You are currently browsing the category archive for the ‘Unitarian Universalism’ category.
San Francisco 2006 Pride Parade, by Dejan Čabrilo (licensed under Creative Commons)
Tomorrow thousands of hetero, cisgender people will show up on Market Street just to show up: to let LGBT people know, by their presence, that they support us and will stand by us. (Okay, most of them are also coming to be part of the fun and fabulosity. But support is part of it.) It’s hard to express how important that presence is. I can only say that our lives would feel lonelier, and the world scarier, if not for these allies.
I hope our presence at “Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s S.M.A.R.T. Tents” earlier tonight–that’s the actual official sign there, what an ego–gave the people in the tents, and the millions more around the country who have reason to fear they’ll end up in such places, the hope and strength that comes from knowing you have allies outside your own vulnerable community. That wasn’t exactly why I was there; I was there for the simple reason that immigration justice groups in Phoenix asked us to be. But I know how good it would feel on Market Street in the morning, if I were at Pride, and I hope we gave immigrants to Arizona, and everywhere else in reach of the AP story, something of that feeling.
The past two weeks have been packed with preparations for our launch of the Unitarian Universalist Abolitionists at General Assembly (GA). The Abolition Team is proposing “Ending Slavery” as the next Congregational Study/Action Issue, and for that we need five speakers at tomorrow’s plenary, before the vote. We left one open speaker’s slot in case we met someone during GA who was so enthusiastic that they should be the fifth; I prepared a piece as a backup. Everyone was very happy with what I wrote, but I will not be reading it tomorrow morning, for the best reason: the Youth Caucus has chosen to support our CSAI, and so they are getting that spot. They make their decision by consensus, so it is momentous.
Here, then, is the piece I wrote. I called it “Bury Us Not in a Land of Slaves,” after the Frances Ellen Watkins poem whose close I find so moving. Harper was a Unitarian poet, abolitionist, and survivor of slavery.
There is a child in a cotton field. He is just a little older than my daughter. They could be schoolmates, or playmates. But he doesn’t play much; he doesn’t go to school. He works, without choice, without pay, far from his family. He is a slave.
He might have picked the cotton of the t-shirt I bought my daughter last month. She looks really cute in that shirt. He would, too, this child who could be her friend, this little boy in Uzbekistan or Texas. But he doesn’t have a new shirt, just as millions of other children harvest cocoa beans, but don’t eat the chocolate; or make bricks, but live in shanties made of tin and cardboard. I don’t want to raise my daughter to believe these children are any less deserving than she is. Yet I am trapped, she is trapped, all of us are trapped, in an economic system where slaves make many of the goods we use.
We know how to spring the trap. It’s called the abolition of modern slavery, and it is overdue. So is our involvement.
I hope with our vote today we will follow in the footsteps of the Unitarian and Universalist abolitionists of an earlier day. I hope no one will ever say of us what was said in 1851 when the other churches in a Massachusetts town rang their bells for freedom: “The bells of the Unitarian church, being clogged with cotton, would not sound.” We know that our true self-interest is served by freedom and justice for all. Let us act so that the generations to come will look back on this GA as the moment when the UUs claimed their better heritage and joined the 21st century abolition movement—or, better, helped to lead it—and made freedom ring out throughout this country and the world.
***
Whether or not the CSAI passes (we’re waiting for the result), we have done a lot at this GA to build a UU abolition movement, and we’ll go forward from here. If you want to know more, please:
write to info AT uuabolitionists DOT org, or
visit the UU Abolitionists website (now due for a post-GA update), or
“like” our Facebook page,
Or sign up for our Twitter feed, @uuabolition.
Joy and I were watching Little Women, the 1994 version directed by Gillian Armstrong. Joy is a big Louisa May Alcott fan, something I never was; I got through Little Women once, whereas she read all of LMA’s books for children until the covers were falling off. “She was a Unitarian, you know,” I said. Like some Jews and Canadians, I can’t stop myself from collecting and displaying members of my small tribe .
“I know,” Joy said, with a slight rolling of the eyes. “And you know something? She never said anything about being Unitarian in anything I read. I guess this business of Unitarians not telling anyone they exist goes back a long time.”
“Maybe she thought of herself more as a Transcendentalist,” I said. (According to the Dictionary of Unitarian & Universalist Biography, Alcott never joined a Unitarian church despite her close associations with the religion via family and friends.)
“Still,” said Joy. Yes. Still.
