From Your Minister
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I’ve attended ceremonies in a number of religious communities to welcome in new babies. In some Christian baptisms, I have been stunned to hear priests and ministers talk about exorcising evil from the babies through baptism, through bringing Christ into the baby and thus casting demons out. The first time it happened was at a Catholic baptism. I was aghast, and wanted to grab the precious baby from the priest and say, “He didn’t do it!”
I looked around at the large extended family of this beloved baby to see if they were as disturbed as I was. They were talking to one another, smiling, pretty much ignoring the priest’s words. Now, I’ll say that until these words were spoken, I had been suffering from profound Catholic ritual envy. The oil, the holy water, the words and music had an ancient feel that stirred me deeply. I felt as if I were standing in thousands of years of birth and death and life.
And then, the demons were mentioned. Evil was in that baby, and could be cast out only by Jesus Christ. My envy dissolved in a heartbeat. For the extended family, evidently, words were not central to the occasion, as they were for me. The relationships, the ritual, the beauty of the tradition—that is what the family was there for. None of them seemed at all troubled by demons and exorcism.
We Unitarian Universalist are a very word-centered people, for better and for worse. So my attention to the words was well-honed. But UUs do have rituals of our own. At our baby dedications, we use water and flowers to proclaim the blessedness of this new life, to dedicate the baby to the community and the community to the baby, to bring the baby into a sacred covenant of the gathered people to care for one another. There is nothing said about evil, or what a person must do to avoid being evil. Much is said about the potential of the baby to be a blessing in the world.
Holding up the potential to be a blessing in the world is not the same thing as being a blessing in the world, though. The old saying, “The road to hell is paved with good intentions” could be about any of us. We don’t intend to be oppressive, or exclusive, and yet we often are.
In most UU congregations, the chosen flowers for baby dedications are roses from which the thorns have been carefully removed. This is explained to the community with words about our wish to prevent the young child from the pain that thorns inflict. Every parent wants to spare their children unnecessary pain. And of course no one wants to create bloody babies!
But I wonder what ritual we might develop to include naming the fact that, along with all of its blessings, the world is full of pain and struggle, oppression and greed. And that being a blessing means fighting forces that are large, and real, and aimed against our individual and collective humanity.
There are many days when I read about inhumane practices of individuals, or legislative bodies, or police unions, or courts, or school administrations, or prisons, and no word but evil comes to my mind. We humans are born completely vulnerable, dependent upon one another. Betraying one another’s vulnerability, attacking those who are most undefended, is foundational to how I understand evil.
But evil is not rare or unusual; indeed, it is commonplace. So commonplace that most of us participate in systems that diminish collective humanity every day, whether by wearing clothes made in sweatshops, eating foods grown in conditions that diminish life for agricultural workers, using petroleum and water and other scarce resources without restraint, or using unearned privileges without awareness. It’s hard to get self-righteous if we’re honest about our impact on the world.
Somehow, our invitation to all people of all ages who choose to live in covenant that supports Unitarian Universalist principles and values must include ways to get back to right relationship when we have betrayed another’s humanity, when we have betrayed our own values. As adults, we need to leave the thorns on the roses, and acknowledge the sharp pain that’s right there with the beauty. We need practices of forgiveness and of accountability. We need rituals to acknowledge our complicity in evil systems, and to find ways to heal together.
All of us need to be healed from our own greed, from our lack of trust in our own espoused values. We can only do this through lived experience of something different from the culture at large. Our rituals cannot just be about words, though we need good words: they need to be grounded in relationships and beauty and the timelessness of the ancestors and the not-yet-born and a history of making brave choices.
I believe that together, even still, we can collectively hold the evil that has been created and continues to be created by people, including us. We won’t cast demons out of one another, but we can leverage our collective power to tilt the world just a little bit more towards one that is reflective of our deepest longings.
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