and consistent as the earth's, of course. Roughly speaking, it always takes 24 hours to pass from day through night, and 365 days (give or take) to cycle through the seasons, whereas for us a season might last days, or decades.   

When I was a kid, the singer-songwriter Harry Chapin was telling us that all his life's a circle, and we nodded and sang along: 

All my life's circle / sunrise and sundown/ the moon rolls through the nighttime / till the daybreak comes around.  All my life's a circle / but I can't tell you why. /Seasons spinning round again/ the years keep rollin' by. 

 That sounds kind of right, doesn't it?  Except that it's not. Not exactly. A circle is too neat. Too ordered and orderly. We don't mark the same circuit days after day, year after year -- coming back to the same places we were before, covering the self-same ground to get there.   We live our lives not in ever-repeating circles, but in spiraling cycles. We come back to some of the same places, sure, but coming back to them again we find that they're ever so slightly, and sometimes quite drastically, different because, hopefully, we're different.   Because over the course of our last trip around our own internal sun we've changed.  Grown.  Become someone new.  When Thomas Wolfe said, "You can't go home again," he didn't mean that you couldn't literally, physically return to the place you grew up in, but that if you do you'll find that it's no longer quite the same "home" it was, nor are you the same "you." 

And yet ... 

My brother Paul went to a lecture by the Buddhist teacher Jack Kornfield.  At one point Kornfield asked, "Do you ever look in the mirror and, seeing the face that's looking back at you think, 'that's not me'?"  Paul, who had just passed one of those "milestone" birthdays had to say he knew the feeling.  So do I.  Maybe you do too.  "Well," Kornfield continued, "that's because it's not."  Despite all the outer changes that lead our kids and grandkids to look at pictures of us when we were there age and say, "Really?", something stays the same within us.  Something remains unchanging through all of those outer changes ... and all the inner ones, too. 

Those inner changes are what I was thinking about when I said that most of us were slightly titled on our axes.  We may start off spinning straight and smooth, but we don't stay that way for that long.  All throughout our lives we experience things that knock us for a loop, knock us off our feet, knock us off our axis.  Heartaches, failures, illnesses, deaths, the "thousand and one slings and arrows that flesh is heir to."  Yet it's not just the hard stuff, either, that throws us for a loop.  There's a reason people say to "be careful what you wish for."  Those great things, too -- finding that the love of your life loves you, too; aceing that test, that course, that degree; getting the job you'd hoped for; marriage; babies -- all these things tilt our worlds.  And we wobble 'till we find a way to establish some sense of stability in this new position.  We don't, any of us, come round and round again to the same place, at the same time, in the say way.  Spiraling cycles, not static circles -- that's the reality of our lives. 

And yet, through it all, something remains consistent -- something, some one.  There's an "I," a "me," that moves in and through all of those changes.  Even when I look back over my life and see how differently I thought, felt, and behaved in the past, it's still "me" who's noticing the ways I've changed.  This "me" is who is looking out at the face in the mirror, thinking that the image isn't me. 

When French philosopher Rene Descartes wanted to get to the very bottom, the bedrock reality of what is knowable, he peeled away layer after layer of things we think we "know," yet which we really only guess or assume.  I "know" that I'm standing behind this pulpit, speaking to all of you, yet I might actually be lying in my bed, and you all might be characters in a dream.  There's no way, really, to know for sure.  Piece by piece Descartes took apart the edifice of our certainty.  Yet just before he came to the conclusion that there was nothing we could actually claim to know, no reality that we could count on as more than a mere perception, he realized that someone was thinking all these things.  He couldn't know for sure what he looked like, how old he was, where he lived, who he loved, but it was self evident that someone was thinking, and that, whatever else might or might not be true of him, he could know for certain that he was, as he put it, "a thinking thing."  Cogito ergo sum.  I think, therefore I am. 

Many, maybe even most of us probably don't feel comfortable with such a reductionist idea that our essential existence is as "thinking things."  Yet the idea that there is an "essential existence," a "core reality," an "I," a "me," that moves through this life I know as mine -- that probably seems to us self evident.  Yet what is that thing?  Who is, what is, that "I," that "me" who's asking these things?  Who is, what is, that "I" who's listening and thinking your own thoughts about all of this? 

These are important questions, because when our axes are titled in ways we're not yet used to or prepared for, we need to know where to go to find our center.  When we're buffeted about by the winds of change, we need to know what we can hang on to.  For some of us, of course, the answer would be "God," yet that's really not much of an answer because "God" is just a word, a poetic shorthand, and using it doesn't really tell us all that much about whatever it is we think we're referring to when we use it.  So the question of what, precisely, is our center, our anchor, our grounding point remains an open one. 

A few days ago I noticed a full-page ad in Entertainment Weekly for a book called The Forgetting, by Sharon Cameron.  The ad was nothing more than an image of the book's cover, and the words, "What isn't written, isn't remembered.  Even your crimes."  Who wouldn't be intrigued?  It's the story of a young woman named Nadia, who lives in the city of Canaan, where every twelve years every person completely loses every one of their memories. All of them.  After "the forgetting," as its called, people don't know their names, don't recognize their families, can't remember a single thing from the moment of waking up.  So everyone has a book with them at all times, and everyone dutifully writes down everything about their lives, so that when they awake from the forgetting they can remind themselves of what they've forgotten. And over and again they are reminded of these words from what's called "the First Book of the Forgetting:" 

"At the first sun rising of the twelfth year, they will forget.  They will lose their memories, and without their memories, they are lost.  Their books will be their memories, their written past selves.  They will write in their books.  They will keep their books.  They will write the truth, and the books will tell them who they have been.  If a book is lost, then so are they Lost.  I am made of my memories.  Without memories, they are nothing." 

