Creating Situatedness

Bless the World, part 3

Without rooting in social context, we don't know who we are. There are new tools of individual freedom today, but they cannot be utilized without social interconnection, solidarity, grounding. Marcia Pally’s new book Commonwealth and Covenant offers the phrase, “separability amid situatedness.” This is the capacity to be unique, to create, explore, innovate, experiment with new ways of thinking and living – while also being situated — embedded in loving families and enveloping communities.

“Though we are all unique individuals, we become our singular selves through our relations and responsibilities to the people and environments around us.” (Amazon review)

To put it in terms of the Unitarian Universalist principles, the first principle and the last principle mutually constitute each other. The first principle declares the inherent worth and dignity of every person (or being), and the last principle is about the interdependent web of all existence. But it is the interdependent web that creates our inherent worth and dignity – and because of our worth and dignity, we rely on one another in relations of interdependence. Separability amid situatedness. But

“overemphasis on 'separability' — individualism run amok — results in greed, adversarial and deceitful political discourse and chicanery, resource grabbing, broken relationships, and anomie.” (Amazon review)

Blessing, as I said previously (HERE), is about place. When a person, object, or event blesses you, when you bless someone or something, there’s a relationship. Blesser, blessee, and blessing situate each other, locate one another, and place us within a context of belonging and value. It is both cause and effect of healthy cultural infrastructure within which we can thrive.

Creating situatedness – the blessing of each other by each other – requires, as Marcia Pally recognizes and as our Unitarian Universalist covenantal faith tradition has long embodied, covenant rather than contract. When two isolated individuals make a deal, they express it as a contract. When we are situated within something, we have a covenant. A contract protects interests. A covenant protects relationships.

“A covenant exists between people who understand they are part of one another. It involves a vow to serve the relationship that is sealed by love: Where you go, I will go. Where you stay, I will stay. Your people shall be my people. People in a contract provide one another services, but people in a covenant delight in offering gifts.” (David Brooks, NYTimes, HERE)

If the social fabric we need is to be rewoven, it will happen through covenant – “hundreds of millions of people making local covenants — widening their circles of attachment across income, social and racial divides.” And that will probably require a shared story about who we are as a people.

I’ve never been all that keen on the notion of patriotism. For starters, why don’t we say “matriotism”? For enders, patriotism has often seemed too closely tied to unhealthy nationalism. But when I heard New Jersey Senator Cory Booker contrast tolerance with what he called patriotism, I thought, “OK, that’s a definition of patriotism I can get behind.”

Tolerance, said Booker, means, “I’m going to stomach your right to be different, but if you disappear off the face of the earth I’m no worse off.” Patriotism, on the other hand, means

“love of country, which necessitates love of each other, that we have to be a nation that aspires for love, which recognizes that you have worth and dignity and I need you. You are part of my whole, part of the promise of this country.” (Booker interview with Bill Maher, quoted by David Brooks)

I’m still not sure why nation – as opposed to state or county on the one hand – as opposed to continent or planet on the other hand – need be the crucial category. But whatever the category, the emotion Booker described is what it means to be situated in a shared collective life. That love, that recognition of worth and dignity and our interdependence, locates and grounds us, makes it possible for each of us to be blesser, blessee, and blessing.

Without that, there is no “together” – and no other possibility waiting. Without that, good proposals that arise lack political will and remain unimplemented. Without that, Mother’s Day is a commercialized celebration of one narrow image of what mothering looks like.

Be a blessing to the world. I charge you – with all of whatever authority is mine because you have freely conferred it on me: Be a blessing to the world – as a mother is blessing to a child, and also as a child is blessing to their mother. Knowing that you can’t do that alone – knowing, as you do now – that blessing the world requires attending to relationship, nurturing the situatedness that makes separability meaningful, then may you realize that other possibility, waiting – that possibility whose name is “together.”

