Why I am a Unitarian Universalist
As a good Pentecostal kid, I read the Bible. I read of a God who condemned the oppression of the poor. I read of a Messiah executed for threatening power structures. This is not what I heard from the pulpit. I could not reconcile this dissonance in my mind. I felt alone.
At college I found a small group of humanists who called themselves Unitarian Universalists. They were joyful people whose values of commitment and compassion I admired. I was not alone.
I became a poet. I began to think that all scriptures are part of a vast and beautiful human project to capture compassion and awe. I began to believe that scripture is creative writing. I began to believe that the writers of sacred texts were poets. And, like me, all were bound in understanding by barriers such as time, geography, and language.
I am a Unitarian Universalist because I believe religions are very human attempts to find meaning and purpose. The texts and practices that have accumulated over time are at once sad and glorious, brutal and loving.
We humans, all through time, have been whistling in a graveyard. And writing poetry.
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!
Guns: Relationship Status: “It’s complicated.”
I first held a gun when I was eight years old. One of my uncles let me fire his new pistol. I still remember the strain of trying to hold the heavy gun steady so he wouldn’t think I was too weak to try it. All these years later, I vividly remember the incredible rush of power that washed over me as I fired that pistol.
I was eight years old and I held in my hand a tool that could spit fire and knock a beer can off a fence several yards away. I was eight years old and I held in my hand a tool that could have ended the life of the uncle who handed it to me. It is difficult to articulate how much power surged through my little being. I swear I heard the Scots heritage in my mutt-blood swim screaming to the surface with a mighty roar…
Nine years later, the older brother of the uncle who first handed me a gun died after being shot by another family member. Not long after that, the father of my classmate was killed while responding to a domestic violence call. The man who killed him was devastated to realize, once he descended from his pain-killer induced high, that he had killed not only a police officer, but a friend.
Four years ago, my partner called me at the hospital where I was working as a chaplain to let me know that he was not one of the two white men shot to death a block away from my house (where a heroin deal apparently turned deadly). Shortly before that, I had watched an ambulance come claim the body of a sixteen year old boy, victim of a drive by shooting at the other end of my street.
I have lived in the rural life and the urban life and what each had in common was:
- a sense of powerlessness about how the world is run and
- deaths by firearms.
Our country (and colonial powers around the world) has a history of taking away a population’s weapons and property (i.e. indigenous peoples, Japanese-American relocation camps, mass incarceration through a government-created drug war…) when people in power decide to do so. How then, to trust that you really will be safer by giving up your guns?
Christian social justice activist and writer Jim Wallis proclaims:
Former assumptions and shared notions about fairness, agreements, reciprocity, mutual benefits, social values, and expected futures have all but disappeared. The collapse of financial systems and the resulting economic crisis not only have caused instability, insecurity, and human pain; they have also generated a growing disbelief and fundamental distrust in the way things operate and how decisions are made.
I confess that I am grateful to finally live in a gun-free home, I freak out just a bit when even toy guns are pointed at me or anyone I love, and I would love to trust that I could walk through my neighborhood at night without hearing gunfire. But I was also here in New Orleans when the National Guard rolled through with their Humvees and their guns and I know what it feels like to be occupied by a military force – first denied access to my home and property, then patrolled and subject to interrogation once home again.
My faith and my lived experience teaches that life is rarely an either/or proposition. In this interdependent web of all existence, we are all connected, tangled together in a tapestry of history and mystery. It’s complicated.
It is hazardous to talk glibly about gun control unless we talk about creating a nation that is welcoming, safe, and empowering for all people. This conversation is complex and deserves real discernment, not sound bites and bullet points.
Guns do not provide actual safety. They provide a sense of power. [Bear witness: our government is not at all ready to give up its guns, its sense of power.]
I suspect that if we are going to end gun violence, we will have to address the collective needs of all – urban and rural, white and people of color, individuals and institutions – who feel powerless without their guns.
Like-Hearted People
“You need not think alike to love alike.”
This was the wisdom of Francis David, spiritual advisor to King John Sigismund of Transylvania, the Unitarian king who pronounced the first edict of religious toleration in the year 1568.
You need not think alike to love alike.
At Unitarian Universalist gatherings, I sometimes hear “it is so nice to be with a group of like-minded people.” Beloveds, it is tempting, in the not-so-liberal parts of these United States, to take refuge in liberal religion. Here you are welcome. We often say in worship welcomes “no matter your gender, your race, your ethnicity, your sexuality, your age, your size, the color of your eyes – you are welcome here.”
