From Your Minister
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I love poking around and discovering old words which are new to me. One word that surfaced from my reflections on freedom is the Old English frith, which is related to the words for both friend and free. (My ruminations on this connection were launched by a blogpost called “Friendship is a Root of Freedom” at a website called Joyful Militancy: Thriving Resistance in Toxic Times.)
Variations of the word frith were prevalent in many European cultures, including Iceland, to describe the kind of peace and security that come only from being in right relationship. Freedom is connected to friendship, to kinship. Unitarian Universalists say something about this kinship in our seventh principle, naming “respect for the interdependent web of all existence.”
However, in the way our principles are delineated, “a free and responsible search for truth and meaning” (our fourth principle) might seem to be separate from that interdependent web. Too often, we hear UUs state, “You can believe anything you want to.” However, that kind of individualism will not lead to frith.
Frith means that freedom includes accountability to and responsibility for one another. A free and responsible search for truth and meaning doesn’t mean that I can conduct thought experiments in a tiny bubble without taking into account how my meaning-making impacts the others around me. That’s why I like this word frith, which acknowledges that complexity, that interrelatedness, as foundational.
What would it mean if we lived in a world where frith was the norm? I like to think that our spiritual communities are places in which we try to find out; in which right relationship is the center point grounding our free and responsible search for truth and meaning.
When I hear white Unitarian Universalists say that they are tired of talking about racism, or male Unitarian Universalists say they are tired of talking about misogyny, or other people using all of the ways we are privileged to keep from hearing how our meaning-making is limited and hurtful, I long for a time to talk through who “we” are, and who is included in that center where our faith lives.
Paula Cole Jones, director of racial and social justice for several UUA regions, developed the idea that there are two different paradigms in UU circles, our seven principles being one, and Beloved Community (deep multiculturalism) the other. After working with congregations for over 15 years, she realized that a person can believe they are being a “good UU” and following the seven principles without thinking about or dealing with racism and other oppressions at the systemic level. She cites as evidence the fact that most UU congregations are primarily European-American in membership, culture (especially music), and leadership, even when located near diverse communities.
She realized that an eighth principle, which brought these two paradigms together was needed to correct this problem.
Recently, Black Lives of Unitarian Universalism (BLUU) has supported the addition of an eighth principle, which would join the other seven:
We, the member congregations of the Unitarian Universalist Association, covenant to affirm and promote: journeying toward spiritual wholeness by working to build a diverse multicultural Beloved Community by our actions that accountably dismantle racism and other oppressions in ourselves and our institutions.
This request, which is being discussed and will eventually become an agenda item at our General Assembly, is a movement to create frith in our principles—to unite the two strands that Jones identified, to declare that only in connecting right relationship to freedom are we truly living our faith. I’m sure there will be disagreements, but I look forward to the conversation, because it is so needed. And I am hopeful that we will vote to add this key element to what it means to live our faith.
As a white person, I’ve spent many hours trying, often unsuccessfully, to convey the systemic nature of oppression to other white people. It’s been, and will be, my life-long work to fully understand the tenacity of systemic racism and white supremacy. Because I am a visual thinker, I often see the issue in terms of an image I heard from Dr. Bill Jones, one of my first teachers about the systemic nature of racism. Dr. Jones said that privileged people see a metal bar in front of an oppressed person and we think, What’s the problem? Go around it!
We don’t understand that there are bars after bars, connected to one another, and that they encircle the oppressed people, with just enough space between the bars that privileged people only see the space around them and don’t get it that the bars are placed strategically to block any movement. I have witnessed, in my own lifetime, some amazing bar-bending by people of color, and yet every statistic about racial divides in wealth, health, education, safety, housing, transportation, incarceration—and every other measure—describe how the bars are still solidly in place.
Frith means that I understand how, in the words of Martin Luther King Jr.,“No one is free while others are oppressed”—and that my being kind to everyone, while it’s a good thing, does not stop oppression. Frith is our path to freedom.
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