 Can you imagine?  No memories of who you are that are older than 12 years ago?  You may know, the way we know facts from a text book, that this person is your spouse, and these people are your parents, and this stranger you're looking at is your best friend, but you don't actually remember them, not directly, not for more than the past twelve years.  

Some of us come uncomfortably, painfully close.  Anyone who's had any association with Alzheimers or other forms of dementia know well what it's like for someone to lose their memories of who they've been and become "lost."  Yet the situation in Canaan is different, I think, because during those twelve years you are completely lucid, living your life forming new vivid and vibrant memories ... which you know you will forget in no more than twelve years.  The people of Canaan live stuck in a repeating cycle, and are aware of both the reality of their situation and the limits that confine them. 

For the people of Canaan, they live just as you and I do, but they have no "I"  that has traveled with them throughout their lives, no touchstone for when the axis gets tilted. There's nothing to hold on to.  Except, their book. 

Everyone carries their book with them at all times -- tied to them, in fact.  They know that their books are, in that great phrase, "their written past selves" and that "the books will tell them who they have been."  Even in this strange world, people need that.  Need something consistent amidst all the inevitable challenges and changes of life.  Need a sense of identity that can tell them who they've been, who they are, and who they might be.  For the people of Canaan, who have no connection with their past, their books provide them with a "written past self" that helps them navigate the present and points them toward a future. 

What is that identity for you?  What is it that you hold on to when your feet are swept out from under you?  Who is the "you" who looks out at the face the the mirror? 

What gives the plot of The Forgetting its push is Nadia, because she, for some reason, didn't forget during the forgetting.  She remembers.  And remembering, she wants to understand why things are the way they are, and how -- if -- they could be made right.  While the book is written for ages 12 and up, I have to say that I had a hard time putting it down, and really wish it hadn't come to an end.  The plot twists felt completely real, and were completely unexpected.  It was, as my mom hated to hear people say, "a good read." 

What would be in your book?  Who is the "you" you come back to, the "you" who is you, the "you" you can count on when you can't count on anything else.  What, for you, precedes "ergo sum" -- you ... what ... therefore you are?  Our Unitarian Universalist faith doesn't give us the answers to these questions.  It does tell us that they're important to ask. 

There is a danger in what we've been thinking about this morning, that I feel I have to address.   We can get too attached to our anchors, hold too tightly to those things that ground us, limit ourselves by being too bound by what we've been.  It is all too easy to say "this got me through the last axial tilt, so I'd better not let of of it.  Even a little."  We can become almost superstitious about it, like the athlete who insists on wearing the same socks to every game because he was wearing them that time they won.  We can use this sense of "who I've been, and who I am" to fix ourselves in place.  Yet are not meant to be fixed in place.  We are meant to be in orbit -- moving, turning, rotating, spinning, circling, looping, pulsating, resonating, and, yes, repeating, yet never quite exactly in the same way. 

The author of The Forgetting address all of this too, having her heroine write in her book near the end, 

"We are made of memories.  I've read those words every day of my life.  Today I decided that they're true.  We are who we have been.  But it's my choice today that is the memory of tomorrow. It's my choice that determines what I will become.  Not the memories of the past." 

We live our lives not in ever-repeating circles, but in spiraling cycles. We come back to same of the same places, to be sure, but coming back to them again we find that they're ever so slightly, and sometimes quite drastically, different because, hopefully, we're different.   Because over the course of our last trip around our own internal sun we've changed.  Grown.  Become someone new. 

May it be so for us all. 

Pax tecum,

RevWik

***** 

Preachers all know the experience of having to cut a passage (and sometimes more than just one passage) from their sermons.  Sometimes the whole thing is too long.  Sometimes this passage isn't entirely on point.  Often it's one of the passages we really love.  (The sacrifices we make for the congregations we serve!)  Here's one from this past Sunday's sermon:

In 1765 the French literary critic Antoine Leonard Thomas wrote an essay in praise of Decartes and wrote a slightly expanded version of all of this.  It should probably be emblazoned on the walls of Unitarian Universalist churches everywhere. You see, Descartes had not been merely thinking when he had his epiphany.  Specifically, he was in the process of doubting -- doubting everything.  And when he got to the point of doubting his own existence, he realized that the act of doubting required a Doubter and that, in this case, he was the Doubter.  Dubito, ergo cogito, ergo sum -- I doubt, therefore I think, therefore I am. 

Why is it so hard to listen ... and hear?

Last night I attended a public forum hosted by the Blue Ribbon Commission the Charlottesville City Council called into being for the purpose of deciding what to do about the large and prominent statues of Generals "Stonewall" Jackson and Robert E. Lee.  Earlier this year a high school student started a petition to have the statue of Lee removed from Lee Park.  She wrote:

"As a younger African American resident in this city, I am often exposed to different forms of racism that are embedded in the history of the south and particularly this city. My peers and I feel strongly about the removal of the statue because it makes us feel uncomfortable and it is very offensive. I do not go to the park for that reason, and I am certain that others feel the same way."

Last night people from the community expressed their support, and opposition to, the idea of removing the statues.  Some others offered alternative suggestions.  The meeting was, to say theleast, "lively."

