Lately I’ve found myself in several different conversations where folks have begged off of coming to church because they don’t believe in “organized religion.” I’ve laughed and shrugged this off with a line I’ve heard since childhood – that Unitarian Universalism is “disorganized religion.” Pretty good joke. I’ve certainly been to my share of committee and congregational meetings where this appears to be the case. Sometimes it seems like it takes forever for us to get on the same page because, perhaps, we haven’t even been looking at the same book. It brings to mind a joke wherein some UU newlyweds go on their honeymoon, and the groom discovers that the bridal nightgown has been made with 40 yards of fabric, the punchline being: “for UUs, the joy is in the search.” Unitarian Universalism isn’t about coloring in the lines, or painting by numbers – it’s about finding your own way, your own truth, choosing your own palette and canvas of understanding and spiritual practice. Our principles are straightforward in utterance, but highly complex in practice. There is a great deal in our search for truth and meaning that cannot be considered organized.

That said, the months of June and July have taken me for the first time first to UU General Assembly (GA) in Kansas City, MO, and then to the Midwest UU Summer Assembly (MUUSA) in Potosi, MO, where UUs did actually manage to gather in large numbers, hold manageable conversations about policy and practice, hold one another both in love and accountability, worship together, make music and art together, and workshop new ideas together. It feels like a bit of a confession to say it, but the truth is, this was a beautiful thing to see. We managed everything from basics, like registrations and nametags and mic times, to bigger challenges, like ombuds reports and covenantal relations management and harassment interventions and protest marches. We were, undeniably, organized – and I was honestly proud to see it. Indeed, a seed was planted in me, and I began to consider: why do we see it as a good thing for our unions or activist groups to be organized, but not our religious denomination?

In his lecture series, published as Varieties of Religious Experience in 1902, American philosopher and psychologist William James was an early distinguisher between what he called personal and institutional religion, the latter being what we have come to call organized religion. James asserts that institutional religion has the divinity most in mind, while personal religion is focused on “man’s . . . conscience, his deserts, his helplessness, his incompleteness.” James is not himself interested in discussing institutional or organized religion, in its focus on “dispositions of the deity” and other clerical and theological matters. For James, all of this is suspect, in comparison with religion that springs from the individual heart. But what if one’s institutional religion were designed and implemented to support each person in that inward, individual discernment – perhaps of a deity within, perhaps of what else might matter to one in place of a deity? Maybe of one’s more direct relationship with or place in the cosmos? What if one’s religion was organized, not as a way to foment a single idea about the deity, or the divine, or the cosmos, but to support one’s exploration of these? What impact would this have on James’s perception of personal and institutional religion as distinct and separate – one suspect, the other worthy of consideration and exploration?

Indeed, what if one’s religion were organized to support one’s exploration of the immanent, the relational? What if it were organized to support, say, a weekly racial justice vigil? A monthly covenant group? An annual evening of immersion in the arts? What if it were organized to feed the needy, or champion the oppressed, or give expression to one’s own inner strivings? What if one’s religion were organized so that one’s personal reflection could give rise to communal action, and communal action could in turn seed the soul for personal reflection?

I know that many of us have come away from, and all of us live alongside of, religious organizations that seem not to have the well being of their constituents in mind, let alone that of their communities and societies. Some of us have come out of religions organized to tell us we were unworthy, or damned, or that we should not exist at all. This is a crucial danger in organizing – that we will lose sight of our love for one another, our responsibility to one another. It’s true, organizations wield power, and sometimes they wield that power to harm. If we are honest, we must say that sometimes even Unitarian Universalism has succumbed to this misuse of power. This is why holding one another accountable in love is so important to our denomination’s well being. But this danger of abusing organizational power is present whether we are organizing a religion, or an activist group, or a garden party. I believe UUs can be vigilant, hold this danger in mind, and avert it, in order to organize in support of our own personal growth, the communal growth of our congregations, and the growth of our values in the world.

I find myself coming to a place where I can say aloud that I believe that the world could be a better place if Unitarian Universalism were more organized – more willing to grow as a denomination, as well as supporting the growth of our individual members. Coming up in August, I’ll be speaking from the pulpit about some of what is lost when we do not organize ourselves for this purpose. In the meantime, let me thank my congregation for sending me to GA, and for building time for MUUSA and other denominational activities into my job description. It is an empowering thing to see hundreds, even thousands, of Unitarian Universalists coming together in one place to do the work of our faith. I invite each of us to be not only individual, or congregational, but denominational in our thinking, and to consider what it might be that we are called to do to further organize and grow this religion.

