Keep the Faith!
art by Kristi of Barn Owl Primitives
In his story of a man with a sneering wife, Sufi master Rumi begins:
A special guest was coming to visit and the man worked 200 days to earn the price for the quality lamb kabob he wished to serve this guest. On the appointed day, the man bought the meat and brought it home for his wife to cook and then went to fetch the guest.
While he was gone, the wife cooked the kabob and
ate
every
bite
of
it.
When the man returned with the special guest, she greeted them at the door, saying “the cat has eaten the kabob. You’ll have to buy more, if you have any more money.”
The husband asks a servant to bring the scales and the cat. The cat weighed three pounds. “The meat was 3 pounds and one once. If this is the cat, where is the meat?” “If this is the meat, where is the cat?” Start looking for one or the other!
Sometimes truth can be found on a scale. Usually, it is a more complex endeavor for us human beings. The recent trial of George Zimmerman for the death of teenager Trayvon Martin revealed a plethora of truths in the lived experiences of the people of United States. Some have an expectation of justice within the justice system. Others have no expectation of justice within what they consider a criminal system – one that actively perpetuates crimes against humanity.
What you look like, where you grew up, who you live with – all of these are complex predictors of how you experience truth and what truth you experience.
Walking away from the Justice for Trayvon Vigil in New Orleans last week, I met up with a history professor from Tulane University. She brought up the Jena Six, which some of you may remember as a time when the criminal justice system in Jena, Louisiana revealed to the nation its deep roots in the Reconstruction Era, built after the abolition of slavery to maintain control over black bodies. In 2007, a nationwide protest against the mockery of justice there descended upon the town of Jena, population 2,500, with an estimated 50,000 protesters.
There were so many people – and so few white people. The professor I was walking with said, “if you took all the Unitarians out of the crowd, I could have put the white people present in my car.”
Author activist Jordan Flaherty, in his book Floodlines: Community and Resistance from Katrina to the Jena Six reports that “perhaps one to three percent of the crowd was white, in what amounted to a disturbing silence from the white Left and liberals.”
I would call it a disturbing silence from white people, regardless of their political stance. When children of color are demonized by a criminal justice system created for and by white people, we cannot be silent. We cannot be absent.
What was faithful was the profession of divine living by the white Unitarian Universalists who showed up, were called out as allies, people living into the truth of beloved community with their bodies, their whole and holy beings.
What was faithful was the profession of divine living by the Unitarian Universalists of color who walk in this faith with trust that we are going to live into our collective covenant with more and more anti-oppressive skill, more and more respect for the inherent worth and dignity of each person, more and more beloved community.
When we show up as our whole and holy selves, lives are transformed, systems are changed, beloved community becomes possible. Keep the faith, beloveds. Keep showing up on the side of love in this world.
_________________
References:
The Essential Rumi, 1995 (translated by Coleman Barks).
Flaherty, Jordan. Floodlines: Community and Resistance from Katrina to the Jena Six, 2010.
Storms and Solidarity
All day Thursday I wore my Standing on the Side of Love t-shirt, through meetings with academia, organizers, congregants, and staff. A day of solidarity, a day of grief and a day of joy. Solidarity with the Texas State Senator Wendy Davis, who stood on the side of love (without eating, drinking, using the bathroom, speaking off-topic or leaning against any furniture) for all families for eleven hours. Solidarity with communities of color and anti-racist allies grieving the gutting of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Solidarity with beloveds all across the nation celebrating the end of the mis-named Defense of Marriage Act and the first step in the passage of a national immigration reform bill.
It is a lot to hold, beloveds. And this doesn’t even begin to take in the illness of the beloved elder Nelson Mandela or the floods and the fires around the world. Or my dear friends who are moving away from New Orleans this week or the beloveds going through a second round of chemo.
This morning, I sat and watched a summer thunderstorm crash through my neighborhood and gave thanks for this precious moment of unscheduled time, a chance to be fully present to the storms within and without. May you, too, have time to bear witness to your own storms with gentleness and compassion. May you feel companioned by a host of thousands standing in solidarity with you on your life journey.