Your politics, however…Your education level…these might matter …
Seeking sanctuary with like-minded people, while a deeply understandable and very human response, is not the basis of our faith. We are called to honor the inherent worth and dignity of all in our interdependent web of existence– no matter how people vote, what they believe, or where they went to school. Liberal religion is grounded in a theology of inclusion. As Rev. Marilyn Sewell states, “at the center of our faith is not belief, but love.” Love. We are a people of covenant, a people of promise. And we promise to love one another.
During a dialogue on race and class with a group of UU volunteers in New Orleans, one group member casually mentioned the “white trash-y” trailer park area across the tracks in his midwestern home town.
I felt the term sizzle across my skin, leaving a faint contrail of anger and shame… White trash. Trailer trash. Humans who have the skin color of privilege, but few other privileges. Who often live in generational cycles of poverty, who generally have few educational opportunities. Who have had nothing for generations but their pride and their whiteness, neither of which keeps the refrigerator full or pays rent, much less a mortgage.
I remember the day I received a copy of my birth certificate, ordered for the purpose of applying for my first passport. There, in black and white, and forever a part of my American identity: “Place of residence at time of birth: Fort Fredericka Trailer Park.”
I am often reminded in subtle and not so subtle ways that I am welcome in Unitarian Universalism because I am the exception, not the rule of my people. I left my home state after high school, struggled through a liberal arts college education that my public education had not quite prepared me for, got a passport and studied abroad in Central America on scholarship. Much of this was possible because my father joined the Navy at 19, put his body on the line for a chance to break the cycle of poverty and violence that he grew up in. Much of this was possible because my grandmother believed it was important to educate girls to and insisted that her daughter have the same chance to graduate from high school as her sons. It was not a question in my house whether I was going to college after high school. The only question was how I was gonna pay for it.
Without these breaks, these formational pattern changers, I would not be a Unitarian Universalist minister. The educational requirements alone for the training would have been barrier enough, let alone the cost of them…
Come, come whoever you are
We sing and we say these words from the 13th century Sufi Mystic Rumi:
Wander, worshiper, lover of leaving
Though you’ve broken your vows a thousand times
Come, yet again come
Our Unitarian legacy is tolerance, our Universalist legacy is radical salvation for all souls. How then can we reconcile the promise of our faith with the practice of our faith?
It is not faithful to write off a group of people because they do not sound like you, do not think like you, do not have the same life experiences as you. We know this to be true in the marrow of our bones. We know it and so we work on radical hospitality, begin Welcoming Congregation programs, have A Dialogue on Race and Ethnicity. And this is good, faithful work!
Please let us remember, in our stretching, that everyone means everyone. As we discern our internalized superiority and inferiority around race, gender, and sexuality, let us also remember to check our assumptions and oppressions around class and educational privilege.
We are not called to be a faith of like-minded people. We are called to worship and work together as like-hearted people – loving all of creation with compassion and curiosity.
“You need not think alike to love alike.”
Come, come, whoever you are. May you find yourself welcome here.
A Place in the Family
I pretty much only listen to radio in the car, which explains how I stumbled on just a few minutes of a call-in show which featured an evolutionary biologist. I suppose it shouldn’t have been surprising that the question I heard as I was pulling into my driveway went something like this: “Scientists have looked at millions of fossils, but no one has found the fossil that shows the transition from a fish to a lizard, or a chimp to a human. Why should I believe that I’m related to a chimp or a giraffe or sludge at the bottom of the sea when there’s no real evidence?”
I tend to be a little…unsympathetic toward this kind of question. Luckily, I was alone in my car as I shouted back at the caller: “DNA! Have you never heard of a little thing called DNA?” Fortunately, the presenter responded calmly that the caller had brought an excellent question. Then he went on to describe how, based on their scientific knowledge, he and a colleague had predicted where one would find a fossil that showed the transition of species from fish to lizard, and what such a fossil might look like. And then they found it. Where they had predicted (Canada), and with many—but not all—of the characteristics they had expected to find.
The biologist went on to explain how DNA shows us the way in which we are related to all other living beings. “It’s beautiful!” he said. “The chimpanzees are our close cousins and the sea sludge is a distant cousin and the giraffe is somewhere in the middle, but we’re all related.”
And then I got it. The two world views I was hearing about were not simply between someone sophisticated in the uses of the scientific method and someone with less understanding. The caller didn’t want to be related to a chimp or a giraffe or, God forbid, sea sludge. He wanted to be the pinnacle of creation, something utterly different from—and better than—the rest of the living world. To see himself as related to a giraffe would mean being shoved off of the pedestal, removed from his rightful place in the Great Chain of Being. Being related to a chimp would, I imagine, mean losing his relationship with the God who had placed him, as a human, in dominion over the rest of the world.