* * *
This is part 3 of 3 of "Bless the World"
See also
Part 1: The Blessing You Receive and the Blessing You Do
Part 2: Together Is Hard

Together Is Hard

Bless the World, part 2

"None of us alone can save the world. Together -- that is another possibility waiting," as Rev. Rebecca Parker said. Getting together to build a more peaceful and just world is no easy matter. We lack consensus about what, in fact, justice requires when, where, and for whom. Nonviolent conflict resolution methods remain precarious and fragile in the face of temptations to resort to violence.

Consider, by way of illustration, the mottled history of Mother's Day. In 1870, Unitarian Julia Ward Howe wrote her “Appeal to womanhood throughout the world,” also known as her “Mother’s Day Proclamation.” She urged women across the world to join the cause of peacebuilding. Long before Mother’s Day was celebrated with brunches and flower bouquets, Mother’s Day was part of organizing pacificist mothers against war. Julia Ward Howe’s radical call to create peace still resonates today. She wrote:

“Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn all that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience. We, the women of one country, will be too tender of those of another country to allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs. From the bosom of the devastated Earth a voice goes up with our own. It says: ‘Disarm! Disarm!’”

But getting together for peace is difficult for us. Howe’s “Mother’s Day for Peace” was observed in scattered localities for 25 years, but never caught on nationally. Mother’s Day did not become a national holiday until 1917, and when it did, it was no longer a day sharing Julia Ward Howe’s focus on peace. Rather, the new national Mother's Day resulted from Methodist Anna Jarvis’s campaign for a day to honor the important role of mothers.

Jarvis' Mothers Day was ripe for commercialization, which quickly happened. The holiday grows seemingly more commercialized every year. Moreover, Mothers Day as we have known it promotes a very homogenized and romanticized notion of motherhood. In 2011, a group called Strong Families re-conceived of Mothers Day as "Mamas Day." Strong Families explains:

“We know that mamahood is not one size fits all. But most popular images of mothers exclude mamas based on their sexual orientation, race, income, immigration status and more. And Mothers Day, one of the biggest commercial holidays in the United States, often reinforces traditional ideas of family and motherhood that there's only one way to be a family.” (mamasday.org)

Each year, Strong Families commissions artists to create original art reflecting the various ways our mamas and families look. At the mamasday.org website you can see their collection of e-cards. By adopting a “mamas” framework, Strong Families makes visible the diverse kinds of families that exist today. Mamas Day is a celebration of all mamas, everywhere -- which means it does something that commercialized, homogenized, romanticized Mother's Day does not: promote extending to every family the rights, recognition and resources it needs to thrive.

The ways we conceive of mother’s day are a chance to more powerfully bless the world with a more inclusive blessing. Our Unitarian Universalist Association is on board with Mamas Day. On May 8, the UUA.org home page declared:

“Today, Unitarian Universalists join Strong Families’ Mamas Day campaign to shift away from the commercialized version of Mother’s Day. Unitarian Universalists identify with Strong Families’ expanded frame of motherhood as we welcome and support all families in our congregations and spiritual communities. Strong Families takes this a step further by helping people advocate for laws that protect and help families thrive. This is a cause worthy of Julia Ward Howe’s radical vision of Mother’s Day.”

In the 146 years since Julia Ward Howe's "Mother's Day Proclamation," her vision has progressed very little. It's been essentially abandoned for most of that time, and the attempt to revive it remains small-scale. It's just one example of how getting together to build a more peaceful and just world is no easy matter.

Moreover, we are in the midst of trends that make “together” harder and harder. Demographic diversity is increasing all over the world from global migration. We can celebrate the richness that diversity brings, but without a shared sense of commonality, an understanding of the unum amidst our pluribus, there’s not much togetherness.

Second, growing inequalities of wealth erode the sense that we’re all in this together. Inequality creates division.

Third, the internet gives people a lot more choice of what to watch, what to read, but it also means we and our neighbors share less and less of a common story. And in general the ideology of individualism grows stronger. Alienation and isolation is a problem. Alienated young men and women join ISIS – or street gangs -- so they can have a sense of belonging. Political polarization grows as people don’t interact with those on the other side.