 

© Mary Shelden, July 19, 2018

 

“There is a rewarding, even exhilarating, role for each of us in making democracy real.”

          ~Frances Moore Lappé and Adam Eichen, Daring Democracy

 

When 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.

 

© June 18, 2018

 

 

And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.  ~ Anaïs Nin

 

This is my ninth blog post as your DLRE, and it’s the first I’ve really struggled with. Though I’ve returned again and again to this month’s theme of Creativity, I have wrestled with even remembering any of my initial ideas about writing on the subject. It would not be unlike me to have several false starts in a piece of writing like this, but to have to goad myself into starting at all, well – that’s unlike me.  There’s a lot going on in my head, and it’s pretty interesting – at least to me — but to be honest, I’m not at all sure what of it, if any, I want to share with all of you. The truth is, creativity is an uncomfortable topic for me. It’s adjacent to some old hurt places that I’m not sure I’m ready to share anywhere, let alone at the place where I work.

Figuring out where that professional boundary lies is part of my struggle, I think. That boundary is different, of course, for a religious educator than for a university professor (my previous work). It’s also something you and I negotiate together, both individually and collectively. Creativity entails risk, and how much I risk with you depends on how much I trust you – and trust is something that builds slowly, over time. A few times now in the time that I’ve been with this congregation, for example, I’ve wept a bit in front of you: once during the story for all ages about Harvey Milk and the time before the SCOTUS Bashear decision; again during the gift-giving at Bret’s farewell party; and yet again this past Sunday during the bridging ceremony for our graduating seniors. In each of these cases, I knew I was likely to cry – a little or a lot – in sharing some vulnerable part of me with you, and I decided to risk it. This is a thing that’s hard for me to trust you with – because it’s uncomfortable for me, and because I know it’s uncomfortable for some number of you. I don’t really like to make you uncomfortable – because I’m a caring person, and also, I work for you. It can be a challenge to discern what’s in my own best interests, and yours. It’s especially important for me to be careful with the little ones. They should never have to worry about me, an adult whose care of them is my job. And I know every one of you carries a little one inside of you, for whom I also need to take care.

Still, I also know that navigating this path of vulnerability and trust is just the road I travel now. This is ministry. Creativity entails risk, and you and I together create this church. We don’t have to do it all – others have come before us, and much has already been done for us. Still, we must do our part in creating it and recreating it, day in and day out. And that means we must risk sharing ourselves with one another. Michigan State’s Intercultural Dialogues program offers a visual model for this negotiated territory of calculated, negotiated risks. They call it the learning zone. According to their model, while we may love to be in our comfort zone, we don’t do much learning there. Of course, being in places where there is some actual danger to our well being is also not good for learning. But there is a zone between – where we may be uncomfortable, stretched, but also excited, engaged, opened to new ideas, other people’s and our own – that’s truly optimal for learning. I shared this model several times with my group during our Beloved Conversations series, and I think it’s especially helpful for when we’re learning across cultures. But in another sense, we are always learning across cultures. Your comfort zone, your danger zone, your optimal learning zone are all different from mine, and for different sets of reasons. If we are working together, learning together, ministering together, creating this church together, we are navigating boundaries, limits, and risk.

It’s been just a year now since I first stepped foot inside of UCE, and a big nine months since I came on board as your DLRE. I’ve learned a lot in the arc of this church year – about this job, this congregation, and our shared ministry. I’m grateful for your patience with me, as I’ve had a lot to learn. I hope you’ve been learning about me, too: that I’m a bit messy and not naturally organized, but that I’m honest about my flaws, and I work hard to address them, and to learn what I don’t yet understand, and that I care deeply about this work we do together. I hope that you’ve had the opportunity to see me learning, as I have benefited from watching you learn. As we contemplate what we’ve undertaken in the year now passing, and think about what we will build together in the coming year, let us each do our best to trust one another, and to risk learning together. When we falter or trangress, when we fail one another, let us reconcile, rebuild trust, and begin again. Our shared ministry here is too important for us not to. Again and again, let us risk together its creation.