The biologist, by contrast, couldn’t have been happier to be related to sea sludge. He loved being cousins with the chimp and the giraffe, and his devotion to understanding more and more of the family genealogy was part and parcel with his joy in being a part of the family of things. I don’t know anything about this man’s theology, but as someone who shares his joy in this web of relations, I would imagine that if he believes in God at all, it is a God who is within all beings, in relationship with all beings. He, or at any rate, I, would find the Holy in the whole creative process of evolution, in the unfolding of diversity over time. There would be no worry about losing a relationship with God if we tumbled from the top of the pyramid, because God was never at the top to begin with. Neither were we humans. God was—is—in the connections, in all the crazy ways that we are interrelated with the Family of Life.
I have no idea whether anything shifted in the caller when he heard about the fish/lizard fossil or the linked DNA. How could he process such information, when the price of believing it was so high? But I couldn’t help but wonder whether it felt lonely up there, at the top of the Great Chain, looking up toward God and the angels in the invisible distance, disconnected from the chimps and giraffes and lizards below. Me, I’d rather be down here with the sea sludge, representing just one of the crazy cousins in this massive family gathering we call Planet Earth.
We Are All In This Together
“If middle-class Americans do not feel threatened by the slow encroachment of the police state or the Patriot Act, it is because they live comfortably enough and exercise their liberties very lightly, never testing the boundaries. You never know you are in a prison unless you try the door.” ― Joe Bageant, Deer Hunting with Jesus: Dispatches from America’s Class War
“I spent Thanksgiving Day in Central Lock-up!”
Waiting for keys to be cut in the local hardware store this week, I was completely drawn into the generously shared story of another customer with the shop’s owner. “Pulled over for not coming to a complete stop.” An initial infraction, no grace from those in power, a questionable ensuing search of the vehicle, an old open beer can giving the opportunity to turn a citation into a charge that was later thrown out by a judge as having no merit – later. After spending Thanksgiving in jail. And missing a day of work for court. Which cost him. Literally.
Living one infraction away from lock-up is a situation that is truer for more people in this country than we care to admit. Living paycheck to paycheck is a situation that is truer for more people in this country than we care to admit.
One in three Americans who grew up middle-class has slipped down the income ladder as an adult, according to a 2011 report by the Pew Charitable Trusts.*
One in three Americans who grew up middle-class has slipped down the income ladder.
Others are clinging desperately to the rung they are on.
Upward mobility, the American holy grail, is not guaranteed.
Neither is physical freedom, when prisons are a national industry, investments that can be found in a market prospectus.
Beloveds, if this sounds irrelevant to your life, try the door a bit. See how far your liberties can be exercised if you challenge an economic system that gives 50% of the American population less than 2.5% of the national wealth. See how far your liberties can be exercised if you challenge one of the thousands of ordinances, rules, and laws wrapped around your neighborhood, your state, your country.
The myth of pulling oneself up by one’s own boot straps, the myth of prisons existing only to house bad guys – slowly these are proven to be falsehoods, lies that have been used to justify closing our eyes to the human costs of comfort for a few.
Let us name the house we live in. Let us recognize that in working for the common good, we make a good life more possible for ourselves, our family, our beloveds. This is faithful work. Dear ones, we are all in this together. May we build beloved community together. For everyone.
* Drawn from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (a group of 12,000 interviews that researchers have followed since 1979), the report “focused on people who were middle-class teenagers in 1979 and who were between 39 and 44 years old in 2004 and 2006. It defines people as middle-class if they fall between the 30th and 70th percentiles in income distribution, which for a family of four is between $32,900 and $64,000 a year in 2010 dollars. People were deemed downwardly mobile if they fell below the 30th percentile in income, if their income rank was 20 or more percentiles below their parents’ rank, or if they earn at least 20 percent less than their parents.”
How to Vote as an Act of Prayer
We’d love to cast a vote for compassion, freedom, justice. But they’re not on the ballot. So we can’t let the ballot reflect the extent we allow ourselves to envision the world we want to create. Hold that bigger vision in prayer or meditation before turning to the act of voting: a land where justice shall roll down like waters, and peace like an everflowing stream. A land where we bind up the broken and the captives go free. That’s the ballot our hearts and souls can cast, every day and with every activity.
But meanwhile, it’s time to vote! So the following are my ideas about how to turn that activity into a form of prayer.
