Bearing Witness is a Blessing
AISHA HAUSER, msw, cre-ml
Lead Ministry Team, Church of the Larger Fellowship
Growing up in an Egyptian Arabic speaking home, we never just said, “hello” to greet each other. We would say “Ahlan wa sahlan” which translates to “easy family.” You are part of our family and it is easy to be together is how I would explain this. An affirmation of connection.
I learned that the Zulu greeting is “Sawubona” which means “I see you, I acknowledge you, I recognize you as a person.” What a powerful and life affirming greeting.
I acknowledge you.
I recognize you as a person.
This month’s theme is witnessing, and the greetings I describe above are a way of witnessing who we are to each other in community. As humanity has become more transient in the last few hundred years, many of us travel and live in many places throughout our lives. This means our friendships and connections are fluid. Before the internet, I would maybe receive a handwritten letter from a friend I met after they or I moved to a new town. This was a rare occurrence.
Now that social media is a pervasive part of our lives, I have found that I am able to remain connected to people that I got to know and care about during a moment in time when we lived in geographic proximity to each other. I can follow people as they acknowledge milestones in their and their loved one’s lives.
Through TikTok, I have learned more about non-famous people all over the world and here in the United States than I ever would have on any other platform. People who are interested in transforming our hurting world into a more healing and equitable place.
We all are continuing to bear witness to the genocide in Gaza, the Congo, Haiti, Sudan among other places, thanks to social media. Awareness has been brought to our phones. We can never again claim, “we didn’t know.”
We do know. What we do with that knowledge is part of choosing how we move forward as a collective.
The Church of the Larger Fellowship would never have the reach it does at this moment in history if it wasn’t for the internet and social media. We as the CLF are able to bear witness to the lives of our members all over the world, including our beloved incarcerated UU community.
Bearing witness is part of the ways we share stories of our lives and the lives of those we care about. Humans have been sharing these witness stories for as long as we have could communicate. It is a blessed thing to be able to bear witness to the joys, sorrows, horrors, celebrations and all that it means to be human. We will support and love each other through it all..
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.