 

© May 17, 2018

Dr. Mary Lamb Shelden

Home to the table, home to the feast,
Where the last are the first and the greatest are the least . . .
Where the rich will envy what the poor have got –
Everybody’s got enough, though we ain’t got a lot –
No one is forgotten, no one is alone,
When we’re calling all the children home.
~ John McCutcheon

 

There’s a rosy glow around my memory of the family dinners of my childhood. My mother cooked five nights a week – a feat hard to fathom in the current version of my world. There were four of us growing kids in those days, and though Mom was far from a typical housewife, she did this thing nightly without fail until I was around ten years old, and my brothers, who had eaten with such gusto and appreciation, went off to college. It was more hit or miss after that. By then, we girls could cook for ourselves, and well, so her cooking became a more occasional thing. But for that stretch of time until I was ten, other than fish sticks on Friday or burgers on Saturday, Mom generally made the meal happen, and marshalled us all into action: cutting up fruit or veggies, setting table, clearing table, doing dishes – there were plenty of jobs to go around. One of the remarkable things about our culture of family mealtime was that Mom made an effort to make these chores gender equitable, and Dad backed her up on this; tasks were generally assigned by age, rather than gender. And in this way, with plenty of reminding and cajoling and the occasional sound of Mom putting her foot down, dinner happened on a nightly basis.

I’m aware of some nostalgia as I recall these events. It wasn’t always delightful. My dad was an Abbott exec who commuted daily from Libertyville to North Chicago. If he left work late or traffic was bad, things would get tense at home. The meal was coordinated to coincide with his homecoming at a particular time, and if my mom was going to the trouble of cooking, you’d best be on time for the meal. This was, of course, in the days before cell phones, so if Dad didn’t walk in the door at 5:30, there was some suspense around the reason for his delay and just how long she would need to keep the meal warm and the hungry children at bay. Still, in a way, this tension around unscheduled delays is more a measure of how often things went according to plan than it is an indication of deviation from it. Then, too, my parents’ relationship was sometimes stormy, or sometimes one of us kids was in trouble. The family dinner table was also the place for family meetings, which in my family were generally about scheduling but often about some sort of family psychodrama playing itself out. I think the stress around meal planning and preparation and family scheduling and conflict have a lot to do with why I was not so adamant about family mealtime when it came time to raise my own daughter. Still, a lot went right in that nightly ritual, much of which I hold fast to and seek to reproduce in my own life.

For one thing, there was the daily check-in and relating of stories about our day. Often my dad’s report was inscrutable to me – the players in it mostly faceless in my mind’s eye, the plots driven by tensions and conflicts I couldn’t fathom. But often Dad brought home a story specifically with us kids in mind – some comedy of error about life in corporate America. My mom was a first-grade teacher when I was little, and later went back to graduate school and became a special ed teacher. Her stories were often about what she was teaching, or learning, or challenges with particular students. The characters in the daily stories of my siblings were better known to me – indeed, sometimes they were at the table with us. That celery-green laminate kitchen table seemed endlessly expandable, and extra places were often set – for neighborhood chums or friends from school, for John and sometimes Greg when they came out from the city, for this or that family friend. Sometimes their stories mingled with ours, or they asked questions to draw us out, or commented on what we’d related. I think my love of story comes in large part from this nightly ritual, as well as my sense of audience.

Then, too, every topic of the day was discussed at our family dinner table: the war in Vietnam, the draft, women’s liberation and equality, gun control, contraception and abortion, gay rights, Watergate, world hunger, world religion, and whatever election was upcoming. My parents, both seekers, shared with us the expanse of their minds, open to learning and, in turn, we each shared what was in our own growing hearts and minds. Everyone at the table of every age was invited to weigh in on whatever was the current topic, and we were invited to try on one another’s perspectives, and to try to imagine perspectives not in the room with us. Though it was never explicitly stated and may have only been half-conscious, what my parents were doing was trying to help us navigate the world around us with compassion, empathy, an open mind, and a questing spirit. Whatever food was on the table each night, there was a concomitant food for thought, as nourishing to me today as it was fifty-odd years ago.

