I had the honor of spending this week with a dozen youth who chose to spend the first week of August in New Orleans. So you already know that they are brave. You should also know that they are leaders and followers, conveners and collaborators, organizers and educators. But this isn’t a note about nouns. This is a note about verbs. Unitarian Universalist Verbs.
My colleague, Rev. Paul, showed up (consistently, faithfully) this week wearing these verbs around his neck:
CARE
SHARE
GROW
LEARN
HEAR
HOPE
LOVE
I want to take a moment and affirm the National Youth Justice Training UU youth for embodying these verbs with courage and kindness beyond measure. Let us join Jessica, Emma, Emily, Emily, Meiling, Alex, Ellie, Ian, Sam, Sam, Anais, and Leah in transforming the injustices of this world into Beloved Community that both is and is becoming.
May it ever be so, beloveds.
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.
Beloveds, let us have a common vocabulary. In the midst of the conversation on race prompted by the verdict of the Zimmerman trial, allow me to point us toward the 4 I’s of Oppression, spelled out clearly here by YouthBuild USA: – https://youthbuild.org/sites/youthbuild.org/files/Four%20Is.pdf Ideological, Institutional, Interpersonal, and Internalize Oppression. Recognize that racism operates on many levels in this country. If you do not know this, please take the time to learn about it before joining loudly in the conversation. This matters.
Let us hear truth when it is spoken to power. Let us keep the dialogue grounded in the realities of oppression. And if you are white, keep showing up in solidarity with all who call for Justice for Trayvon. It is beyond time for more than a handful of white people to stand on the side of love in this country.
Dear ones, let us live into the possibility of Beloved Community with courage and grace.
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.
We are all in this together, beloveds. All of creation is ultimately and intimately relational. Our faith is grounded in and continuously points us toward relationship. Covenants, promises about how we will be in relationship, cannot be made by one’s self. There are no solitary covenants – only communal ones.
It may surprise a few of you to learn that the Principles and Purposes Unitarian Universalists often speak of are part of congregational covenants. We covenant to affirm and promote the Principles and Purposes as member congregations – with other UU congregations. Indeed, in spite of the historically individualistic tendency of liberal religion, our strength has always lain in our relationships.
“None of us,” writes psychotherapist Marilyn Peterson, “can survive alone. Our capacity to trust, therefore, is precious because without it, we are isolated from the human community.” (At Personal Risk, 1992).
During my “year abroad” in California as an intern minister, I learned an important lesson from the ancient redwood trees of Northern California (author unknown).
Huge as they are,
They have very shallow root systems.
Yet they [are] not be blown over by strong winds.
The secret of their stability is
The interweaving of each tree’s roots with
Those that stand by it.
Thus, a vast network of support is formed
Just beneath the surface.
In the wildest storms,
These trees hold each other up.
So it is, I believe, with our liberal religious faith, Unitarian Universalism. Because we are an evolutionary faith, described by UU historian Susan Ritchie as “the Protestant Reformation that never stopped,” it is actually unfaithful for us to send down deep roots of certainty. Instead, we are called to send out many roots in a covenantal interweaving of commitment and accountability, becoming stronger through our relationships with each other.
May you find joy in the weaving, dear people of promise.
I expect by now you’ve heard the story: seen the pictures of the people bludgeoned by water cannons, the dog in a gas mask, the sufi dervish whirling in the street with deliberate disregard for the danger of his surroundings. It started simply enough. A group of people decided to sit in to protest a public park being razed in order to put in one more shopping mall. A group of people, young and old, decided that they had had enough of their country being sold off to the highest bidder, enough of the rights of the people being stripped away at the pleasure of the powers that be. And so they went to sit in the park. And there they sat as the bulldozers came at them, non-violent protesters in the long and distinguished lineage of Gandhi and King and Tiananmen Square and so many others. And in the long and shameful lineage of the British in India and Bull Connor and the Chinese government in 1989 and so many others, the Turkish government responded with water cannons and pepper spray, with police in riot gear prepared to do whatever it takes to subdue the population.
