I am ever so grateful that I was assigned The Wolf Shall Dwell with the Lamb: A Spirituality for Leadership in a Multicultural Community, written by Eric H. F. Law, during my studies at Loyola Institute of Ministry – New Orleans. It has been an invaluable source of wisdom as I bear witness to the ways Unitarian Universalism is and is not welcoming. I gratefully commend it to ministers and lay leadership.

Law is an ordained Episcopal priest who grew up in Hong Kong, then immigrated to the United States when he was 14. He has a lot to say about external and internal culture, both the breadth and depth of hospitality. Law offers a helpful paradigm for understanding how to get beneath the surface of what limits our ability to welcome multiple cultures. He writes:

[E]xternal culture – [music, food, dance, art] – constitutes only a small part of our cultural iceberg. The larger part is the hidden internal culture that governs the way we think, perceive, and behave unconsciously… the “instinct” of our cultures…The cultural environment in which we grew up shapes the way we behave and think. Implicit in this cultural environment are the cultural myths, values, beliefs, and thought patterns that influence our behavior and the way we perceive and respond to our surroundings.

Most of the time we are unconscious of their existence.

They are implicitly learned and very difficult to change…Internal culture is like the air we breathe. We need it to survive and make sense of the world we live in, but we may not be conscious of it.

Internal cultural difference is not a matter of different ways of singing or speaking or dressing. It is a matter of perceiving and feeling.

Some of you may remember the scene from Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (2007) when Harry Potter sees a strange reptilian horse pulling the carriage and asks “What is it?”

Ron Weasley: What’s what?
Harry Potter: That. Pulling the carriage.
Hermione Granger: Nothing’s pulling the carriage, Harry. It’s pulling itself like always.
Luna Lovegood: You’re not going mad. I see them too. You’re just as sane as I am.

While being called as sane as Luna Lovegood was perhaps not particularly reassuring to Harry Potter, I hope that the image can be useful for Unitarian Universalists.

The carriage of our faith does not pull itself. Unitarian Universalism swims in the waters of implicit culture. This faith, our congregations, and each one of us have internal cultures.

And as Law explains:

The same event may be perceived very differently by two culturally different persons because the two different internal cultures highlight different parts of the same incident… To discover the unconscious, implicit part of our culture is a lifelong process. Some of us go through life like a fish in the stream and never know we are living in water… “When whites and people of color recognize that there are cultural differences in their perceptions of power, they take the first step toward doing justice.”

To Eric Law’s multicultural list I will add other layers of internal cultural perceptions of power differences that usually receive only external attention:

* cis- and trans- gendered,
* the gender spectrum from female to male,
* the spectrum of abilities and mobility,
* the sexual orientation spectrum,
* the class caste from poverty to the 1%,
* the ageism that saturates our lives from infancy to elderhood…

Law believes that “because of cultural differences some people are perceived as lions and wolves and some as lambs and calves” unconsciously, setting up “an uneven distribution of power before groups even meet.”

He writes:

 If the church is to become the holy mountain on which people from diverse cultures shall not hurt or destroy each other, we must respond to the call to do justice.

Doing justice in a multicultural environment requires us to understand the consequences of these cultural differences in power perceptions. Doing justice commands us to reveal this unconscious and disproportionate distribution of power. Doing justice compels us to develop new leadership skills that can confront injustice. Then we can create a just community when people from different cultures encounter each other with equal strength.

Our call in this time, as a people of faith, is the same one found on the cover to The Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy, namely, “Don’t Panic.” Realizing that our perceptions will be strongly influence by our internal culture, let us look around at life outside of our stream and honor that the water we live in is not the totality of the human experience.

Let us welcome grace into our midst, offering mercy to ourselves and to each other as we discern how we are together and how we wish to be together. May we bring our whole and holy selves into a community committed to collective liberation, to radical inclusion, to equity and compassion in human relationships.

Beloveds, let us do justice together, faithfully.