One moment in particular struck me.  A man who had grown up in Charlottesville spoke about how the statue of Lee was not only part of the physical landscape of Charlottesville, but the landscape of his life, as well.  He remembered walking through the park as a boy, his father stopping them at the monument to point out that the statute was considered "one of the finest equestrian statues in the world." It was clear that for him, the statue not only commemorates a Confederate General, it memorializes his childhood, his relationship with his father, and the pride he feels for the city he calls home (which, as he said, has something in it so precious as to be one of the finest in the world).

This speaker was white.  Other speakers, African Americans, spoke of other childhood memories -- memories in which they were told not to go into the park because they would not be welcome.  They spoke of the feeling they'd had that this imposing statue, so centrally situated in the city, was a clear and intimidating message to them of their place in the community.  As Zyhana Bryant, the high school student who initiated the petition said, many African Americans feel uncomfortable in the park, and many avoid it altogether.

People who say that "Black Lives Matter" is an unnecessary slogan, who say that the problem it purports to address is one more of perception than reality, who say that it is inherently anti-police and, more generally, anti-white, are missing the point.  It's not just because Black people are more likely to be stopped by police in situations where whites would not be.  It's not just because black people -- especially young black men -- are shot and killed by police disproportionately.  It's not just because the rates of incarceration are so out of balance that it is not only infuriating, it's disgusting and embarrassing as well.  It's all of that, yes, but it's also more than all that.

Last night was a case in point.  A white man said that his fond memories of the statue of Robert E. Lee ought to be -- need to be -- taken into consideration when determining their ultimate fate.  Left unsaid, though no less clearly communicated for that, was that the painful memories of people of color ought not to be considered.  His memories matter.  Their's do not.

And until white Americans are able to really hear, respect, acknowledge, and be moved and changed by the lived experiences of African American, and people of color more generally, then we need to keep repeating that Black Lives Matter.  Until the contributions of African Americans to this country are recognized as being fully as important as those of white Americans -- even when doing so displaces the historical narrative celebrated in the dominant culture -- then we need to keep repeating that Black Lives Matter.  Until we realize that if the "heroes" of white America are not "heroes" to people of color then they are not our heroes, we will need to keep repeating that Black Lives Matter.  Until we -- white Americans -- fully acknowledge (not only with our words but in the way we live) that they -- African Americans -- are not "other than" the us we claim to be as a nation, we will need to keep repeating that Black Lives Matter.

Black feelings matter.  Black memories matter.  Black history matters.  Black lives matter.

Pax tecum,

RevWik


Yesterday, on the blog of the congregation I serve, I wrote a post expressing my thoughts about the issue of what to do with these statues.

The Power of a Promise

This is the text of the sermon I delivered on September 18, 2016 at the congregation I serve, Thomas Jefferson Memorial Church Unitarian Universalist.

Here’s a catchy title for you:  A Platform of Church Discipline Gathered Out of the Word of God and Agreed Upon by the Elders and Messengers of the Churches Assembled in the Synod at Cambridge in New England.  Kind of rolls off the tongue, doesn’t it?  Trippingly, as my mom used to say. 

It was 1637, and the settlers in what know we today as Dedham, Massachusetts, came together to discuss the creation of a church.  Although the roughly 30 families had already come together to the extent that they were generally able to govern themselves, they had not yet figured out how to worship together.  And that was a pretty important thing back in 1637.

You might be surprised to learn that our impulse to set up “cottage conversations” whenever we have large issues to grapple with was their impulse as well.  For a year those settlers, now neighbors, met in a series of cottage meetings, each one being organized around a specific question.  Given what we know – or think we know – about the religious sensibilities of 17^th century New England, we might imagine that the topics for discussion would be things like salvation, damnation, predestination.  We might imagine that in order to come together in forming a church these doctrinal issues would need to be sorted out and that some sort of mutual understanding would need to be reached.

We’d be wrong.  The result of their deliberations was not titled, A Platform of Theological Understandings Gathered Out of the Word of God and Agreed Upon, etc., etc.  Instead, what comes down to us is A Platform of Church Discipline …  In other words, these folks felt that even more important than a unified theological understanding, what was essential in forming their new church was a common organizational understanding.  Not, what would be the common beliefs, but what would be their agreements about how to be together.  (This should come as welcome vindication for the folks who’ve been serving on our Governance Task Force this past year, who know how important their work is but who’ve often felt as if they, alone, have cared about it.)

The Cambridge Platform, as it is more commonly (thankfully) known established the vision of a church built on covenant instead of creed, built on the promises inherent in such principles as investing ultimate authority in the congregation itself rather than in some ecclesiastical role or structure.  The church – the meaning, the very idea of “church”– is defined in the Platform as “a company of saints by calling united into one body by a holy covenant, for public worship of God, and the mutual edification of one another in the fellowship of the Lord Jesus.”  I want to lift up three things in there:

“A company of saints by calling” means people who identify themselves as trying to live a good, moral life.  No outside body or power declares them to be such; they are “saints by calling.”  We could add, they are “saints” by an inner “calling,” an inner recognition that they belong.

Then, the Platform declares that there are really only two reasons for a church to exist – the public worship of God, and “the mutual edification of one another.”  “Edification” is the improving of someone’s morals or intellect; we could say that it involves making someone a better person.  Yet these 17^th century New Englanders apparently didn’t think that this was a job for the clergy to do for the laity but, instead, something that they were all called to do for one another – “mutual edification.”  That’s a pretty huge, radical leap from what was more commonly understood at the time, and that’d be more than a little radical in some arenas still today.