Not long after I became a Unitarian Universalist, I was lurking on a UU chat list when a conversation began about the Trinity. Someone argued that a great deal of Trinitarian Christianity, in the United States, was largely binitarian: lots of emphasis on Jesus and God the Father, almost nothing about the Holy Spirit. This was not only the kind of interesting conversation that made me very happy to have found UUism, and “binitarianism” an accurate description of most of what I heard on Christian radio, but it made something click for me, because I thought, “Geez. The Holy Spirit is the only aspect of God I actually believe in.”
So I am troubled by The Onion’s news brief headlined God Quietly Phasing Holy Ghost Out of Trinity. It was just called to my attention today, but it’s dated 2003, and apparently the Holy Spirit has been out of the picture since Easter of that year.
Oh well. It can be in exile. I still like it, love it in fact, and it’s still the only part of the traditional Trinity that I consider divine. God the Father, if He exists, is not someone to whom I would sing praise. Annie Dillard wrote, “We have not yet encountered any god who is as merciful as a man who flicks a beetle over on its feet,” and while I think that is overly sweeping (there are kind gods out there), it does apply to the God described in the Bible, who frequently neither demonstrates compassion nor asks it of us. Jesus, in contrast, begged us to be loving, and I aspire to follow many of his teachings, but his presence in the Trinity is problematic on account of his being purely human. But the Holy Spirit? A force, invisible but palpable, that moves us to create beauty and goodness? That’s what moves me to deep reverence.
One strand of historical Unitarianism rejected the Trinity because the Biblical evidence of a Holy Spirit was thin. But if, as the old joke has it, Unitarians are those who believe in “at most one god,” then for me the Holy Spirit–elsewhere known as the Ruach HaKodesh, which translates “the Breath/Spirit of the Holy,” or the Shekhinah–is a good candidate.
Flower Communion is a ritual practiced in many, I would venture most, Unitarian Universalist congregations in the spring. It was instituted by Norbert Capek, a Unitarian minister in Prague, in 1923, and takes a variety of forms. The central element is that each person brings a flower to the service and each takes a different one away. I love this service. Ours will be on May 13 this year.
I came across a Flower Communion liturgy that I wrote in 2002, and may use or revise for this year. The italics are the congregational response. Read the rest of this entry »
“The UU Occupier,” who describes himself as “a Green, an anarcho-pacifist, a secular humanist, and a Scot,” and is a member of the Unitarian Universalist Church of Palo Alto, has begun a blog called “I Am a UU Occupier.” It’s great to have an addition to the UU and economic justice blogospheres. Check him out!
He also has a passion for prison reform, and blogs at Angolathree and is raising money for The Innocence Project here. UU Occupier, how about a leading a study group with me on The New Jim Crow?
Until the killing of black men, black mothers’ sons
Is as important as the killing of white men, white mothers’ sons
We who believe in freedom cannot rest
We who believe in freedom cannot rest until it comes (“Ella’s Song,” Sweet Honey in the Rock)
What does it take to get justice in this county if you’re a black man attacked by a white person? When will young black men be free to walk in safety?
Your assault can be captured on videotape as Rodney King’s was. You can be shot 41 times, as Amadou Diallo was. Your killer can document his own stalking of you on a recorded call to 911, as Trayvon Martin’s did. And it still doesn’t seem to be enough to land a conviction, or even a proper investigation, of your attackers.
What will it take?
For a start, it will take millions more of your countryfolk, especially the white ones, demanding justice. That’s why this Sunday is “Wear Your Hoodie to Church Day” at UUCPA. Everyone is invited to wear a hooded sweatshirt, and we’ll put our group photo out there to show the world that our hearts are broken by the death of Trayvon Martin, that we are watching, that we want the same justice for his family as we would want for our own, and that we will not rest until black Americans are as free as white Americans. (If you don’t have a hoodie, show your support by being in the photo anyway!)
Last night was the last of our midweek contemplative services. They have been very special for me and other participants, but since the attendance has remained small and recruiting leaders has been difficult, it is time to call an end to this phase of the experiment. Maybe we will try them again in the not-too-distant future, in some form, if there is a groundswell asking for them.
The theme last night was “heart to heart,” and we had a ritual of blessing little pewter hearts with something we have gained from coming to these services, and/or that we hope that others will take away with them. We blessed them silently, each of us putting our hand over them, then I gave a heart to each person, and after I spoke their name, we went around the circle speaking the blessing we had each given. So I 
have a heart in my pocket that holds tenderness and gentleness, compassion, clarity, generosity, humility, space for reflection, and the love and support of friends who show how they feel. All blessings I am very glad to carry in my heart. One more blessing is this congregation, whom I love so much that it’s a good thing that heart is made of pewter or it just might burst.