Before your vote, do thorough research about all of the positions, even the tiniest. You may not love this research, but find organizations or friends who do love to do it and read what they wrote. Print up a sample ballot, mark it up, and stick it in your pocket. Clarify your mind. Scrambling around trying to sort through obscure races in the voting booth will take you right out of praying mode and into guilt and panic!
Walk into the polling place with gratitude that it is there. As the election judges check your name off the list, offer a moment of gratitude for them and their service. Offer a moment of gratitude for all of the check marks on that list, for all of the people in your neighborhood who take time to affirm their freedom and power to vote.
As you walk into the voting booth and set up your ballot, offer gratitude for all who have worked for your right to do so: founding fathers and suffragists, freedom riders and voting rights activists.
Now take out the ballot. Offer gratitude for all who would offer their time and their families and their lives for public service, whether you agree with any of their positions or not.
Look at the names on the ballot of the candidates you will vote for. As you check a candidate’s name, visualize that person’s strongest, most powerful, courageous and bold self. Vote for that candidate affirming the possibility of who they might become in office with strong community support and accountability.
As you check names, visualize yourself at your strongest, most powerful, courageous and bold self. Offer up gratitude for all of the civic leaders and organizations that will help you to be such a person. Commit to being a citizen activist. Cast an invisible vote for yourself beside each candidate’s name.
If you vote on community initiatives, take time to visualize all of the activists who worked to support freedom and justice about this initiative. As you check a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ box, imagine all of those affected by the initiative who vote with you. Especially imagine those who cannot vote, because they’re school kids, or their immigration status doesn’t yet allow them to vote, or because they served time for a crime, or for any other reason. Imagine your beloved ones who have died and won’t be casting a vote. Put them all into your pen and let them help you put in that check mark.
After you’re done voting, and despite the lines waiting, allow yourself a moment just to touch the ballot, to offer up a blessing for democracy itself, for fair elections, for the concept of one person one vote, for the lofty view of humanity which initially envisioned such a system, and which has expanded the notion of ‘personhood’ over the last several centuries.
Leaving the booth, smile at those around you, walk to the machine and insert your ballot, offering one last invisible bow of gratitude as you leave.
Prejudice is Part of Human Nature
We human beings have many times many different prejudices. I’m not trying to make a value statement in saying that, just naming something
that I believe is an inherent aspect of human nature. We are deeply prejudiced beings. The primary difference I have seen among human beings was whether or not they were aware of their prejudices.
Why is it impossible for us to not be prejudiced? Because we are beings of infinite yearnings and finite knowledge. We feel called to make decisions and judgments, even though it is impossible for us to have perfect knowledge of all that is around us.
At the base of my argument on this issue is a theme I’ve turned to many times before, and that is that while objective reality and objective truth do indeed exist, it is impossible for human beings to ever comprehend, grasp, or access it. Each time we seek to define any objective reality, or any objective or ultimate truth, we are prevented from doing so through our own limited perspective as a single human individual, and by our incapacity to grasp all knowledge that can be related to any given subject.
And yet, even with the incapacity to achieve objective reality or ultimate truth, many human beings inherently yearn for it. While objective reality and ultimate truth do indeed exist, we human beings do not have the capacity to discern or conceive it. We spend our lives in our own masses of perceptions, preconceptions, prejudices, and assumptions. And as I do not know all of humanity, even my statement that no one can access objective truth must itself be a subjective statement, no matter how objectively I frame it.
Religions have long realized this tension between the human desire to encompass ultimate truth and objective reality, and our near complete incapacity to do so. Some theologians have even proposed this tension as the ultimate source of all human religion… the attempt to address this tension by designating an ultimate truth a
Friends: The Spice of Life
If most of our life consists of basic repetitive tasks that are simple and predictable—some would say boring—it’s the people we interact with who make our days interesting. If our life were a soup, the people we know would be the spices.
Some people, like salt and pepper, are always nearby, always present at the table, every day. They are our basic fallback for a good meal. Even though we may get fancy with varieties, the basic flavor is familiar, easily accessible, comfortable to use. Other people are more rare in our lives, and have very particular ways in which we interact with them.
This morning, missing a particular friend, I found myself thinking that she makes me think of chipotle pepper. My handy dandy search engine told me that the adjectives often used to describe chipotle pepper include: intense heat, dark, smoky flavor, wonderfully hot and smoky. Yep, that describes my friend in a nutshell. When you miss her, you miss her particularity.
Reading those adjectives made me wonder about the adjectives commonly used to describe other spices, and how they might also describe people.