But here’s the big one, the thing I really want to make sure we don’t miss:   the church is “a company of saints by calling united into one body by a holy covenant …”  They weren’t called together by God or some other Higher Authority.  And it wasn’t that they had a shared theological understanding; it wasn’t that they agreed on creed.  What brought them together, and held them together, was that they covenanted with one another, that they made promises to one another about the kind of community they were making and how they were going to behave with one another within it. 

The basis of their church is the basis of ours – an agreement to come together in mutual respect, even when we disagree.  What brings us together, and holds us together, are the promises we make to and with one another about the kind of community we are making, and how we are going to behave with one another within it.  Not surprisingly, the settlers who came together and created The Cambridge Platform are, indeed, our religious ancestors.  There’s a direct line from them to us.  When we ask ourselves, as we’ve been doing this month, what it means that we, as Unitarian Universalists, are “a people of covenant” – this is what it means:  that what brings us together, and holds us together, are the promises we make to and with one another about the kind of community we are making, and how we are going to behave with one another within it. 

Earlier we read together the words of our covenant.  I’ve often thought that when someone signs the book to formalize their membership in this community, or when we recognize our new formalized members during a Sunday service, we should have them raise their right hand and ask them:

·         Do you promise to communicate with compassion and respect, especially when we disagree?

·         Do you promise to celebrate diversity and nurture our inclusivity?

·         Do you promise to embrace each of us spiritually and emotionally?

·         Do you promise to promote social justice within our congregation and the larger community?

·         Do you promise to generously support the ministries of the church with time, money and enthusiasm?

·         Do you promise that when someone has fallen short, you will lovingly call them back into covenant, and hope that others will do the same for you?

I wonder if there’d be people who would decide not to sign if they knew that doing so meant saying “yes” to these promises.  And I wonder what it’d be like if during that same New Member Recognition Service the rest of us were asked to raise our right hands and reaffirm our commitment to these promises, too.

There is such power in a promise.  It’s true that commitments can challenge us. Think about New Year’s Resolutions – most of us make them and then break them, and have done this so many times that we hardly ever make them anymore.  Or, when we do, we take the resolve out of them by saying that we’ll try to do this or that but, you know, “I can’t make any promises.”  Making a promise, a commitment, is saying that I’m going to go for it with all that I’ve got; that I’ll resist giving in to excuses; that I’ll make the effort a priority; that I’ll stick with it even when it’s not particularly comfortable to do so or when I don’t really feel like it, thank you very much.  I understand the reality that all I can really ever do is try my best, but a promise is a way of saying that I don’t intend to use that as an out.  As Grand Master Yoda so famously said, “Do or do not.  There is no try.”  That’s the spirit, the heart, of commitment; and commitment is the heart, the spirit, of covenant; and covenant is at the core of our Unitarian Universalist faith tradition, and it’s the heart of who we are as Unitarian Universalists who’ve come together to create this community of faith. 

So we promise to communicate with compassion and respect, especially when we disagree.  And that means, of course, that we’re willing to disagree, that we’re willing to risk disagreeing.  And yet even in this open-minded and open-hearted community we often hold back sharing all of who we are, and how we think, and what the world looks like through our eyes.  I guess we often do this because we don’t want to offend anyone.  I know that we sometimes do this because we fear rejection even in this loving and inclusive community.

The first congregation I served had a Unison Affirmation we repeated each week at the beginning of our Sunday sanctuary service.  There was a line in it that said, “We respect differences of opinion, and strive to be a democratic community.”  More than once I felt the need to challenge them on this, asking, “How do we know we respect differences of opinion if we won’t risk having any?”

Take our prized theological differences, for instance.  How often do we really talk plainly, openly, without inhibiting qualifiers, about what we really believe – especially with someone we know – or suspect – believes something else?  I’ve often observed that we UUs seem to have a theological “don’t ask, don’t tell policy” –  I won’t offend you by telling you that I believe in God, and you won’t offend me by telling me that you don’t.  We appear to respect our differences, even though it looks like that because we try to avoid calling attention to them.  The surface may appear calm and clear, yet underneath it’s all pretty murky.

Here’s the thing – maintaining a semblance of acceptance always … always … comes at the cost of the real thing.  Let me repeat that:  maintaining a semblance of acceptance always comes at the cost of the real thing.  And it makes the next step, the one our faith tradition calls us to, eager engagement with difference, virtually impossible.  You see, I don’t want you to hold back in telling me about your Atheism.  I already know how the world looks to a Theist.  I already understand what a belief in God – what I mean by that phrase, anyway – I already understand what a belief in God adds to my life.  I got that.  What I don’t know is what life without that belief looks like.  I don’t know how your life is enriched by your belief that we humans are all there is, and that reality consists of what we can taste, touch, feel, and see.  Clearly it is, but how it is, is a mystery to me.  And unless you dare to tell me, I’ll never know.  And you’ll never know … for sure … that you can.  We’ll express a respect for one another’s different views, but we won’t actually know them.  So we won’t actually know each other.  And TJMC won’t really be what we say it is, what we tell the world it is, what we truly need it to be.