When I consider what is meant by intergenerational religious education, this is the model uppermost in my mind. Though I know many families these days do not share a nightly meal together, as demands on our schedules have increased and our culture has forgotten to honor this nightly ritual, still I hope that the family dinner table of my childhood – or maybe one in your memory or imagination – can offer at least a metaphorical model of what is possible. As each of us considers our own ongoing spiritual development in our community of learners, I hope we see that it’s not enough for us to commune with our agemates. Though we may find our most simpatico audience there, reaching across generations can be a way to bump us out of our well-worn grooves and patterns of thought and into new perspectives and ideas. And we have both a duty and a joy to bring those behind us in the story of time into the larger conversation, to make space for them to weigh in, test their own ideas, and discover the expanses of the mind. What nourishes us is what sustains us – but just as importantly, what nourishes us is what we sustain. Come in – set your place and get your plate. Pull up a chair. Join us at the table.

 

© March 21, 2018

 

Dr. Mary Lamb Shelden

Losing love is like a window in your heart.
Everybody sees you’re blown apart,
Everybody feels the wind blow.
~Paul Simon, “Graceland”

I lost my father to lung cancer when I was in my mid-twenties, when my daughter was just three years old. It had been a rough go – just under a year between diagnosis and death, in my memory, and by the end, the great man who had towered over our family was half his former size. I spent the years following Dad’s death fairly fixated on my own mortality and demise, and I developed a couple of chronic conditions that fed this fixation. I was worried all the time about whether I might have this or that terrible disease, and I learned I wasn’t alone in this. The internet was a relatively new phenomenon then, but what it offered almost immediately was food for worry, and a community of worriers. I had plenty of conversation partners – people in the prime of life attending to all the little aches and pains, anxious that it might be cancer, trying to ensure that, if it was, they would catch it early. I went to see many doctors, who generally could not even help me address my symptoms, let alone their root causes. Finally, after roughly six years mired in this obsession, a new idea occurred to me: the more fearful question for me was not so much, what if I died, as it was, what if I lived? What if I pulled through? What might be asked of me then? And really, what was I here to do?

Up to that moment I had admittedly been angry with my father, for reasons I thought myriad and complex. I was mad at the breadwinner complex that kept him so many hours away from our family. I was mad that he hadn’t stood up to my mother more in her moments of fury. Even as I fumed, I could see that I what I was really mad at him for was dying. I would have made it about the cigarettes, had I had the option, except that for much of this period, I was still myself smoking. Indeed, I may have ultimately given up smoking, the better to be mad at him for it. Then, as I let go of this numbing habit, I found my anger easing, and my grief and love for him welling up in its place. I began again to recall the early mornings of my childhood, when I would awaken and come downstairs, and see him through the banister rails, in the living room – in lotus, or mountain, or child, or sirsasana, and I would tiptoe past him to the kitchen and get out the milk and cereal for us, for our quiet breakfast to come. This vision of him is as clear to me today as it was 47 years ago, and I cannot now recall it without a wash of pain that fills my eyes. The hurt is simply attendant to my love for him; I cannot retrieve one without the other.

Grief hurts, to be sure. There is a reason they call it heartbreak; to grieve is to be broken open. But grief has important work to do, and it is best if we understand that as we stand here, open to all the universe, it is then that we may best be filled. “Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding,” says Gibran. It hurts – but like death itself, the pain of grief is not unceasing. It changes. It eases. It passes. If we can bear simply to be with it, in it, we will learn almost immediately that it ebbs and flows. But if we are attentive, we can give the pain of grief permission to go, knowing that, like the tide, it will be back, knowing that we will not get it all done at once, or maybe ever, at least until the moment of our own passing. Grief hurts, but it also teaches. It teaches us what matters, what to hold fast to, where we have erred and what are the consequences of error. It teaches us what we are capable of bearing, and why it matters that we bear it. And at its best, it teaches us that those around us have also known grief and can help us to bear it.

Here’s the thing: love entails loss. When we love truly, we don’t merely risk loss – we guarantee it. Loss is an inevitable part of love, in just the way that death is an inevitable part of life. We are mortal. If we love, we will suffer. It can be hard to remember, here in the thick of it, that grief is just part of the rent we pay for being human. That, indeed, if the rent is high, we are among the lucky.

