AISHA HAUSER
Lead Ministry Team, Church of the Larger Fellowship

One of the most impactful trips I have ever been on in my life was with a friend to Olympic National Park in Washington State, specifically the Ancient Forest, an area that dates back to pre-contact, when only the indigenous people lived and thrived on this land, before the arrival of European settlers.

We were completely cut off from any of the digital and online life we were living. Being this off the grid took a bit of getting used to, however I quickly found something shifting in my physical body and my emotional state.

I felt calmer and inching closer to feeling relaxed. I hadn’t fully appreciated that there is a different kind of relaxation one feels when fully unplugged from anyone who isn’t in your physical presence.

Going into the ancient forest helped ground me while paradoxically allowing me to become more expansive at the same time. 

Old growth and ancient grown forest ground contains layers upon layers of flora and fauna. In fact, the word “flora” means goddess in Latin. How fitting that divinity is part of the naming of these natural and sacred living entities.

The quiet of the forest is not silent. There is the rustling of the trees, the sound of a stream, birds chirping and the muffled sounds of our feet along the forest floor.

I felt myself release tension as I walked.

I placed my palms on the trees, leaning on them for comfort and solace.

It was truly a cleansing experience, a forest bath.

According to the National Geographic website:

The term emerged in Japan in the 1980s as a physiological and psychological exercise called shinrin-yoku (“forest bathing” or “taking in the forest atmosphere”). The purpose was twofold: to offer an eco-antidote to tech-boom burnout and to inspire residents to reconnect with and protect the country’s forests.

While the term ‘forest bathing’ may be relatively recent, humans have found ways to heal and cleanse while communing with nature throughout millenia.

Jesus prayed at the foot of olive trees in the Garden of Gethsemane.

The Bodhi tree also known as the Wisdom Tree is believed to be where the Buddha found enlightenment.

Integral to Pagan practices are communing with nature often among the trees.

While I did not find enlightenment during my time in the ancient forest, what I did find was a deeper connection to myself and the earth. 

Rev. Dr. Michael Tino
Lead Ministry Team, Church of the Larger Fellowship

Recently, I’ve heard more and more people wondering what is the place of covenant and accountability in Unitarian Universalism. In some circles, they have become almost dirty words–signs that we are somehow abandoning the individualist faith that so many people mistakenly think we are. And yet, both of these concepts are central to our faith.

Covenant consists of the sacred promises we make to one another. It is not a fixed set of beliefs, but rather a living understanding of how we are in community together. Covenants define the practices of Unitarian Universalism as well as what we are striving to create together.

As a faith movement, our congregations are bound to each other in covenant. That covenant is expressed in Article 2 of the Unitarian Universalist Association by-laws. It lives there because covenants and by-laws, unlike creeds, are meant to be changeable. As our understanding of our faith deepens, as our understanding of our world develops, and as the circle of our faith widens to welcome in those who have too long been marginalized, we must adapt the promises that hold us together.

And so it is that our covenant has been updated recently. Rather than simply asking our congregations to “affirm and promote” principles (a phrase that I came to see as the faith analog of the meaningless phrase “thoughts and prayers”), our new covenant asks us to engage in specific actions to live our faith in the world. It asks us to understand power, how it is abused to lead to oppression and exploitation, and to actively work to dismantle those things in our world. It asks us to commit to changing, growing, and repairing damaged relationships. It asks us to create fully accessible and inclusive communities, and to embrace our differences as we learn from one another.

These are good promises, solid promises that, if we keep them, will help us center our faith in love and live from the values we claim: justice, equity, transformation, pluralism, interdependence, and generosity.

But what if we don’t keep our promises?

That’s where accountability comes in.

In 1646, the congregations in the New England colonies brought delegates together to discuss how they would be governed. The 1648 Cambridge Platform has served since then as the basis for what we call “congregational polity,” the way in which Unitarian Universalist congregations still come together. Even in 1648, congregations realized that one of their responsibilities to each other was to be able to hold each other accountable to the practices and ideals of their faith.

How this happens has changed a lot since 1648, but it has not ceased to be part of the relationship among congregations. We are collectively responsible for the covenant of our faith. And so, we have to be collectively responsible for asking our sibling UUs to be accountable to that covenant.

Accountability does not mean punishment, nor does it mean banishment, like so many people seem to fear. It does mean that we are allowed to ask each other to do better. It means that we are allowed to point out when each others’ actions fall short of the values we claim. Yes, it might mean that we are going to have to get used to giving and receiving constructive, loving criticism.

