Sunday Service: In-person and Online Sunday at 10:30am
Natural Harmony
Our Worship Leader will be Rev. Dr. Nicole C. Kirk and our Worship Associate will be John LaPlante.
Hopes and Fears from the “Promise and Practice” Service
The Promise and the Practice of Our Faith Campaign is described on the UUA website as “our opportunity to take the lead as a faith denomination in addressing our history of upholding white supremacy. Together, we can collectively work to dismantle it and amend a long broken promise to the Black Lives within our Association.” The service at UCE on June 3 addressed this possibility, giving congregants a chance to commit to writing, during a ritual of lamentation, their hopes and fears about assuming a leadership role in righting the wrongs of the past in our denomination.
Hopes were expressed by some in terms of individual aspirations, such as for greater understanding, the wisdom to come up with the right words and actions when they are needed, the ability to overcome fear of mistakes in speaking up, better listening, letting go, being more fearless, having more insight. One person hoped to go beyond being open to the “other” and actually seeking out people of different backgrounds and experience. Others yearned for more peace, love, kindness, comfort, joy, and dignity and respect for all people.
Some writers hoped that UCE and UUA will lead the way in acknowledging past failures and in finally dismantling white supremacy. There was also hope that the community, the nation, and the world will work for greater love, honesty, and understanding and an end to policies that increase income inequality.
Fears also ranged from the personal to the general: “I fear being ridiculed by my neighbor, that I will not contribute all I can, that I’ll hurt someone, that I will close my heart to others.” More broadly, that we at UCE will not realize our white supremacy and the hurt it causes, that we as Americans are stalled by apathy and comfort with things as they are, that we will repeat the same mistakes, and that the current divisiveness and hate in the country will get worse before it gets better
There is much work to be done, but it seems clear that people were deeply moved by this service, and that many have been wrestling with these concerns and want to learn how to be part of the solution.
Queer(ing) Theology
After the celebrations of Pride month in June, we will come together to reflect on the gifts offered by a queer theology. We will also reflect together on what happens when we use “queer” as a verb – queering church, queering faith, queering theology. As we build new understandings about what is required of us to create radically welcoming spaces such as challenging gender binaries, celebrating new expressions of gender and sexuality we may never have known before, and understanding LGBT struggles beyond marriage, let us worship together.
Our Worship Leader will be Rev. Jason Lydon and our Worship Associate is Heike Eghardt.
Where is My Place? How to be a Good White Ally.
Former Intern Kevin DeBeck discusses the intersectionality of white supremacy and what it takes to be a good ally in the fight for racial justice.
Kevin recently graduated from Meadville Lombard Theological School in Chicago. He is currently getting ready to go before the Ministerial Fellowship Committee in September, where, if he passes, will be eligible for ordination sometime thereafter.
Restoring Balance in Yourself and the World
The Summer Solstice has just occurred and it is Pride Sunday! It is a time for honoring who we are. It is a time for reflecting on our connection to other people and to the Earth. This week we will reflect on how service within our communities is a form of spiritual practice that can help us feel more balanced as we attend to the numerous connections in our lives.
Susan Frances, Ministerial Intern.
“There is a rewarding, even exhilarating, role for each of us in making democracy real.”
~Frances Moore Lappé and Adam Eichen, Daring Democracy
W
hen I think back to Barack Obama’s historic election win on
Nov 4, 2008, and the moving speech he delivered that night, one particular moment stands out to me. He said,
This victory alone is not the change we seek. It is only the chance for us to make that change. And that cannot happen if we go back to the way things were. It can’t happen without you, without a new spirit of service, a new spirit of sacrifice.
I remember that moment with clarity, watching in a friend’s living room in Richmond, Virginia – for though I had been a supporter of Obama’s since his Illinois Senate run, as the camera panned over the beautiful sea of faces in Grant Park, I knew they weren’t hearing him. Every face in that crowd said, “He is our hope.” Even as he warned us that night that he would disappoint us, and that it was up to us to take this chance to fight to reshape our policies and our institutions, and even as I felt our collective joy at the prospect of the more united America he invited us into, I sensed a collective yearning to return to the way things were. I could almost hear it, like a whisper: We have our new president now – all will be well. Not all of us, surely – but enough of us – had fought hard to elect Obama in order to go back to sleep.
Our fifth principle affirms “the right of conscience and the use of the democratic process in our congregations and in society at large.” This is what we hold, together, to be true: that democracy, wedded to conscience, works. As UUs we should, as Susan Frances has recently reminded us, understand our congregational meeting as a holy ritual. For our denomination, General Assembly, where I’m headed this week for the first time, is likewise an annual act of consecration of our covenant. We UUs should also understand democracy as communal, both in the sense that it happens in our community, and in the sense that it’s a form of communion. Democracy is messy – this should be no surprise to us. And even in our UU havens, where there is so much shared sentiment, we cannot count on our ideas to be uniform or consistent. Quite the contrary: we can count on disagreement. So it is not the sameness of our ideas that holds us in covenant, thank goodness! It is our shared principles, which we eternally work out, work through together – one of which is affirmation of the democratic process, messy as it is. This congregational experience serves to inform our participation in democracy at a higher level.
Democracy is sacred, communal, messy — it’s also ongoing. Our shared experience helps us understand that elections are a first step, not a last, in our democratic participation. I am as guilty as anyone of forgetting this, truly. But I am learning my lesson these days. Hannah Arendt, in The Origins of Totalitarianism, argues that totalitarianism rises in cultures where atomized individuals, in the absence of intervening institutions, such as families or unions or philanthropic organizations, are susceptible to regime propaganda. Unable to deal with the messiness of life, in the absence of opportunities to create shared understanding and solidarity with one another, these atomized individuals seek a simplified understanding that the regime supplies, with what Arendt calls a “lying consistency.” As we’ve been learning in our Tuesday night series, this is the status that totalitarianism exploits for its own purposes. If this sounds familiar enough to make you nervous, you’re not alone. But as we have also learned earlier this year in our Tuesday night series, if totalitarianism requires atomization, democracy requires community, and supplies it. As the authors of our UUA common read, Daring Democracy – Frances Moore Lappé and Adam Eichen – so ably document, our participation in democratic organizations and movements not only thwarts anti-democracy forces and helps build democratic policies and institutions, it also “meets deep emotional needs” for community. There is no getting around the fact that democracy is participatory – if it isn’t, it’s not democracy.
As Obama tried to warn us, it can’t happen without us. Democracy doesn’t just allow participation by the people, for the people – it requires it. We don’t get to go back to the way things were. But the good news is that, as we build democracy together, again and again, we find each other in the work. And that, friends, is part of the good news of Unitarian Universalism. As we affirm the democratic process, we find each other in it. In these days so fraught with state terror, I find myself brokenhearted in a daily way. Most recently, in the face of families being separated, and of environmental policies overturned and scientific findings willfully ignored, there are some days when I wonder whether I can bear it. I am a person of immense privilege, and my practice in this world generally is to move through it without permission to falter – after all, those most affected by state terror don’t get to quit fighting, so why should I? Even so, I confess these days, sometimes it is hard to find the strength to stay woke. Where I find my solace and my hope, though, is in people in the struggle. It is a joy and a source of strength to see them at their rallies, on their picket lines, on their news beats. On good days, when I’m feeling sound of body, I join them. And often, dear ones, I find you there, and it gives me heart. Democracy is the sacred work of our denomination, and it is one of the gifts we bring to the larger community, nation, and world. Our children and our earth are calling us to this sacred duty. May it be so. May we make it so. Blessed be.