 

© February 22, 2018

“If you have come here to help me, you are wasting your time . . .
But if you have come here because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.”
~ Aboriginal Activists Group, Queensland, 1970s

 

My first marriage came apart for many reasons that I won’t go into here. When it did, though, I went from a 11-year relationship with a man to a brand new relationship with a woman. While I had identified as bi* since my teens, and had always been forthright about this with partners, family, and close friends – and actually, anyone who asked, and whenever the subject came up — my bisexuality had been obscured to many in my social circle because I had been in a committed relationship with a man. Folks saw a man and a woman, and simply assumed that both of us were heterosexual. Honestly, I think much of the reason that bisexuals are stereotyped as players, or heartbreakers, is that we’re only seen as bi at the break-ups, when our next partner is a different gender from our last. We’re not seen and therefore not understood during our long stretches of monogamous fidelity. Not that all bi people are monogamous, or faithful – but if we’re only seen at the break-ups, those of us who are monogamous and faithful will likely never have an opportunity to influence the narrative about bi people, to the extent that one exists at all.

As it happened, at that time, the UU congregation I was with had started down the path toward recognition as a Welcoming Congregation. Ten years prior, the minister and I had co-led the adult RE curriculum, and now, as I was leaving my marriage to another member, and beginning this new relationship with a non-member who became a semi-regular visitor (and who, not incidentally, became my life partner and spouse – i.e., Margie, my beloved now for 21 years), I was co-leading a second offering of the curriculum, and then co-chairing the committee leading the congregation through the process. To say the least, then, this period in my life was awkward – for me, for Margie, for my former, for our daughter Marjorie, and for the congregation. The good thing was that I had had a long relationship with this congregation, and with my denomination, and I was clear about what was needed. I knew that LGBT people (by then we were using these four letters) needed safe havens. It was still a crime in many places for us just to live as who we were, and while my former was a person of admirable good will, I was acutely aware that people like me going through a divorce, or seeking to adopt, very often had no standing in the courts in their plea to be custodial parents, and that this was only one of myriad challenges faced by LGBT people. I also knew that UUs were called to offer safe haven for us – that our first principle, and our long prophetic practice in many quarters, should be the ground from which safe haven could spring.

All of the above is prelude to the moment I’m about to describe. For all the years I’d attended this particular church, we’d had precisely one member of color: an African-American man named Chuck. Despite the fact that the surrounding community had a fairly large black community, the church had not succeeded in drawing black members – a common issue for UU congregations, then and now – except for Chuck. Chuck was in real estate, if I recall correctly, and had a man-of-the-world quality about him. I had had many pleasant conversations at coffee hour, but we’d never gotten to a level of conversation where I felt comfortable asking a question often on my mind, about why he’d stuck it out with us, solo, all these years. For this fact I was grateful, but perplexed – but I didn’t know how to shape the language to ask him about his experience in choosing Unitarian Universalism. Indeed, looking back now, there are a great many questions I wish I’d thought to ask Chuck.

But when the time came to put together a conversation series leading up to our congregational vote on the resolution to become a Welcoming Congregation, Chuck came to me and asked to be given floor time. I said yes, of course, and then asked what he’d want to say. He said, “I want to help folks to understand that LGBT people have always been with us, in the struggle.” I thought this a really beautiful idea and, of course, put Chuck’s name on the roster of speakers. But I wasn’t really prepared for the power of what Chuck had to contribute to the conversation. I remember with clarity the day he stood before the congregation and said that, as a young man, he’d been in the struggle for civil rights, and had been a member of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, better known as SNCC. And he said that gay people – vulnerable as they were – had put themselves in harm’s way in order to advocate for civil rights for African Americans. He said, “I stand with them today because they have always been with us.” And I remember and cherish the dawning sense of pride I felt that my people had been there with him, the way he was now here with us. Chuck for many reasons, but certainly in large part simply because of who he was in the context of our congregation, had an ethos unique among our membership. When Chuck spoke, people listened. I don’t know precisely what difference he made in the vote for resolution later that year – as I recall, it was unanimous. But I do know the difference he made in the room that day, and in my own heart.