Who will not be subdued. Who continue to flock to the streets. I understand the courage of those first protesters, the ones who decided to sit down in a park and make their presence felt, who were willing to see what would happen when they demanded that someone take the needs of the people, and not just the corporations, into account. Sometimes you summon up what is inside of you and do the brave thing, walk the talk. But what about all those other people, the ones who joined the protest once they knew about the water cannons and the pepper spray, once the news spread (by word of mouth and social media, since the official media kept a complete blackout) of the injured and the dead? What about them? What does it take to knowingly walk into that kind of danger and chaos?
It takes, I think, an allegiance to a self that is greater than the self that feels the police batons and the pepper spray—a self that is injured not by physical indignities, but rather by moral ones. Call it Soul, if you will, this larger self, or call it Community Consciousness or Human Dignity or Living in the Kingdom of God. Whatever it is, it does not belong to a particular time, or place, or religion. It’s what led Gandhi, the Hindu, and King, the Christian, and the young man (Buddhist?) who faced down a bulldozer in Tiananmen Square to counter violence with persistent love. It’s what holds the Sufi dervish dancing in the streets of Istanbul and Bill McKibben getting arrested on the steps of the White House in protest against the Keystone XL pipeline. Who we are is bigger than who we are.
Not all of us. Not all the time. But enough of us, enough of the time, that it seems possible that love might have a chance against greed, that freedom and justice might sometimes prevail. Not all the time. But maybe enough.
It will only be five minutes. A favor. Celebrating women in the month of May and need a female minister to represent.
When she asked a few weeks ago, calling in the middle of a rich and full work day, I said yes, okay, sure. I needed practice publicly speaking about ministry, especially as a community minister ordained less than a year ago. An invitation to a brief moment on local TV on a Friday night made sense.
Yesterday, deep in the throes of a summer cold, trying to time the cold medicine for a sneeze and snot-free five minute window, the favor-asker nowhere in sight, I was beginning to rethink that yes. Two hours later, walking out of the studio with a DVD in my hand of a half hour show exploring becoming anti-racist, community connection, incarceration, and goodness only knows what else set to air Sunday night, all I could do was laugh and cough.
Universe, your wicked sense of humor is going to kill me…but what a way to go…
His Holiness the Dalai Lama has graced New Orleans with his presence this weekend. Prayer flags are fluttering from balconies more accustomed to Mardi Gras beads and brass bands are sharing the scene with throat singing…
HH Dalai Lama arrived under the auspices of a conference called “Resilience: Strength Through Compassion and Connection.” Those familiar with his life story (http://www.dalailama.com/biography/a-brief-biography) know that His Holiness embodies this resilience.
As you think about your own life, where to you find stories of resilience? Where are compassion and connection in those stories – in you?
Standing in the doorway between the ticket table and the concert last night, the music from the incredible jazz trio on the chancel washing over me, I was overwhelmed with gratitude. This is my life!
Somewhere between scheduling the termite treatments and the ceiling repairs from a leaky roof, between taxes and budgets, between making groceries and making amends – there is this gift – pure, sustaining creative joy.
On this Mother’s Day weekend, as we celebrate the creative power of women, I lift up some of the amazing, creative female artists I have had the joy of encountering as part of my work this year: Asali DeVan Ecclesiastes, Cindy Scott, Helen Gillet, Gina Forsyth, emma’s revolution…their creations remind me that life is a journey of choices – and that I can choose joy, I can choose to work for peace, for a world welcoming to all babies, all beings.
Beloveds, as you make your choices today, may you remember your sources of sustaining joy and celebrate your own power to create a life well lived.
love is the voice under all silences;
the hope which has no opposite in fear;
the strength so strong mere force is feebleness;
the truth more first than sun more last than star.
~ e.e. cummings
Beloveds, today the sun is shining. Yesterday the sun was shining too, even though it was pouring rain here in New Orleans. And last night, the sun was shining. Love is like that – present and shining through the dark nights, the stormy days, and the bright times.
Trust this. Trust this love more than fear, more than force, more than lies. Trust this love. Trust this sustaining shining, even when you cannot see it. There is no out but through. May we go through this together with love.
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