Do you know someone who is strong, sweet, and familiarly cool? That’s the mint in your life. And someone nutty, warm, spicy, sweet? That’s your nutmeg friend! On the other hand, if you are friends with someone who is bitter when raw, perhaps they are more like juniper berries.
Some friends, not to mention acquaintances, are like cayenne: They are very hot and spicy, so should be used with caution. Or like savory, should be used sparingly. Others must be interacted with very carefully, as they can stain, like turmeric. Or, like cloves, can quickly become overpowering—we need to use great care when working with them!
Some folks we know are slightly bitter, just like celery seed, marjoram, and paprika. Some are kind of nutty, like poppy, sesame, or carroway seeds. Some are earthy and pungent, like bay leaves.
Clearly not all people, or spices, combine well together, and all are best in particular kinds of situations, or dishes. Some are very versatile. Some are associated with particular cultures or nationalities. Some are great fresh and some really need a lot of careful cooking. Some, like cinnamon sticks, add flavor while cooking but should never actually be consumed.
In my kitchen, and in my life, I like to have all kinds of different options. Just as I would be unhappy with only using salt and pepper for my spices, I would be much less blessed if my friends were all of the same age, temperament, race, gender or culture.
In my kitchen, and in my life, I love variety. And while salt and pepper may be my go-to spices, I have no interest in a salt-and-pepper life! Thank heavens for a wide variety of friends who are spicy and diverse!
Hating Hateful Haters
Last week, advertisements began appearing at commuter train stations in the county where I live that, it would seem, blame all of Islam for the actions of violent extremists who are Muslim. Debate over the ads here in Westchester, including in the congregation I serve as minister, has centered on the question of “hate speech.” Similar debate is happening elsewhere around other current events as well, including senseless violence against our Sikh siblings, the denial of equal marriage rights to same-sex couples, and the persistence of misogyny in our political arena.
What, we’re asking ourselves, is “hate speech,” and what is the proper response of moral, loving, spiritual people to it?
I should be clear at the outset that I am not seeking a legal definition of hate or hate speech. Im not a lawyer or a judge. Rather, I am asking for a spiritual definition of it. Whether something is right or wrong has little do do with whether it is legal. (This is, interestingly, something on which the religious right and the religious left can agree–even if we differ on what is right and what is wrong.) What is acceptable in a compassionate society is a smaller set of things than what is not punishable by law.
To me, demonizing an entire group for the actions of a few is the epitome of hate speech. The impulse that leads some to vilify all of Islam because there are Muslim terrorists who justify their actions with a misunderstanding of their religion is the same impulse that makes communities protest the building of mosques and deny some among us their freedom of religion. The more we accept dehumanization, stereotypes and lies about groups of people, the more likely we are to accept violence against them–or people who look like the stereotypical images we have of them stored in our narrow minds.
Recent public debate about rape is another example of speech that, frankly, should be unacceptable to all people who seek to shape our society in an image of love and compassion. If we deem it acceptable for anyone to create a category of “legitimate rape,” we are implicitly condoning a culture in which survivors of sexual violence are stigmatized, doubted, and shamed. Women who live in fear of violence should not be verbally assaulted by those seeking to make political points with their “base.”
Finally, if we use our freedom of speech to block another from having the same rights we enjoy, have we not crossed a line that no religion should accept? I believe so. My impending marriage here in New York has no impact on your relationship or relationships with your past, current and future partners. Don’t blame me for the moral decay of our society–blame our increasing tolerance for hate. Take the twig out of your eye before you reach for the speck in mine.
Unitarian Universalist congregations covenant to affirm and promote, among other things, a “free and responsible search for truth and meaning.” in my faith, freedom comes with responsibility. It should be so in our society as well.
Just because certain speech is protected by the freedoms enshrined in our Constitution does not make all speech responsible speech.
If you’d like to engage in a meaningful dialogue about Jewish-Muslim relations with respect to Israel and Palestine, you’re not going to get there by calling everyone who disagrees with you a terrorist.
If you’re trying to instruct your followers on the specific ways taught by your faith to lead a moral life, you don’t need to violate my freedom of religion or make me a second-class citizen to do so.
If you’d like to open a dialogue on the sanctity of life, denigrating the lives of women isn’t an appropriate place to begin.
Those of us who believe in compassion, equality and love cannot remain silent in the face of such unacceptable hate. Our goal should not be to silence the haters, but rather to drown out their hate with our love. Where ten people show up to call a group of people nasty names, a hundred others should be present with a message of love and acceptance. Little by little, those who choose to hate will get the message.