What it Means
Today the Supreme Court struck down the Defense of Marriage Act and declared that the proponents of California’s Prop 8 had no standing to argue against Judge Walker’s ruling that Prop 8 was unconstitutional. What these rulings mean in the real world seems pretty straightforward. Same-sex couples can finally resume getting married in California. Same-sex couples who are legally married in states that allow their unions will be entitled to the full federal benefits of marriage. For me, as someone who was married in California during the brief period when it was legal before Prop 8, it means that I won’t have to keep filing my state taxes as a married person and my federal taxes as someone who is single. It means that if I die before my wife that she will be entitled to my Social Security benefits, and that our house will belong to her. The benefits are significant, and tangible.
But the non-tangible benefits mean so much more. The Supreme Court’s rulings mean that we are, like the Velveteen Rabbit, finally Real. At long last the law of the land recognizes what we’ve known all along: that two people who fall in love and commit to one another for life, who have a child and a house and dogs and cats together, who argue and make up and talk about their day and eat dinner and check homework and sleep in the same bed are married. Just plain married. Not domestic-partnershipped or gay-married, but married. Real. Entitled to refer to one another as “my wife,” and have people understand what that means.
I know that a judicial ruling won’t change the hearts of all the people who feel that our relationship is counter to God’s will, or simply icky. Everyone’s entitled to their opinion. But everyone is not entitled to have their opinion enshrined as law, and the law has finally stood up and said that equal rights are equal rights, and that your personal theology and comfort levels don’t get to trump that fact. If your church doesn’t want to perform weddings for two men or two women, fine. My church is happy to. Was happy to 15 years ago when Kelsey and I stood up in front of our family and friends, our church community, and declared our life-long commitment and enduring love, and is happy to now. Only now, in some select states of the union, the minister can sign the wedding license knowing that it is Real, not a second-class document that somehow disappears if you cross the state line.
That matters. It matters that so many of my friends, gay and straight, liberal and conservative, religious and unchurched, have been hoping and praying for this day. It matters that in the course of my lifetime we have gone from the Stonewall riots to the highest court in the land declaring that “no legitimate purpose overcomes the purpose and effect to disparage and to injure those whom the State, by its marriage laws, sought to protect in personhood and dignity.”
I would like to wrap this joyful moment in a bow and declare, with Theodore Parker and Dr. King, that the “moral arc of the universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” But I know it’s not that simple. I know that yesterday the same Supreme Court which today ruled to protect my personhood and dignity ruled against key portions of the Voting Rights Act. I know that the arc of the moral universe is less of an arc than a squiggle, bending this way and that, and only because people take the trouble to bend it. I know that the status of my marriage is a small thing compared to families torn apart by immigration laws, or the bizarre declaration of Citizens United that corporations are people and money is speech. I also know that my 18 years with the love of my life are a gift and a blessing regardless of what the courts have to say. But still, in spite of it all, there is the fact that we have arrived at this moment, somewhat the worse for wear, and with much of our fur worn off, to hear People Who Matter declare that we are, in fact, Real. It is a celebration of marriage, and I, for one, intend to have cake.
When Worlds Collide
I had an interesting conversation with a friend the other day about a controversy in her church. A member raised the question to the congregation about what their policy should be about bringing guns to church. This was not a question that had ever crossed my friend’s mind in the course of many years of church-going in Chicago, but she’s in another part of the country now, and the question is real. And, if you’ll forgive the pun, loaded.
There are members of the congregation who cannot fathom why anyone would carry a gun anywhere other than a shooting range or a hunting trip, and maybe not even then. They feel threatened knowing that there is a deadly weapon in their midst, and offended by the idea of bringing an instrument of violence into a place of peace.
There are also members of the congregation who, it turns out, have been bringing their guns to church all along. They see carrying a gun as an act of community service, a way to keep the community safe should it be threatened from the outside. Carrying a gun makes them feel safe, and makes them feel like they can contribute to the safety of loved ones around them.
