This past weekend I had the chance to do one of my favorite things. Presiding over friends’ weddings is a great perk of the ministry gig. This was a beautiful wedding, joining two families from very different backgrounds. Guests came from Milwaukee and Mumbai, wore brightly colored saris and sundresses, suits and cortas,On the dance floor, Bollywood mingled with Madonna and midwest polkas. And everyone ate and drank and danced as the skies opened and poured blessings on the barn roof.
At one point in the evening, I found myself standing in a doorway overlooking the dance floor. I took it in: the bride and groom surrounded by family and friends from all over the world, everyone moving, arms and legs and bodies, mouths open in delight, music echoing, laughter filling the air.
My daughter was asleep on my chest, wrapped tight against me in her sling. I held her close as I watched the joyous scene before us. I thought of how people have danced at weddings for thousands of years and still do — every day, everywhere, even as bombs fall and disease spreads, even as we mourn devastating losses, cradle our broken hearts and lift our heads high, even as we fear what might be and hold fast to hope for what could be. For all of human history people of every hue, every tongue, every nation have danced at weddings with joy and fear and pain and hope and love.
Love brought us all to the barn on a September evening. A gentle, kind-hearted, soul-rich, giving kind of love that is contagious in the best kind of way.
The bride and groom chose a poem from the 14th century Sufi poet, Hafiz, to preface their vows. I offer it here as a prayer that love might continue to do its work in our broken, hurting world.
Congratulations K&K.
˜
It happens all the time in heaven,
And some day
It will begin to happen
Again on earth –
That men and women who are married,
And men and men who are
Lovers,
And women and women
Who give each other
Light,
Often will get down on their knees
And while so tenderly
Holding their lover’s hand,
With tears in their eyes,
Will sincerely speak, saying,
My dear,
How can I be more loving to you;
How can I be more kind?
What ‘Ol Abe Saw
Moses, Jesus, Paul, et. al. as motivator. Their words as marching orders for how to live and what is right to do.
Sounds good. Yet, as he watched the bloody carnage justified on both sides by Christian theology, Abraham Lincoln perhaps said it best:
“I know that the Lord is always on the side of the right. But it is my constant anxiety and prayer that I and this nation should be on the Lord’s side.”
Which side is the Lord’s side? Or is it that God plays for both teams? Or is it that human beings are condemned to action that may or may not be “right” until God (or Satan?) sorts it out?
Cherry-Picking and Sound-Biting
This contrast came home to me during the recent fight over gay marriage in the state of Minnesota, where I live. Progressive religious leaders took a long look at the reign of the religious right in politics and decided to counter it. We took the Christian message of love and inclusion to the statehouse. I knew that we had accomplished the goal when a conservative state senator said, “This is about more than religion.”
The worm had turned. And, indeed, the right to marry is now guaranteed in the state of Minnesota.
Many of my religious sisters and brothers believe that the loving and inclusive message of their faith traditions prevailed. Don’t get me wrong—I’m all for loving and inclusion. It’s the message of Moses, Jesus, Paul, et. al. that bothers me a bit.
Weren’t we progressives cherry-picking and sound-biting as crassly as our conservative opponents?
Where were the real Moses and Jesus and Paul in all this?
Perhaps our hearts were telling us things. Perhaps our sense of right and wrong was talking, on both sides. But these sacred thinkers weren’t saying anything new that the scriptures weren’t telling Abe Lincoln and Jeff Davis back in their days of choosing who to slaughter and why based on those old writings.
This gives me pause. Are we really best served as we make decisions in the Twenty-First Century by referring to old texts and deities that pretty clearly don’t do a whole lot of clear talking?
Or might we be better served “using our own little heads”?
That’s a phrase I learned from my fundamentalist Christian mother: “Use your own little head.”
By it, she meant for teenage me to “listen to my raisin’,” another catch phrase, rather than my peers. My mother was cautioning me to use my own head. Further, at least to my future-humanist ears, she was saying that reason, not the religion in my gut, should determine my actions.
Shouldn’t reason, not the religions of our various cultural backgrounds, serve as the arbiter of public discourse and our efforts at realizing a just society?
As a multi-faith leader, I spend a lot of time saying and showing that people of diverse religious faiths can find common ground. I believe in that work.
I’m also convinced that our common evolution as cooperative and rational animals trumps the overlays of religion and culture made since our common trek from the Rift Valley began.
We are rational animals.
After all, which would you prefer as a physician, someone who feels your pain or someone who knows how to stop it? Listening to the heart is a fine thing to do. And, there’s no doubt scriptures make great soundbites.
Listening to our own heads is the hard part.
The Thursday following the fundamentalist disruption of worship service at First Unitarian Universalist Church of New Orleans, a Pro-Woman, Pro-LBGTQ, Pro-Religious Freedom rally was planned for City Hall. It may not surprise you that the Unitarian Universalists showed up. Dozens of Standing on the Side of Love t-shirts, signs, and stoles were vividly on display. A small but exceedingly vocal counter-rally was staged on the hill above the rally by some who had apparently raced back to New Orleans from Baton Rouge for this very purpose. Even with the bullhorn, it was difficult to hear what was being said at the rally over the yelling of the anti-choice protesters.
