Anything I can do, We can do better…
“We think that honesty and living in truth are better ways to live than propaganda and denial and comforting stories.” –Tom Schade, “Religious Community is Not Enough: Unitarian Universalism’s purpose is much bigger than gathering with like-minded people for mutual support,” UU World Winter 2013.
Earlier this year the Board members of the Center for Ethical Living and Social Justice Renewal voted unanimously to attend an Undoing Racism training offered by the People’s Institute for Survival and Beyond. While most of the members of the Board consider themselves anti-racist, we are stretching into what it would take to intentionally shape the Center to be an anti-racist institution. A primarily interpersonal understanding of racism limits our collective ability to address institutional, internalized, and ideological racism. With support from the Unitarian Universalist Veatch Program at Shelter Rock, the entire Board registered for the November Regional Training in New Orleans.
Beloveds, it is not enough to send off one or two of a congregation’s more social justice-y members to a training and consider the work of anti-racism done. It isn’t even enough to go through a congregation-wide training – once. This system of inequity, so deeply in the bones of our country’s constitution that you can take white people out of leadership and have the system continue to provide a preferential option for whites, requires a diligent commitment to undo.
One white member of the Center’s Board was attending this training for the “umpteenth time” since beginning to attend in the 1980’s and was clear that she would keep coming back. What has been done to us as a nation is a powerful, hypnotic thing. It lets me think, as a white woman, “I worked hard for what I have” and not even begin to reflect on how hard my neighbors of color have worked to have not even half as much.
It is hard to express my gratitude to the members of the Center’s Board for showing up for the training, day after day, for an exercise in living in truth, unpacking and confronting propaganda and denial. And doing it together. While I have attended multiple-trainings as an individual, this is the first one I have attended as an intentional member of a collective – and I experienced this training profoundly differently than the ones before. Instead of getting stuck on my own abilities (and lack thereof), I was able to think about the resources and structures of the organization I was a part of – and this has sent me back into the world with energy and hope.
The strongly individualistic (white) values of this nation will not serve us in the task of undoing the structures of oppression. Dismantling systems of oppression is collective work, friends. Find your collective. It is not enough to be a lone crusader in the work of undoing racism. This position only enforces the structure of isolation, designed to prevent collective organizing. If this is your position, look around. You are not alone. All of our lives are diminished by the structures of racism.
Organize, beloveds. The work will not be done perfectly, but together, we can begin to heal that which is profoundly broken.
Collective Joy!
It is Carnival time in New Orleans!
From now until Ash Wednesday, there will be beaucoup parades, parties, and costumes…While February 12th will be “just another Tuesday” in much of the country, here it will be Mardi Gras – the final day of communal revelry before the ascetic season of Lent begins. It wasn’t until I moved to New Orleans that I actually understood the season of Lent. While it may be perfectly obvious for some, it took the context of Carnival, culminating in Mardi Gras, for me to truly appreciate the gift of Lent. A season of contemplation and prayer after a season of glorious communal excess now makes perfect sense.
But first – the glorious communal revelry, the collective joy…
While Lent encourages us to turn inward for reflection, sometimes taking our humanity to task, Carnival gives us the resources to accept and even celebrate our humanity- mine, yours, that stranger’s. Carnival reminds us, in the wisdom of ecotheologian Thomas Berry, that “the universe is composed of subjects to be communed with, not of objects to be exploited.”
In Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy, Barbara Ehrenreich proclaims:
“While hierarchy is about exclusion, festivity generates inclusiveness. The music
invites everyone to the dance; shared food briefly undermines the privilege of
class. As for masks: They may serve symbolic, ritual functions, but to the extent
that they conceal identity, they also dissolve the difference between stranger and
neighbor, making the neighbor temporarily strange and the stranger no more
foreign than anyone else. No source of human difference or identity is immune to
the carnival challenge… At the height of the festivity, we step out of our assigned
roles and statuses—of gender, ethnicity, tribe, and rank—and into a brief utopia
defined by egalitarianism, creativity, and mutual love.”
Collective joy tells us that we are enough – that we are all enough, that we belong to the wonder of creation. As Rev. Sam Trumbore once prayed:
Ash Wednesday will arrive soon enough…
Now, we feast on the abundance of life
The delight of hearing, seeing, smelling, tasting and touching
In a celebration that unites
the diversity of all races, classes and faiths
at the common table of fellowship…
May it be so.
Happy Mardi Gras, beloveds!
Joyful Epiphany
Sunday, January 6th, marks the celebration of Epiphany – a.k.a. Twelfth Night, Three Kings Day, la Fiesta de Reyes. Epiphany honors many sacred events within Christian traditions – the day the child Jesus was visited by the Magi, the baptism of Jesus, his first miracle of turning water into wine at a wedding .
In New Orleans, however, January 6th is most widely celebrated as the night we transition into a new season – from Holiday to Carnival. [Note: We have four fairly distinct seasons in New Orleans: Holiday, Carnival, Festival, and Hurricane.]
The seasonal changes brought by Epiphany are quite visible. Red, green, and blue lights are exchanged for purple, green, and gold lights. Doors and windows bedecked with Christmas wreaths and menorahs transform into doors decorated with Carnival wreaths, masks, and Mardi Gras beads. And the music changes too – carols are gone, replaced by Mardi Gras tunes.
Epiphany is the first day of King Cake season. It is the night of Phunny Phorty Phellows, hopping onto the St. Charles Avenue streetcars, heralding the start of Carnival. It is the birthday of Joan of Arc, the Maid of Orleans, and a carnival krewe marches in her honor from the Bienville statue (representing the founding of New Orleans) to the Joan of Arc statue at Decatur and St. Phillip Street.
Epiphany is the night we welcome collective joy, in the form of Carnival, back onto center stage in our lives.
Carnival offers us an opportunity to take a break from taking ourselves so seriously, from our expectations about how the world should be, and gives us a chance to engage in the healing joy of communal celebration. The work of transforming ourselves and the world is on-going. And it is through seasonally and repeatedly choosing joy that we can find the energy we need to continually commit to this work.
“I think that the energy to do all those things [to help make the world a better place] comes from choosing joy,” writes the Church of the Larger Fellowship’s Lynn Ungar. “You can inspire people to a certain degree by sheer terror…However, if we’re going to keep those changes going, if we’re going to find new and creative ways to build better lives, then I think we’re going to have to draw on some deep wells of joy.”
Epiphany opens the lid on a deep well of joy for me and my city.
What is your source of joy?
Where do you find your energy to make the world a better place?