It does not help that these two opposed and mutually contradictory views are also associated with differences of class and culture, making any conversation deeply fraught. It’s the kind of situation that doesn’t have a clear, correct solution, and the opportunities for offending people, for misunderstanding motives and assumptions, are rampant. There is no compromise. You can’t “sort of” bring a gun to church. You allow it or you don’t, and saying, “Well, just don’t bring a gun if you don’t want to” is not much consolation to a person who feels that they can’t settle into the prayers of the community knowing that a person next to them is armed and prepared to kill.
My friend wasn’t asking for advice, but if she was, here’s what I would have said—and I think it applies to the unsolvable issues that each of us has to decide on throughout our lives. When there is no way to answer a question, it is probably time for a deeper question. There’s no good way for this congregation to answer the question: “Should people be allowed to bring guns into our sanctuary?” But maybe it would be helpful for congregants to be in conversation with one another, taking turns answering the questions “What frightens you?” and “What makes you feel safe?” It might not provide a clear-cut answer to the original question, but it would provide a way for people to tell their stories, to approach one another less from a place of knowing what is right and wrong and more from a perspective of what Nelle Morton called “hearing each other into speech.” People could relate dreams they’d had about guns, tell of their own experiences with guns, tell the stories their parents or grandparents related to them in which guns meant terror or survival. These conversations might not lead to a clear answer as to whether or not guns should be allowed in worship, but they would help to weave the fabric of the community together rather than tearing thread from thread in a pitched battle over who is right and who is wrong.
There are plenty of subjects in this country which have become that kind of battleground: abortion, gay marriage, gun control, aid to the poor, climate change, etc., etc., etc. And it’s pretty much impossible to have a conversation amongst 300 million mostly unrelated people. Which is why it is so important to grab onto these conversations wherever we can: in our churches, on Facebook, with relatives and friends. As we slip ever more deeply into a culture in which differing opinions descend into obscenities and name-calling in the comments sections of news sites or YouTube, it matters more and more that we find ways to turn to the questions behind the unsolvable questions, that we hear each other into speech. If there’s one thing that most of us can agree on, it’s that society and government based in mud-slinging and sheer contrariness gets us nowhere. We need questions that demand that we put our full humanity into the answers.
The People’s Work
In The Prophetic Imperative: Social Gospel in Theory and Practice, Rev. Richard Gilbert lays out a Unitarian Universalist interpretation of worship. He wrote:
The church is a worshipping community, a religious community that deliberately and regularly gathers together to celebrate life in all its dimensions. Worship understood as the celebration of life is the most generally accepted definition in Unitarian Universalist circles today. Worship derives from the Anglo-Saxon weorthscipe, pointing to and celebrating that which is of worth. Religion is derived from the Latin religare and means to bind together. The form of this religious worship is called a liturgy from the Greek words laos (people) and ergos (work), literally, “the people’s work.” All this leads to an understanding of worship as a binding together or coming together of people to fashion ceremonies pointing to what they regard as of worth.
A primary point of coalescence in Unitarian Universalism is our emphasis on the value of inclusion. From the first principle to the last, we covenant to affirm the worth and interdependence of all existence. Institutionally as an Association of Congregations, we are working to name and undo systemic exclusions that we have been educated into not seeing. Those at the margins can see the growing edges of an organization most clearly. Our faith calls us to trust this naming and bring these insights into the center of our institutions, welcoming even challenging visions.
One named challenge is time of worship. This is not a criticism of Sunday worship, but rather, a critique noticing “who is not at the table” as well as, “who is there but not getting fed.” Sunday morning service is deeply embedded in the Protestant tradition from which Unitarian Universalism emerged. It matters that we examine this practice with anti-racist/anti-oppressive/multicultural lens, unpacking the assumptions and exclusions that come with simply following this tradition. Certainly, no single time will work for everyone. But having only one day and time for worship each week excludes many from being a part of an inclusive religious community with a life affirming faith.
Similarly, having only one way of worship, (the “sermon sandwich” Protestant-style service, which with a few modifications can be traced to the 17th century), can be seen as an exclusionary practice through AR/AO/MC lens. Not only does it privilege a particular canon, it is extraordinarily challenging for many youth and elders of multiple identities to engage meaningfully in the service. It is said that how a society treats the youngest and the eldest tells us about the state of its soul. As a faith, we are morally called to serve the youngest and the eldest with as much attention as we give to everyone in between. The integrity of our “collective soul” depends upon it.