And so a group of people, mostly UUs, turned toward the hill, forming a sound barrier between the those speaking their truth in the center of the safe circle and those screaming their truth from the hill, and began to sing (to the tune of Siyahamba, a South African freedom song,) We are standing on the side love, we are standing on the side of love. The singing continued until everyone had had a chance to speak their truth in the Pro-woman, Pro-LBGTQ, Pro-Religious Freedom space.
As the rally drew to a close, everyone not on the hill joined hands, forming a gigantic circle, and sang together: We are standing on the side love, we are standing on the side of love. Rev. Melanie Morel-Ensminger blessed us all, sending us off with the wisdom to “Go Now in Peace.”
The police were on alert and surrounded the park – subtly…We were allowed to protest injustice in peace. Our right to do so was affirmed by the community and by the powers that be.
Friends, that’s a privilege we have not extended to #Ferguson or the many communities of color protesting the extrajudicial killings of children and young adults. Please, before you say “they just need to calm down,” consider the humane and human need to protest injustice. May you tender the communities’ outrage with mercy, with compassion, perhaps even, with love and holy curiosity.
May you withhold your judgment. In times of grief, there is no room for our shoulda, woulda, coulda…. only room for compassion.
If you cannot find your compassion in this time, please still yourself until you can. And if you wonder where it went, spend some time thinking about how systems of oppression steal the humanity of the oppressor as well as the oppressed. If you cannot find compassion for the human grief of others, you may have lost touch with your own humanity. Beloveds, it is worth the work of undoing oppression to reclaim it.
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Some among us are asking, “Is there a center to Unitarian Universalism?” Or is it like the old story of blind persons describing an elephant, with a twist:
One of us touches the side and says, “It’s a wall.” Another feels the leg and says, “It’s a tree.” Another grabs the tail and proclaims, “It’s a rope.” But after all our surveying, is the one thing UUs can say for certain only that There is no elephant?
Do we have a theological center? And why are we asking about this? When did pluralism become a problem?
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We are people of the word. Or, better said, people of words, many words. Words are one of the most important ways that we “know” things.
But words, to quote Henry Adams, are “slippery things,” and words mean different things to different people. Take the word “freedom.” To the privileged early Unitarians, freedom meant freedom of thought. To the African American community, however, it meant freedom from slavery and freedom from oppression. The two groups had a hard time talking.
I am paid to evangelize, to grow current congregations and plant new congregations. I’ve been lurking on internet sites of fundamentalist evangelists, because, quite frankly, they have systems for planting new congregations. I mean, they’ve got systems! They have trainings and boot camps and coaches and conferences just for planting. I have a hot case of holy envy.
So I thought about attending such a conference as an add-on activity in a city where I was already working on behalf of our Association. Well, attending it didn’t work out, but on the plane back home guess who my seatmates were? That’s right, two fundamentalist, evangelical men who had been to the church planting conference.
I strained my ears to hear what they were saying. The older man seemed to be in charge, and the younger one deferred to him. The elder quoted scripture and talked a lot about saving people. Their whole mission is converting people to Christianity so they may be saved and get into heaven.
I wanted to jump in, interrupt with all of the questions I had for them.
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One of the ways that we create spiritual or theological common ground is so simple it’s almost embarrassing: We agree to do so. We make a commitment to each other to create a space that is held in common. In religious language, these commitments are called covenants. In the Bible, covenants are between people and God.
Covenants, if they are to truly hold us, need to be large enough to contain the whole selves of the people who make them (including both what is holy and what is unholy). The place we are most likely to see covenants being created is at weddings. Two people commit to one another before their loved ones and what they name as holy. I have seen people make some pretty unlikely promises over the years—promises that are romantic and beautiful, but in my mind fairly unsustainable.
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Covenants are intentional.
Covenants are audacious.
Covenants are a promise
that can change our lives
together in this faith. Read more →
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As someone who grew up Unitarian Universalist, I have to admit that there are some disadvantages to being a UU kid. There are advantages, of course, like being able to celebrate holidays from a variety of different religions, but there are definitely drawbacks. Mostly these problems come when someone asks you, on the playground maybe, what church you go to. It’s hard enough just getting people through the ten syllables of Unitarian Universalist. But if you manage that task then the inevitable follow-up question is: “What do you believe?”
I happen to think that’s kind of an unfair question, especially to put on, say, a fourth-grader. If you say you’re Methodist or Baptist or Jewish nobody asks you what you believe. They have a category in their head to put you into, and they just leave it at that. Now, their assumptions about what you believe might be totally wrong, and I’m sure there is not one nine-year-old in 100 who could tell you the difference between what a Presbyterian and an Episcopalian believes, but the point is that no one feels they need to ask.
But if you’re UU there’s not only the long, awkward name to get through, there’s also the uncomfortable fact that people don’t know what mental box to put you in, so they ask about what you believe. Which leads you to the equally uncomfortable fact that your religion doesn’t tell you what to believe, which really messes with people’s idea of religion in general. And beyond even that, if you’re going to actually answer the question then you need to have figured out for yourself what it is that you believe, and how to say it, which is hard enough for a grown-up, and a real uphill climb for a child.
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As a Unitarian Universalist congregation with no geographical boundary, the CLF creates global spiritual community, rooted in profound love, which cultivates wonder, imagination, and the courage to act.