And that’s just one example of the power in the promises we make that make this community.  Read them over again at some point, and see how challenging they are.  And I’d don’t mean just how challenging it will be for me to really live that way, but also the challenge they offer me to go deeper and live more fully.  The much celebrated “seven principles” of Unitarian Universalism are also a promise, a covenant, a challenge.  (You can find them on the UUA’s website, uua.org, or on ours, uucharlottesville.org, or in the front of the grey hymnal.)  These are not statements of what UUs believe, no matter how many times they’re described in that way.  Instead, they are a series of principles, and it is the covenant to “affirm and promote” them which brings together, and holds together, as the Unitarian Universalist Association of Affiliated Congregations.  (The UUA’s full and formal name.)

What it means to say that we Unitarian Universalists are “a people of covenant” is that we are not bound together by shared creeds, but by shared commitments.  Those commitments form our covenant, and that covenant is what makes us who we are.  Or, at least, it can.  It can.  If we trust one another, and trust ourselves, enough to put it into practice, we will make real who we say we want to be.  If we can’t, or don’t, we’ll be just show.  And I don’t know about you, but I’d rather have the real, than the show.

Pax tecum,

RevWik

Eruptions

This morning I submitted the following letter to my local paper The Daily Progress.  In July I wrote a post which expanded on this theme

Protests “erupted” in Charlotte, North Carolina, CNN reported.  The protest was in response to the shooting of Keith Lamont Scott, but that’s not what caused the violence.  “Eruption” seems an apt description.  Volcanoes and geysers erupt because the pressure beneath them has built to a level which can no longer be contained.  So, too, when violence “erupts.”

In his Notes on the State of Virginia, Thomas Jefferson wrote::

"Deep rooted prejudices entertained by the whites; ten thousand recollections, by the blacks, of the injuries they have sustained; new provocations; the real distinctions which nature has made; and many other circumstances, will divide us into parties, and produce convulsions which will probably never end but in the extermination of the one or the other race."

In the one hundred and forty-one years since, those “ten thousand recollections” have not dimmed, nor have those “new provocations” ceased.

I do not condone violence.  Rather, I abhor it.  Yet I can understand it.  It is not a surprise to me when it erupts.  How can it not?  All of that heat and pressure has to find an outlet.

Two quotations have been echoing in my mind these last few days.  Both are from Malcolm X;  both are, I believe, quite relevant.

“I don’t favor violence. If we could bring about recognition and respect of our people by peaceful means, well and good. Everybody would like to reach his objectives peacefully. But I’m also a realist. The only people in this country who are asked to be nonviolent are black people.” “We are peaceful people, we are loving people. We love everybody who loves us. But we don’t love anybody who doesn’t love us. We’re nonviolent with people who are nonviolent with us. But we are not nonviolent with anyone who is violent with us.”

Pax tecum,

RevWik

Can you help me understand ... ?

I was once advised that asking someone "why" -- as in "why did you do that?" or "why do you think that way?" -- tends to make people feel defensive.  It's better, then, to ask, "Can you help me to understand ... ?"  Most people, after all, respond positively to being asked to help.

So ... to all of the people who say that "Black Lives Matter" is, itself, a racist slogan because it singles out the lives of Black people as being more important than the lives of anyone else  -- can you help me to understand something?

Does this say to you that colon-rectal cancer, or esophageal cancer, or lung cancer don't matter?

And does this say to you that forest fires are the only thing that is damaging to our wild areas -- that, for instance, the dumping of toxic waste, or just simple dropping trash don't matter?

And does this say to you that the polar bears should just suck it up and learn to enjoy the warmth?












So can you help me to understand hos this says to you that the people who post it believe only Black lives matter?








Can you help me to understand this?  Because, honestly, the only reason I can imagine that White people would have that reaction to this declaration, but not the others, is because it touches on the truth we would rather not acknowledge -- that for hundreds of years Black people have been treated as if their lives don't matter, and having to acknowledge that truth makes us uncomfortable.  Well guess what?  As Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. said, "there are some things to which all of us should be maladjusted."

I know that this train of thought isn't original to me.  I repeat it here only because it bears repeating.  It bears repeating until the defensive walls are broken down so that the need for this message is recognized.  Until White people recognize that the work of making our country's systems and institutions change so that they do, in fact, treat Black lives as if they matter is our work -- then it needs to be repeated.

How do you explain "Unitarian Universalist spirituality"?

The Membership Committee of the congregation I serve is wrestling with the question of how to explain Unitarian Universalist spirituality to newcomers (and old-timers).  Since I'm unable to attend their retreat this Saturday (since I'll be at our Board's retreat!), I wrote something up for them to consider.  Here's what I said:

I’d start by saying that we are not as unique as we sometimes think and say we are – progressive Christians too, for instance, encourage people to think and explore and search their own lives in coming to understand God.  We are, however, generally more expansive in our encouragement of that search.  Using a video game analogy, ours is more of an “open world” model rather than one that restrictively directs your movement.  I would also note that I do not believe that “spirituality” is about what someone passively “believes” but, instead, how a person actively engages their inner and outer world.

That said, there is a line in the hymn, “We Laugh, We Cry” (#355) which says that we believe, “even to question, truly is an answer.”   An important part of the spiritual grounding of our faith tradition, as I understand it at least, is precisely this encouragement to seek for truth and meaning.  This is not the same as saying, “UUs can believe anything we want.”  That’s way too simplistic.  It is to say, however, that our faith encourages us to challenge ourselves to look into our own lived experience (equally with the insights of religion, science, and the arts) as a source of understanding “the twin realities of being born and having to die” (as the Rev. Forrest Church put it).  This is no small thing.  Ours is, at its best, an active faith that calls on us to examine, to re-examine, and to keep on examining our understanding of the universe and our place in it.  One way to describe the spirituality of Unitarian Universalism is that it calls on us to become comfortable in the discomforting place of not-knowing.