Social change agents tell us that people fear not change but LOSS. What could be lost when all are included? Comfort. Security. A sense of control, maybe. What could be gained? Our very humanity and the embodiment of our faith.
Come beloveds, let us do the people’s work together…
Before the Court
As I write, the Supreme Court is just finishing up oral arguments on the Defense of Marriage Act. Something, presumably, is going to be decided about same-sex marriage, although what exactly that might be is anybody’s guess. But the thing is, everyone knows the eventual outcome. Everyone—at least everyone who is honest—regardless of how they feel about same-sex marriage, knows that whatever this court decides, same-sex marriage is going to be the law of the land. The scales have simply tipped too far to go back.
By now, most people know gay folks. If they aren’t in their families then they are neighbors or co-workers or folks who volunteer at their children’s school. And when you see people and their actual lives it’s very difficult to come to any conclusion other than…who cares? It turns out to be patently obvious that most gay and lesbian relationships are simply not very interesting, in the way that most straight relationships are not very interesting. People have lives. They do what people do, which is largely working and shopping for groceries and pulling weeds. Gay people just don’t do it very differently.
And when you’ve seen enough gay people picking up their kids from school or their partner’s laundry from the dry cleaners it becomes hard to argue that something that is obviously the same is really totally different. When the best argument you can come up for why opposite-sex marriage is special is that marriage is for procreation and straight couples can get pregnant by accident, then it is pretty clear that your ship has taken on quite a lot of water, and is headed toward the bottom sooner rather than later.
And really, that sooner rather than later is the most remarkable part of the whole thing. Of course there is still prejudice against gay people. But the rate at which that prejudice has faded is astounding. It turns out that, in the end, people have a hard time denying rights to the people they already know. As more and more people are open about their lives and relationships then more and more of their family members and neighbors and friends have to admit into their hearts the fact that we are talking about people. Real people. Just people. Who would like to have the same rights and privileges as everyone else, and probably deserve them.
It turns out that much of the time it’s just not that hard to love your neighbor. The real religious challenge is to love the person who lives across the tracks, across the world, across lines of race and class and culture. So let’s have an enormous cheer for the great progress that we’ve made on the full inclusion of same-sex couples in our society, and let us pray that the Supreme Court comes down on the side of both love and reason. And then let’s get on with the difficult and never-ending work of expanding the circle of love and justice.
Voting as Spiritual Practice, as a Neighborly Act…
Every day you have less reason
not to give yourself away.
~ Wendell Berry ~
On this eve of a national election, so many conversations begin with “well, depending on who wins the election, …” In our representative democracy, a lot does depend on who wins elections.
Because of how the presidential election is decided, via the electoral college, it can feel as if your vote doesn’t count, especially if you tend to vote the opposite slate from the majority of voters in your state. I have heard more than a few people wonder out loud if they will even vote this year “since their vote won’t count anyway.”
What is imperative to remember during these bouts of feeling disenfranchised is that your local votes also change the world. It matters who sits on the city council seat, who becomes judge, whether that change to the city charter or the state constitution becomes law. It matters in daily life to real people.
Detention policies, educational opportunities, the right to marry – all of this is decided by voting at the local level. The roots of change have always been local. So read up about the local issues. Discuss them with your peers. And then vote, if you can, my friends. Think of it as a spiritual practice: Read, Reflect, Act.
Our votes matter very much to our neighbors and our selves. May this weekend be a time of spiritual practice for you as you prepare to vote for the sake of your local community next week.
The Connection of Church and State
I am a big fan of the separation of church and state. I do not believe that it is appropriate for the government to privilege any religion, or impose any set of religious beliefs on its citizens. I don’t think that anyone’s religious views should be allowed to determine who may or may not get married. I don’t think that anyone’s religious views should be allowed to determine laws around abortion or access to contraception. I don’t think that we need to set aside time in schools to pray, and I don’t think that “under God” should ever have been inserted into the Pledge of Allegiance. There is no reason at all to teach “creation science” in biology class, as if any science were involved in the religious stance that all the overwhelming evidence for evolution should be set aside because the Bible says something different. It is not the place of a free, democratic government to impose the religion of some set of people on other people who may not share those views.