I share this story about Chuck here now out of my profound sense of gratitude for his clear example. Chuck came to the work – our congregation’s work toward a Welcoming Congregation resolution – out of a sense of shared struggle. He understood, and helped teach me, what it means to have my liberation bound up with that of another person or people. He was a beautiful illustration that day of what it means to be an ally – to understand that as allies we, too, have skin in the game.

King said, “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” As a person of immense race and class and educational privilege, I have often struggled to understand how this is true. Privilege often blinds us to what we give up to our unconscious assumptions. But Chuck that day offered me a clarity that will always be with me, as others before had offered him. We are in this world together; what harms you must inevitably harm me. Though the harm to me may only be my gradual desensitization to the harm you experience, still that is a monstrous harm to me, even when, or especially when, I am not conscious of it. As I become aware of my privilege, I may seek to be a hero – and indeed, Chuck was a hero to me that day, in using his privilege to help me and people like me. But the more so because he understood at a profound level that each of us, without the freedom of the other, could not be free.

 

*While I’ve had long years of ambivalence about my bi label, I have settled into it. One thing that continues to bug me about it, though, is that it tends to reinforce the idea of two opposite, mutually exclusive genders – so let me be clear here that I see this two-ness in bisexuality as two ends on a spectrum, or two poles on a sphere, of gender. I know many prefer pansexual as their chosen label for this reason, but I dislike the way that label tends to reinforce other stereotypes – as in people like me are attracted to everyone, or to all of creation – “everything that moves,” as the saying goes. Indeed, one of the things that chafes me most about the bi label is that other people get to have labels about what does matter to them in their attractions, whereas I am stuck with a label about what doesn’t matter to me. I am attracted to particular people, not to particular genders. Still, bi is my chosen label – the best  for me of the limited options I see so far, and an example of how language fails, and of how labels are never adequate substitutes for stories.

 

© January 18, 2018

“As I thought back to that moment . . . I knew exactly why I looked away. I was so afraid of my own need, I couldn’t look need in the eye.”
~ Brené Brown, Rising Strong

A few days after Thanksgiving this year, an old high school friend reported on an interaction he’d had with a stranger, a black man, on Chicago’s South Side. The man had approached him saying, twice – “I’m not robbing you, but I’m desperate for money.” My friend, a white guy, a tradesman working in the area, gave him the $20 he had in his wallet, and was now processing the event on Facebook, trying to figure out whether this was “a new kind of scam.” With alarming speed, the discussion thread turned to weapons for self-defense. Few were the voices urging mercy and compassion – though when we emerged, I think we gently rounded off the discussion. I hope we helped others on the thread re-think their positions, but I have my doubts.

This stranger who approached my high school friend has been much on my mind this holiday season. I have come to think of him as one of the guests at my table.

I know the Guest At Your Table boxes you took home this season back in November – or maybe left in the church at their usual stations – may have become invisible to you by now. I know because this has sometimes happened to me during this season. It is a truism among UUs that, as Emerson warned, repeated rituals can become “dead forms.” But there is another opportunity in ritual practice that I hope we consider. As we daily or nightly light our chalice or menorah or kinara, I hope that by the candlelight we can see this little box as a placeholder for the very real people desperate for our help.

Who is the guest at my table? It is the man who sits outside the Evanston Athletic Center, with his daily greeting and request for aid. I have generally walked by him, explaining that I don’t have my wallet, which is true. But a couple of weeks ago, after I had passed him in the usual way, another woman came behind me with a folded bill in hand. “Thank you for remembering me,” he said, and she replied, “I always have something for you.” And in a moment, I realized that I had been so concerned about being suckered, that I had forgotten to be concerned about being hardhearted. The guest at my table is also the guy outside the CVS, where I go only a couple of times a month, always noticing that he is faithfully at his station – so that I have come to ask, what am I doing so faithfully as he, and is it worth doing? The other day, I picked up two Panera gift cards and a couple of packs of handwarmers, for the EAC guy and the CVS guy, whose names I do not know – Margie’s idea that I felt was a good one. When I gave this little gift package to the CVS guy, he was clearly touched – but it was the difference it made to me that I want to share with you. I was aware that this gift was insufficient. I began to think, though, then about the larger difference I might make if I could make such a contribution – which was well within our means – a regular practice. I was feeling pretty good about this Idea while I was parking at the club – and then the guy I had expected to see there wasn’t at his usual station. He has been much on my mind since then. Today will be my first opportunity since to deliver his little package. I hope he is well. I hope I will see him, as it has turned colder. Or that he is someplace warmer.