Al “Carnival Time” Johnson sings “it’s Carnival Time and everybody’s havin’ fun…”

The twitter feed, the facebook, the news cycle all make it very clear that not everyone is having fun… but this weekend (until Ash Wednesday), I will put my twitter feed down, my facebook and the news away, and  I will spend time with the people of my city dancing on the streets in handmade costumes with bands that have been practicing all year.  Beloveds, we are going to have some fun.

Carnival time in New Orleans is complex, with a twisted history of racism, classism, sexism — AND it is an opportunity for the utter subversion of the oppressive status quo.  It is a time when strangers become friends, generosity is the word of the day, and hope for a new day is lived out in the prefigurative politics of a communal celebration. 

See y’all after the Mardi Gras.

This winter has devastated my sub-tropical garden in New Orleans. I was out of town when the last polar vortex dipped down for a visit. In my absence, all of the plants that I had brought into the house during the first big freeze were left outside to melt into gelatinous puddles. The joyful exception to the sad stories in my garden is the camellia.

And I am not the only one who is excited about the flowers. The honey bees amped up their buzz big time when I snipped a few branches off to share with a friend.

I imagined for a moment that I could hear the thoughts of the cold, hungry bees.
What the #%&$#  was the large two legged doing, walking off with these precious blooms???

Perhaps the bees were buzzing nothing of the sort, but it made me think about how hard it is to celebrate the gift of abundance from a mindset of scarcity.

I recently bore witness to a white man proactively insist that the construct of systemic racism is not real, but rather slanted propaganda. That there are only individuals, no such thing as collective identities…

How deep the fear of losing the flower of privilege must be, for such loud, unsolicited buzzing.

How terrified to share what grace has provided…

Bees know the truth and the power of the collective. May we be so wise.

[More king cakes than you can imagine and only two weeks into Epiphany, I am still tugging on the promise of this season, even as I find myself tugging on clothes that seem strangely tighter…]

Kathleen Norris notes the irony that King Herod “appears in the Christian liturgical year when the gospel is read on the Epiphany, a feast of light…Because of his fear, [Herod] can only pretend to see the light that the Magi have offered him” (Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary of Faith, 1998).

Perhaps because of our fear, we can only pretend to see the light Universalism offers us.  Here is our epiphany.  We are loved, each and every one of us, every single atom and molecule. We are loved – not for what we do or believe, but for the divine light that shines in each of us. 

We are all children of the same star dust and no distinctions we create can defile our original blessing.  In a culture built on hierarchy and scarcity, it is a faithful act indeed to trust that everyone is held equitably in a compassionate heart of love.  The scarcity of divine love is a dangerous myth, a tool to control and coerce. 

Our work in this world, beloveds, is to proclaim the message of epiphany.  We are loved, not for who we are, but because we are.  We do not have to prove ourselves worthy of love any more than we should need to prove ourselves worthy of water. Just as we need water to be healthy human beings, so too do we need the knowledge that we – every single one of us, no exceptions, not even the most evil creature you can think of, every single one of us is held with compassion greater than we can imagine.  It is a grace we cannot earn and we cannot lose. 

Our faith has long valued acts over beliefs, and as a social justice organizer, I often celebrate this fact.  But there is one belief that I pray will soak into the marrow of our bones, into our synapse and our blood.  No one is left out of the mystery, no one is denied a strand of the interdependent web of all existence.   We are all beloved. 

May this season bring you sweetness – and the courage to live as a beloved among beloveds.

I was walking in City Park with a community organizer this week when suddenly we were only the width of the boardwalk away from a Great Egret, its fancy fringe plumes fluttering in the morning breeze. We paused, taking in the beauty, marveling at the unexpected joy of such a close encounter.

A few minutes later, on the other side of the lake path, I was startled by the sudden appearance of a pelican swooping in for breakfast. (With all due apologies to the fish), I clapped my hands in delight when I watched the pelican give the throaty head waggle that signifies success.

And I noticed, as our walk continued, that our conversation had transitioned as we were present to the beauty and wonder of where we were. A talk that had begun with the challenges and frustrations we were facing was giving way to some creative collaboration, some hope, some joy.

May you too find beauty in this world to give you hope and joy, to point the way towards collaboration, community, creative resistance to all that would tell us we are less than, not enough.