So no, you can’t “believe anything you want.”  In the first place, “belief” is not, for UUs, the core of “spirituality.”  In the second, we are encouraged to actively engage ourselves and the world in a free search for meaning; to then engage with others in open, inquisitive dialog about what they’re discovering in their searching; and to then arrive at our own tentative beliefs.  Unitarian Universalist spirituality truly understand and engaged, ought to lead us to the place so many of our youth model for us during their Coming of Age service – “this is what I believe now, but I know my beliefs will change over time.”

One other aspect of our faith tradition’s spiritual core – it is not enough to engage in this search for truth and meaning.  We then must strive to apply our discoveries to the way we live our lives in the world.

One final, general, observation – this is not, in my experience, the way a lot of UUs understand and experience our faith.  Far too many, it seems to me, come to UUism having already decided on the “answers to life’s big questions,” and have no real interest in looking any further.  We come, many of us and maybe even the majority of us, to have our understandings affirmed rather than challenged; we want our already established biases reinforced instead of re-examined.  In this we are absolutely no different than the majority of other religious traditions we humans have ever create.

So here’re three "elevator speeches" about the spiritual core of Unitarian Universalism:

·    Unitarian Universalism challenges us to hold our beliefs lightly, always ready to let go as we discover new and deeper truths.

·    Unitarian Universalist spirituality is found in the free and ongoing search for truth and meaning, within the context of a community of open-minded seekers.

·     Unitarian Universalist spirituality is an active search for meaning in life as we experience it, which we then strive to put into practice in life as we live it.

I hope it need not be said, but this is, of course, a provisional answer ...

Pax tecum,

RevWik

It's all connected ...

Anyone who's read these musings for any length of time knows my passion for addressing the systems of oppression that have created and which perpetuate the brutal dehumanizations of institutional, systemic racism.  This is work that I feel passionately about.

Yesterday I saw a link on a friend's Facebook page to an article by Mary Karr in The New Yorker magazine, "The Crotchgrabber: on a shockingly casual case of sexual assault."  Ms. Karr writes about an incident in which a stranger approached her on the street and grabbed her crotch.  The "casual" in her title refers to the manner in which he did this.  "[A]n approaching guy chatting equably with a tall friend dodged at me to grab my crotch ... he grabbed between my legs with a meaty claw, big as a waffle iron.  He also called me the C-word ... then he passed on into a sandwich shop with his buddy."

Earlier in the day I'd read another piece, a post on the blog of a woman named Erin Bailey, in which she asks, "What Do We Deserve?"  She details some of the ways she has been mistreated -- dehumanized, really -- because of her gender and her appearance:  "What do I deserve?" she asks:

I deserve to be treated like a human, not just a woman, because that means something different these days. 

And us women, what do we deserve? 

We deserve not to feel silenced by your yells. 

We deserve to feel empowered for bettering ourselves. 

We deserve to feel sexy in our own skin without feeling like we're hear to bait you. 

We deserve to speak out without the threat of you lingering on our minds. 

We deserve to run outside. 

We deserve to be judged on our merits, not our outfits. 

We deserve more.  A whole lot more.

According to feminist.com, one-out-of-every-five American women has been the victims of an attempted or completed rape in their lifetime, and 44% are under age 18; 80%.  [See the rest of their statistics if you want to be deeply disturbed.]

While I was away on vacation a congregant left on my desk another article from The New Yorker -- "White Plight:  is whiteness a privilege or a plight?",  written by Huan Hsu.  Reading it I couldn't help but think of the anonymous comment that was left following my recent post, "Where is my Outrage?" expressing the view that the real evil we face as a nation is the economic (and, I would add, cultural) caste system that disadvantages, disenfranchises, and dehumanizes poor whites.  There is a truth to this view, a reality that many liberal whites would like to ignore because it makes the fighting of oppression even more difficult.  This poor white anger often expresses itself in racial categories -- racist words and actions -- yet to simply write it off as racism is to miss the point of the intersectionality of oppressions.  [In my response I noted that in Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow:  mass incarceration in the age of colorblindness, Ms. Alexander demonstrates pretty conclusively that there has been an intentional effort by the wealth, white, elite to pit poor whites and people of color against one another so that there would be little likelihood that they would recognize the common source of their oppressions and work in solidarity to overthrow the system that keeps boots on both of their necks.)

About a year ago a friend -- my first college roommate -- embraced her identity as a transgender woman.  She came out publicly on Facebook and in her daily life.  Today she posted what seemed to me essentially a "thank you" note to all of her friends who had been supportive.  In other words, she was thanking people for not rejecting her because of her gender identity.

from Mary Crawford’s Transformations: Women, Gender, and Psychology

It would be nice -- not quite the word to use, I know -- if the problem we face as a nation was racism.  Or sexism.  Or homophobia.  Transphobia.  Ablelism.  Classism.  Ageism.  Human-ism (by which I mean the elevation of humans above the rest of the natural world that has led to such degradation of our planet, not the philosophical/religious stance).  The inhuman treatment of undocumented immigrants.  I could go on.  The website Interrupting Oppression has a list of 20 different "isms," certainly is incomplete.  The Anti-Oppression Network identifies nearly 30, yet it also no doubt is not exhaustive.