Who is the guest at your table? Have you seen the men I’ve described here? Or the woman who sits outside the Jewel on Chicago Avenue? Who do you walk by as you go about your dailiness? Are they in your thoughts and prayers? Might you make room for them there? Might you make their well being a practice in your own life?

Tulsidas Ramayan tells us that when Hanuman, servant of the god Rama, was asked what he was, man or beast, he answered quietly: “When I don’t know who I am, I serve you; but when I know who I am, I am you.” The guest at our table, friends, is us.

The Unitarian Universalist Service Committee (https://www.uusc.org/) – the legacy of the organization that we learned about during our visit from the General Assembly Chalice, that helped so many immigrants escape the Nazis—is our UUA organization assisting those around the world most desperate for our help. This holy week—as our congregation has affirmed that we stand ready to protect the immigrant strangers in our midst, as we remember that ancient holy family, escaping Herod’s wrath and treachery—I invite you to keep those most desperate in mind, to stay awake to their need, and to your means of answering it. May our flame of aid and assistance burn brightly in this dark season. May we be of service. May it be so.

 

© December 21, 2017

“In the glare of your mind, be modest.
And beholden to what is tactile, and thrilling.”
~ Mary Oliver, “Flare”

 

Since starting work at UCE, I have met with my Children and Youth Program Team, I believe, four times. At each of these meetings – and at our K-12 RE teacher orientation — I have attempted to light a chalice, only to have the ritual go badly wrong. In all of these attempts, the candles I’ve used have refused to light: either the flame has not caught, despite repeated attempts, or has caught only to quickly fail. As symbols go, mine in this series have been spectacularly lacking, and it has only been the goodwill and eager assistance of other team members that has gotten me through these early professional embarrassments.

Though I am generally agnostic about the existence of an intervening deity, there are moments and, especially, patterns of moments, that lead me to feel that the universe is trying to tell me something.

The chalice now at my UCE office (which now has, I hope, a better candle in it) is a handmade clay goblet picked up at a Goodwill store many years ago. It has sat on my home altar for a couple of decades, performing generally as a vessel for libations – serving as a vehicle for water, rather than flame. I’ve entertained the notion that there may be some attendant spirit still in it from these previous rituals that resists the fire. I like many things about this chalice: its earthy essence, its rough texture, its particular shade of teal glaze, the fact that it looks like a drinking vessel are all sources of my satisfaction with it. I believe this is the right chalice for this transitional moment in my life – and, indeed, stray notions notwithstanding, I think these initial stumbles through ritual are not the chalice’s fault at all. It is much likelier, in fact, that the error lies with me. If I strain to listen, I seem to discern in moments a voice, as if on the wind: Look to your wicks, Mary, it tells me. Attend to your symbols.

When I first started work as DLRE, I began to ask my UU colleagues, here and at other congregations: where do you get your church? As a lifelong UU, I’m aware that although my faith has not changed, my role with regard to it has. Where once I was served by a congregation, now I serve one. This is not an absolute difference – I have also served my previous congregations as a volunteer and lay-leader, and I now experience many gifts from participating in this congregation. Still, although the change is nuanced, it is also definite. So I am grateful to begin now to find places and ways to get my church. I am grateful for access to the recorded sermons of my gifted colleagues, Revs. Bret and Eileen and Susan. I have joined the Church of the Larger Fellowship, and am grateful for the community I find there, and for the ministry of Rev. Meg Riley. I have been reminded of the other places where I’ve always gotten my church: walking the dog, doing the dishes, watering the plants – and sitting down to a meal with my beloved partner, where we recount to one another the events of our day. During this season of Guest At Your Table, I am making a commitment to daily readings and small rituals – like putting coins in the box and lighting a chalice – that help me to deepen the exploration of this faith I love. Unitiarian Universalism has helped me keep mind, heart, body, and spirit together, through all of life’s challenges, and has led me to this remarkable moment in my life. And when December 4^th arrives, I’ll be observing Chalica for the first time ever, seeking to understand more fully the deeper meaning of our seven principles and what they mean for my life. I’ll be keeping my wicks trimmed and my matches dry. I’ll be attending to my symbols.