For too long, our faith has been mired in a hyper-individualism that is good for no one. We are not the faith where, as some claim, one can believe or do whatever one wants to. We are instead a faith where we proudly center our interdependence with one another, a faith that insists that none of us are in this alone.

In the back of our hymnal is an uncredited (anonymous) reading that blesses us with these words: “May we know once again that we are not isolated beings, but connected, in mystery and miracle, to the universe, to this community, and to
each other.”

To these words, I add this: May our connection to each other be grounded in covenant. May it be a connection of mutual accountability and growth. May it be a connection that helps us all live with love at the center of our lives. 

Companioning One Another Through These Times

by Nicole Pressley
Organizing Strategy Director, Side With Love – Unitarian Universalist Association

On November 15, 2015, the Minneapolis Police Department killed a black man named Jamar Clark. That night, community members, organizers, and activists formed an encampment outside the Fourth Precinct to demand the release of the body camera footage and justice for Jamar Clark. For 20 days, as the Minnesota winter set in, businesses, organizations, unions, and people came together to build and sustain community. Meals were served, warm clothing was provided, and systems of care, security, and conflict resolution were designed. People danced. People sang. And people preached.

On a very late night, as many of us huddled under the propane heaters donated by the Sierra Club, Rev. Danny Givens preached a sermon about Henrietta Lacks, a black woman whose cells were used without her consent to lead to breakthroughs in science. He called us to remember the many ways in which that violation of black bodies feeds heteropatriarchal capitalism. He invited us into the powerful call to ground our work demanding justice for Jamar Clark in a broader demand to dismantle state violence and commit ourselves to black liberation.

This was the beginning of my journey into Unitarian Universalism. Rev. Danny Givens worked at Unity Church in St. Paul. At this encampment, I experienced “church” and activism in a new and powerful way that transformed my relationship to both. In my prior experience, sermons were delivered from ornate pulpits in the comfort of a building, not on a cold wet street under the threat of arrest and violence from police and white supremacists. The primary subjects were usually men whose stories felt too far away to be easily relevant to the struggles I find to be critical, as a black queer woman. Instead, he elevated the story of a black woman. Instead of focusing on salvation as a reward for our good deeds after death, he opened us up to the possibility of transformation and liberation as an urgent spiritual and political practice.

I reflected on this moment recently as I stood in solidarity with students at their encampment at Northeastern University. I was in Boston because I had the honor of being the respondent to the Minns Lecture, an annual Unitarian Universalist theological presentation, offered by Rev. Jason Lydon a few days previous. Rev. Jason spoke about the UU Service Committee’s National Moratorium on Prison Construction. He opened his remarks with the connection between the police violence against students on Emerson College’s campus and that of the cruelty of the prison system.  At the Shabbat service that followed the early morning raid and arrests of Northeastern students, attendees discussed the police repression on Emory’s campus and at Stop Cop City actions in Atlanta. In the midst of this political action, the U.S. Supreme Court heard a case on the criminalization of encampments of unhoused people across the country. With the Court’s ruling in favor of criminalization, students at elite universities and their unhoused neighbors will sit in the same jails, with the same charges, and for different reasons with vastly different resources. I think about how our jails will fill with trans people, medical professionals, and people seeking abortions, because life-saving care is also criminalized.

“If they take you in the morning, they will be come for us that night.”
—James Baldwin

Baldwin wrote these words on November 19, 1970 in a letter to Angela Davis in solidarity after her arrest. These words are not a warning like those we usually hear, “you’ll be next,” or, “first they came for…”. It is an understanding. Baldwin knows, deeply, that being targeted by the state can happen to anyone who finds themselves out of favor with those in power. LGBTQ, BIPOC, and disabled people, union organizers, sex workers, the unhoused, even women in bathing suits have found themselves the target of state based violence.

Criminalization as a tactic is not new, yet under increasingly fascist conditions in this country, we may find the connections between our struggles more easily.

As I wrote in this year’s 30 Days of Love, a project of the UUA’s Side with Love campaign: “before criminalization becomes a political tactic of disconnection and domination, it is first a spiritual acquiescence to dehumanization and disposability. We deny a moral mandate of mutuality in search of the protection of power over others.” Too often, we take up solidarity in a reaction to a threat. We use it as a political strategy, attempting to build larger coalitions as a means to pass or block legislation or win some other material demand for our communities. I hope that instead, like Baldwin, we can begin to know in our bones that our liberation is inextricably bound — that maybe, we are not just all we have, but we, together, are all we need.