It would be "nice" because it's easier to get your head around trying to tackle one of these issues, and if they're truly interconnected it becomes a knot that seems impossible to untangle.  I'll confess -- as I seem to be doing more and more lately (a sign of maturity, maybe?) -- that I don't know what to do with this.  I am seriously overwhelmed.  In just the past two days I have been confronted with seemingly different examples of "man's inhumanity to man" (sic), yet I know that they are really different manifestations of a single evil.  (And yes, I know that folks of my ilk rarely use the word "evil," but is there any other?)

This post really is a musing.  I'm not sure where to take it; I'm not even sure that I'm saying much of anything that's worth saying.  To add to the confusion, while looking up something for this post I came across the article,  #JeNeSuisPasLiberal:  entering the quagmire of online leftism, by David Auerbach.  It's a long and academic work -- and one I'm still trying to work my way through -- yet I think it's really important for those of us who see ourselves as "liberal" or "progressive" (or, at least, as people working for social change) to consider what he's saying.  One thing that my musing this morning makes very clear to me:  nothing will change if we insist on trying to simplify this incredibly complex puzzle, especially if we also insist on judging/condemning anyone who calls attention to any of the myriad of complicating factors.  Nothing.  You cannot affect change without understanding the problem.  This is particularly difficult when the world you live in is the problem.

Pax tecum,

RevWik 

Ten thousand recollections ...

This morning while I was walking the dog, my neighbor stopped his bike ride to tell me that he appreciated my letter to the editor that the paper printed a couple of days ago.  Brian was born and raised in South Africa (he is White) and he said that since the shooting in Dallas he has been thinking of a line from Alan Paton's Cry the Beloved Country.  (He called it required reading in South Africa.)  As he remembers it, the old priest says something to the effect of, "I'm afraid that by the time the Whites start loving, the Blacks will have started hating."  (I looked it up.  The actual quote is, "I have one great fear in my heart, that one day when they are turned to loving, they will find that we are turned to hating," and it is spoken by the character the Rev. Theophilus Msimangu.)  I have one great fear in my heart, that one day when they are turned to loving, they will find that we are turned to hating.

The congregation I serve is named after the third President of the United States -- Thomas Jefferson.  We're located in Charlottesville, in the shadow of Monticello and literally up the road from the University of Virginia.  The presence of "Mr. Jefferson" is still felt in places, so it makes sense that when our congregation was formed it would be named for him.  He did, after all, write the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, was one of the so-called "Founding Fathers" of the nation, and was draftsman of the Declaration of Independence with its stirring words about liberty and freedom.  (He also said some very nice things about Unitarianism, such that for a long time he was claimed as "one of our own." We now somewhat sheepishly acknowledge that he maintained membership in the local Episcopal church throughout his life.)

He also wrote other things, though.  His Notes on the State of Virginia contains some deeply racist thoughts about "the Black race," which he considered fundamentally and irredeemably inferior.  An argument could be -- has been -- made that he was just a person of his time, his thinking conditioned by the thinking of his day just as our is now.  Yet Jefferson's views on the inherent differences he saw between Whites and Blacks was not universally held.  Even in his day he could have thought differently.

The link I make between Cry the Beloved Country and the thoughts of Thomas Jefferson is that he, too, recognized the likelihood that the treatment endured by enslaved people at the hands of their enslavers would most likely lead to an explosion of violent rage.  In explaining his position that freed Blacks should not be allowed to continue to live in Virginia he wrote:

"It will probably be asked, Why not retain and incorporate the blacks into the state, and thus save the expense of supplying, by importation of white settlers, the vacancies when they leave?  Deep rooted prejudices entertained by the whites; ten thousand recollections, by the blacks, of the injuries they have sustained; new provocations; the real distinctions which nature has made; and many other circumstances, will divide us into parties, and produce convulsions which will probably never end but in the extermination of the one or the other race."

One hundred and forty-one years ago Jefferson predicted that "deep rooted prejudices entertained by the whites; ten thousand recollections, by the blacks, of the injuries they have sustained; [and] new provocations ..." could predictably lead to the development an unquenchable anger, hatred, that would no doubt end in violence.  In those one hundred and forty-one years since those "ten thousand recollections" have not dimmed, and the "new provocations" have not ceased.

Do I think that our country's ongoing history of racism will end in "extermination"?  I don't.  I have too much hope and faith in the power of Love for that.  But when folks like me who have been raised to think of ourselves as White wonder what all the anger is about ...  Well ... I think we ask because we just don't want to look at the truth before our eyes.

Pax tecum,

RevWik

Note:  the image is a composite of a well-known portrait of Jefferson, with that of Isaac Granger Jefferson, one of the enslaved workers at Monticello.

You fix this shit ...

"You fix this shit ..."

This comes from an essay Anthea Butler wrote for Religious Dispatches, in which she responds to her editor's request for a piece about the murders of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile, and the five police offers who were shot and killed in Dallas.  She says, essentially, that she'd one writing for white people who are looking for a person of color to express the outrage, the power of the pain, that we white folks can't (or won't) express ourselves:

"I'm done saving you, good white folks.  You want Black people like me, who like you, to say the prophetic thing, and bail your ass out for not speaking up, for remaining quiet -- while you get your work, vacations, and scholarship done this summer."