On the other hand, I’m absolutely in favor of people making political choices based on their religious views. How would you not? If your religion matters to your life at all, surely it has to inform your decisions about what laws and which individuals will work for the things that matter to you. If you follow the one who said “ For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me….Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me,” then surely you will vote for the candidate who seems the most likely to provide for the poor, care for the ill and have compassion for the immigrant and those in prison.
If you call yourself religious, it is your job not only to hold a core set of values that you understand to be at the heart of your religion, but also to go out and practice and advocate for those values in the world.
As a Unitarian Universalist, I would say that freedom is a central value among my religious peeps. But it’s not at the very center. At the core, the value we hold most dear is ever and always love. That’s why you see UUs in bright yellow t-shirts that read “Standing on the Side of Love” at rallies in favor of marriage equality and compassion for immigrant families. Love is where it’s at for us. When I vote, it’s on the basis of the practical application of the principle of love. Love for our neighbors, love for citizens of the wider world, love for the planet which we share with so many non-human beings. I am Voting on the Side of Love.
What values are at the very heart of your religious life? Where do you see those values taking shape in the political sphere? How will you vote for the heart of your religion?
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That’s What Bearing Witness Is…
Let go of what you know
and honor what exists
Son, that’s what bearing witness is
Daughter, that’s what bearing witness is
~ David Shannon Bazan, Bearing Witness
Less than 15 miles away from the city of New Orleans as the crow flies – or 25 miles if you drive along the every curving Mississippi River – there is a parish (county) called Plaquemines. From the town of Braithwaite to White Ditch, water flowed in over top the river levee just over a month ago. Hurricane Isaac slowly swirled across southeastern Louisiana on the 7 year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina and the Flood of 2005. When the city of New Orleans stayed dry and the power was restored within a week, most of us breathed a sigh of relief and tried to pick up where we had left off – beginning new school years and new jobs, or simply a new season, transitioning from summer to autumn.
On the long stretch of road along the east bank of the Mississippi River, it was another week before the water drained away. Still today the houses, tombs, and trees washed over the road are being cleared away. You have to see it to believe it. And few people have seen it. It’s a rural commuter community downriver. New Orleans did not flood. Next news story.
Driving along highway 39 with Rev. Tyrone Edwards, I was reminded again of the importance of bearing witness. It restores us to our humanity, to our connection with all that is. It is certainly spiritual practice.
I knew from talking on the phone to partners in the area that the situation on the ground was intense. In addition to houses, cemeteries, and trees uprooted and washed around, dead animals and rotten fruit had to be cleared off of the roads before people could return home – or at least return to where their home had been. It was so hard to imagine that only a half hour outside of my (fairly) functional city, there was utter devastation for hundreds of families, homes, farms, and an ecosystem. I had to travel there, to bear witness to what exists.
So it is with many things, the importance of this journey to bear witness – white people doing the hard work of letting go of what white people “know” to acknowledge and begin to undo the racism that exists, men letting go of their conditioning of superiority to honor the truth of women’s long struggle within sexism, heterosexuals realizing that there are other ways to love, cis-gendered people recognizing that trans-gendered people are living their own truths…when we are willing to let go of what we know and honor what exists, we bear witness to some extraordinary truths.
On Thursday, I journeyed over a bridge, through a tunnel, and on a ferry to bear witness to a community bearing the consequences brought about by forces beyond their control – coastal erosion, chemical spills, underfunded engineering, climate change… As the ferry pulled away, taking me back to the city, a brilliant rainbow arced over the flooded gas station where I had met Rev. Tyrone Edwards earlier in the day. While there is no Genesis promise that Plaquemines Parish will not be flooded again, the rainbow is still a symbol of promise. We can offer the promise of bearing witness to each other – letting go of what we know and honoring what exists. This is what bearing witness is, beloveds. May we find the courage every day to make the journey.
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.