Last year I tried three Lenten practices: I refrained from one thing (Facebook), I engaged in one thing (daily drawing), and I gave money to justice work (abolishing human trafficking). I didn’t keep to the drawing practice very well. The other practices, I kept, and they were deepening. I’m going to follow the same structure this year: a negative practice, a positive practice, and the practice of generosity.
This year I have a somewhat different internet-related practice: not to use the internet as entertainment. In his poem “Ash Wednesday,” T. S. Eliot prayed, “Teach us to sit still.” It’s something I strive to learn, and the net is amphetamines for my monkey mind. So although I will appear on Facebook, I will endeavor not to fritter. Right now I want to go over there just to see what’s going on. That’s the kind of thing I’m planning to resist from now until Easter.
photo by JamesJen, used by permission (Wikimedia Creative Commons)
The line is fuzzy. Reading the week’s secrets every Saturday night at Postsecret seems like a spiritual practice, even though it sometimes affords all the satisfactions of gossip; reading others’ blog entries is serious but can easily drift into just fooling around; using Facebook to see how a friend is doing or take some political action honors the spirit of the practice, but can easily turn into mere entertainment. I will have to be attentive to what’s calling me to a webpage in order to know when to continue and when to stop.
My positive practice is to walk the labyrinth each day I’m at church. The first couple of days’ practice will be to restore it. It’s made of river stones, which are easily dislodged, and the path has actually been altered in at least one place, as I realized when I walked it the other day and discovered that once you get to the center of the labyrinth you can walk right out. There may be labyrinths with that design, but ours is the Cretan labyrinth and follows the same long path out as one took in. I for one need that contemplation time both going into the center and emerging.
I’m going to continue the support of justice work I began last year by putting much more time into the abolition work I’ve been neglecting. I have no desire, or evening time, to be on organizational boards. What I do best is write, speak, coach volunteers, and teach, so I think this is the time to dig out my notes for a UU abolition curriculum and get a draft done. I’ll also be helping the good folks at Aptos, which has the only anti-slavery action group of any UU congregation that I know of (if there are others, please chime in in the comments!), to have a strong presence at General Assembly (GA), where the Congregational Study Action Issue they proposed is being considered as the next official UU-wide issue and where they have a program on the GA schedule, bringing Kevin Bales of Free the Slaves to tell UUs what the problem is and what we can do about it. I already give to anti-trafficking organizations, but I’ll give a special donation for the season.
Do you have, or have you had, any practices for Lent? What are they?
Black History Month, day 18
Some of the theological issues that engage me most are theodicy, the interplay between our lived experiences and our theologies, humanism, and naturalistic theism. As I prepared a talk last fall on humanism, theism, and naturalism, it became clear to me that I should be reading much more from black humanists. From the little I’ve read so far from such theologians as Anthony Pinn and William R. Jones, humanism as a whole (and the variety I know best, Unitarian Universalist humanism) could learn a few things from African-American humanists:
- An emphasis on the evil done by human beings. Banjamin Mays is critical of humanism but makes an illuminating point that among African-Americans, it may be that humanist perspectives “do not develop as the results of the findings of modern science, nor from the observations that nature is cruel and indifferent”–here I would interject, “as they frequently have done among more privileged people”–“but primarily because in the social situation, the [black American] finds himself [or herself] hampered and restricted . . . Heretical ideas of God develop because in the social situation, the ‘breaks’ seem to be against the Negro and the black thinkers are unable to harmonize this fact with the God pictured by Christianity.” I am white and privileged in many other ways, yet this echoes my experience growing up Jewish and, from hearing the accounts of survivors of the Holocaust from a very early age, being fully aware of the almost unimaginable depths of human evil. As a result of its clearsightedness about human evil, black humanism offers…
- …a liberationist perspective that, in contrast, has tended to be weak in the (mostly white) humanism I have encountered within Unitarian Universalism.
- A positive declaration of what it means to be humanist.Like Unitarian Universalism as a whole, humanism within UUism can get stuck defining itself by what it is not. I haven’t read Pinn’s Why Lord?, but according to the author(s) of the Wikipedia article on Pinn, in it he “notes that Black humanism has no interest in disproving the existence of God”; it is “not overly concerned with God as a negative myth, but rather God as a liberating myth that is nonetheless unsubstantiated.” Thus “African-Americans need not waste their time disproving God’s existence, but are simply better off seeking their liberation with the human tools of ‘desire for transformation, human creativity, physical strength, and untapped collective potential.’”
- And the final, perhaps most obvious lesson of black humanism is: There are a lot of black humanists out there. Why aren’t more of them finding a home within Unitarian Universalism?
Sermons in Stones 
Recent comments