I hear this.  At least, to be honest, I'm trying to hear this.  It's hard as a person who was raised to think of myself as white to really  hear this.  Still, I'm trying.  And I think to myself -- what the hell am I supposed to do?  Damn.  how do you change the collective consciousness -- even more the unconsciousness -- of a country?  How do you "turn" the folks who see Donald Trump as, as Ms. Butler put it, "a savior"?

We're told that in Biblical times a prophet could speak out with such conviction that even kings would put on sackcloth and ashes as a demonstration of their heartfelt mourning and desire to repent.  Mohandas Gandhi would stop eating, and the people of India -- Hindu and Muslim alike -- would change their behavior out of concern and respect for the Great Soul.

Is there -- could there be -- such a prophet today?  Who do the American people love so deeply that they would pause in mid-battle for?  I'm not holding my breath for this kind of a solution.

But what can be done?  What can I do?  I know that "show up" matters.  I believe -- deeply -- that it makes a difference, when white folks help white folks to recognize -- to really see -- the racism that is embedded in our culture in which we move unconscious as a fish glides through water.  These things make a difference.  As does working to ensure the enfranchisement of people within historically marginalized groups.  As does writing letters to politicians, and signing petitions, and attending rallies, and getting arrested, and ...

And how do you change the collective consciousness of a country?  Because it's just not enough to change laws.  The ratification of the 14th amendment changed the status of African Americans ... except that it didn't.  The Voting Rights Act of 1965 ensured that people of color would have the same access to participation in the democratic process as anyone else ... except that it didn't.  (And to further drive home the point, this issue had already supposedly been taken care of back in 1870 with the ratification of the 15th amendment!) 

Yes, we can do anti-bias training for police officers, and it's important work.  Will it really address the implicit bias that is at work in every interaction?  There are so many things that we can do, yet I keep coming back to what seems to me to be a fundamental questions -- how do you change the collective consciousness of a country? 

"You fix this shit ..."  Who are better positioned to change an inherently unjust system than the people who benefit most from that system?  And yet ... how does a fish change the water in the tank?

I truly wish I knew ....

Pax tecum,

RevWik

Where is my outrage?

I need to confess something ... something that I'm ashamed of.  Shame is, I know, a word that's out of vogue these days, yet I can't think of anything more appropriate.  "Guilt" is something different, and "embarrassed" doesn't come close.

Yesterday on my Facebook feed I saw a piece that had been posted three months ago on imgur.  It consisted of two things -- a letter purported to be from a first-year law student, written anonymously, complaining about a professor having worn a Black Lives Matter t-shirt on campus.  "We are here to learn the law," the letter says.  "We do not spend three years of our lives and tens of thousands of dollars to subjected to indoctrination or personal opinions of our professors."

The second half of the post is claimed to be the professor's response.  (I'm describing it this way because it is, after all, the internet where I came across this and it's so hard to know if things are, indeed, what they appear to be.)  "I am accepting the invitation in your memo, and the opportunity created by its content, to teach you."  The professor goes on to say that he will present his response into two parts:  "Part 1 addresses the substantive and analytical lessons that can be learned from the memo.  Part 2 addresses the lessons about writing that can be learned from the memo."

It is brilliant.  The tone is brilliant.   The content is brilliant.  He articulates answers to the challenges made by so many folks who have been raised to think of themselves as white to the Black Lives Matter movement.  One example:  his first section is a series of naming the unspoken premises behind statements in the student's letter and, then, his critique of them.

Premise:  History doesn't matter.  Therefore sequences of cause and effect can be ignored (or inverted).

Critique:  To assert that the Black Lives Matter movement is about violence against the police is to ignore (and invert) the causal reality that the movement arose as an effect of police violence.  Yes, the movement is about violence, in that it is about the subject of violence, but it is not about violent retaliation against the violence it is about.  It is a tragic fact that rage as a consequence of racial injustice sometimes gets enacted as violence (although not nearly as often as we might expect, given the long-standing causes of that rage).  We can all lament the fact that violence begets violence.  But we can't even do that if we ignore that violence that has done, and is doing, the begetting.

Brilliant, right?  Clear.  Cogent.  I was so impressed that I immediately knew I would be re-posting the link, and referring to professor's arguments often.

So what am I ashamed of?  That I was enjoying it.  That I was reveling in this professor's ability to take apart the student's arguments -- which echo the arguments so many of us hear far too often, even from well-meaning people we know.  He said, more clearly that I ever will, what needs to be said.  And I was loving it.

But where is my outrage?  Where is my anger that these things need to be said at all?  How can I be enjoying something that was born out of such a painful, literally life-and-death reality?  There are real people lying dead on real streets ... and real mourning of real families and friends ... and real fear in the hearts of real people.  This is not a rhetorical exercise.  And the only reason I can sit back and enjoy with clarity (and, let's face it, the cleverness) of this professor's response is because I can sit back, because as a person who has been raised to think of myself as white I am removed from the reality that gives birth to the need for a movement such as Black Lives Matter.

I am the adoptive father of two sons of color.  The brown skin of one will no doubt at some point bring him into direct contact with this reality; the white skin of the other will no doubt shield him.  Yet however close to home this comes to me, what I realized this morning as I reflected on my response to the exchange between this professor and student is that I can sit back.  That I am sitting back more than I was aware of.

Of that, I am ashamed.

Pax tecum,

RevWik