 

© November 16, 2017

“I believe that every thought and every act of racism is harmful; if it is my thought or act, it is harmful to me as well as others.” ~The Birmingham Pledge (http://www.thebirminghampledge.org/)

 

In one of my earliest memories – I must have been only about age 3 or 4 – my family stands around me. I am seated in a blue tweed easy chair in the living room. There are many faces encircling me. In my memory, I see the scene alternately from my seated vantage point and as someone standing just outside the circle. I am being asked to say “negro.” Someone special is coming to visit – a new friend – and I’m being coached to see whether I can say the word clearly. If I can it will be fine. If not, I will hurt our new friend’s feelings. It will be very, very bad if I say the word unclearly. Which, of course, is what I do. It’s agreed, then, that if I have any cause to comment on the appearance of our new friend, I should use the word “black.”

To this day, I cannot tell this story aloud without weeping.

This is my earliest memory of racial difference. Later that day, our new friend did come to visit us, and he is a cherished friend to this day. But the tension of that moment before his arrival has also always remained with me; like a sore in the mouth that the tongue seeks out again and again, I have returned to this memory – first as a moment of shame, that I could not get it right, and then later with curiosity as a fraught moment of my development, and then later still as a personal interlude representative of a larger cultural moment. For decades, I thought of it as the moment I learned about blackness. It is only more recently that I have begun to understand it as the moment I learned about whiteness – about my own race, and about my unsought, unwished-for power to harm. I remember with clarity the sense of dread and frustration and grief I felt at the possibility that I might accidentally hurt another person’s feelings enough to do lasting injury.

I have been awake to the need for racial justice my whole life. At first, my conception of it was interpersonal: if white folks could just learn to treat people of color equitably, it would be better. I came later to understand it more historically; Alex Haley’s Roots, in my teens, and in my twenties the PBS documentary, Eyes on the Prize, were the first key textbooks of my remedial education in racial history, but curiosity and a hunger to understand took me further. I am grateful to my professors in Women’s Studies and the African-American authors they taught me for helping me to understand race as a social construct, and racism as systemic – as largely institutional and unconscious socialization. I’m grateful to friends and colleagues in Richmond, Virginia, for helping me to discern racism as structural—as built not only into our institutions and policies, but into things as solid and enduring as our roadways and county lines and transportation systems. My understanding of racism has evolved considerably over the decades since that first remembered moment –but even so, that moment contains the kernel of understanding I’ve drawn on most recently.

I understand my privilege as a white person – in socio-economic status, certainly, and in access to resources like education. I would never deny this privilege. While other aspects of my identity may put me at a disadvantage, most assuredly my race advantages me in ways I have done nothing to merit. When I first began to learn about the untold histories of peoples of color, I felt a guilt I thought was unearned, as a person who never supported, for example, slavery or Jim Crow; then I began to realize that there were things I did or didn’t do, and ideas I unconsciously held, that I could still do something about; and eventually I began to understand that I could actually use some of the privilege I have to mitigate some of the systemic damage from institutional and structural racism. I have come to understand, over time, that when I take these steps, it is freeing to my own soul. I feel some relief from the earned and unearned guilt, and I tread a bit more lightly on the earth.

Indeed, it is only within the last couple of years that I’ve begun to understand what I felt in my heart in that first recognition of race as a youngster – an idea that I think our use of the word “privilege” may obscure for many: that racism – indeed, oppression of all kinds – doesn’t just hurt those oppressed. This is, I think, a thing understood by many people of color, but too seldom by people of whiteness. While the benefits of privilege are undeniable, it exacts a cost on the spirit of the oppressor. It is not ultimately a positive to me that mainstream history is centered on my race; that our economic system is set up to disadvantage people “not like me”; that our neighborhoods and townships and counties are set up to exclude people “not like me”; that it’s hard to form friendships across racial lines. While the financial benefits and relative ease of access to resources is undeniable – indeed, I have no wish to deny them – I cannot see it as ultimately of benefit to me that others are disadvantaged by my race. Indeed, I feel the wrong, the loss, the pain acutely.

In many ways, I am still that four-year-old, still wishing with all my might that I could change things so that I had no power to harm my friend.

 

© October 12, 2017