The narrative of continuing progress toward racial justice, which was always a bit rosier than the reality, has been exposed as false: in the last few years white America has been realizing there’s been no progress in race relations for at least a generation.

People feel powerless. The supposed liberations of individualism leave us uprooted. We need social identities in order to act effectively. Efficacy comes from knowing who you are, having a firm identity, and that comes from embeddedness in a rich social fabric. Other people, noted Ralph Waldo Emerson, “are lenses through which we read our own minds.” Without a strong network around us, we never know our own mind. Without rootedness in social soil, there’s no sense of who one is. Without a foundation neither fluid nor at risk, there’s no ground from which one can live daringly.

* * *
This is part 2 of 3 of "Bless the World"
See also:
Part 1: The Blessing You Receive and the Blessing You Do
Part 3: Creating Situatedness

The Blessing You Receive and the Blessing You Do

Bless the World, part 1

“Choose to Bless the World,” a benediction by my colleague Unitarian Universalist minister, Rev. Rebecca Parker:

Your gifts—whatever you discover them to be—
can be used to bless or curse the world.
The mind’s power,
The strength of the hands,
The reaches of the heart,
The gift of speaking, listening, imagining, seeing, waiting
Any of these can serve to feed the hungry,
Bind up wounds,
Welcome the stranger,
Praise what is sacred,
Do the work of justice
Or offer love.
Any of these can draw down the prison door,
Hoard bread,
Abandon the poor,
Obscure what is holy,
Comply with injustice
Or withhold love.
You must answer this question:
What will you do with your gifts?
Choose to bless the world.
The choice to bless the world is more than act of will,
A moving forward into the world
With the intention to do good.
It is an act of recognition,
A confession of surprise,
A grateful acknowledgment
That in the midst of a broken world
Unspeakable beauty, grace and mystery abide.
There is an embrace of kindness,
That encompasses all life,
Even yours.
And while there is injustice, anesthetization, or evil
There moves a holy disturbance,
A benevolent rage,
A revolutionary love
Protesting, urging insisting
That which is sacred will not be defiled.
Those who bless the world live their life
As a gesture of thanks
For this beauty
And this rage.
The choice to bless the world can take you into solitude
To search for the sources of power and grace;
Native wisdom, healing, and liberation.
More, the choice will draw you into community,
The endeavor shared,
The heritage passed on,
The companionship of struggle,
The importance of keeping faith,
The life of ritual and praise,
The comfort of human friendship,
The company of earth
The chorus of life welcoming you.
None of us alone can save the world.
Together—that is another possibility waiting.

Blessing is our theme in May. It’s what we’ll be exploring in our Journey Groups this month.

There’s blessing, the noun, a thing that brings goodness, joy, or help to our lives. Food is a blessing. Waking up in the morning is a blessing. Air filling the lungs is a blessing. Friends are a blessing and, if you’re lucky, so is family. In this sense, the theme, blessing, is essentially the same as the theme gratitude. Reflecting on, noticing, attuning to and taking in the blessings in our lives is all about noticing things to be grateful for and being grateful for them.

But blessing also has this other side. Besides the blessings you receive, there is the blessing that you give. Besides blessings, the nouns, there is blessing, the present participle of the verb, to bless.

I and many others have observed that gratitude and generosity go together. When you are filled with the sense of thankfulness – that you are provided for abundantly with gifts you did not earn or deserve – then you are naturally primed to give generously: to pay back or pay forward. That close connection between gratitude and generosity – so close that they are two sides of the same coin – might not be obvious. But with blessing, those two sides are combined in the same word, aren’t they? When you pay attention to the blessings you receive, you are naturally primed to look for ways to be a blessing to others, ways to bless the world.

You receive gifts, and you have gifts, which you can use to enrich the lives of others, or not. You can choose to notice the blessings. You can choose to be a blessing. You can bless the world. By yourself, you can bless it a little bit. Together, adding your blessing to yours and yours and mine -- coordinating our blessing for synergistic effect – together, we can save the world.

* * *
This is part 1 of 3 of "Bless the World"
See also
Part 2: Together Is Hard
Part 3: Creating Situatedness